@darknight-brightstar @zeitheist @squad51goals Where Silky sweats in a hospital bed, wanting forgiveness, and Birch sits beside him, wanting the same thing.
Thomas does not really sleep. The fever pulls him one way and the Sear pulls another, and he lies shadowy and suspended between them, like birds on a telegraph wire. But while he does not sleep he seems to dream: or maybe, he is simply tumbled back and forth in time, which has no meaning or reason. Memories burst unbidden from the bubbles in his lungs, they sluice down into the needle from the bottle hanging above his bed. Lungs, bottle, bed, light, dark. He struggles to breathe: air in, air out. It catches inside him, trapped, fights inside his chest and throws outward through his teeth: he coughs, wheezes, coughs again.
A hand lays on him: his Sear skews out in all directions. He thinks of the Jesuits, in Rochester, and then the nuns, in Greenwich Village when he was just a wisp still. He'd been reared on rows of beds and tall windows and the promise of a greater light. Sisters had sat with him through fever when he was small, tended his body with damp flannels and peaceful words. But this touch strikes him like a pig-axe deep in his lights, and the fever skitters around it, hissing like coals.
When he opens his eyes the world is blocks of light and humming shadow, blurred, throbbing strangely. The teeth of the night-time are ground to the root and the day is straining on the horizon. Who's to sound the waking bell, who's already awake to tend the horses?
He closes his eyes again but the hand is insistent: it is familiar. It is real. He remembers.
If he is dreaming, he thinks, turning his head: it would be a fine dream to stay in. If he is dead, he thinks, it would be a fine enough welcome to St Peter's dew-damp fields.
He was not dead or dreaming then and he is not now, not again, not when his vision stills and the sweat stops stinging his eyes.
"Easy, Silks," says the sight of distant smoke. "Easy now."
Thomas wants to take in the face: the throat, the stiff collar, the heavy coat with the captain's sigil on the sleeve, the hands, the dirty nails. That coat looks as if it's never been worn; as if it still has cedar in the pockets.
The face is bent now, in hands, the one scarred - the skin flat and toneless, pale as Irish table-linens. The shoulders curve and hunch. He looks as though he is praying, though Thomas knows he never prayed to any God in his life but stubborn will and worn no halo but his own fists.
He is not real. How can he be real, be here.
I never guessed I would see you again. I never had any hope of that.
I used to pray for it. Did you know? How I used to pray to God you would forgive me, what I couldn't do for you?
At the crest of dawn and cradled in the fever's breast he dreams about Saint Florian's Hall and the morning sun, in thick, dusty blocks, breaking in and painting gold the decades of wax and polish on the floor. Men stood, clasped firmly in wool, white gloves, their hair glossy with pomade, mustaches waxed as the floor, men waited with furtive eyes and firm jaws for their belts, their flourishes, their captain's coat and sigil.
An empty auditorium, a single wooden chair that clacks when it opens and leans hard on one leg. Clacks like a laugh. Lit up by a sunbeam. Among that room of stoic men, who whispered. The sun holding up the ceiling, the dust suspended like ash in water in gutters, gulped down by drains and washed away to the river.
When he coughs, the dust motes dance in the light, and shine like sparks. It hurts to breathe, but the dream hurts more, he doesn't want to go back there.
Thomas sweats as if he lies in state in embers, watches the coals thrum and throb like the gloss of a gelding's croup at the canter, in the sun, in the blazing scorching half-twilight of a four-alarm blaze. He sweats in the dark: where the sun and the house have fallen, the rafters stove-in like ribs, where the smoke ate up his tongue like rats and his sear scratched out his outstretched hand and he was too late, and he doesn't want to go back there.
Thomas opens his eyes. He imagines that he opens his eyes and everything is right-side up again.
Thomas opens his eyes. He stares at the high ceiling. His chest is broken open and all his dreams flown out, scattered and fearful.
Thomas opens his eyes and turns his head: there is his brother, exactly where the sear said that he ought to be.
"My God," he whispers, his voice as dry as decades. "You're still here."
Birchy looks at him, his eyes red, as if he has been walking through smoke. Birchy's mouth moves: opens. Closes. His throat bobs hard and his lips grow tight. He is sorry, says the deep sear. He is so, so sorry.
For what?
"I left."
"Oh."
The sear moves around him like a cloak, like something he could sink his hands into, some holy thing that ties him to earth and flesh. His younger self draped across the flank of a horse, his hand on the muscular arch of its great neck. God lives in the hands. God speaks in the eyes. Listen, Thomas, say the Jesuits. Listen, Castor, says old Kidder Parson.
You alright there? Says a boy, years ago, at Captain Jack Hazel's engine-house. Lying in bed and reeking as the sweat of their sear dries on their skin. Feeling tender-skinned and brand new.
@zeitheist @darknight-brightstar @squad51goals @its-skadi At Wynantskill again: Finding family whether it wants to be found or not. Davey learns some things, not least of which is that Lufty Parker is not quite as grave and terrible as he appears.
Davey sleeps hard into the day, deeper and darker than he has in a long, long time.
He dreams: Looking out across a river, windswept after a spring storm. The streets are damp but the sun, cracking the clouds with its sharp golden teeth, is bright and warm. The skinny city trees (and he knows this is the city) are heavy with early blossoms that fair glow against the rolling clouds. When he looks over the railing, down into the water, he is taller, his shoulders broader. When he turns toward a friendly step, his voice sits more deeply in his chest.
Dreaming, he feels small and welcome inside this body. The face of the young man coming up the walk keeps slipping out of true: as if it is a secret, or the sort of face you read about in a book and have only imagined. This young man laughs and claps him across the shoulder.
Was looking for you, he says, not so much older than the grown boys. Was lookin' all over for you.
He smells salt and creosote, tidal flats and coal-smoke. The southerly wind calls up thoughts of shirtsleeves, and running for the sake of running. City air fills his lungs, and his leg is true.
Davey wakes to distant sounds of shouting, but it is not what wakes him.
"This ent your bed, is it?"
He sits up. His hand hurts from gripping the little brass horse, and he feels all creased from sleeping in his clothes. Lufty Parker's face is as grim as ever, shadowed even when he's clean-shaven, the scar below his eye and across his temple pale as milk and smart as paint, as if it were painted on. Pulled from the raw salt-river air and the friendly hand, his sear runs aground on Lufty's like a little coracle on the back of a whale. Davey can never quite bring himself to look Lufty in the eye, so broad and so deep his presence. He fears it like you do a night-time doorway.
"Sorry, sir," he says. His voice is just a boy's again. It cracks roughly against the roof of his mouth, as if he has been crying all night.
"The lads is looking for you. Won't come to breakfast, still."
"Sorry, sir."
"What's that you've got?"
"Nothing."
"A lot of nothing, to fit in your hand so."
Davey thinks he might hear a little bit of - not a laugh or a smile, but a dappling of some gentleness in that old-city brogue. He unclenches his fist, and holds the prancing horse out. "I didn't nick it."
