GOLD IN THE ABRAHAM

Before you read any further, you must agree to the following. 

     1) I will abandon my ambition.

     2) I will not carry my brother.

     3) I will follow, where others lead.

     4) I will not show charity.

     5) I will pass on my pain to my children.

     ☐ I agree to the terms and conditions. 

Now read those again. Read them out loud. Write them down. 

     Congratulations. You’re a nobody. 

     Now panic. 

     I am the man who kills nobodies. 

• • •

     Let me tell you how that works. 

     You’ll be in a queue, gripping your heavy basket with white knuckles. You’ll be leaving the aeroplane after arriving on holiday. You’ll be walking across the hot tarmac.

     And you’ll be gone. 

     You’d probably be so engrossed in the free newspapers that your final thought would be about cheap flights to Tokyo. How embarrassing. 

     Imagine. 75 years of biting your fingernails, picking the shell out of your scrambled egg, changing the channel. An entire life of trimmed lawns, greenhouses and inside out rubber gloves. 

• • •

     I grew up in Forthspring, Idaho. Back then we had a ranch by the River Abraham on a plot of land which stretched three miles south to the forest and across to the clay mines. We had warped pantry shelves which were always full, my mother always used to say, “As long as you’re workin’.” 

     With shelves of plates looking for all the world like the local bakery, looking back I have no idea how she kept it from going stale. Homemade treacle tart, sitting out for just long enough that the filling had a chance to soak into the crust. Cakes, biscuits, jam. Bags of sugar, bags of flour. 

     As long as we kept ourselves busy we were allowed to eat whatever we liked.

     We chopped up the fallen trees into firewood for hours on end. We would have to use the axe with the worn down wooden handle which had a grain running along the sides in small ridges, giving us blisters the size of dimes. When we couldn’t hold the axe any more we fixed fences, fed the livestock and most afternoons my father and I would go hunting for dinner. 

     Sometimes he would even let me hold the rifle. I was young back then, and though I practised on the bird feeders in the yard when he wasn’t around, I didn’t find it easy. The pea-sized dents in the shutters and the embedded pellets in the bark of the oak tree were enough to show that. When I got older I was good enough to be able to hit something that was completely still, but as soon as it was a moving target I had as much hope of hitting it as I did of reaching puberty before Mary Elizabeth got home from Summer camp. 

     You’d better keep moving.

• • •

     On the first warm day of the summer my brother Danny and I were panning for gold in the Abraham. It was always the first thing we would do when the chores were done. Danny had this big metal pan which he’d scored marks into with his penknife. He said it was his secret to always finding more gold than me. We’d found our usual spot along the riverbank and already had flakes of colour in the big glass collecting jar.

     So Danny, he turns to me and he says, “When I’m a grown up,” oh and by the way he’s standing knee-deep in the river, gold pan in hand when he says this, “I’m going to be rich.” 

     I don’t know if it was the smile in the corner of his mouth or the fact that he didn’t take his eyes off the rubble in his pan, but as I looked over from the shallow water, I believed him. 

     Danny was my older brother by a year. He was first to kill a deer, first to break a bone, and was the first person I could ever imagine moving away from Forthspring and making a life somewhere else. He was my hero. He was so confident for every moment I was timid and where I wobbled on the stones across the river, he leapt two to three at a time. He would fall in, of course, but being cold and wet-through was, according to Danny, “what being alive felt like.”

     He sat by my bedside when I had glandular fever. He would cheer me up by reading telegrams from our father’s desk in funny voices. We laughed so much that day that it hurt more than my swollen tonsils. 

     When I stepped out of line, Danny corrected me. I feared disappointing him more than anybody else.

     And then came the day I walked home from hunting with my father to see my brother’s body being carried out through the back door of the kitchen. 

Complete story available to agents and publishers. Contact Russell James at russelljamesauthor@gmail.com