A Red Leaf & Ten Orchids Ch. 15

"I see it," she said, "but I'm not sure what I'm seeing there."

"Uh ...that's your aunt's knee and leg down to her foot." he said feeling silly.

"I see... Oh, my, God ..."

Josh watched Kayla's little smile for a moment, "Well go Aunt Rose," she said in a soft voice. She lowered the glasses and they both laughed.

Josh was worried about the tower. Since he was heavier, he climbed down. After a time, Kayla told Josh that she could see them standing, putting clothes on.

Josh nodded, and opened his cell phone as she climbed down.

"Brisebois. Go ahead."

Josh smiled. "Jim, we're thinking of getting supper ready, and need to know if you guys are planning on coming back in anytime soon."

There was a pause while he conferred with Rose. "We ought to be there in about a half hour. What's for supper?"

"I dunno yet. Kayla's' cooking, and I'll assist. You still like steak that's squirming, if that's what she decides on?"

"Yes." Jim smiled.

Ok, Bye." Josh closed the phone as Kayla walked over looking at the rust on her hands from the tower. He smiled, looking at the phone. "I'm kind of glad we don't have any oysters."

When Kayla grinned at him, he said, "Look babe, two things; one, we shouldn't climb that thing. It's not safe, and two, we can't say one word to them that we know what they were doing. Nothing. You're safe, but I'm not. You have no idea how that man can inflict pain."

She laughed, and said that she wouldn't say anything anyway. "And there's Aunt Rose to think of," she said, "if I know her at all, what she was doing must have been a real trial for her to decide, so I'm sure not going to say a word."

Josh thought a moment before he nodded, "Yeah, the last thing that she needs now is to feel badly .

Now I'm sorry that I saw them at all."

"I think I did have a good idea though, "Josh grinned, "when I told him that Rosie would be the best person to show him the place."

Kayla nodded, "Another thing that we don't dare talk about, huh?"

Together they set about dinner. "What did you mean when you said 'squirming'?" Kayla asked.

"He gets disappointed if what he eats isn't still twitching. It's not pretty." Josh chuckled. "By the way, what did you think of where they were?"

Kayla looked at him. "What do you mean? I really liked your instructions to help me find them. It was like having a look into how you think, to look for what doesn't belong, or is missing. I really enjoyed that."

Josh smiled at her. "I'm worried now. I don't want to give away all of my secrets. But that wasn't what I asked you. Tell me about the place." He was trying to encourage her thinking.

She frowned, sure that he was trying to illustrate something for her. "Well, it looks pleasant. Shady, with some grass under the trees, I think. But that's hard to tell because we're below it. How am I doing?"

"You're doing fine," he coaxed, "especially since you saw that the elevation makes it obscure. I've been there a few times. The copse of trees there is a great place to reflect, and watch the clouds roll past. You can see most of the ranch's land from there. A pretty regal view, you could say."

"What does that mean, 'a regal view'? That's a clumsy turn of phrase. What are you trying to teach me now?"

Looking out at the yard, he saw Jillian replacing the cardboard noisemaker on her bike. She had it down now. Joshua rolled his eyes at Kayla, and chuckled. "Only a few days ago, you were calling ME stupid."

He finished chopping vegetables, and dried his hands. "I'm not trying to teach you anything now. I'm trying to get you to imagine something with me. Without the truck in the scene, I'd never have spotted them. On the other side of those trees, is a place to park out of sight from here."

Josh slid his hand down the back of Kayla's jeans. It was a bit tough to get past the waistband, but he did it. He caressed her bottom gently for a moment before he whispered into her ear almost silently so that she had to listen hard to catch the words.

"That hilltop offers a regal view to someone who might want to look out across the land and maybe become a lioness queen, I think."

Kayla's eyes lit up as she turned leaning against him. "Aunt Rose did warn me that you were incredibly observant," she purred at him. "Tell me more."

He smiled shyly. "We ought to take a drive there soon to scope it out better. They might want to go there again as well, so we'll need to pick the time for our reconnaissance when they're not there, if they do go back. It's a nice spot."

"Would anyone be able to see us there?" Kayla was intrigued.

