In the community of Hillsplit, standing above the seven green hills and looking beyond the jagged wall, looms the wooden effigy to the great Lacturn rising sixty feet into the sky. Lacturn gazes west to the sea and watches. Chiseled from venerable maple, his eyes are the most impressive, chilling visitors with their frigid unity. He holds a hatchet across his chest; his left leg bends slightly, and appears ahead of the right, as if he were walking, or charging, towards the sea. The mouth and teeth open, protrude, and curve into a snarl. Of facts about the man, few are known. Yet in Hillsplit, wild tales about Lacturn abound.

Lacturn fathered five hundred children.

Lacturn split the hills from his own teeth. 

Lacturn fought back the Islanders with only his hatchet and his wolves.

But as the proud members of this community look up to him, they do not concern themselves with the truth of these tales. What matters, they say, is the feeling he engenders. And when they follow his eyes, fastened to the west, over the jagged wall to the sea, they know they exist within him. And when they obey his gaze to the undug soil beyond, a sense of home permeates through their breasts and out into their blood. And when they touch him, their fingers soft on his varnished legs, the torch passes and they, too, will take up the call to protect these revered hills from anyone or anything that dares to disturb the tranquility that exists here in Hillsplit. The calm. The traditions. The generations. Here, in Hillsplit, they say home is a very important thing. Homelessness is a fate worse than death. 

Beyond the wall, the sea remains unruly. The waves fall and rise, rippling and crashing, into the shore and sometimes—and this is what the people of Hillsplit fear the most—things arrive on their stony shores and sometimes those things remain. On some cloudy and damp mornings, the people of Hillsplit will peep out from their stone compounds to their wall and pray nothing sleeps there: no fingers cling to the glass, pulling-up unknown weight, spilling unclean blood. For the history of Hillsplit, or at least what is told to children around the night fire, is defined by what has arrived at their shores, by the bodies that break against their walls, by the heroes with hatchets that break back sending those bodies hurling back into the sea. And with every storm survived, Lacturn further glows atop his hill, warning of rocks, an old lighthouse. 

Sometimes the spirit of the people of Hillsplit is tested. Sometimes single bodies sneak above the wall and fall onto the quiet grounds of Hillsplit like orange leaves in the falls of other places. But the people of Hillsplit are generous and their sympathy never travels far. And here is such a time when they thought about the plight of another. How they might feel to be away from home, among different hills and below higher walls. 

. . . . . . . .

The traveller crept up the green hill and saw men hammering nails into their mud-stained compounds. He fell to his knees, rested his bandaged hands, and let the cool wind whip his wet hair from his eyes. The sun had blotched his wrinkled cheeks, his skin as dry and dark as red sand. At that same moment, as if from some divine providence, the group of men spotted him, in quiet prayer on the apex of the hill, shouted unintelligible instructions, formed an attacking party, and descended on the traveller. 

Far from the violence of home that had propelled him on through ugly and grey muck, the traveller, in his soaked clothing, studied the party snake its way over the hills, each part bolted to the other, toward him, chanting short, rhythmic songs full of mirth, with their hatchets drawn and sharpened. Although he knew the weightless paper secured him only a meeting with the authorities and he had already laid his hands to the mercy of many strangers, he hoped that feeling still existed among men. He knew what to expect. As the party pulled him to his feet and dragged him back to the compounds with dark, black smoke rising from the chimneys, he sighed and a released a smile. 

The plaid-dressed men stood rigid and rooted in the dirt floor around the traveller; their eyes as colourless as an evaporated sea drooped over him. Three stone walls stretched around him while he faced a glassed partition leading to another room. The traveller reached for his pocket and pulled out a little scrap of wet white paper and held it out to the silent men. 

 I’ve travelled a great distance, said the traveller, encountered many hardships, and, if it pleases you, I would like to be granted food, water, and warm bedding until my case is heard.

