Triptych

Next - Part II

"SO, YOU want to marry my daughter."

Basil felt all the colour slide off of his face. Mark reached into a cabinet just inside of the barn's wide front doors. "Oh, God," Basil blurted before he could get the brain-mouth disconnect under control. "You...this is the part where you threaten me with the shotgun, isn't it? You're going to - to blast me full of grapeshot for taking your daughter's virtue!"

Mark paused, one hand on the knob of the cabinet, the other arm hidden up to the elbow by the angle of the door.

"Did you take her virtue?" Mark asked, the wicked gleam back in his eyes.

"What? No!"

Another lazy smile tugged at the side of Mark's mouth. "Didn't think so - Gwennie had a pretty handsy boyfriend in grade ten."

Basil clapped his hands against his ears. "La la la! I'm not hearing this! If you're going to shoot me, shoot me, but don't torture me first!" Mark grinned harder and shook his head a little and withdrew his arm. In his hand were two pairs of heavy, worn-in work gloves. Basil dropped his own hands back to his sides, feeling suddenly ridiculous.

"Not going to shoot me then," he said.

Mark raised an expressive eyebrow. "Disappointed?" "Not as such, no."

Mark dropped one pair of the gloves into Basil's hands, and clapped his shoulder manfully. Basil had never quite understood the masculine urge to beat the crap out of one another for fun or camaraderie, but suffered gamely.

"C'mon, Bay-zil," Mark said, still pronouncing his name with the rural drawl, "I've known you'd end up with my daughter since before she could say 'Papa.'"

"And that doesn't make you want to shoot me?" Basil asked uncertainly. He had been picked on by enough people like Mark in grammar school to have left him with a healthy self-preservation instinct and an aversion to jocks and soldiers. Farmers didn't quite fit the type, but they were close enough to make Basil twitchy.

Mark tugged on his gloves. "Don't push it."

"Yessir," Basil replied, using a more formal address partially out of fear, partially out of respect for the man who had raised Gwen, and partially because, well, this was also a man who had known for twenty-nine years exactly what the future held, and it hadn't driven him crazy. Moreover, now Mark and his wife Evvie had no clue what came after. After the return, the hasty phone call, the quiet desperation of reaching across an ocean to patch up a family, after a humid day of digging. And that wasn't driving Mark nuts, either.

It took a strong person to know the unknown and live with it. It took an even stronger one to suddenly come to a point where nothing replaces everything, and the once-sure future suddenly becomes chaotic chance.

"None of that 'yessir' crap," Mark said, turning towards a heavy door at the far end of the barn and gesturing Basil to follow. "I ain't my father. 'Mark' is just fine for my Gwennie's..." His voice faltered on the honourific, "her Ag-lu-nated."

Basil couldn't help the sharp hot welling at the back of his eyes but he blinked rapidly to push it back. He smiled sadly. "Just 'husband' is fine. We...we're not an Aglunate anymore. Not without..."

Mark acknowledged the rest of the sentence with a grunt, sparing Basil having to vocalize it. When they reached the door on the far end of the cavernous grand barn - Basil's nose was tickling from the hay already - they stood in a shaft of dust-mote speckled sunshine for a brief moment as Mark yanked up the ancient iron handle.

"No ring, though," Mark said, pointing over his shoulder at Basil's hand. Then he pulled back the door and began to walk down the revealed stairs to a lower level. He half vanished into the darkness, and Basil couldn't help the flash of apprehension, the memory of one too many horror movies that featured dark stairs and empty barns and crazed cannibals.