Free Heart of a Shepherd by Rosanne Parry Page B

I stay andsearch the edges of the picture for Dad. But he's never there, and they never say the names of the dead.
    I used to like the news when Dad was home. We would put it on every evening after chores, and Dad and I would find the news stories in the atlas. If the big brothers were home, they would make pretend bets on the sports, and everyone watched the weather.
    Grandpa has kept track of the local weather every day for the last forty-eight years. He keeps a log in his journal of the daily temperature at six o'clock in the morning, noon, and nine o'clock at night, along with the barometer reading, wind direction, and rainfall. Sometimes I watch him copy it out in tidy block print in the plain black journal he writes in every evening after supper. He always looks up from his writing for the weather, checking the local report for accuracy and keeping an eye on communities in Montana, Nebraska, and Washington where he has friends.
    Sometimes I see him sigh and shake his head at the weathermen, especially the young ones. “They don't account for the shape of the land,” he would grumble. If it looked like anyone was paying attention, he'd launch into his personal philosophy of the weather.
    “The land makes weather as much as the sky,” he would say, demonstrating the contours of a landscapewith his hand. “The shape of the hills and the amount of water in the ground.” And then he'd lean back in the La-Z-Boy and say, “Land shapes a man's heart, too, and his aspirations. A man near the mountains learns to look up, and it calls his mind to God.” And then he'd do that Quaker thing where he sits quietly and says nothing, and the rest of us go back to playing chess or poker, and a dozen hands later he would say something like, “God's in the valleys, too, in the coolness of the water and the softness of the ground. That's the tender side of the Almighty.”
    I love it when he talks like that, because then, when I go wading in the creek, I think of the Holy Spirit squooshing up between my toes.
    Now I turn off the news and get the atlas from the bookshelf in Dad's room. I sit on the edge of his bed and flip it open to the Middle East. Nothing but flat land in the entire nation of Iraq. Well, okay, maybe a few hills around the edge. For real mountains you have to go east to Iran or north to Turkey. What's Dad going to look at on all that level ground? It's not even nice tidy deserts like in Saudi Arabia. Iraq's got swamps, and every picture I ever see on the news just looks dirty and depressing. What's going to lift him up over there?
    Cities are even worse. Dad can barely stand Boise. I don't know how he's coping with Baghdad. Whenever we have to go to town for something, Dad maps out the route and timetable like it's a mission. He gets us in and out of there in two hours tops.
    I asked him about it once and he said, “In the city, they never look at you when you walk by. To get a friendly smile or a civil greeting, you have to buy something.”
    I hear Grandma and Grandpa and Ernesto on the front porch, talking about tomorrow's work. I head back to the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee for them, and grab a handful of cookies for me. I sit down at Grandma's computer and log on to the chat room the brothers have on Sunday nights.
    FRANKenstein: Hey, Brother, what's the news? How are the Grands?
    I wipe the cookie crumbs off my fingers and type in an answer.
    IGuanodon: It's calving this week. The Grands are tired but fine.
    PyroPETE: Hola amigos, what's the news? I'm the staff duty officer tonight for the battalion. It's hotter than habaneros down here.
    IGuanodon: I pulled a calf just now. It was great! How are your soldiers? Did you blow anything up today?
    PyroPETE: Nope, land mines were last week.
    JOHNBronco: Good job on the calf, Brother. Your arms are going to be killing you tomorrow.
    PyroPETE: Didn't you and Jim have a college rodeo this week?
    JOHNBronco: We medaled in team roping. I took third in bronc riding,