Giants (A Distant Eden Book 6)

Giants

Copyright © 2014 by Lloyd Tackitt. All rights reserved.

First Edition: August 2014

Cover and Formatting:
Streetlight Graphics

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

INTRODUCTION

A short story about giants. But is it about the rampaging giants that roam the land destroying all they come across, or is it about the giant spirit that some people have?

GIANTS

I
was about halfway around the perimeter of our land, doing a fence check, when Mr. McReary came riding up, his horse all a lather. Our ranch is sixty square miles and it takes several days for me to ride the fence, stopping occasionally to tighten a wire or make other repairs as I went. It isn’t that Pa is land-greedy, it’s that it took hundreds of acres of West Texas’ semi-arid land to support each cow, so the range was large but the herd wasn’t. Anyway Mr. McReary came thundering up, skidding his horse to a stop just across the fence, his side.

“Robert, glad I spotted you so soon. There’s a giant coming this way, southwest to northeast,” he shouted without preamble. “About six days out from all accounts.”

I nodded that I’d heard and he tipped his hat, turned his horse, and rode off at a rapid rate. He knew that I knew what this meant. I turned my own horse for the house and sunk spur. This was dire news, and the sooner Pa knew it the sooner we could start moving out of the way– and the sooner we got started, the more we could save. I had a long, hard ride to get home. At best we might have five days, given how long it would take me to get home and on how accurate the six-day forecast might or might not be.

Best to figure three days, I thought.

Giants were not rare, but they were uncommon. Everyone knew that a giant would not be deflected from its line of march and destruction. The only thing to do was to get a line on where the giant was going and move everything of value that could be moved out of the way. The giants destroyed everything in their paths. They were more deadly than tornadoes, but slower and more predictable. All in all, it was better to deal with a giant than a twister, but not by much and no one wanted to deal with either. I had to flog it home to tell Pa, we had a lot of moving to do.

A big problem would be moving the cattle out of the giant’s path. Giants didn’t deviate from a line of travel once they started on it, but they did veer from side to side by as much as a couple of miles if there was something to chase down and eat, or buildings to destroy. Then they would return to their original line and continue their onward march.

Giants loved to eat two things, people and cows. In both instances, the method of eating was to crush the body in their huge hands, breaking all the bones and liquefying the internal components. Then they would bite off the head and suck all the “juices” out through the neck, leaving a shriveled bag of skin as the only remnant.

No one seemed to know where the giants came from. From all accounts they hadn’t existed before the collapse, back when grandpa was just a baby. Grandpa was long gone, Pa was sixty-three, and I was twelve. Ma was forty-two – she sometimes accused Pa of cradle-robbing, but she always smiled fondly at him when she did.

It was after midnight before I got home. Pa’d heard me riding up long before I got there, and he was outside on the porch in his long johns waiting for me. He knew I wouldn’t have come home that late unless there was an emergency, or be riding fast at night either. I pulled the exhausted horse to a stop, and before the dust could begin to settle said, “Mr. McReary says there’s a giant on a path right at us, about six days maybe. Coming from the southwest, heading northeast.”

There wasn’t anything else to say, all else was as understood, just as when Mr. McReary had told me.

Pa stood there, tall and muscular, not looking a day over forty. He had a full head of hair and a close-cropped mustache and beard. His clear gray eyes shone brightly in the moonlight as he appraised me for a moment. “You need to rest, or do you think you can ride on and warn Mr. Hank?”

Mr. Hank was only a couple of miles northeast of us; he’d likely be in the line, too. “I can ride. I’ll be home before breakfast.”

“Be sure that you are. Your Ma is going to be a mite upset as it is. She purely hates disruption. You might not get fed if you’re late.”

“I’ll get the paint saddled and go, this one is done for the day.” I pulled the reins around and rode to the barn. Our barn isn’t a normal barn, but then Pa isn’t exactly a normal rancher. Fact is, there’s not much that is normal about him. Pa liked to invent machines, steam-driven machines mostly. Pa has a real thing about steam. The barn is huge, almost an entire acre in size. It’s made of metal, with trusses that span from side to side so that there are no columns inside. It’s an amazing structure, and folks have come from miles around to admire it.

