The Trek to Forever
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 11
Naomi’s water broke at dinner.
She knew it before she fully understood what was happening. One moment she was at the stove and the next moment the world had shifted in a way that was entirely biological and entirely beyond argument and she stood in the kitchen of their farmhouse on an October evening in 1858 and looked at Johnny across the table and said, “It’s time.”
Johnny was on his feet before she finished the sentence.
He got her settled. Helped her to the bedroom they’d added when her belly had started showing in the spring, the room they’d built with Joseph Hartwell’s help and two neighboring Quaker farmers who had shown up on a Saturday morning with tools and lumber and the particular cheerful efficiency of people who consider a neighbor’s need their own business. He got her settled against the pillows with the clean linens they’d been stacking in the corner of that room for two months and he looked at her and she looked at him and they had one moment of complete stillness together.
Then she said go get Prudence.
He went.
Mrs. Prudence Hinshaw was sixty-two years old and had brought a lot of children into the world in and around Tabor Iowa and had the specific unflappable quality of a woman for whom the extraordinary had become ordinary through sheer repetition. She answered her door at the knock, assessed Johnny Brighton on her doorstep in one practiced look, said give me two minutes, and was in her buggy in ninety seconds.
She arrived at the farm, went directly to the bedroom, looked at Naomi with those experienced eyes, and said first babies take their time. Then she looked at Johnny in the doorway.
“Water,” she said. “Hot. And those linens.”
He heated water. He passed clean linens through the door at intervals. He made coffee. He drank some of it. He paced the length of the main room approximately ten thousand times. He put more wood on the fire. He heated more water. He paced some more.
The Iowa night settled around the farmhouse with its particular enormous patience.
The cattle were quiet in the barn. The horse had been fed. The east windows held the darkness outside and the firelight inside and Johnny paced between them with his hands doing the useful things hands could do out here and his mind doing the useless things minds do when the most important event in a man’s life is happening on the other side of a door.
He thought about Naomi.
He thought about the first night in Georgia and her back against his chest and the way she’d finally gone to sleep while he lay awake listening to the plantation breathe around them. He thought about the Ohio River in the dark and her voice steady and low calling the current to him. He thought about Indiana and her hands on his face in the safe house and put it down Johnny spoken in the dark.
He thought about everything she’d already survived before tonight.
She could do this. She could do anything.
He heated more water.
The hours moved the way hours move when you’re waiting for something that can’t be hurried.
Slowly. And then more slowly.
Mrs. Hinshaw came out twice. Once for more linens. Once for the coffee which she drank standing up in the kitchen with the no-nonsense appreciation of a woman doing hard work in the middle of the night. She told him Naomi was doing well. She told him first babies take their time. She told him to stop pacing because the floor had done nothing to deserve it.
He paced anyway.
Around two in the morning Naomi cried out from the bedroom and Johnny stopped moving entirely for a moment and stood in the middle of the main room with his hands at his sides and felt the sound move through him.
Then Mrs. Hinshaw’s voice. Low and steady and completely certain. That’s right. Just like that. You’re doing fine.
He breathed.
Made more coffee.
Paced.
The darkness outside the east windows began to change around five in the morning.
Not light yet. Just the quality of the darkness shifting. The specific grey that comes before the grey that comes before the dawn. Johnny had learned to read it on the road. Six months of pre-dawn departures had made him fluent in the language of night becoming morning.
He stood at the east window and watched it change and listened to the sounds from the bedroom and thought about the east windows being bigger. I want as much of the morning light as possible she had said on the road into Tabor and he had made them bigger come March and every morning since the light had come through them straight and clean and fallen across the floor of their house the way she’d wanted it.
This morning it was going to fall across something new.
He stood at the window and watched the darkness change and waited.
At ten minutes past six the light came.
And with it, from the bedroom, a sound.
A cry.
Not his. Not Naomi’s. Not Mrs. Hinshaw’s steady voice.
New.
A voice that had never existed in the world before this exact moment. Small and furious and absolutely certain of its own presence. Announcing itself to the farmhouse and the eighty acres and Mills County Iowa and everything beyond with everything it had.
Johnny stood at the east window with the morning light coming through it and felt that cry move through him the way the Ohio River current had moved through the boat. Unstoppable. Cold and fast and changing everything it touched.
His eyes went bright.
He didn’t try to stop it.
The bedroom door opened.
Mrs. Prudence Hinshaw stood in the doorway with a bundle wrapped in the clean linens and looked at Johnny Brighton standing at the east window in the morning light with his mother’s quiet eyes full and his hands at his sides and sixty years of bringing children into the world behind her and said.
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