Lufty pushes his hand back toward him, and sits at the foot of Capper's bed. "Ya know," he says, "that's all Birch brought up here wi' him. Aside uniforms, but, the only thing of his own."
Davey tries, subtly, to hunch toward the head of the bed. Lufty is a tall man, sturdy-built, with wide shoulders and a barrel chest and large, rough hands. He shouts so loud it rolls across the big yard like wine-casks down the gangplank of a ship, and everyone goes still as rabbits and bend to listen. Lufty, even in his shirt-sleeves, takes up most of the space in any room, and the bed sags toward him.
"Swear, he didn't come outta this quarters til a month gone by. Miserable bastard. So mad he coulda taken the flight off a falcon." Lufty sighs. "Long time he just wore a path 'tween here and his office. Long time."
" 'Cause of his leg?"
"That last box - Jack Hazel told me," Lufty says, thoughtfully, as if he hasn't heard Davey at all. "Lotta smoke, was. Looking for hot-spots on the third floor, whole damn thing came down. Birchy was at Bellevue two, three months 'tween the breaks and the burns."
Davey thinks about the dream where the house falls. He closes his eyes, and tries to picture the face of the young man by the river. The horse is heavy in his hand, heavier than it ought to be. "I set a fire," he says, because it is easier to talk to the wall with Lufty beside him, somehow. "At the children's home. I didn't mean to - I was only - " He grits his teeth, because he doesn't want to cry in front of Lufty the way he cries by the fish pond, or in front of Capper. "I wanted to - " He struggles to articulate: the yearning for sky and smoke, the urge to run, the mad and raving thing inside him that struck out.
"I know." Lufty says, and Davey is blindsided by the deep and terrible realization that Lufty does know. "I know, ya wanted it to stop. Ya didn't want to be alone no more, m'right?"
He wanted the warmth. He wanted to go back: to the place where mother and father would wrap him in their arms, where Lyddie's bow was askew and her front teeth had a gap where both had fallen out.
"Birchy - when he couldn't ride the boards, he thought it all were gone. Everything he was and wanted."
Davey had shouted for them: down that long dark hall.
"I lost two my brothers on the boards when I was twenty, lost them in the East River to a pier fire. The lot of us went in the water but it was just me come up. Thought I killed them, last I took them hands and jumped. It was us or it was the pier would give way, and we didn't know what they'd laded out there. Thought I snuffed 'em right out, and my sear cried out for so long I thought it would not stop. Silks - Silks I think believed he killed Birch right the same."
"Capper's not dead."
"I told you once Birch is a fool backwards and forwards. That miserable bastard left the city and let Silks write him and never wrote back, not til you come here. Too damn mad and miserable to see what Silks believed he'd done."
Davey knows the young man at the rail, now. Sees him through the eyes of the dreamer. Only color those cheeks ever got was a sunburn or a laugh, and never a single strand of auburn hair out of place even at three o' clock in the morning. Was looking for you, he says. His chest aches. For all the anger: like something infected, lanced and left to drain.
"Kid, Birchy will come back home, to you too, I know, because the damn fool finally learnt his lesson by leaving."
"He wants to say he's sorry."
"Well he damn well better."
"I should've said goodbye."
"Could write him." Lufty - almost then - laughs, his eyes as silver as the hair at his temples. "But come for mess now. Lads have looked for ya' long enough."
@zeitheist @darknight-brightstar @squad51goals @its-skadi Silky is sick in the city, and Josiah has to make some choices, and have some conversations. Emotions are hard, yo.
It's never good, to see that look on Eddy's face. His fighter's jaw is set, but his eyes are soft like ships on a dark harbor. This is the face that bodes bad news, something Eddy can't fix with his hands, a hot cup of coffee or a knock about the ears. When Josiah sees that look, after breakfast one late winter's day, the first thing he thinks is the state has come to call on Davey again. He'd taken them in his teeth that day at the gate, and thought if not rid of them altogether, he'd bought them enough time to think of how to put them off for good. It did wake him, though, to watch the high moon paint his quarters and fear the state might come back, with papers, with authority, with some force he could not bluff.
(If they were to take Cleary now, he thinks, the boy would be lost forever. He would be some shadow growing thinner and paler on the back ward of the state hospital, he would settle sure as smoke in that long dark hall of his or drown in the lake below the lawn. For sure, he would.)
"No," Eddy says, his raw knuckles flexing, catching the rattle of Josiah's thoughts, "no, it ain't the young fella."
"So what is it, then? You hear from town there's none left of those hot peppers the grocer pickles, that you eat whole from the stem?"
Josiah's humor falls as flat and pale as vellum in the typewriter, gnawed down by keystrokes.
"Got a telegram from the city, Birchy." Eddy grips the butcher-block of the back kitchen's table, leans, uprights, and leans again. "Silky's gone down sick."
"Sick." Josiah has to steady himself. His bad leg throbs like a bad dream that upends the day. "Gone down sick? Who sent it?"
"Hastings at 27. He's at casualty down at Bellevue, thinking it's pneumonia."
He cannot go. He cannot go: he is responsible here, the Captain of this house, their grounds. He cannot go: to leave his post, to leave the lads, to leave the boy. Worst of all, that: to leave the boy. What kind of captain would he be then, to leave the newest and the rawest of recruits, who still trembles under the blunt wind of the sear and some days even falls to it? Some damn bastard, he would be, but his heart and his bent leg howl as the breath of horses, carrying him surely to the city. He was a coward once who left a hundred thousand words unanswered, the great sulk of an overgrown child. It was not Silky's fault, was it, after all, that the roof had caved, that his body had broken under the greedy teeth of the timbers?
But he had never told Silks that, had he. And he could, now. He could have the chance to say it again.
"It's an awful long way, to the city."
"I haven't seen him since the promotion."
"You'd be leaving the boy."
"I know it."
"Do you?"
"I do know it, Eddy."
"Took you how long to answer a simple letter? How long would you plan on staying? Til he was well? Til the dark took him?"
What a bitter kick in the chest, the fury rising up inside him so hard it makes his eyes water. "Silks isn't going to die. He didn't die in that damn fire and he won't now."
"If'n you go, Birch, I'll drive you to the station. But you'll tell Lufty and Monroe and the lads, and most of all, young Cleary, where you're off to."
Lufty, he knows, will understand. Lufty and Monroe both, are men who have swallowed smoke and coughed out grief in spatters on the sidewalk, ribs heaving under the weight of it. Josiah was not the first fireman to be ground hard in the blaze's splintering teeth, he will not be the last.
Though some days he feels as if he is the only fool to lose a brother by his own carelessness and greedy fury. Fool, to lie shattered, dry and cracked and thirsty for the safe embrace of brick walls and floorboards that creak with midnight steps and men who roll over in starched sheets and roll over again. Fool that Silks had sat for, holding the hand without the needle, speaking to him from far away through the ether and the lazy dream-fields of poppies and long sunshine.
But the boy, god, the boy.
Whatever he does, he can't spare the boy. Would that he could. For his sear to have broke before his voice, the boy ought to be allowed to live a life of perfect grace, running the field with the lads and catching perch down in the pond, every line charged, every ladder strong, every jake out clear.
