Stone Creek
By Kate Brandes
JUNE
It was night—the only time they worked.
Frank drove a stolen Ford pickup they’d burn later. Tilly cranked her window all the way down to feel the honey-suckled June air on her face as they went along the remote, windy road through upstate New York.
She switched on her handheld transistor and sang along to what was playing. Frank had gotten her the small SONY the year before when she’d turned twelve so she could keep up with current events. But mostly she listened to music and imagined other people listening and humming along to the same song.
Frank tapped the steering wheel with two fingers, not to the music, but because this is what he did when he had something to tell her she wouldn’t like. “I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“Uh-oh.”
His quick smile didn’t match his eyes. “We need to change location right after we’re done with this job.”
She kicked the dash. “But we only just unpacked.”
He stared straight ahead, lips pressed into a thin line. He hated it when she complained. But this was insane. Moving every two weeks was bad enough, but this time they’d rolled out the sleeping bags an hour ago.
His foot eased on the gas and the truck slowed. “The Feds are on our tail. And they don’t have enough imagination to understand the significance of our work. You know that.
This was Frank’s FBI speech. She’d long pictured the FBI as an army of identical wiry men dressed in suits, standing in long rows as though produced by a factory. In her mind, they each carried a briefcase containing photos and recordings of innocent people, guns at the ready.
Still, she’d never seen an agent. Neither had Frank as far as she knew.
But Frank liked to talk about Ted Kaczynski’s arrest in 1996 as though it had just happened yesterday. She wondered if he was about to launch into that now. She’d read Ted K.’s manifesto, all 232 numbered sections about why he’d mailed bombs to people. How industry and technology caused psychological suffering while it also damaged the natural world. And about corporations having too much say in people’s lives. Ted, like Frank, spent all his time thinking about how to fight the system. Tilly realized after reading the manifesto that Ted talked like Frank. Or Frank talked like him, more like. Tilly didn’t understand why Frank thought so much of Ted K. because Ted would write things like: I will kill but I will make at least some effort to avoid detection, so that I can kill again.
She and Frank blew up dams, not people. A statement against big industry and ecological destruction and a fight against complacency, Frank said. They worked to inspire a revolution, but not to kill. Never to kill.
Even so, Tilly was tired of moving around. She wanted a regular life where she could listen to songs with other people in the same room. She most definitely did not want to pack up all their shit again and drive somewhere else in the middle of the night.
“Listen,” Frank said, sitting higher in his seat, “you’ll like this new plan.”
She spit a bad taste out the window.
“What I’ve been thinking is we move once more and then stay put. Hide in plain sight. We’ll do this last dam and start fresh. What about that?”
She stared at the side of his face, trying to figure out what he was really saying. They’d never stayed in one place longer than a few weeks. “What do you mean?”
“If we don’t leave a trail, the Feds can’t track us. They don’t know Frank Stone from nobody. They don’t know Tilly Stone. We can live where we want if we stop the work.”
She tried to figure out what he was aiming at because it couldn’t be that simple. “Why would we stop now?”
“You’ve wanted a more normal life. I promised myself when you got old enough, I’d give you that. You’re almost thirteen, so maybe it’s the right time—that’s what I’m saying.”
The night was so black she could see nothing beyond the reach of the headlights. It was hard to imagine living another way even if that’s what she wanted.
“You should have a real home. For a while anyway,” he said.
“Where would we go?”
He hit the brakes, stopped the truck right in the middle of the road and faced her. “I was thinking about the family cabin.” Now he was talking. She threw her arms around his neck.
This was Frank’s childhood home. He’d told her so many stories about Cottersville. Could he really mean it? She squeezed him harder, hoping to seal the deal.
“All right, all right, Tilly-bell.” He laughed as he hugged her back. “But we need to talk serious for a minute.”
She sat back in her seat but couldn’t stop smiling. This was better than ten Christmases.
“I need to tell you right now,” he said in his dad voice, “all the old rules apply.”
She pressed her lips together in an effort to look more serious. “I know the rules.”
Frank insisted she speak like an “educated person.” He was constantly harping about proper English and forced her to read way too many books. And they went to plenty of movies, which typically brought on another lecture: “See what the actors do, the mask they put on for the part they’re playing? That’s what you have to do. Disappear into the situation you’re in. You want to be the person in the background playing the bit part. The one no one sees.”
She’d blended in fine with other kids in the library. In fact, she did it better than Frank. Ladies noticed him too much. But she could sit in a restaurant, go to the post office, the store, a gas station without anyone looking twice. Still, none of that was real. Now, Frank was talking about living a real, regular life.
