Embers of Hope
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 13: What Is Conceived in Darker Times
The second pregnancies came in the fall, which felt right in a way that was also not right.
Fall was the season of preparation, of laying things in against the winter, of taking stock of what you had and what you would need and whether the two were close enough together to survive the distance between them. It was the season for honest accounting. And the accounting that fall, when Coulter sat with it quietly in the early mornings on the porch with his coffee and the cooling air coming down off Lassen, was not dishonest enough to pretend that what had been conceived in hope the first time was being conceived in the same spirit the second.
Something had shifted in the world outside the ranch’s fence lines. He felt it the way you feel a change in weather before it arrives — in the quality of the light, in the behavior of animals, in the particular silence that precedes something loud.
Cutler and his three men had come back twice since August. The second time there were six of them. Both times Coulter had been on the porch with the rifle against the post and both times they had stopped at the gate and said their piece and left without coming through it, but the leaving had a quality of postponement rather than retreat. They were not done. They were calculating.
Hollis had ridden over in September and said, with the direct plainness that Coulter had come to respect in him, that the talk in Redding had moved past drinking and into something more organized, that there were men involved now who were not hotheads but cold ones, which was worse, and that Coulter should make whatever preparations he was going to make and make them soon.
Coulter had thanked him and gone back to his preparations.
Kweina told him first, in the way she told him everything — directly, on a Tuesday morning in October, sitting across from him at the kitchen table with her coffee and her clear dark eyes.
“Again,” she said.
He looked at her.
“All three of us,” she said.
He sat with that. Outside the kitchen window the oak along the creek had gone the color of old copper in the fall light and the air was sharp and clean and the ranch lay around them in its autumn beauty and he felt the two things simultaneously and completely — the joy of it and the fear of it — without the ability to separate them because they had become the same feeling, which was perhaps the most honest feeling available to a man in his situation.
He reached across the table and took her hand.
She held it and looked at him with the expression she wore when she was seeing him fully and wanted him to know she was seeing him fully.
“We knew this was the plan,” she said.
“We did,” he said.
“More children is more future,” she said. “That has not changed.”
“No,” he said. “It hasn’t.”
She looked at him for a moment longer. “But you are afraid.”
He did not insult her by denying it. “Yes.”
She nodded. She turned his hand over in both of hers and looked at it the way Miwena sometimes looked at it, as though it contained information available to the right kind of reading. Then she looked up.
“So are we,” she said. “We are afraid and we are doing it anyway. That is what we have always done.” She paused. “That is what you do also. It is one of the reasons we chose you.”
He looked at her across the table in the fall morning light and thought about three young women walking through his gate on a spring morning with the weight of a people’s survival on their shoulders and asking the hardest thing they had ever asked with their chins level and their hands still.
They had been afraid then too.
They had done it anyway.
“All right,” he said.
She squeezed his hand once and released it and picked up her coffee.
Tsela received the news of her second pregnancy the way she received most things — as a fact to be incorporated into her understanding of the situation and acted upon accordingly. She told Coulter on the same morning as Kweina, sitting at the table after Kweina had gone to the garden, with the directness that was her natural mode.
“You know,” he said. It was not a question.
“I have known for two weeks,” she said.
“You didn’t say.”
“I was thinking about it,” she said.
He waited.
She looked at her hands on the table, then at him. “The first time I was thinking about what we were building,” she said. “This time I am thinking about what we are protecting.” She paused. “It is the same thing. But it does not feel the same.”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
She looked at him with the measuring quality she had never fully put away. “You are making plans,” she said. “I can see it in you. You have been making plans for weeks.”
He had not told them yet about the lawyer. About Corbin and the documents under the floorboard. He told her now, the full of it, because Tsela was the one who needed the full of it — who processed incomplete information poorly and complete information well, who needed to know the actual dimensions of a situation to orient herself within it.
She listened without interrupting. When he finished she was quiet for a moment.
“The documents protect the land,” she said.
“The land and whatever I can attach to the land,” he said. “It’s imperfect. The law is imperfect.”
“The law was not made for us,” she said. Not bitterly. Simply accurately.
“No,” he said. “But I’m using what it offers.”
She nodded slowly. Then she said, “There is something I have not told you.”
He waited.
“Daha is not well,” she said. “Since the summer. He does not show it in the way that sick men show it but I know the signs and Poya knows the signs and we have not spoken of it directly because speaking of it directly does not change it.” She looked at the table. “He wants to see these children born. He is holding on for that.”
Coulter thought about the old man standing in the kitchen with James against his chest, his lips moving, the hope on his face that had no precedent in anything Coulter had seen there before.
“Then we’ll make sure he does,” Coulter said.
Tsela looked at him. “You cannot promise that.”
“I can work toward it,” he said. “That’s all a promise ever is.”
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached across the table and put her hand against his face, briefly, in the way she reserved for the moments when words were insufficient and touch was the only accurate language.
He held still under her hand.
She took it back and rose and went to the stove.
Miwena he found in the barn.
He had known since Kweina told him that morning and he had been waiting for the right moment and had decided by midday that there was no right moment and that waiting for one was a way of not having the conversation rather than a way of preparing for it.
She was with the horses, as she usually was in the afternoons, moving between them with the ease of a woman entirely at home in the company of large animals. She looked up when he came in. She read his face immediately, as she always did, and turned back to the horse she was working with and continued what she was doing.
He came and stood beside her.
“James is asleep,” she said. Answering the question he hadn’t asked, which was whether the boy was attended to. Tsela had him.
“I know,” he said.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.