Silks or Davey, he thinks, what'll it be, what choice do I have?
The sun sprawling across the yard has taken on the keener brass of springtime - the snow is still deep, the ice still thick enough to drive a double hitch onto, but the turn of the earth is winning out as she always does. The lads sweat at their work - Lufty and Monroe have let ladders and ropes ice overnight, and each exercise begins with a clamor of ideas on how to handle the frozen gear. Bertram and Jules are keen to lead, while Kitson, Jacob, and Lee, the newest lot, scamper about and skitter like fawns. How funny, to see from the broad steps, that Davey knows nearly as much as a half-year, though he has not the strength yet. He will, though. There is an awkward, coltish grace about him. Something he has not grown into. Josiah woke one night when the sky was half-silver with stars and Davey was standing in his quarters like a ghost-child, the sear singing in their bones. A long way to grow, that one. A long, fine way.
Lufty catches him after lunch. Lufty is harder at the edges, often, than Eddy has ever been. Even when Josiah was still stiff about the collar in his new kit, Eddy was all bluff, and quick to mild. Eddy would brawl for any jake among them. Lufty was tougher to read, even after he was on the boards. Lufty Parker was burned once, and badly, in a fire at the piers in Chelsea. His scars creep up the side of his neck, and cup the back of his head like a brief and tender lover. They invite no dormitory tales, only an edgy kind of sorrow. Josiah had heard, in his rook year, that three men had plunged into the East River, but just one had come up. The oakbellies, he had been told, had tried to make Lufty a captain, and he'd refused to show up for the ceremony. They'd tried to make him a battalion chief, and he'd hopped the first train to Troy.
So he had been told.
But Lufty knows the white rooms and white coats at Bellevue and the casualty ward.
"There's not no happy choice to make, Birchy," Lufty says to him in his office.
"It's just not gonna be so. That said, it's not about if you goes, I think, it's about if you're coming back."
"You think I won't?"
"I know you will. But it's not me what needs convincing."
Josiah sighs. His leg is tight, aching, and he ought to stretch it out. But he's afraid if he ventures out now, he'll run into Davey, breathless with some discovery. "What am I supposed to say to him, Luft?"
"To Silks or the boy?"
"Either one."
"I couldn't say. When I went into the river, I thought we'd all come out. We had a fire at our heels and the river below us, and the last thing I remember before spitting up black water on the cobbles was Matty taking my elbow and Tom saying it'd be alright."
He's never heard this story, not from Lufty's taut lips and clenched teeth, so he stills like a boy in church and lets the old memory - the smell of creosote, and the greasy river, the snapping pilings and the blinding smoke - shiver on the air and fall as motes of golden dust. The worst was not the plunge, was it, but the waking.
Alone.
It's going to hurt them both, but crueler for the boy.
After Lufty leaves him to his battered thoughts, he sits at his desk until the dusk unravels into night. The dinner mess bell clangs. The lads thunder about downstairs like wild horses, shouting, stampeding.
He ought to get up now, go to the kitchens, get a bite. Eddy is always after him to put something more than gristle and spite on his bones. He plants his hands on his desk, ready to make the effort to stand, when of a sudden Davey's there, in the door.
Josiah has a good look at him, now, under the humming electrics. Still too thin, for his widening shoulders. Hair in need of a trim or at least a comb. (He tries to do it like Bertram Cochrane, slicking the sides down, but the loose black curls are springing free by midday). A tear in the shoulder of his shirt fixed by clunky, deliberate stitches. A boy exuberantly ragged at the end of a long day.
"Capper. You weren't at mess."
Josiah pins a smile to the corner of his mouth like he means it. "Eddy send you up?"
"No sir."
"I'll be down soon."
The boy hesitates. "Capper? Are you angry?"
"No. Why would you say?"
"You been up here all day, Capper, that's all. Eddy said - well I think he said, maybe I just thought of something he did say, you know, the sear said he - well you know. Eddy's sear is so bright sometimes. I forget. Eddy said you used to get your hackles up and hide out in your quarters all day."
Josiah chuckles softly. "He's right. I did. I'm not angry, m'son."
"What's wrong, then?"
"Come sit." There is not gonna be no happy choice, said Lufty. And there won't be, but he'd be crueler not to tell the boy.
Davey comes round to his desk and pulls up a chair, as he does when they read and talk, about things Josiah knows - like radio manuals and floorplans and exit strategies - and things that Davey knows, like checkers and poems and music.
"I told you 'bout my pal, Silky. You remember, his letters."
"Yes sir."
"He saved my life. Before I was a captain."
"I dream that sometimes. Like you know about the lake. And Liddy."
Josiah picks up a pen and twirls it over the blotter. His chest is tight, like breathing through a wet kerchief. "Davey, Silky's very sick. We got a telegram from his captain." He takes a deep breath, pushing through it, like crawling under thick smoke, palming every door. "He's in the hospital in the city."
Davey watches him through a child's lashes with eyes that pierce him like a brother. Josiah longs for a horse between them, the calming stroke of the soft brush on the soot-dappled back. He longs for the darkness between bunks, staring at the ceiling. In the low, fragile light, Josiah sees the dampness welling up in Davey's eyes. It is too hard to hide.
Davey knows already. He is biting his lip, as if he is already a young man.
While he lay in a Bellevue bed, a needle in one arm, Silky had bent over the other, murmuring. Josiah, from his awkward seat with his bad leg locked in its brace, leans forward in one great surge and takes the boy in his arms and holds him tight. As close as his nightmares, as tight as his memories. "I will come back. I will, Davey, I promise you. I'll come back."
The child's stumbling sear is a raw mess of questions, frantic as birds beating their wings against a low-slung slate-clouded sky. He is crying. Good, Josiah thinks. Good that grief be open.
"You promise," Davey whispers at last, hoarse with a sob and muffled deep into his chest. "You got to promise, Capper."
"Promise. I promise, I promise. As sure as I can't run, m'son, I promise I will come home."
Or: feelings are hard. In which Josiah travels to the city to see Silky, ill with pneumonia, for the first time since [redacted].
@zeitheist @darknight-brightstar @squad51goals
The leaving aches more than the journey, even as every jolt of the train coach mule-kicks his leg, even as there are hours yet to go. It scours him to think on it, how he had promised Davey, how Davey had hovered as he packed a change or two of clothes, his shaving kit, spare bolts and straps to his brace. Davey had seemed to be holding his breath, there in the doorway - blinking and wary, as he had back in autumn at the County. Questions caught up in his teeth like a slow, warm wind across dried leaves. If he were a better man, perhaps, a more tender man like Eddy or a wiser man as Lufty, he might have known the things to say.
A pad of paper and a half-book of stamps, into the case, then. As the boy watched.
He'd looked for Davey that morning, early, when the youngest of them should still have been rousting himself with the rest, splashing water on his face and shining his boots (as he did) for morning bell. Jules said he didn't know where the boy was, and Bertram said he was down by the pond, and Jules had given Bertram a look for that.