He could not say for sure whether his hosts had understood him, yet he remained confident that their accents might fade into the rhythms of natural conversation.  

As one, the men reached into their own pockets and pulled out pencils and notepads; they began to scribble. 

They spoke in a dull baritone, eyes tied to their pads.

We are the examiners. We examine the behaviour of strangers. We document their mannerisms, customs, and beliefs. We’ve been chosen by the Patriot himself. 

The others echoed that name in reserved reverence, as if a god of both heart and horror. 

The traveller shook his head. 

Would you kindly present this paper to the Patriot and tell him I am waiting.

The examiners continued to write and to speak.

The stranger is unfamiliar with the customs of the hills. He expects the Patriot to wait on him.

No. It was not my intention to appear ungrateful of all your efforts. The Patriot may come whenever he pleases. Forgive me as I am tired. 

The examiners continued to write and to speak.

The stranger appears hostile. Commence questioning.

The men began their interrogation with a sharp ease.

How have you moved here?

I walked over many hills.

Yes, but how have you moved here?

I only wish to stay here for a brief time.

Yes, but how have you moved here?

On stoned tables, restless boys are strapped face down. For the crime of abandonment, men hold their tight calves and bring the hatchet square to the tendon. With a swift hack, the boys are forever hobbled and grow into men whose limps show the folly of seeking greener hills. For, as children are warned, it is far more troublesome to run by tiptoe. 

Do you share our common ideas about the family, the farm, and the future?

What are those?

Do you share our common ideas about the family, the farm, and the future?

I don’t know what those are.

These virtues have a long history: of tired and terrified bodies coming together to make fires and to sire spawn; of the myths of long-bearded fathers in toques cutting over fat trunks and diligent mothers washing dirty knees and brothers and sisters building houses that will stand and house their children and their children’s children, forever, into eternity. 

The traveller has shown all the qualities of a stranger. The Patriot may approach. 

The examiners funneled into the backroom separated by glass. In among their exiting bodies, the traveller noticed a tall man, with big, rounded shoulders. He stood still, letting the smaller men break around him and settle behind the glass. As the tall man approached the traveller, the examiners’ eyes enlarged, their breath fogging the glass. With every step taken by his leathered boots, they clapped and banged on the glass. They hooted, jumped, and snarled, foaming at the mouth, coyotes teasing an injured calf. Behind the tall man, it appeared as if commotion had baked and whipped them into a vignette of nameless, bubbling flesh. 

The tall man raised his left hand, and quiet fell through the room. 

I am the Patriot. 

His face was polished yet pure, resembling a candle-less cream cake while his legs, two sturdy tree trunks, moved awkwardly along the ground as if he were an anchored dingy. He faced the traveller and angled his eyes to the dirt below. 

The traveller said.

I will not sit. I will not tolerate this treatment. I demand the respect owed to me.

The examiners hooted and hollered, wrestling with one another for the best position behind the glass. 

The Patriot smirked and said

You will sit. You come here to our hills uninvited. We take you in. Yet you make demands. You demand respect. You demand hearings. What is it about strangers that make them so self-righteous? As if we were responsible for your predicament. But we’re the cause of neither your cold nor your hunger. Look how you quiver alone. 

The traveller pulled his heavy, wool sweater over his head to reveal his bare and scratched forearms. He undid his cotton trousers, brought them to his ankles—bloodied blotches and purpled patches flayed his lower legs—and dropped them next to his sweater. Like a troubled fowl caught in a lashing storm, the traveller slunk to the ground. And as he placed one tattered leg across the other and sat naked below the Patriot, he saw for the first time the black flag hanging from the ceiling. 

The Patriot fingered the handle tucked in the belt of his trousers, his eyes to the flag. Eight white wolves stood in a circle behind a land of black. They formed an impenetrable unit that circled unmarked land, strangled it, and then laid claim to its soil. Within the wolves’ orbit stood a stately maple tree with roots, little bony fingers, branching forth. The appendages gripped and squeezed and sucked the earth. The maple rose as firmly rooted in the soil as the compounds that lay littered over the seven hills and the blackened hands that drove through the earth. 

