The Trek to Forever
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 7
Kentucky came at them cold.
Not the polite cold of Tennessee mornings that retreated by midday into something manageable. Kentucky cold in November was a different animal entirely. It came off the river from the north and it came off the hills from the east and it met in the middle of every road and every clearing and every exposed stretch of open ground with the particular indifference of weather that has no opinion about who you are or where you’re trying to get to.
It just pushed.
Their contact in Kentucky was a woman named Ruth — the coincidence of the name made Naomi smile when they were introduced, a real smile, the full one, and the woman who was also Ruth laughed and said maybe it’s a good omen and Naomi said maybe it is — who went by Aunt Ruth to everyone in the network regardless of age or relationship because Aunt Ruth was the kind of title that made white men on the road think twice before stopping a woman traveling with purpose.
Aunt Ruth was fifty-three years old and free born in Ohio and had been crossing into Kentucky and back for nine years with the particular confidence of a woman who had decided somewhere along the way that fear was a luxury she couldn’t afford and had simply set it down and walked away from it. She was tall and broad shouldered and wore a wool coat that had seen better decades and boots that meant business and she looked at Johnny and Naomi when they arrived at her farm outside Bowling Green and said, “You’re younger than I expected.”
“We get that a lot,” Johnny said.
Aunt Ruth looked at him for a moment. Then she laughed. The kind of laugh that arrives without warning and means exactly what it sounds like.
“Come inside,” she said. “Both of you. We’ve got planning to do.”
The planning happened at her kitchen table over food that was simple and hot and exactly what two people who had been riding in Kentucky cold needed without knowing how badly they needed it until it was in front of them.
The Ohio River, Aunt Ruth told them, was fifty miles north. Under normal circumstances she moved people across at a point twelve miles east of Louisville where the river narrowed and a man named Gideon kept a flat bottomed boat and a willingness to use it in exchange for compensation that the network provided and a conviction that what he was doing was right that no compensation could have purchased.
These were not normal circumstances.
The reward handbill had reached Kentucky ahead of them. Five hundred dollars had a way of traveling faster than the people it was hunting. Gideon’s crossing point was being watched. Not officially. Not by law enforcement. But by two men who had positioned themselves on the Kentucky bank with the patience of people who understood that the river was a bottleneck and bottlenecks were where you waited if you wanted to catch what was flowing through.
Aunt Ruth spread a hand drawn map on the table and pointed to a spot twenty miles west of Gideon’s crossing.
“There’s another point,” she said. “Less used. The river’s wider there which makes the crossing harder but the watching is thinner.” She looked at Johnny. “Can you swim?”
“Yes,” Johnny said.
She looked at Naomi.
“I can manage,” Naomi said.
Aunt Ruth looked at her the way Moses had looked at her when she’d said the same thing about riding. Like she was filing the information away next to a question mark.
“The river’s cold,” Aunt Ruth said. “November cold. Moving fast.” She paused. “There’s a boat. Small. Enough for two people and what you’re carrying if you’re not carrying much.” She looked at their saddlebags. “You won’t be taking the horses across.”
Johnny looked up. “We leave the horses?”
“I’ll keep them,” Aunt Ruth said. “They’ll be here if you ever come back this way.” She said it without sentiment, just factually, the way you say things that might or might not be true but need to be said. “On the Ohio side there are people. They’ll meet you if the crossing goes right.” She paused. “If it doesn’t go right you’ll know before you reach the other bank.”
The fire crackled between them.
“When?” Johnny asked.
“Tomorrow night,” Aunt Ruth said. “Dark of the moon. No light on the water.” She folded the map and held it for a moment. “I’ll take you to the crossing point myself. From there it’s yours.”
She looked at them both across the table. At this boy and this girl from Georgia sitting in her Kentucky kitchen fifty miles from the river that was either the most important crossing of their lives or the place where everything ended.
“Get some sleep,” she said. “Both of you. Tomorrow you’ll need everything you have.”
That night Johnny lay awake for a long time.
Naomi was asleep against his side with her breathing slow and even and her hand resting on his chest and he lay in the dark of Aunt Ruth’s spare room and listened to the Kentucky wind and thought about the river.