But the pond - cupped gently in a curve of the land, and down a narrow, winding path - was where the boy went when he wanted to be alone, wanted his thoughts to float out serenely on the calm face of the water (still dense with ice) and not out into the sear-shot of others. Josiah could've gone down. He could've - but there was a train to catch. And he wouldn't have known what to said except his helpless promise that he'd come back.
At a stop in a little town called Selkirk, he'd gotten up to try and stretch his legs. He was not used to travel, now, and no longer curled up like a beetle in his quarters while the rest of Wynantskill went about its day, and he did ache. Standing up in the train compartment, he'd nearly fallen from the sand in one leg and the charley horse in the other, and he'd knocked his case off the rack shouting and clutching for balance. The case had popped a latch, and, catching his breath and biting his curses, he paused to snap it shut again. It was heavier than he had recollected packing, and when he looked again, there in the middle of his things was a small book and a blue pocketknife, tied up in twine.
That was Davey's knife, deep blue bakelite with stainless trim, a gift from Antoine before he'd graduated. A pride of a knife, well-oiled, a keen balance, two blades, an awl, and a can opener. The book is Whitman - Leaves of Grass. Davey had dredged up recitations in him long left over from Hudson Classical, pushed him to read choice stanzas over and over. A page was dog-eared: a bad habit of his that Davey had clumsily scolded him over, playing at being grown. It didn't need to be - the book fell open, loose from many readings. Josiah paused over the poem there, thoughtful. Shut the book and returned it to the case.
Many hours yet to the city, where he had arranged a room near the hospital.
From Selkirk south to Ravena, to Coxsackie, Catskill and Saguerties, down through the Hudson Valley, until the very edges of the city unraveled themselves toward the oncoming train, and he saw bridges and skylines and viaducts and things he remembered, stout five-story walkups like blunt teeth, the dull rust of railyards, at last into the belly of Manhattan.
>>
He is so pale.
Silks was always fair, even in summer, when his skin would tighten and brighten like a lobster fresh from the pot, and the sun splashed copper on his auburn hair. Fair, and strong-boned, his Jesuit manners a soft varnish over his city-boy laugh.
But now he seems to disappear almost into the linens, nothing but soft twilight shadows, his veins trailing over his thin body like spidery blue cataracts. Shadow, and breath, ragged breath that slows, then catches, into a dry cough that mule-kicks him half off the bed.
There are only a hand of men in the long white ward. A police officer sits murmuring softly by another man's bedside. A fellow with a busted arm reads a colorful magazine. A few are asleep. One, like Silks, has a needle in his arm and a bottle hung up by the bedside. Josiah remembers that dreadful morphine sleep, the way it dragged him as if it had teeth or hooks, how his dreams caught on the secrets and the spirits of the city. The days cracked like the spine of a dusty tome, and the centuries split like soft, fine vellum, breathless and translucent. His breath and his blood blood flowed into the streets and her smoke and iron filled up his bones and every time a fellow came to see him he tumbled headlong into his shy or sorrowed heart.
He would take the pain any rank and reeking day, over the poppy fields and the black smoke.
Silks, four beds in, across from a window where the evening light is just cresting the white-enameled iron of his bedstead, coughs again, and hard. Struggles to catch his wind.
(They were young men. Smoke-eaters, the Times called them. Silks caught him against his shoulder while he coughed up ash that tasted like beef-gristle and blood, and vomited in the street. Silks caught him, and steadied him, away from the clamoring press.)
He can't do this. He can't, not even lurking in the safety of his long coat, his hat low over his eyes, he can't. Silks won't even recognize him, probably. It's been so long. Been too long. They had not even spoken at the promotion, when he had stood stiff and sweating with the pain of his leg - how it sang, still, the nerves sheared like feathers from a buck-shot wing. He had stood the whole long ceremony, for the higher your rank, the nearer to the end, and he was there to get his captain's coat and brass for all the good it did. Right to the cab from there, to Grand Central and up to Troy, his neck still alight with misgiving eyes.
Josiah had felt him there, Silks, like the tumult of a fire's breath, a sudden draft, the snorting of a horse all lathered from its run up the grand boulevard. Felt him there at his side, across the room, as surely as he'd been there every off-day he had right here in the casualty ward. Birchy, he would say. Birchy, wake up. Have some water, Birch. Gotta eat, Birchy, your leg'll never patch up with you starved.
(and as he drove, gasping, through the poppy fields and the dark morphine sea, Silks bowed his head and prayed, and said that he was sorry.)
He can't do this.
(The first steps he took out of bed, he fell, and cussed the nurses and the nuns.)
He cannot.
(When they fitted him for the brace, he felt its sheen and its click and its creak like laughter.)
He cannot do this.
(It held him upright, but it would never hold him on the boards.)
He is walking, as steady as he can, down the aisle between the beds. He thinks, it's not at all unlike the men's ward at the county, the empty beds, the empty eyes, the soft weeping that might just be the sear at the back of his mind. He is walking with a limp, he is walking toward the last door, he is walking down a dark hallway, he is in the smoke, he is under the give of the ceiling and he doesn't know it.
Each bed has to it one hard, high-backed chair, and he collapses down and bows his head, taking his hat off, smoothing his hair, looking everywhere but the bed.
Silks is coughing again. He sounds like the roar of a train in a tunnel just beyond the light's reach, the way the hot, rank air drafts back toward the engine.
He lays his hand on Silky's shoulder.
"Silks - "
Just that cough. That godawful cough.
"Deep breath, Silks. Hold on to it."
Like they were back in the smoke. Back on the cobbles.
He feels Silky looking in his sear before he feels the eyes, and he can't bring himself to look.
"I'm dead, aren't I." Silky wheezes. "I'm dead, you can't be here."
The fever is palpable on him. The sweat. He is so, so pale.
"God would send me you, I do suppose." Quick gasps between each word, he struggles, and his eyes are glassier than Josiah remembers.
"Your god would send you better."
"No," Silks whispers, and Josiah catches his flailing hand. "No, it is you, isn't it."
"Hastings sent a wire. Eddy told me."
"Oh." Silks breathes deeply - a struggle deep in his chest. "Oh." Looks sharply at once: "Where's the young fella?"
Josiah balks. "At home."
"What a fool you are, my Birchy." Silks pats his arm, weakly, softly. The fever has cracked his lips, and Josiah brushes the damp hair off his brow.
"I've heard that."
"You gone thinking I'd die?"
"I came to be sure you didn't."
"Fool, Birchy."
"I know, Silks. I know. And I'm sorry."
Silks shakes his head wearily. "Don't. Don't be sorry. Nothing - " that gasp again. " - nothing sorry. Just here. You're here."
"Yeah, pal, I'm here."
"That's good, Birchy. That's good."
It aches to watch him breathe. Josiah finds his body, unwitting, matching each struggling inhale, each slow and rattling exhale. He sees the pulse beat rapidly in Silky's long, pale neck. Feels it matched in his wrist. "Take a rest, Silks," he says. "I'm here."
Silky nods, distantly, his eyes soft and glassy. Turns his face against the pillow, and shuts his eyes.
