The home was now a large place with a wrap around porch and double wooden entry doors, finely crafted with inlays, the craftsmanship something to boast and crow about. But that was not the way of Mr. Nation or his wife of twenty-five years.
They had seen fit to return to Manchac when their four young children became too wild for the confines of their Brooklyn brownstone. And so it was that Nash brought his family back to the swamp, to the place where it had all began. There the children grew up, the boys- Winston, Roan and Isaac-and a girl with wild audburn hair and skin tawny dark. Her they called Riley.
They had been here for fifteen years now. Fifteen years since Bastie's place had been extended, since the Simoneaux kin were all too happy to take Nash up on his offer to buy their land. It was nothing at all to a man of his means, a man who had become succesful, and content with the things he had built, more so by the life he was leading. And so Bastie's old farm reached out, extended beyond the hidden trails that led to the old fishing shack, right to the sugar cane fields that Nash had torn down. It was a project of immense effort, as was the deconstruction of the Simoneaux mansion that had not been touched in some forty years, falling in to unreclaimable disrepair. The shelters and rehab stores got the woodwork from the foyer and the fine trim and millwork that had not rotted in the years of neglect. The rest of the mansion went to ground, became ash and dirt-a hard but very satisfying project. Nash and Willow set tracks and built cottages that could one day house their children and their families, if they so desired.
Those two great lines, divided for so long, had been settled, at least for now. But joy had come at a great price. There is always a price to pay. It had come in smoke and fire. It had come with fret and worry, with blood and tears, with loss, with anger, with pain. Yet joy endured-it came and went, then came again, until the girl with the wild, chaotic hair and the boy who could not be bothered with love or joy at all, had paid the toll, settled the debt so many had left waiting.
And like before, like lifetimes before, the memory remained, passing into one life, into the next, through bone and blood and cells that made up one life and then another.
There it stayed.
The End