Fifty miles north. Cold. Moving fast. Two men on the Kentucky bank waiting with five hundred reasons to look carefully at everything that moved.
He thought about what Aunt Ruth hadn’t said. The things her voice had moved carefully around the way you move around furniture in a dark room. What happens if the boat capsizes. What happens if they’re seen before they reach the Ohio bank. What happens if the people on the other side aren’t there.
He thought about Naomi saying I can manage.
He’d heard her say that twice now. Once about riding and once about swimming. Both times the thing she said she could manage had turned out to be something she did better than she’d claimed and probably better than he did.
He thought about her hands steady on his shaking ones in the Tennessee safe house.
He thought about corruption of natural law printed on a handbill and nailed to a post in a Tennessee town.
He thought about his father’s root cellar and the hundreds of double eagles still sitting in the dark and what they represented and what he’d taken from them and what that taking meant.
He thought about Iowa.
Naomi stirred against him.
“You’re thinking loud again,” she said without opening her eyes.
“Sorry,” he said.
She was quiet for a moment. Then, “Tell me about the farm.”
He looked at the ceiling. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” she said. “Start at the beginning.”
So he told her. In the dark of Aunt Ruth’s spare room with the Kentucky wind pushing against the windows and the river fifty miles north and the morning coming whether they were ready for it or not. He told her about the eighty acres and the log house and the well and the twenty fenced acres already broken and ready for spring planting. He told her about the barn and the cattle and the horse and the plow and the seed.
He told her about the kitchen garden she would put in come spring. The herbs and vegetables growing in Iowa soil that belonged to her. He told her about the fireplace in the log house and the two windows facing east that would let the morning light in straight and clean every day of every year they lived there.
He told her about the deed with her name on it first.
She listened with her eyes closed and her hand on his chest and her breathing slow and steady and somewhere in the telling of it he felt the thing that had been keeping him awake begin to ease. Not disappear. Ease. The way pain eases when you stop fighting it and let it be what it is.
The river was the river. Cold and fast and fifty miles north and they would cross it tomorrow night in the dark of the moon and what happened after that was in God’s hands and the hands of the people waiting on the Ohio bank.
But the farm was real. The deed was real. Iowa was real.
He had walked a thousand miles in his mind to get there and he could walk fifty more.
“Johnny,” Naomi said softly.
“Yes.”
“The windows facing east,” she said. “I want a garden box under one of them. For herbs. So the kitchen smells like something growing.”
He felt something move through him that was too warm and too specific to be anything other than joy.
“Done,” he said.
She settled deeper against him.
Outside, the Kentucky wind pushed and pushed against the house and found no way in.
Aunt Ruth woke them three hours before dawn.
No lamp. No fire. Just her voice in the doorway of the dark room saying time and the specific quality of silence that followed that told them everything about what time meant this morning.
They dressed in the dark. Quickly. Efficiently. The way they’d learned to dress on this road where every minute of darkness was an asset and light was a liability. Johnny checked the leather pouch inside his shirt. The eagles cold and heavy and present. Naomi checked the travel document and the folded paper from Anna Reese tucked against her skin.
They took only what they could carry on their backs. The saddlebags stayed. The horses stayed. Everything that belonged to the road stayed.
What they carried was what they were.
Aunt Ruth was waiting in the kitchen with two bundles wrapped in oilcloth. “Dry clothes,” she said. “Sealed as well as I can manage. You’ll want them on the other side.” She handed one to each of them and looked at them both in the darkness of her kitchen for a moment.
Then she did something that neither of them expected.
She put her hands on Naomi’s face. Both of them. Cupping her jaw the way a mother does. And she looked at her for a long moment in the dark.
“You are somebody’s beloved child,” she said quietly. “Don’t you ever forget that.”
Naomi’s breath caught.
Aunt Ruth dropped her hands and turned to the door. “Let’s go,” she said.
They followed her out into the Kentucky dark.
The fifty miles to the river crossing took most of the night on foot through terrain that had no interest in making itself easy. Aunt Ruth moved through it with the certainty of someone who had made this walk before and knew every variation of its difficulty and had decided that difficulty was simply the price of the work.
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