I am the God
Volume IV: The Choice
The cousin's name was Daniel Pruitt.
He arrived in Wilson on the second Saturday of November — driving up from San Antonio, where he had lived for thirty years, where he had a wife and two grown children and a job in logistics that he had held for two decades and was, by his own description when he called Marcus to arrange the visit, "not particularly attached to anymore."
He had been Robert's first cousin.
They had grown up together, sixty years ago, on adjoining land — Daniel's family had owned the parcel north of Robert's, had sold it in the eighties when Daniel's father retired, and Daniel had grown up knowing the land the way you know land you ran across as a child, before you understood that land could be owned or sold or left to anyone.
He had not been close to Robert in recent decades.
Christmas cards. The occasional call. The specific distance that develops between cousins whose lives go different directions and who maintain the relationship through habit rather than through active tending.
When Robert died, Daniel had been notified — he was, it turned out, the closest living relative, a fact that had surprised him as much as anyone — and had not come to the funeral, had been traveling for work, had sent flowers and a card and had felt, in his own words, "like I should have done more, and didn't know what more would have looked like."
Eight months later, he called Marcus.
"I keep thinking about the ranch," he said. "I don't know what to do with it. I don't know if I should do anything with it. But I keep thinking about it, and I thought — you knew him. You were there. Maybe you could help me understand what it is I'm thinking about."
Marcus had said: "Come see it."
Chuck was there when Daniel arrived.
Not by plan — Marcus had mentioned the visit and Chuck had said he'd come, the way he came to things now, present for what was there.
Daniel Pruitt was sixty-three years old, with the specific build of a man who had spent thirty years behind a desk after spending his childhood outdoors, the body remembering something the life had moved away from. He got out of his car at the ranch gate and stood for a moment, looking at the land.
"I haven't been here in—" He stopped. "A long time."
"Take your time," Marcus said.
Daniel walked through the gate.
He walked slowly.
He looked at the fence line — the section Marcus and Chuck had fixed in May, the cedar posts forty years old, still holding.
"Robert built this," he said.
"Most of it," Marcus said. "Cut the cedar himself. Took him a summer."
"I remember that summer," Daniel said. "I was — I would have been ten. Eleven. I remember him out here with the truck, hauling posts. I thought it looked like the hardest work I'd ever seen."
"It probably was," Marcus said.
Daniel walked further.
He stopped at a specific spot — not marked, not distinguished from the surrounding land in any way Chuck could identify, but Daniel stopped there with the specific quality of someone arriving at a location that held something.
"There was a tree here," he said. "A big oak. We used to climb it. Robert and me and his older brother — Robert had an older brother, did you know that? He died young. Car accident, nineteen sixty-eight. I don't think anyone talks about him anymore."
"I didn't know," Marcus said.
"His name was Thomas," Daniel said. "He was three years older than us. He used to climb higher than we were allowed to. Robert and I would stay on the lower branches and Thomas would go all the way to the top and we'd yell at him to come down and he never would until he was ready."
He looked at the empty space where the tree had been.
"The tree came down in a storm sometime in the nineties," he said. "Robert told me once. I think it bothered him more than he let on. Thomas's tree."
The narrator sat with this.
A brother named Thomas, dead since 1968, remembered now by a cousin standing in an empty field where a tree used to be, on land that was now without an owner who knew the story.
A layer, surfacing.
"I didn't know about Thomas," Marcus said again, quietly.
"No reason you would," Daniel said. "It was before your time. Before Robert's time, in a way — the Robert you knew. He was different after Thomas died. Quieter. My mother used to say Thomas had been the loud one and Robert learned to be loud to fill the space."
Chuck thought about Robert's laugh.
Too loud for indoors.
He had assumed it was simply Robert's nature.
He thought about a younger brother learning to be loud because the loud one was gone.
The layer going deeper than anyone currently living had known.
"He was loud," Marcus said. "His laugh. I always—" He stopped. "I never thought about why."