Josh shrugged. "Jet fighters maybe, but they don't come around here much, and they move too fast to be able to see much ground detail if they're low. That leaves just spy satellites and aliens."

She smiled. "How about if we go there at night?"

"Then we probably wouldn't be the only ones mating there," he said, "that's where the coyotes go. I've heard them up there at night."

"Ok, let's see if it would be a good place for the daytime" she grinned. "But you forgot one detail." Kayla kissed him. "We still need to see if we can actually do this physically. Practice makes perfect."

After dinner, Rose and Jim sat on one side of the porch table as he went over his accumulated data. They were involved in some serious discussions. Kayla watched Josh running around laughing with Jillian on his shoulders, and Daisy chasing them. He looked like he could do that all day.

Kayla did sometimes sneak a glance at the older two, and smiled as she noticed that they seemed to have gotten pretty friendly. And they both enjoyed tea. On one of her trips back from the kitchen with some refills, she noticed that even though their talks were fairly involved, they often held hands under the table. She wondered what that was about, but since her aunt seemed pretty chipper, she'd content herself to watch a while to see where it went.

"Excuse me Jim." Kayla began, "Josh said something about him possibly being recalled. if he has to go back, where would he be sent? Unless it's someplace in the far north of Canada, I would at least like to visit him" Kayla said.

Jim looked up. "If that were to happen, he'd go to Afghanistan, Kayla."

"Afghanistan?"

"Yes. That's where the deployment would be to. Josh's been there twice already. Normally, he's always been a ready to go guy, always looked forward to an overseas posting. But the last time, he changed and became more withdrawn," Jim said quietly.

Kayla sat down slowly. "Jim, I want to marry him much more than I want to live without him. My Aunt has noticed that he's been a little different this time as well. Please tell me what happened to him. I want to know,... please?"

Jim exhaled. "Short official version -- an IED was detonated in a village as his unit was passing through. There were two fatalities, both Afghani nationals. Other than cuts and scrapes, the worst off on our side was Josh. End of story."

"But that's not the whole thing, is it?" she asked, "Please tell me what happened."

Brisebois looked over, "Kayla, I'm just an old soldier. I've seen all kinds of awful shit. I'd really like to leave it alone. Are you sure you need to know?"

She nodded. Rose was listening intently.

He sighed. "Man is the cruelest animal in the garden, most often to his own kind. One of my worst nightmares is a picture that I cannot erase from my mind. He was with a large patrol passing through that small village, and I was along with them, since there were two groups, one of them Josh's, but they were teamed together. The insurgents had chosen to explode a charge as we were passing through the center of it. They could have done that anywhere else, but decided that the people there needed to know who was boss, I guess, so that they could see that they weren't safe.

When the charge went off, Joshua was thrown some distance. We took some cuts and scrapes, but nobody in the patrol was hurt except Josh, and that wasn't serious. He had landed against some razor wire. You might have noticed the scars from it on his chest and left arm. I still don't know what happened to his body armor, it was just gone, though I guess it had served its purpose. I saw him down and ran to pull him out of the wire. He shook his head, and yelled instructions to his people in case there was a follow-up ambush.

Then he noticed a tiny hand under some debris. He cleared it away, and uncovered a little girl from the village next to the body of her mother, I guess. She couldn't have been more than 5 or 6. The other sergeant radioed for help for the villagers as Josh held that dying child in his arms. He spoke to her softly and told her that she was beautiful, and then he kissed her bloody face. He knew she couldn't understand him, and that she was fading out. Her blood ran down his front to his knees. She was already beyond any help that we could give her."

Jim looked into the distance for a moment before he came back to himself, "I'm sorry.

Anyway uh.., the little girl smiled at him, then reached up and touched that scar on his face; I heard her voice when she spoke to him. She didn't even cry. A few seconds later, her hand fell back down and she was gone. I looked at him, and his face just crumpled. His head came back up and he screamed with everything he had. All of the arteries and tendons in his neck stood out. It was like his soul was leaving him. Then he began to cry."