There are, of course, stalls for the horses, and the usual tack items are allocated space, but the vast bulk is taken up with steam-driven machines. Trip hammers, cutters, rollers, stampers, and much more line up in the dark with shadowy, lumpen shapes that only hint at their purpose. Coals in the furnaces still glowed softly from the day’s heating. I pulled the saddle from the chestnut and then grabbed a dry tow-sack and rubbed her down, drying her coat of the pungent and earthily pleasant-smelling sweat. Giant coming or not, Pa taught me to never mistreat a horse, never put one up wet, always see to their needs before my own. I brushed her out quickly, then put oats in the bin for her, and made sure her water was running clear through the watering trough Pa had rigged up for the horses. Then I put the saddle on the paint. I was in and out of the barn in under five minutes.

Pa waved to me from the porch and handed me a pair of ham-loaded biscuits wrapped in a dish towel and a cup of warmed-up coffee loaded with cream and sugar that he made me drink on the spot before leaving. I was right proud of him for thinking of me that way, I hadn’t eaten since daylight of what was now the day before, and my stomach thought my throat had been cut. As I rode away I had the strange thought that Pa had just treated me the way I had treated the chestnut mare. I laughed out loud at the thought, knowing the truth of it.

I rode the paint hard to Mr. Hank’s ranch. The difficulty of riding hard at night is that the horse can injure itself, running in the dark. Had it been daytime, I could have made the trip quicker – going across country in a straight line – but I elected to stay on the wagon road for the horse’s sake. Regardless, I arrived at Mr. Hank’s around two a.m. and woke him up.

I started shouting his name from as far off as I thought he might hear me, and kept on shouting right up to his front porch, where I saw him waiting in the dark corner shadows, out of the pale moonlight, with a shotgun levelled at me. And that’s why I’d been shouting. I knew he would hear the horse coming, but I wanted him to know who was on the horse. The fact that he still took necessary precautions didn’t bother me in the least. It’s what we do out here.

I delivered the warning from the back of the paint. Mr. Hanks replied, “I’d invite you in for a bite to eat before you go on back home son, but I’ll saddle up and go warn Mr. Rivera right now, sounds like he might be in the path, too.”

And so the warning would go on. I thought about it on the ride home and figured that if I were to graph it out on paper, the warning would start as a point – that point being where the giant was actually spotted – then gradually widening out into a cone shape as the distance from the giant increased and accurate prediction of its line of travel decreased. I was purely guessing, but from what Mr. McReary had said about the giant’s location, it would be a good guess that we were in the narrow top of the cone. Still, a near-miss is as good as a mile, so I’d be sure to ask Pa about it.

I got home before the sun crested, but the sky was considerably lighter off to the east so it would only be a few minutes coming. I rode into the barn and unsaddled the paint, rubbed him down and fed him, then went to the house. Pa was on the porch with two cups of coffee, one for me. This time it was hot, un-milked and un-sugared, the way we normally drank it. The fixed-up coffee earlier that night had been for extra energy, and had been welcomed.

This hot, stiff coffee was for waking up, and was even more welcomed. I was drowsy after riding hard most of yesterday and all night. But I was more hungry than tired, I’ll promise you that. Pa said it was natural to always be hungry at my age, and the only time I didn’t feel a gnawing hunger was for about an hour after a big meal. I could smell Ma’s breakfast and it was working a powerful magic on me.

Pa just grinned and said, “Get in there and eat before your Ma throws it to the hogs”. If I hadn’t a full cup of hot coffee in my hands I would have run in there, but I could only walk fast without spilling it. Pa laughed out loud at me. He often does, and I generally laugh right along with him. I did this time, too.

The table had been cleared except for a plate piled high with thick cuts of bacon, a pile of scrambled eggs, a side plate covered with biscuits and butter and syrup ready to be spread and poured. Ma and Pa had already eaten – they generally rose well before dawn, and today held excitement so they were up even earlier. Ma gave me that warm smile that made her eyes so beautiful that, as Pa often said, “Made a man’s heart just downright ache and would make a man kill a mad bull with his bare hands if that’s what it took to see it again.” When Ma looked at me like that I knew the depth of her love for me, and she looked at me like that most all the time. Even when she was angry at me, that love showed right through the anger. It made a fella want to never make her angry. But I gotta tell you, that sounds easier than it is ’cause she holds to a Mount Everest of high standards, and expects the same from everyone else she cares about. No sir, it ain’t easy keeping her peaceful and smiling. But it’s worth the effort when it works.