"Most people don't think about why other people are the way they are," Daniel said. "We just take people as they come. Robert was loud. That was Robert. I'm probably the only person alive who remembers there was a reason."
"You just told us," Marcus said.
"Yes," Daniel said. "I suppose I did."
He stood at the empty space where the tree had been.
"I don't know why I told you that," he said. "I haven't thought about Thomas in years. Decades, maybe. And then I stood here and it just — came up."
"The land remembers," Chuck said.
Daniel looked at him — they had been introduced, briefly, at the gate, and Daniel had not asked who Chuck was beyond Marcus's friend, which had seemed sufficient.
"What do you mean," Daniel said.
"I've been spending time with a geologist," Chuck said. "She talks about the land holding records. Things that happened, staying present in the layers, even when no one remembers them specifically. I think you just experienced that. The land held the memory of Thomas and the tree, even though you'd forgotten, and standing in the place brought it back."
Daniel considered this.
"I like that," he said. "That's a better way of putting it than I would have come up with."
He looked around the ranch — the fence, the fields, the place where the tree had been, the house in the distance where Robert had lived for thirty years and Bill's farmhouse beyond that, visible across the flat land.
"What am I going to do with all this," he said.
It was not addressed to anyone specifically.
It was the question he had driven up from San Antonio with.
They walked the property for two hours.
Marcus showed Daniel everything — the fences, the cattle that the Hendersons were managing, the outbuildings, the house. He talked about Robert the way Marcus talked about everything: specifically, with the names attached, the eight years of Tuesday calls, the laugh too loud for indoors, the way Robert had been there in the hospital, the way the weight had gone all the way in.
Daniel listened.
He asked questions.
By the end of the two hours he had the specific quality of someone who had arrived knowing almost nothing and was leaving knowing something — not everything, but something real, something that had weight.
"I have a son," he said, as they walked back to the gate. "Twenty-six. He's been — he's been a little lost, the last couple years. Out of college, doesn't know what he wants to do. He's been living at home, which isn't — it's not working for any of us."
Marcus and Chuck were quiet.
"I keep thinking," Daniel said, "about what it would mean for him to come out here. To run this. He doesn't know anything about ranching — neither do I, not really, not anymore. But—"
He stopped at the gate.
He looked back at the land.
"He needs something real to do," Daniel said. "And this is real. And it's been in the family — even though I haven't been part of it for thirty years, it's been in the family. And maybe—"
"Maybe it's time for it to be in the family again," Marcus said.
"Maybe," Daniel said.
He looked at the empty space where the tree had been — visible from the gate, the specific clearing that marked where something had once stood.
"I'll talk to him," Daniel said. "My son. I'll bring him up. Let him see it before deciding anything."
"The Hendersons can keep managing the cattle until then," Marcus said. "There's no rush."
"No rush," Daniel said. "I like that. I've been feeling rushed about this for eight months and there's no actual rush at all."
"The land's been here a long time," Chuck said. "It can wait for the right decision."
Daniel looked at him.
"You're not from around here," he said. "Originally. Marcus mentioned you grew up here and came back."
"Yes," Chuck said.
"What brought you back," Daniel said.
Chuck thought about the honest answer.
"The route brought me here," he said. "I came back to Wilson and then a pipe needed fixing and then—" He gestured at the ranch, at Marcus, at the eight months of everything. "Then this."
Daniel looked at him for a moment.
"That's not really an answer," he said. "But somehow it feels like one anyway."
"Most true things are like that," Chuck said.
Daniel almost smiled.
"My cousin would have liked you," he said.
"Everyone says that about Robert," Chuck said. "That he would have liked me."
"Was it true," Daniel said.
"I think so," Chuck said. "Marcus thinks so. I never got to find out for myself."
"That's a loss," Daniel said.
"Yes," Chuck said. "But it's in the layers. The not having met him is part of what I am now, the same way the meeting would have been."