@darknight-brightstar @squad51goals @zeitheist Lord have mercy we have crossed the 30K word threshold.
Davey, at Wynantskill, after Birch goes to the city.
The night Capper leaves, Davey sits on the wide steps outside quarters and watches the sun drift beyond the trees, the raw honey of its passing light pouring over the big yard. The grown lads are having their down-time after mess, talking and studying and playing cards and dice. Ellis had taught him the card trick before he graduated, and he is not very adept at it, but the grown lads take it with utter sincerity, no matter that he fumbles.
The stone is growing chill. Spring is somewhere near, by the thinning of the pond ice and the birdsong in the morning, but the nights are still dark and sheer. The door creaks, and Bertram's steps startle him - he knows the steps of every jake, their Sear nascent yet but whispering against his like a cloud-veiled horizon.
"Are y' coming in, young fella, or will we have to thaw you by the stove in the morning?"
Davey gets to his feet and shuffles past Bertram, his words all stuck in his brain like a seed gets stuck between your teeth.
"Don't mope so," Bertram says, gently. "Captain Birch'll be back before the creeks rise, you'll see."
Eddy had said the same, after he'd come back from dropping Capper off at the train station. Davey had finally come up from the pond, up the steep and jagged path, icy in the dips. Capper could barely manage that path on a clear dry day before the snow, and surely could not now, and Davey had known that, in his heart. He had meant to hurt Capper, going down that path, where he had sat on the fish platform and cried hotly and angrily.
"He didn't leave you like you think he did, son," Eddy had told him, coarsely, as everything about him was. Sand and sawgrass was Eddy (said Lufty Parker), but beneath that, a kindness and a loyalty bright and raw, as the taste of an autumn apple straight from the orchard.
Lufty Parker, for his part, said, "Birchy's a fool backwards and forwards." (Lufty had a Sear like the winter sea - one year, when he was small, before Lyddie was born, he had gone with mother and father to the ocean, and see the deep blue waves threatening the dunes with fangs of flotsam. Lufty's Sear was like that: poised to toss him into the dunes, it frightened him with its power and shadow.)
He goes to bed and, trembling with the exhaustion of the day, tumbles into sleep, where he dreams of the lake at the end of the lawn. The reeds at the edge lean in, as he goes to the shoreline - the fire at his back - and the rocks are silken under his feet and when he looks they are made of glass, and wink at him in the sooty light. The water is deeper than he remembers, copper where it laps the shore and deep, beer-bottle brown beyond. He is sure that something is there, something the light has roused.
Bring the water, someone says. Boy, bring the water. Someone shouting, when he turns, a figure with slate eyes in a long coat and a helmet with a brass horse leaping off the crest. Bring the water, boy, bring the damn water.
But he has nothing to carry it in, and scoops it into his hands, and when he lifts it, it is only light that falls through his fingers and disappears in smoke.
The house falls again, as it always does, and he sees it go, its form bending queerly in the trembling water, and collapsing in a wall of coals.
Davey wakes shaking under his blankets. The dreams of the grown lads around him are like blades of grass bending under bare toes, and their breath, their snores, their sighs cast him about like a little boat. The moon is far too thin to roust their shapes from the shadows.
Most nights when he wakes he finds them solace: he dozes off, his place certain and centered. Tonight they feel like an itch, like the tips of feathers poking from a pillow, like hay caught in a shoe. Trembling, he can't sleep. Quiet as a little mouse, he rises and dresses and walks out into the hall and up the wide stairs where the officers keep their quarters.
Capper's room is small and neat and has such few things in it, and fewer now that he has gone to the city far away. His bed, made up with a thick red wool blanket, is up against one wall, with a wash-basin on a stand on the other, and the window between the two limned in frost. The wash-basin has its block of hard yellow soap, it has its little square mirror set at a man's-eye height above. He cannot see himself in it unless he steps back. There are shirts in the wardrobe, a coat of summer wool, a pair of boots.
Davey stands in the middle of it all and closes his eyes and tries to think of Capper, there.
But he so far away, now.
Davey hunches under his sweater and sits on the bed. Capper told him, the fire brought the Sear. Told him now it came to the first fireman, just him and his horse desperate against the blaze that was trying to tear up the whole city and swallow it in great chunks of stone and earth. It was a gift, he said, like a song in the dark. I didn't want it, Davey had said. Capper had not said anything to that, but his heart had quickened and his Sear had pulsed up and whispered like embers in the great and it was the first time, in a long time, in what felt like forever that Davey hadn't felt quite so alone.
It was not mother or father or Lyddie, it was not poetry, the piano, oranges for the Dawning Days, or a fire that stayed, quite firmly, in the hearth where it belonged. But it was something like a rope, coarse and sturdy, something like a tree, rooted but supple yet against the storm-winds. He'd felt some hope then, that he might not be lost again, that he might find in the heart what he'd set that fire at the children's home to find.
In the little cubby above the bed is a brass statue of a horse in stride, just the right size and weight to fit into a palm. Davey holds it tight. He lies on the bed and holds it tight and reaches, further and further, stretching like the horse's legs, straining down the cobbles in shining harness. The grown boys asleep, their thoughts tousled and tumbled, their dreams ordinary. Eddy, sleep wide and flat and black as a spring field. Lufty Parker, who seems to never really sleep, but only rests. Running, running. Across the little town center, where Antoine had bought him his knife. The knife snapping open with a little click, the blade as blue as moon-ice. Follow the moon down the railroad grade, galloping. Far, far away to the city. Curled up on Capper's bed, brass horse in his fist and pressed to his chest, his breathing evens.
He is asleep before his Sear touches Manhattan, but he will make it there in his dreams.
@zeitheist @darknight-brightstar @its-skadi @squad51goals Is it just Josiah, or is Davey growing up a bit?
Winters at the training grounds were a long, hard slog - they always had been. Beautiful, it could be reckoned - especially those frigid evenings after a storm, when the temperatures plummeted and the sunset looked painted-on, as if the world had invented a dozen new colors just for those swift moments. Beautiful, sure, the frosted landscape breathless, yearning under the bluest sky. Beautiful until you had to live in it - and live in it, as Josiah did, on a game leg. He had a crutch, which Eddy was forever - gently, and not-so-gently - after him to use, but his pride got caught up when he looked at it, and he choked on thinking of riding the boards and exercising the horses in the streets.
He might use it, now and again, when no one was watching. He was glad for the paths the lads had cleared. And Davey, too, now - the young fellow digging in and scrambling with the shovels just as much as the recruits themselves. He was regular among them, when he could be - when Josiah would let him loose from studies or Eddy couldn't capture him for kitchen duty - the boy was in on their books and manuals, or he was in the garage, or mending and checking the hoses and the gear. Bertram Cochrane and Jules Menlo, now leading the young men as Antoine and Ellis had done, were forever subtly - and not-so-subtly - bringing him along, as if he were one of them already.