I scarfed down my breakfast in great gulping bites, only slowing down to chew properly when Ma frowned at me slightly. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t have to. I knew better, and hard as it was to slow down I did. While I finished eating, Ma did the dishes and Pa was out feeding the chickens and slopping the hogs. I finished up and took my plate to the sink and pumped fresh water to wash it with, Ma put the butter and syrup up while I cleaned my dishes. Pa came in as I finished and we all sat down with the coffee pot and cups to talk about the giant coming our way. I was pure tired and figured I’d not be sleeping soon, but I was wide awake for this talk.

Pa started out, “Robert,” he said – Pa and Ma always called me Robert and never Bob for some reason. I got called Bob a lot by some of the other folks I know, and it didn’t bother me a whit, but Ma and Pa always said my whole right name. “Robert, I’ve told your ma about the giant coming, and that we only have a few short days to move as much as we can as far as we can out of its path. I figure we need to spend about an hour talking about what we can, and should, move, then we’ll get to it.”

That’s when Ma blew the ground right out from under our feet. She didn’t often put her foot down to Pa, but when she did it stayed down. And this time she put it down hard and she put it down fast. She looked Pa right straight in the eyes and said in a fierce tone, “I’m not moving from this house. You go out there and turn that giant away from here.”

There was a long stunned silence as Pa and I stared at Ma, each of us frozen with a cup of coffee halfway to our gaping mouths.

# # #

“Ma?” Pa said with some discomfort. “Do you know what you’re asking? Hell, woman, I’ve never heard of anyone turning a giant from his path, and lots of folks have tried. Even cannon balls just bounce off their armor and only make ’em mad.”

Ma remained iron calm in contrast to Pa’s tension. Pa had good reason to be tense. The chances of getting Ma to move now were less than the chances of turning the giant from its path, and as Pa said, no one had ever managed that feat. Yet.

Ma replied, “I am not moving. You can take everything you think is of value from the house and the barn, and all the cows and horses, and you and Robert can go hide out with all that stuff, but I will stay here – and you know I will.” She smiled at Pa then, an almost-sweet smile that had a hint of sadness in it for putting Pa in such a pickle. But not enough sadness to indicate any idea that she might relent.

Pa just settled back into his chair, something he rarely did except of an evening in the rocking chair on the porch when he and Ma would watch the day gentle off into night. That little move, settling back in the chair, was as clear a signal of total defeat as waving a white flag would’ve been. He knew, absolutely knew, that Ma wasn’t going to be moved from her house, giant or no giant.

He looked at Ma steadily for a few ticks of the kitchen clock. The clock seemed much louder than usual.

Ma eventually said to Pa, “Not once in our life together have you failed to do whatever it was you set your mind to doing, not once. You’ve done things that no one ever thought of, and you’ve done things that everyone thought to be impossible. Once you set your mind to a problem, it gets solved. For some reason that solution involves steam most of the time, but all the same. I expect you to move that giant away from us, and I have complete certainty that once you get your mind wrapped around that need, you’ll find a way to do it. Now you two go on out to the barn so you can do your thinking and cuss me under your breath while you get started on the problem. I have vegetables to can and don’t want you under my feet.”

And just like that we were dismissed with an impossible mission to perform. Pa and I set our coffee cups down on the table – the coffee had grown cold anyway – stood, and pretty much trudged out of the house and to the barn.

But, as always, once we were in the barn everything seemed better. We flung open the shutters over the windows around the perimeter, opened the several large doors that were big enough to march a small army through and let the growing daylight penetrate into the interior. This was where we thought, this was where we built the machines. Ma was right about Pa and steam. Seemed that most every problem he solved involved steam in some way or another. Pa, when he was sometimes feeling fanciful, called steam “the magic”. And he certainly knew how to make steam do magic things.

The barn was filled with steam-powered machinery that Pa and I had built. We had several of what he called “assembly lines,” each line involving a multitude of machines that were designed to perform specific jobs, and each one depending on the one before it to do something first. There were large, insulated steam pipes running from the various forges and boilers to the machines. When Pa was in the throes of building something, the entire barn would be lit by the red glow of the forges, machines would be clanking and clanging and pounding, steam would be hissing from relief vents and everywhere you looked metal would be moving from station to station with Pa and me dancing in attendance. Even the smell of the place was the astringent smell of steam. These were the best times, when we danced with the machines to the music of the steam and metal being pounded into shape by the red glow of the furnaces, with the machines beating out a primitive tempo. Sometimes we went days without sleep, not needing or caring for the idea of stopping until we had reached some milestone or other.