Daniel looked at him with the specific quality of someone encountering an idea that was unfamiliar but not unwelcome.
"I'll think about that," he said.
"Tell your son about Thomas," Chuck said. "If he comes here. The tree, the climbing, all of it. The land will hold it better if someone knows the story."
"I will," Daniel said.
He got in his car.
He looked at the ranch one more time through the windshield.
"Thank you," he said. "Both of you. For — for knowing him. For being here when I needed to understand what this place was."
"Witnesslove," Marcus said quietly.
Daniel looked at him.
"What?" he said.
"It's a word," Marcus said. "For what you just got. Someone seeing the land — and Robert, and Thomas — and giving you the seeing. So you could see it too."
Daniel sat with the word for a moment.
"I like that word," he said. "I don't fully understand it. But I like it."
"You will," Chuck said. "Eventually. If your son comes here, and stands where you stood, and remembers Thomas because you told him — that's the word, happening again."
Daniel nodded slowly.
He started the car.
He drove away.
Marcus and Chuck stood at the gate and watched the car go.
"Thomas," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"Eight years of Tuesday calls," Marcus said. "And I never knew about Thomas."
"Robert carried it," Chuck said. "In the layers. It shaped him — the loudness, the laugh — and you knew the shape without knowing the cause."
"And now I know the cause," Marcus said. "And Robert's been gone for eight months and I'm only just—"
He stopped.
"What," Chuck said.
"I'm only just getting to know him better," Marcus said. "After he's gone. The account keeps growing even though he's not here to add to it."
"The chain," Chuck said. "Daniel had a piece of Robert that you didn't have. And now you have it. And it changes what Robert is — to you. Even though Robert isn't here for the changing."
"Nothing lost," Marcus said.
"Just deeper," Chuck said. "And wider. The account isn't just what you saw directly. It's what other people saw, too, when it reaches you."
Marcus looked at the empty space where the tree had been.
"If Daniel's son comes here," he said, "and runs this place — Robert's place — that's a kind of—"
"Continuation," Chuck said.
"Without anyone choosing it for that reason," Marcus said. "Daniel didn't drive up here thinking 'I'm going to continue Robert's legacy.' He drove up here confused about what to do with land he didn't know what to do with. And it might turn into — into the land staying in the family. Into Thomas's tree being told to someone who never knew Thomas. Into the whole thing continuing."
"The spiral doesn't announce itself," Chuck said. "It just keeps going. And sometimes you look back and see that it went somewhere."
They stood at the gate.
The November afternoon was doing what November afternoons did — the light low, the air cool, the flat land stretching toward the horizon with the patience of land that had been there for forty million years and would be there for forty million more, holding whatever was given to it.
"Robert would have liked Daniel's son running this place," Marcus said.
"Probably," Chuck said.
"Even though he never met him," Marcus said.
"The not-meeting is in the layers too," Chuck said. "Same as Robert and me."
Marcus looked at him.
"You keep coming back to that," he said. "The not-meeting."
"It's been on my mind," Chuck said.
"Why," Marcus said.
Chuck thought about the honest answer.
"Because the choice means I'm going to keep not-meeting people," he said. "Robert was one. There will be others — people who matter to people I love, who I'll never meet, because the timing doesn't work out. The choice doesn't mean I get everything. It means I get what's available, and the not-available goes in the layers too."
"Like Clara's not-made," Marcus said.
"Like Clara's not-made," Chuck said. "Except this isn't a failure to address something. It's just — time. The conditions. Robert died before March. That's not anyone's failure. It's just the shape of when things happened."
"And you're at peace with that," Marcus said.
"I'm in it with it," Chuck said. "Not the same as peace. But — present with it. The way I'm present with everything now."
They got in Marcus's truck.
They drove back toward Wilson.
The empty space where the tree had been receded behind them, holding what it held, waiting for whoever came next to stand in it and feel something they couldn't name.