In the springtime, Josiah knew, those two would be gone ahead to their houses. Not so long off yet as the snow and the bitter wind made it seem - he was already thinking toward putting letters out to the Captains, reviewing the companies' calls for new men. He'd heard from Natty Pilcher at Engine 10 that Antoine had got and broke his sear over a 4-alarm blaze down in the Bowery, had gone ten straight days of fever and dreaming, and woke up stronger than ever. Pilcher had put in a clipping from the Times about the fire, and Josiah could spot a hand of men he knew - young men, who'd yet been boys when he knew them and sent them off. Still angry, then. Still hiding out in his office most days. Before Eddy had shook some hard sense into him.
Before the young fellow, too.
He hadn't gotten word yet about Ellis from Leland Jorgenson over at 316, but he'd heard by way of Jackson that Leland had never been overmuch for long sentiments, and at best he might get a telegram from headquarters. He hoped, at least, he'd find out if the lad was alright. Davey had gotten a letter from him, in his awkward looping hand, about how Queens was a funny place, a city in the middle and still wild at the edges. Davey had eagerly shown him the 'gram that Ellis had taken with his brand-new Apparat - across the widening of the East River, with Rikers' Island in the middleground, and far away the fringes of the Bronx. Josiah had told him about the jail on the island, and how he had used to go down to the shore on his days off and watch the boats and the ferries and the men fishing from the shore, old men with long beards and long coats who seemed to have grown out of the rocks and the sand.
"Did you go with Silky?"
Josiah had hesitated. "I did. You know, one day, you might have to cough up to calling him 'Captain', should you chance to meet him on the job."
"Is he a captain then, yet?"
"Not quite. He will be, I'm sure."
"Capper? When I've got my coat - will I have to call you Captain?"
Josiah had ruffled his dark hair. "Only when someone else is a' watchin'."
Davey had laughed. His laughter now is loud, and bright, and Josiah swears in some moments he catches now the soft creak of a voice more a boyish, more growing yet - like a footstep on a distant stair. Is his face broadening, his jaw stronger? Perhaps it's only the steadying influence of square meals and time spent out of doors.
Silky, who has listened to me longer than any man ought,
Sometimes I wonder who I am to teach this boy the lot of life. Some days he has as much in common with the yearling deer or the otter as the other lads, and some days his face falls in such seriousness I hardly can bear to see it. I know he is lost in his hallway and his house, as I wake thinking of that last long day on the boards and the morphine eternity of Bellevue's casualty ward. Now I notice that his whole hand peeks from the cuffs of his jacket. I think on what sort of man he might be if I met him on the street and then I remember I am the one responsible for that result. Has your God gotten a good laugh, putting me in charge before you?
Bewildered,
Your Birchy
Bertram comes to him one evening after the mess bell. "Captain?" Peering hesitantly into the office, as if he expects some sort of secret grandeur. There is only the mess of his desk, letters, books, peculiar items Davey has left in his wake, the detritus of boyhood.
"Come on in then. What's on your mind?"
Bertram, nearly always fiddling with something - his suspenders, his books, the engines, his violin - picks up a little bird that Davey had diligently carved one afternoon in the autumn. (With, Josiah recalls, a knife that Antoine had picked up for him in town.) "Uh, Cap, well, the thing of it is, the little fella's grown out his boots."
Josiah slouches in his chair, exactly how Eddy would chide him for. "He didn't say anything."
"I asked him, Cap. I think he's shy of it. I'd seen he wasn't running near as quick as he often does, see, and I asked him and he got all pink and he finally said his boots was - were - too tight. Said he didn't want to have to trouble anyone to go into town, as ours are all still well too big for him."
Josiah mulls over that. "Tell you what, my son. I give you the notes and the leave, you take Davey in yourself - Eddy's got to stock us up on some things tomorrow, go on with him."
Bertram looks immensely relieved, though still fidgeting with the carving. "Thanks obliged, Cap, I think he'll rather like that."
"I expect so. Don't mind about the balance - just try not to spoil our young fella, alright?"
Bertram is a tall, slim lad who shivers like an aspen when he laughs, which he does now. "Yes sir, yes Cap, I do promise."
Josiah knows he will. Bertram is the sort who, given leave, would buy the boots and spend the balance on something to bring home for the lot of the lads to share. He expects so, and he trusts him.
In the week's mail is a letter on a folded department bulletin, sealed with a glob of wax.
Birchy,
You know I was raised a man of faith, though I have grown to believe more in the men around me than any Man above. I reckon it is hard to build a house when you have no plans for what it will look like when it is finished but my old friend & brother, a house is a house all the same. In other words if this boy turns out anything like you we will all have a time of it down here in the city, and if he drives I pray it will not be at my own house (one day!), for no one should have ever let you near the reins. But if I can not have you by my side again, I will be glad as every new day to have your young Davey. Promise you that.
Yours in sincerity,
Silks
P.S. we hear that you are under siege with the snowstorms. Tell you we are thrilled here by the kerodiesel plows they have working the streets now. My luck to you.
@squad51goals @its-skadi @darknight-brightstar @zeitheist At home in the Bronx or: Silky receives a letter.
Your foolish and misguided friend.
Birchy.
Thomas had thought the letter from Wynantskill was for Captain Hastings. Sure some new lad would be coming down - it was a regular thing, after all. New boys arriving at their houses, certain as the seasons, like the surprise of snowflakes on a late autumn day - what you knowed to be coming, but found a new liking in every time.
But Flip had handed it to him instead, with a shrug to Captain Hastings.
Of course, just then, the bells had dropped and they were off, tearing down the avenue. Flip at the wheel and Captain Hastings beside him, and Thomas and Jimmy on one side and Bruno Spack and Ten-Cats Johnson on the other, the engine a great roaring thing, the lights - new electrics, run off the engine itself - and in all the commotion and the going and the coming (it was only a pot boiled over on a stove, frightening a slim, nervous young maid) - he had just - forgot it there, on the table. Forgot it, tending the truck, forgot it, checking his turnouts, forgot it, reading the paper. Forgot it right through dinner when Flip tossed it back on his lap in the midst of clean-up.
"Might ought be important," Bruno said.
"From Wynantskill?" Ten-Cats laughed. "Might ought be they found out Silky cheated on his exams. It would take them so long."
"Oh sure," Thomas says, wagging the letter, "I cheated. I duped the oakbellies into thinking I was a ten-score dumber, so they'd send me off to work with you lot."
"Ah, fuck off, son."
"Fuck off and dry off, both of you, finish the dishes," Flip shouts from elbow-deep in hot suds.
So it is not til late, and lamp-light, that Thomas sets to read the letter, which is sort of roughly pinched into the envelope, and the return-address stamped on the back is half-smudged. The handwriting on the front is smooth and confident, the writ of someone who learned his letters early. His own hand, guided by the sisters and the Jesuits, carries the same measured strokes.
Practice, Thomas, practice. You will not get better if you do not practice, my son. Now, again, on the lines.