The old soldier exhaled. "I've served the armed forces of two countries on five continents, and fought everything from people to forest fires. The single, most painful image that I cannot ever forget is seeing my friend Joshua standing there holding her tiny broken body to his chest, and watching him cry for her as her blood dripped off his arms into the dirt.

Our interpreter told me that the girl had called him 'fereshteh'. It means angel. I guess that's what she thought that he was. Some of her female relatives took her body from him, and Josh kissed her again as we left. After that, he only responded to questions in monosyllables. He looked like he wasn't with it at all. I was concerned for him. I'd never seen Josh like that."

He sighed again. "You wanted to know, so you might as well hear the rest. About ten minutes later we tried to bring them to us. I called in artillery fire on the likely exit routes, and we had elements outside the village pushing them back in so that they couldn't run from us easily this time. Josh's people had been teamed to the other group, and were checking on some houses while he and I watched the street behind them. We heard footsteps from around the corner. As we went around the building, I twisted my ankle and fell. Joshua ran around the corner fully, and ran into three of them. I was looking up at a young man pointing his rifle at me with a grin.

He saw Josh and the grin disappeared as he began to raise his rifle toward him. Josh stitched him where he stood, 3 rounds in the chest and he shot the other two before they could turn their backs to run.

When shit starts to fly, men react differently. That's why good training is so important, so that they fall back on it and continue to function. Everybody is usually scared, and that's normal, but they keep going. Everybody's different. Some men even get pretty hot in a firefight, but Joshua doesn't. He turns very cold and hard, but he's always efficient and professional.

A few of the village women had been following us at a distance after watching him cry. There was a lot of dust hanging in the air. Our 150 millimeter shells were screaming in and crashing outside the village, and occasionally there was some steel from that flying down the street we had turned at. You could hear it skittering off of everything, but Josh didn't notice it, and I'm sure that he didn't care anyway. Josh walked back to me to see if I was ok. He wasn't crouching and he didn't run over to me. He walked. He just didn't give a damn about anything.

When he saw that I was getting back up, I got a look at the fury in Joshua's face and the look in his eyes. They looked like blue glass. He could see that I was alright, but he looked as though he didn't know me. His facial scar looked like it was on fire and his shirt hung away from him in ribbons. His entire chest was exposed. He was covered in blood; the little girl's mixed with his own. He looked like the angel of death on earth to me and I felt chills on my neck. I remember that he wasn't crying anymore."

It's always important to retain objective, but inside me, I believe that it had become personal for him, but I can't say that with any certainty since there are no facts which point to it. Other than looking pissed, he didn't look as though he was anything but rational

He looked at his rifle, changed the magazine, and ran off when he heard more footsteps and voices up the road. It turned out that he'd been spotted, standing at the intersection of two roads, and they began shooting at him. He saw another of them and then he was running that way after asking me to get word to the others.

By the time that any of the others got there, he was gone. I lost track of him for most of an hour. He didn't respond to calls on the group channel because his radio was gone in the explosion. I didn't think I'd ever see him alive again. I don't know any more of what happened. Josh says that he came back when he was certain that we wouldn't be attacked from that direction and he'd gone all the way to the edge of the place before he came back.

That's all that I know. He could account for every single round out of his rifle and the story added up. There were a couple more bodies and they'd obviously been engaged in attacking when they were killed. Every shot accounted for."

Jim shrugged, "It's my very personal opinion that something happened, but I don't know what it was and he won't say more than what he said then. His story makes sense for a man who got caught up in a firefight because his blood was up. As far as I know, the only thing that he did wrong was that he stepped away without a radio -- and I set the stage when I put his men with the other group.

The problem that I have with it all is that I know him. I've never seen him do anything like that before or since. It's not like him. The men of that village wouldn't come near him after that. I don't think that they thought he was human."

Rose and Kayla looked at Joshua as he spun around holding little Jillian in the air. The two were laughing. He hugged her to his chest, and ran from Daisy as she barked and tore after them.

"I know that he used to have nightmares about that incident, maybe he still does. I would prefer that you don't mention what I've said to you. Everything that he said in the after-action meetings checked out. He won't talk about what he remembers other than what he said then.

