From the Editor

A man who sees his only worth as a provider, may never understand the full power of his presence.

This novella was born as an idea nearly twenty years ago. My father introduced me to spaghetti westerns when I was young. I was named for the Jessica in The Man From Snowy River, with Kirk Douglas. I read my first Louis L'Amour when I was eight. The grit of cowboy culture was prevalent in our home. When I was fourteen I watched the 1960 version of The Magnificent Seven. Over the next two years I would watch that movie dozens of times. The scene from that movie that stuck with me the most was the quote delivered by Steve McQueen’s character Vin. He is responding to Chico, the youngest of the gunslingers, who says, “Your gun has gotten you everything you have. Isn’t that true?”

Vin replies. “Yeah, sure everything. After a while you can call bartenders and farrow dealers by their first name. Maybe two hundred of ‘em. Rented rooms you live in, maybe five hundred. Meals you eat in hash houses a thousand.”

Then the iconic line.

“Home, none, wife, none, kid… none. Prospects zero.”

That hesitation gets me every time, because it is the hesitation of regret.

So in my early adulthood I decided to write a story inspired by the Magnificent Seven. Dedicated to the man who shouldered the burden of responsibility to stay and raise my sisters and me.

Some men are born with the urge to roam and wander. My father was such a man.

Growing up in north-central Pennsylvania, near the New York line, he left home at eighteen. He traveled to Colorado, began putting down roots, and then just as suddenly returned east. It was there that God got hold of his heart.

Salvation did not erase the wanderlust. Two years later he returned to Colorado, where a Sunday school teacher asked him how he felt about dating an older woman.

That woman was my mother.

Four years his senior, she caught his attention immediately. My father still says it was love at first sight.

Eventually he put down roots. Yet growing up, I remember seeing the tension in him—the desire to stay warring against the desire to move on. He never made any of us feel like a burden. He carried responsibility well. But one conversation with my mother has stayed with me through the years.

“Sometimes I feel like Charles Ingalls.”

Anyone familiar with Little House on the Prairie understands the comparison. Pa Ingalls was forever loading his family into a wagon and heading somewhere new—sometimes because circumstances demanded it, sometimes because something in him longed for the horizon.

My father eventually packed us up as well, moving our family from Colorado to Oklahoma when I was fourteen. There was land to be had, opportunity to pursue, and a different life to build.

But life did not change as much as any of us imagined.

The responsibilities remained. Bills still needed to be paid. A wife and three daughters still needed food on the table, clothes on their backs, and a roof over their heads.

There were hardships. There were good years. There were ordinary years.

The older I get, the more I realize that my father’s greatest expression of love was not found in grand gestures or dramatic sacrifices. It was found in the daily decision to stay.

To go to work.

To pay the bills.

To shoulder responsibility.

To keep showing up when no one was watching.

My father learned to stay.

And because he did, I learned what faithful leadership looks like.

Every new contract promised to be the last before he went home.

When rancher Michael Vincent rescues a young woman from the aftermath of a wagon train massacre, he never expects to find a home.

But one split second decision made in pursuit of providing enough for their future leaves another family without a husband and father. This leaves Michael questioning whether he deserves one of his own.

He chooses to continue to provide. Each new contract promises to be the last before he returns. A tax bill. A hard winter. A collapsing barn roof. A growing herd. Another job. Another paycheck.

Another reason to stay away.

As the miles grow longer and the letters grow shorter, Michael must decided whether providing for the woman he loves is worth losing the life he is trying to build with her.

NONE explores the truth of a man who believes his only worth lies in what he is able to provide and the redeeming grace of discovering the full power of his presence.