But as soon as he opens the letter, he puts it down again. And he puts it under his pillow and closes his eyes and clenches his fists and breathes. He tries to settle on the voices of his house-mates, Bruno's blue-chambray laughter, Ten-Cats' whiskey-amber stories, Captain Hastings a blooming, booming scarlet like the truck itself in a blur. He could find any man of his at twenty paces in the black, on the stair, in the smoke. His sear passes over them like the hand of God, finds them good and gracious, and settles in his chest again. He could, for sure, find any one of them beneath the bull-hide of the fire, hot and reeking and blind.
The letter under his pillow hisses and sighs, like a room before you bust the door, like a quiet room waiting patient to take the breath of fire. How funny: how still and warm the room is, how safe it seems, before you bust the door and let all that air in for the fire to gobble up. It shatters windows. It swallows up the life inside and turns it out in light.
It is only a letter.
Like the dozens he wrote.
Birchy boy, I haven't seen you since the ceremony. You showed the oakbellies. I knew you would.
Birchy, I hope you are well at Wynantskill. It is not the same here without you.
Birchy, my bell-ringer, my board-rider, how are you? I miss you so.
Josiah, have my letters reached you? It is different, here, in the city.
Pal, are you still sore I once nearly ran you over with a horse? Please say not.
Some days, Birchy, I look down at the patch on my coat and I wonder how it got there. Do you feel the same?
The seasons changed, the horses retired, the kerodiesels came in service, the lamp lights became electrics, the faces of men lined and their hair greyed, their mustaches drooped longer, but they still played cards, and they still sang songs, and the city still caught fire. No letters came.
New boys came. Thomas left his first house the first hot day of the year the kerodiesels became standard, took his gear and his brass and his coat and belts, and came to Captain Hastings and Engine 27. It was like a new start, he was told. Perhaps there were too many bad memories. Perhaps he would be happier with a Captain who didn't know -
Him.
Josiah.
It is only a letter.
Bruno's brawling blue and Flip's crisp sizzle find their way to the edge of his being. He knows they are close, and listening out. He wishes they would not. Cap, perhaps, has the sense or kindness not to.
It is not as if half the department didn't know.
He lies on his bed, in the low lamp-light, which flutters as if it is concerned - the way the sisters would fuss over his work, hovering, correcting, murmuring amongst themselves. He holds the letter a little ways distant, struggling to reach just one line at a time, afraid of what he'll find when he reaches the next. Each word is a single stair step in the dark - one foot up, a boot-kick, the next foot up, slow and sure with the hose heavy on his shoulder, one hand on his brother, another hand on his back.
It was Josiah, for so long. Josiah, who was to his hand like shine to brass, who was to his arm like the ardent voice of church bells in the morning, who was in his lungs like far-off daylight, who rested in his sear like he had never been an orphan. It was Josiah, moving into the room, Josiah, beneath the beam, Josiah, beyond his reach.
It is only a letter. It is only words that happen to tell him a story. It is only a story about a boy without a family or a house, but - between the ink-spots, the smudging as if hastily folded without a secret read - a child with a long hallway, stretched between the dark and the day, the near and the now. How, on an avenue in the Bronx, on a chill evening with the window's shut, does he hear the voices of children?
It is only a letter, after all. He could put it away in his locker and never think of it again.
Josiah could always write him again. And again.
And again.
In a white ward at Bellevue, full of stern and stoic doctors who seemed to cut through time as surely as scalpels, beset by flocks of earnest sisters who thought that they were only bodies fraught with fire, only the sad and lonely flesh of God - he had bent his head over his first and last friend and prayed again, and again.
And again.
The doctors wanted him away. The surgeons wanted him gone. His Captain, the Battalion Chief, the District Chief, said to rest, to come on now, he's in their care now.
But he would not rest, would he? He would not, he would grab Josiah's sear by its scruff and bear its claws and drag it shrieking back, he would clench the sheets until his own bandages split, until his own tears stung his burns, again and again. He would have bent time backwards at the knuckles, he would have broken his own arm to make the last half-inch and hit Josiah's back before the beam.
Last he saw Josiah, it was at the promotion at Saint Florian's Hall, mid-town. And the rest of them, up for belts, for commendation, for their brass, they saw the steel and leather and looked away from the man, who stood stubborn as the first horse in the ashes. Last he saw Josiah, his Birchy grit his teeth and took his coat with both hands, though it must have cost him dear to do it. Those were the fever-bright eyes he had laid out in the Sear-dark with, those were the wide shoulders he had rested against between shifts on a five-alarm warehouse blaze, for sure, that was the same old Birchy.
Last he saw Josiah, the Sear had no words for him, and he choked it up like ash.
You pulled me back, Silky.
They gave me the captain's coat because they did not know what else to do.
Thomas puts the letter in his pocket and tromps down the stairs to the watch-room, where Cap is listing over in his chair like a fishing boat bobbing in its berth at the piers. He pulls paper from the desk drawer, and a pen from the rack beside the blotter.
It's for the boy's sake, he thinks.
But it is not.
It is only a letter, and for the boy's sake.
But it is not - by the lamplight, it's for him. For the fever and the Sear. For the breath, and that damned beam, and everything it broke and pinned beneath it.
Thomas scrambles to write before he can swallow the words again.
Birchy, you bastard, you bright and sear-blown bastard, I wrote to you a hundred times, and so you say you're sorry, you better be sorry one-damn-hundred times, the sisters would tell me to forgive you because God would want it, but you never believed in God, you just believed in fire and fists well, Birchy, you bastard. I'm the sorry one. I never said it to you at Saint Florian's and I never said it to you at Bellevue and I never said it to you on Ward Avenue. I'm sorry. I wasn't fast enough, and now there you are and here I am.
When I was an orphan with the sisters I never knew what being an orphan was because somebody dropped me off in a basket at the Foundlings Hospital. Your boy is nowhere near so lucky. I tell you I was an orphan, past-tense, Birchy, because even though I was elbow deep in other kids and raised by sisters and taught by brothers, when Kidder Parson came and took me out I found out I had a family so fast my eyes almost spun out of my head. The day I hit the dirt at Wynantskill I knowed that. Why do you think we call them houses? It isn't by God because they're churches.
Birchy I do not know any more than you do. I do not know how to be a captain I do not know how to be a lieutenant, I've only ever been a brother. I think, my first-and-last friend, that's all we've ever got. A house burns down you build another. You got to build the boy a house, Birchy, you got to furnish him a home.
@darknight-brightstar @zeitheist Every single one of my attempts to write pleasant holiday-oriented things ends up ass-deep in character dissection and plot exposition. @squad51goals @its-skadi
In this installment, we talk about seasons, changes, and things to celebrate.
December darkens the days, and sharpens the nights. There is frost every morning, and the sun is a pale consumptive, waking feebly and slipping weakly into evening. The potbelly stove in the dorm is always burning, always someone up in the night to tend it, every hour. The lads spend a productive few hours one off day re-arranging their beds, recaulking the windows, and hanging curtains. When Josiah asks what they are up to, they explain the lads at the ends of the rows have been getting cold in the night, and they are trying to fix it up so that either everyone is warm, or everyone is cold.
"You mind, Captain?" Jules Menlo asks. He and Bertram Cochrane have taken up the lead, since Antoine and Ellis left for the City. They are raw to it, but they are learning yet.
