Everything We Carry
Completed
In Prohibition-era New England, a boy seeking to restore his fading father to his former war-hero glory gets caught in the violent orbit of a charismatic bootlegger, forcing the boy to confront the dark reality behind the myths his family tells to survive.
First Page:
We were in the mountains, barreling up and down steep roads pockmarked by the wet autumn in our worn-out Ford, my father blathering on about his early days in the lumber fields of Vermont as though they had been the pinnacle of his life. I knew better, though.
His name was Ray Trudeau, a name everyone in our corner of the country knew, even ten years on from the armistice. Whenever Ray encountered someone new, you’d see the same flash of recognition. Sometimes it would take a moment, but once prodded—the pilot? from Collier’s?—they’d apologize and wonder how they could have forgotten. The truth was simple. As much as I wanted him to be, Ray hadn’t been that man in years.
We left the main road for an unmarked dirt path in Bartlett, Ray holding tight to the steering column, whispering unintelligible directions to himself as he drove. This was our third weekend working the lumber camp in these forests and each time we’d enter at the same location and navigate the web of logging roads to a different job site.
“You were supposed to take that left,” I said, as we blew past one road. I held up the scratch paper containing the directions my father had scribbled down. “See, take the third left, and second right.”
He glanced at the paper and took the next left, which was not the third but the fourth, as the heavy rains arrived. A few more turns came and went before it was apparent we were hopelessly lost. Ray stopped the Ford and cursed.
“We took the wrong left—” I started.
“Not a sound,” he said, snatching the paper out of my hand. We sat in silence for several minutes broken only by the clicking of the strained engine, drips of rain in the trees, and Ray’s heavy breathing.