“We still keep to ourselves. Do for ourselves. That’s how we stay free. It’s how we stay together.”
If they lived in one place, she’d make friends and belong somewhere. Maybe she could even go to school.
“No promises we can stay, either,” he said. “The first sign of trouble and we’re out of there. No complaints if it goes that way. You understand?”
She nodded. “Can I meet other kids? I mean … later if we’re careful and everything goes right?”
A glimmer of a grin crept in as he hit the gas. “One thing at a time, girl.”
Even though she knew that was supposed to be the end of the conversation, she couldn’t help herself. “Cottersville is where you met my mother, right?” His grin turned downward.
There’d been just one time, about a month ago when he’d had more beers than usual, that he’d said her name: Helen. Tilly’d figured out a long time ago her mother had died during childbirth. That’s why he never talked about her. But since he’d told Tilly her name, she liked to imagine her, Helen, living in a house in Cottersville, where she and Frank might visit and decide to stay. Frank told her she got her dark wavy hair from her mother, like she got the blue eyes from him.
The truck came to a hard sudden stop. Frank got out without a word and went around to the front. Tilly got out, too. There on the blacktop three baby opossums sat next to their dead mother. Two of the babies were still trying to nurse.
“Jesus,” Frank said. “Look at that.”
Frank often made decisions based on signs that appeared to him. Surely this was a sign, but of what Tilly couldn’t tell. She just hoped it wouldn’t change his mind about going to Cottersville.
He took off his jacket, the navy-blue one with the yellow bird stitched into the upper arm and scooped up the littlest opossum, which seemed even smaller in his big hands. He wrapped it loosely in his jacket.
“Hand me the other two.”
Frank had rules about wildlife. If there was the possibility the animal could fend for itself then nature knew better than people. But sometimes, like in this case when the opossums were so young, they could help them.
“There’s a wildlife rehab place not far from here. We’ll drop them there when we’re done.”
Back in the truck Tilly held the opossums on her lap, thinking of things Frank had mentioned about Cottersville: the cabin; the herons flying to and from the nearby rookery; the little town where everyone knew each other; and Stone Creek, named for their family. It was also the place where Frank’s dad had been in a bad accident at the Cottersville Dam, which is why they did their work.
Frank switched off the headlights and drove the last mile or so in the dark, coming to a stop next to the Umbra Dam. They sat waiting, to make sure they hadn’t been followed. But Tilly was eager to get this job done so they could start this new life. “We haven’t seen a soul over the last three days of scouting around here,” she said. “We aren’t going to see anyone now, not in the middle of the night.”
“I just don’t want anyone to get—”
“—hurt. I know. But no one’s out here.”
“Fine.” Frank thumbed over his shoulder at the box in the back of the truck. “You’re up then.”
She handed him his jacket with the opossums, got out and double checked that each stick of dynamite was tied with a primer cord and the fuse blasting cap was taped correctly.
Any prints or other trace she left on the bomb material couldn’t be linked to them. She’d been born at home since Frank hated Big Pharma. Hospitals pump people with poison. There was no birth certificate. With no records of any kind, she was no one to the government and they were kept safe this way. So safe, Tilly now realized, they could live in Cottersville and no one would know the difference.
She wrestled the box out of the truck bed and, struggling under its weight, carried it to the edge of the dam, then set the charges. She unspooled the fuse as she walked back toward the truck.
On a tree close to the dam, she spray-painted the trunk with the same yellow bird insignia on Frank’s jacket, taking time to make sure the wings tapered and spread at the edges, so it photographed well when the news crews showed up later.
Back at the truck, she pulled a lighter from her shirt pocket, flicked it, and held the flame to the fuse, maybe for the last time. When the burn crept steadily along the fuse, making its way toward the box, Tilly climbed into the truck, and they drove off. The firebomb behind them lit the night in one sudden white flash so bright it burned her eyes. The truck jumped with the thud of the explosion and her forehead hit the rear cab window hard enough to bruise. She knew from experience to keep more distance between her head and the glass, but she was preoccupied thinking about Cottersville.
Down the road, the smell of smoke became as faint as the sirens in the distance. And above them, the stars shone bright.
Kate Brandes lives in the small river town of Riegelsville, Pennsylvania, with her family. She writes about rural places and small-town dynamics with underlying environmental themes. Kate has worked as a geologist and environmental scientist for more than twenty years. She currently teaches geology, creative writing and a course on Landscape, Culture and Story of Place at Moravian University, where she also co-directs the Moravian Writers’ Conference. Kate’s first novel, The Promise of Pierson Orchard, was published in 2017. Her novel Stone Creek is out in August 2024.