About a week afterward, one of the women who had seen everything approached him alone. She was very young and shy, and quite beautiful. She'd found his beret, and had come to return it to him. The interpreter told us that she was the dead girl's cousin, and that she wanted to show Josh her cousin's grave.

Through her, he found out that her name had been, 'Boosah', or 'Kiss'. It's written in the tattoo on his right arm. He went with her to visit it with a few men as security on our next trip through.

But things had changed then. Nobody in that village would go near him. Most barely looked at him. The only one who was always there was the cousin. She always looked for him and only smiled very carefully. It's probably just as well that he couldn't understand why, he'd have been embarrassed to hell," he chuckled before becoming serious.

"Kayla, you're a lovely, beautiful woman, all three of you are captivating. Rose and I both have known him long enough separately to understand that while Joshua has given you his heart quickly, he doesn't do that lightly. If you marry him, I can say without a doubt that nothing will ever happen to that little pixie over there, not while he's breathing, anyway. Do you still want to do this after what I've said? Are you sure that he's what you want?"

Kayla was staring at the connectors at the back of his laptop. She didn't answer right away. She composed her reply with a deep breath, and looked up.

"I've never liked soldiers. I always thought that they liked war and killing, or they were just playing tough boy. I never gave them a thought, ever. I guessed what Joshua must have been as soon as I saw him. Maybe that's why I reacted to him the way that I did at first. I also learned later that he wasn't like my preconception at all. He just did what he believed in. I guess he saw his purpose there. Because of you both, I've had to revise my opinion of people like you and him, though I know that there are assholes everywhere in every occupation.

Mr. Brisebois, in spite of myself, I've fallen in love with him, though it sure got off to a rough start, and we certainly never intended it. But I love him more than anything I could ever imagine, and despite everything that I've said and done to him that he didn't deserve, he loves me.

I keep thinking that this must be a dream. I don't know what I did to deserve his love, but he sure has mine. I know what that means to him, too. So my answer to you is yes. I still want him.

I want to be his wife so much it hurts. Jilly already accepts him as her father. That's what she really wants from him, a father's love, and you can see that he gives it freely to her. He's all that I want, how could I want more than him and Jilly?"

She sighed, "If he has to go back there, then we'll wait for him if he has to walk and swim all the way back, because he told me that he would always come back to me, as long as he's alive.

And though I have grown skeptical of anything that most men say, I'll believe anything that he tells me, because he's shown me that I can believe in him. And I do believe in him. So, yes, I still want him very much."

She smiled at him. "I like you a lot, Jim. I'm sure that when you weren't making his life miserable, you were looking out for him if you could. I know that because I noticed that it was you who pulled him out of that wire.

I'm sorry that I didn't leave it alone when you asked me to. I can see that you're still affected by it. I never considered what it must be like to have to go somewhere because you've been sent. You don't even get to choose who you have to fight, or why.

That means that I also have to revise the way that I regard our own soldiers. I think that they aren't appreciated enough.

But I'm not sorry to have heard what happened. It's a piece of very sad history, but it shows me again what kind of man he is. He's the kind of man that I want beside me forever."

Jim Brisebois smiled at her warmly. "I can see why he loves you so much, you know, or at least I've seen glimpses of it.

Anyway, I tore a couple of pieces off of him for it over couple of hours afterwards. I told him that I need leaders who lead, not fight their own wars, and he reminded me with respect that we had been alone there, and that he had taken the fight to the enemy after he knew that I was more or less alright. He said that I wasn't exactly capable of more than a slow limp, so he didn't want me to try to keep up with him."

He looked at Joshua, who was running and trying to stay just ahead of his new daughter so that when the time was right, she would catch him. The moment came, and he even looked surprised as she caught him, jumped up as much as she could, and rode him down into the dirt. She didn't notice how careful he was to be sure that he bore the brunt of it. As Josh got up and dusted himself off, Jim called him over.

"I've got something to say to all of you, but especially to Kayla and Joshua. I've held on to it partly under the pretense of not having had time to tell anyone yet." he winked at Rose. "I stopped by the regiment's offices before I left to grab the forms that we spoke of and I've brought them along with me. We can fill them out any time before I leave, and I'll deliver them personally to the clerks there who still fear me.