The Trek to Forever
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 1
The root cellar was forty yards into the woods behind the cotton barn, hidden under a deadfall oak that had been there since before Johnny was born. His father thought nobody knew about it.
Johnny had known since he was eleven.
He’d found it the way boys find things — following his father at a distance on a night Robert Morgan Brighton thought everyone was asleep, watching from behind a pine trunk while his father moved the bark-covered door and went down and came back up empty-handed. Johnny had waited three days before he looked inside.
He’d never touched it. Never told anyone. Never given his father any reason to suspect the secret had a witness.
He was patient that way. He got it from his mother, who had been patient right up until the fever took her when Johnny was nine, and who had told him in one of her last clear moments that the Brighton men had loud voices and short memories, and that a quiet boy who paid attention would always know more than they did.
She’d been right about that.
He went on a Thursday night in October when the quarter moon gave just enough light to move by and the field hands were in their quarters and his father was in the parlor with his bourbon and his ledgers, doing the mathematics of ownership that passed for his evening’s entertainment.
Johnny counted out fifty double eagles by feel in the darkness of the root cellar. The coins were cold and heavy in his palm. He put them in the leather pouch he’d prepared, tucked it inside his shirt, replaced everything exactly as he’d found it, and walked back through the woods to the house.
Fifty coins. One thousand dollars.
His father would never miss them. There were hundreds more.
Johnny Brighton stood at the edge of the treeline and looked at the house his grandfather had built and his father had filled with the proceeds of other people’s suffering, and he made himself look at it clearly. The white columns. The wide porch. The windows lit warm and golden from inside.
Everything he’d ever known.
He turned away from it and walked toward the side door near the kitchen, the one that opened into Maddy’s domain, and knocked the way he’d knocked since he was small. Three soft. One hard.
Maddy opened the door and looked at him, then at the shape the pouch made under his shirt, and said nothing for a moment.
“Come in then,” she said. “Before somebody sees you standing there looking guilty.”
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