An Incidental Reckoning Read Free

too new for the others that would do their time after settling in. Will had just moved to Tanville, and Jon’s paucity of friends and their shared experience made the friendship a welcome thing for both boys. They even laughed about the fight, saying that in a way Brody had introduced them, and they owed him for that; but underneath was a shared certainty that it wasn’t over, that it had in fact only just begun.
     

Chapter 2

     
    Jon had arrived at the campsite early, set up the tent and gathered kindling for the fire to add to the stacked logs already sitting by the fire ring, courtesy of the recent heavy winds and a park employee’s generosity after attacking them with a chain saw. With nothing else to do but wait for Will, he took a moment to survey the surroundings.
     
    Will had suggested Ravensburg State Park, located in the mountains of the central region of Pennsylvania, as this year’s meeting site. Jon had looked it up on the internet and agreed it had potential, with nearby bogs and state forests to explore. The park itself did not work hard to impress; just a strip of woods sandwiched between a cliff and slides of boulders and loose shale at the back, and a highway on the opposite side uncomfortably close to the campsites. A stream cut through the acreage before the road, but appeared too shallow for the trout fishing they always did on these trips. At one end of the narrow park was a small dam and a pavilion, and on the other the loop of packed dirt accessing the campground. Payment for camping was done using the honor system and the park had no dedicated rangers.
     
    So far, on this Friday evening in early May, only his tent broke up the monotony of the tall pines, their canopy of interlocking branches acting almost as a natural roof. Jon preferred solitude to a tent city populated with screaming children, barking dogs, and small tow-behind campers outfitted to haul civilization into the woods. He had never understood why those people came in the first place: building a fire in the backyard, roasting some weenies, and then sleeping in their own beds seemed easier.
     
    A blue jay screamed from somewhere above, and then a crow dropped down from the trees and flew through the campground, followed by two jays that easily kept pace and darted in to peck at the larger bird. The crow didn’t attempt to retaliate, only sought escape from the angry birds’ territory.
     
    If only it were that easy. But then, maybe if we had fought back…
     
    He heard the clip-clop of horse hooves and turned around, discerned a black shape moving on the road but screened by the trees. A sudden vision of an old-timey horse-drawn hearse came to mind, ghostly and driven by shrouded figures, and an involuntary shiver ran through him. Then through a larger gap between tree trunks, he saw an Amish buggy driven by a young boy maybe sixteen years old. He did not wear a beard, which Jon understood, from his limited store of Amish lore, that he hadn’t married. The boy had been looking into the campground and through the open space their eyes met. The traveller raised his hand in salute without adding a smile, and Jon did the same. Then he was gone.
     
    This trip marked the fifth time he and Will had reunited. Both of them would turn forty before January. They had kept in touch for a while after graduation, but it went as those things do: lives run in different directions, new people and places enter the mix, and at some point the lines mooring the present to the past are severed. And because of the pain they had suffered, he wondered if, consciously or not, both of them had intentionally cut them once their alliance had lost its necessity.
     
    But when Will had called six years ago, he found the bullied high school kid within responding to his friend; like a Matryoshka doll, the hollow wooden nesting dolls that held a smaller version within, and another within the next, and so on until reaching a tiny solid figure the size of a