It wasn’t a promise. But it was a crack in the wall.

“You always did run, son. Ran from the thresher. Ran from the funeral. Ran from your own blood.”

He drove into town—the same two-stoplight town that had once felt like a cage. He bought a hundred saplings from the nursery, paid cash, and told the teenage clerk, “These are for the boy who comes after.”

“Coming back ain’t the same as staying. A man can visit a grave a thousand times. Doesn’t mean he’s buried there.”

He didn’t sleep that night. He sat in the rocker his mother had nursed him in, and he let the ghosts have their say. His mother, asking why he hadn’t come to her deathbed. His first dog, a mongrel named Blue, scratching at the door of a past that could not be reopened. And finally, a smaller ghost—Festus at seventeen, lanky and furious, shouting that he’d rather die than spend one more season in this dirt-poor trap.