The wolves led my ancestors to these rolling hills. The pack took mercy on them. They shared their slaughter and offered them protection and they stayed. Our ancestors knew the importance of place in a world of movement. 

The Patriot lumbered the length of the room as he spoke. Mournful, he watched the flag and pulled the teethed hatchet from his belt and pointed it the traveller. 

The Islanders have their fisher-king. They say a man fashioned shoes out of fish and rode out to meet a beautiful woman perched on a piece of driftwood. From then, their blood has run pure. This we respect. We did not have the safety of islands. We had the pack. United and ferocious. 

The Patriot shot around, clenched his fists, eyes glaring to his restless herd behind the glass. His boots pounded and cracked the tiny stones underneath. 

“Who founded Hillsplit?”

As one, they responded.

Lacturn! Lacturn! Lacturn!

And what did he give us?

Home! Home! Home!

Reflected in the examiners’ eyes fell heavy pickaxes against hard granite covered by a fingernail of soft grass. Hands calloused and muscles wrought, the men plowed and dug through the cold rock. They sweated in the sun as swarms of deer flies swam over their glistening and naked backs. But when the sun set for the day and the flies sat silent on the twisted branches, the men cooked meat on the fire and talked of the future when their children would reap the fruits of all their labour. They loved this land as the rooster loves the quiet dawn. To be away from their fire, walking in the unknown dark, they did not dare imagine.

The Patriot spoke. 

Through hardship, blood is spilt and loyalty is born. A common destiny emerges from the ash. Blood and loyalty. We bleed. Do your people bleed?

In his question, the traveller heard the familiar tired sounds of shovels at work. Frightened little boys mapped the ropes along the measured ground. Along the streaked earth, over the mossy green hills, the boys lifted sharp rocks and dropped them on. Up the rocks rose, one on top of the other, until they formed one long wall that slithered out and over the golden meadows beyond sight. At the fire, the boys playfully took their empty bottles and smashed them. They stood on each other’s shoulders and passed the shards along up through each pair of hands to the top of the wall where the last boy secured the glass and on they went, smashing and securing, down the row. Of the outside world they knew very little, but they held home at last. 

The Patriot moved toward the traveller with his hatchet at his side. Behind, the examiners stayed calm, following him as a dog obeys a twig. 

Let me see your hands.

The traveller laid his bandaged hands flat.

Please . . .

You do it.

Said the Patriot. 

As the traveller chewed through the bloodied wrappings, dark, slicing cuts emerged along his bruised hands; the blood had dried over the scars. 

This is what happens when you leave home. 

The hatchet swayed by his side. 

People need homes. Tell me, where is your wife? What happened to your children? 

The traveller shook as his shoulders and chest heaved forward, his cheeks ripening with blood. He supported himself with the palm of his hand gripping the tail of his trousers, gave his weight to his right leg and rose naked. Just as he had done on the sullen sands and in the deep swamps, he took the white paper out and offered it to the Patriot. 

People move. I’ve seen things you could not imagine. I could tell you stories of strength and those of sadness. I’ve known many lands. I’ve counted the same stars from atop different hills. And what have I learned? Soil is soil. 

The Patriot ripped the paper from his hand and let it fall. He raised and aimed his hatchet, settling it between the traveller’s ribs. 

We will return you home.

He swung, and they clapped. 

At the water’s edge, the traveller was thrown and the waves carried him to a world big and beautiful. 

. . . . . . .

It is snowing in Hillsplit as its people climb to Lacturn. Across the hills, men tie the black flag to the wall. And Lacturn watches from his perch, hatchet in hand, eyes focused. Below, the waves crash to the shore. 

Hillsplit is a wonderful home, they say. And to have a home is a precious thing. A precious thing, they say.