Honor Road by Jason Ross (best non fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

So long as the gods grant him power, spring in his knees, he thinks he will never suffer affliction down the years.

But then, when the happy gods bring on the long hard times, bear them he must, against his will, and steel his heart.”

Odysseus, The Odyssey

Grafton Ghost Town,

Southern Utah

The Buffalo gourd seeds saved Cameron’s son. After ten days of choking down powdered seeds in his willow tea, Denny finally stood up.

Every time the boy shit, it was a clan affair. They picked it apart with twigs, counted the worms, and dumped the black mess in the pit latrine. After a glut of white, wriggling worms during the first week, they began to vanish from his poop.

Everyone in the family ate the seed powder, and they harvested many more backpacks of the wild-growing desert plant. The seeds were both medicine and slight nutrition. They probably burned more calories collecting gourds than they consumed, but the medicinal value made up for it.

The spectacle of worms in Denny’s poop triggered a renewed focus on sanitation. They hardly had the energy to spare, but they did it anyway, sensing that the boy’s sickness was but a canary in a coal mine for the rest of them. If they didn’t make changes, they would all sicken and die. They couldn’t afford even run-of-the-mill dysentery. They were starving in earnest now, and diarrhea meant death.

Nobody in the group knew anything about sanitation. It’d been the sole purview of civil engineers and health departments back in the old world. The four adults washed their dishes in hot water, which turned out to be a sobering investment of calories: collecting wood, building a fire, boiling water to kill water-borne parasites, then using the cooling water to wash the dishes. They’d run out of paper plates long before. Now they used blown-off wood shingles as plates. Rough wood was exceedingly hard to sanitize.

Like a tyrant overlord, boiling water for dishes and drink taxed them half-to-death. They had no modern filter, and they couldn’t rely on their layered, homemade “survival filter” of sand and charcoal to remove parasite eggs from the river water. Plus, none of them knew how to make charcoal. Every time they tried, they ended up with mostly ash. So they boiled all their water—for drinking and washing. After Denny’s sickness, nobody suggested they play Russian roulette with the questionable, silty water from the Virgin River.

The boy was on his feet now, but he was greatly diminished. Denny barely lifted his feet as he shuffled around the yard. He no longer played with the other children, choosing instead to watch with half-lidded eyes. The worms had depleted all his reserves.

Julie peppered the boy with questions until the truth slowly emerged. At first, Cameron argued viciously with his wife about what she’d found, and he personally verified every aspect of the story. The revelation terrified Cameron, and he resisted the truth of it until he had no choice but to see.

Denny had been hoarding food. He’d found a dead muskrat by the river and sneaked a kitchen knife to pare away pieces of the rotting flesh. He started his own fire with stolen twigs from the family fire, then cooked the carrion where nobody could see or smell. He’d eaten the dead animal down to bones. A week later, he sickened.

Cameron could scarcely comprehend how an eight-year-old boy could grow hungry enough to render a dead animal into food. But the true horror was the abject selfishness of the boy’s act. He’d hidden food from his own family—if a dead muskrat could be considered food.

Cameron’s personal guilt tripled as he poked around the dried bones of the muskrat down by the river, seeking some clue as to how his bright, beautiful boy had come to cheat his own blood. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Cameron’s unruly mind repeated, over and over.

Cameron had screwed Isaiah’s wife dozens of times. The only reason they hadn’t been caught by Julie or Isaiah was because nobody had the energy for suspicion. Rude survival commanded all their attention, and they had little enough energy to spare for that.

Cameron didn’t know and frankly didn’t care why Ruth came to him—pulling him away into the darkest shadows, always offering herself from behind. There was nothing about a starving person’s breath that made one want to kiss, but he doubted either of them would kiss anyway. They hadn’t exchanged a single word of love or even explanation. They humped. He hadn’t a clue why she initiated it. Most nights, he could barely achieve an erection, and his climax grew tepid and watery. Still, he took the carnality offered.

Ruth had probably never been an attractive woman, even before the deprivations at Grafton, but the gathering of her skirts and the animal draw of their rut gave Cameron momentary reprieve from his self-loathing. For a few seconds, in those interludes, he was a man—dominant, hearty and fierce. After sex, he flopped in on himself again, but not in shame over violating his marriage—Julie had grown so surly with hunger that Cameron could hardly stand the sight of her. Strangely, he felt shittiest about Isaiah.

The man had been an unfailing friend, aside from having stolen Cameron’s wife before all this. That time seemed so distant now, a glimmer on the lip of the past. After who-knows-how-many weeks in this square of grass and redstone, Cameron could barely recall his hatred of the polygamist. They’d suffered much together, and Isaiah had rallied to save Cameron’s son. The man had become like a faithful, albeit witless, Labrador retriever, and Cameron had grown fond of him, even thankful for him.

That inkling of brotherhood over the weeks of starvation hadn’t discouraged Cameron as he piled up Ruth’s dress and seized his thin seconds of reprieve from on-marching death. The picked-clean bones of the muskrat evoked the same echo of treachery. Cameron’s ignobility reverberated in Denny. His son, at eight years old, had hidden food