"Not at all, boys, carry on."
Josiah is pleased with them. Neat and natty rows of beds can go to hell, the lads are making a fine hearth for themselves. They make sure to vent it properly, and Lufty nods approvingly at their work - a house inside of a house, a canvas-flanked beast breathing and snoring in the wind-snipped nights. Josiah only scolds them once, when he catches Davey at three in the morning carrying wood in for the stove. Sure, he is wrapped up tight as a beetle in a sack of flour, but Josiah reminds them that he's just a boy, yet, and needs his rest.
Young Cleary had stumbled a while, the days after Antoine and Ellis were graduated. Eddy had given him a scorcher of a talk for forgetting to include Davey in the proceedings, and he deserved it. That responsibility is still so new and giddy to him - where now, he can remember his own graduation, and think well on it, and not always be so bitter - and he had left the boy bereft. Fool that he is. Even Silky would've cuffed him for it.
My true friend Silky, he writes, one glassy morning when the sun had lost the strength to lift the frost from the grass, you would not believe me or maybe you would. Do you remember the day the bell sounded for us, at breakfast? In the good cheer of sending my lads to the city, I left out the boy who needs us most, our young Cleary. Your god, my friend, would smote me off the earth. It was a terrible mistake, for I frightened him so badly. I had to set him down later in the day and explain all the proceedings and the ceremony. I am not yet sure he forgives me. I am not sure I deserve it. Here he is, a boy who has already lost one family, and I am to take another from him. You can be sure Eddy let me have it.
yours irresponsibly,
Birchy
In those following days, after Antoine and Ellis depart on the train from Troy, his heart aches, something like a tooth you want to forget, something a body can't escape from. The long hallway is there in his dreams, in the boy's dreams, and now he hears the piano, and the distant laughter. He smells the books in the study. When he wakes, he feels the far-off gaze of a man much his senior, cool-eyed but in such a way as a lake when the summer days grow taut about the city streets. An expectant look, a waiting. Far off down that hallway, as far from the boy now as the Bronx for him, as the dorm he once sweat out his sear in. He would want to look away, as the village folks and the oakbellies look at his scars and his brace.
He knows that hallway, and that's just the trouble, for young Cleary has walked it alone, trailing his fingers along the green wallpaper, and Josiah, trembling for the thought of the beam waiting in the ceiling, has not followed. Coward, he thinks. To let the child walk his hallway and stumble, smoke-wrecked, to his wide lawn, alone. A one-legged and half-hearted coward. Davey looks at him askance often in those following days - doesn't come to read with him or practice his Latin, doesn't follow the lads out on their drills no matter how they coax him. He walks down the pathway past the brambles and into the woods, his too-large coat down past his knees and his collar up so high it leaves just his dark curls tumbling out in the sharp wind, and when he comes in for dinner, he is quiet and small among the lads.
It is one of those long, weary twilights when the winter rattles like dry bones, and his leg aches. He is fixing the ledger, making notes, and Silky's reply is on the edge of the desk. Davey slips in so quietly he only hears it with his sear, so startlingly that Josiah leaves a blot on the end of a row.
"Capper?"
He puts his pen down and smiles like he imagines Silky would at an Antoine or an Ellis. Truth to say, he has missed the boy, even the sometimes frantic, fledgling winging of his sear. He is far too young to grieve such an emptiness as that long, black hallway and the smoke-torn sky.
"May I ask a question?"
Times, the boy's genteel raising surfaces, softly like the wave on the shore. Times, as now, he holds his cap in his hands as if he's in a holy place, and his eyes are the shyness of moss on a shadowed ledge.
"Course. Always."
"Eddy said firemen don't take holidays."
"Come sit. What're you onto?"
"It's almost Dawning Days, that's all..."
"Oh, ghosts above, Davey - " Josiah has to laugh. " - no, that's not how Eddy meant it. He only meant that fires and accidents and all our work, it can happen any time."
Davey sits in one of the clutter of chairs in Josiah's office, kicking his legs, the gesture of a younger boy, an apologetic sort of gesture.
"I don't mean to laugh, young Cleary, but we do know the Dawning Days."
From the sundown on solstice to daybreak on New Year's - the time of spirits, the time of the seasons shifting, the time to do good and remember that the sun is only resting for a grand debut. The oakbellies throw a grand to-do at New Year's, all the officers invited to come at their most festive. He has not gone - and the oakbellies are likely to be glad of it, he figures, for he would not cut such a charming figure in his full dress and a tin of polish on his leg. They would, as they did at his promotion, shuffle and swallow hotly above their stiff collars. He would probably stand the whole night out of pride and spend the week after in bed. Perhaps it would be worth it.
"Do you have a party?"
"As many as we can."
"And lights?"
"As many as the sills will hold. The lights and the cups left out for the ghosts. Eddy has probably got another little tree to plant - you know, that stand of maple by the stables, that's his handiwork."
Davey is looking as delighted as Josiah has ever seen him. His eyes are younger, now. He is more the boy that he must have been in golden days, before his long dark hallway.
"And you already know Bertram and his fiddle, and save us all, we've heard the lads sing."
"They taught me the fireman's song." Davey grips the chair, and then pauses, as if lost of a sudden. "Lyddie would've liked that song, I suppose. Mother scolded her because she called the music our teacher brought her 'musty old tunes'."
From far away, in the marrow of his bones, Josiah feels the soft carpet of the parlor under his shoes. Dark walnut bookshelves and rich, salmon-colored wallpaper embossed with an intricate pattern, the sort of thing a child would run their fingers over. The books are less a rainbow than a late-summer forest, greens and smatterings of red and orange. The girl playing the piano, with the bow in her hair, likes to spin cleverly from the plodding strains of an old mass to the bright chirps of ragtime and dance. The brother laughs.
The oak floors in their dormitory had what seemed to be a century of wax and polish creating glistening currents in the low lamplight. They could have greased the bedsprings with a gallon of lard per man and the damned things would've screamed like witches every time a man so much as thought of rolling over. A cold night outside, and a warm hearth within, each coat and helmet hung on its hook, each woolen blanket tucked neatly around each mattress corner. The brothers are singing and the brothers are laughing.
"Antoine wrote me a letter," Davey says, quietly. "He says he got his sear." Davey bites his lip. "He says everybody looked after him, and his captain Jack Prince gave him a pocketwatch. Does it hurt so much, always?"
"Every man is different. It's a hard hand of days. But we look after each other."
"I don't remember, exactly. I hurt so long, I was in bed and the lady wanted to call the doctor, I think. I hurt so long, and then - then it just felt like - " Davey leans forward, puts his arms on the desk and his head in his arms and sighs. Muffled, he whispers, "I felt like - "
Like wandering, Josiah thinks. That strange stillness when the fever breaks, before you come around to your mates watching over you, before you pull yourself out of your bed weak and stunned and brand-new on foal's legs. A fresh and open field, the shaded place where the last dollop of snow lives nearly into June.
"I know," Josiah murmurs, and lays his hand - his scarred hand - on young Cleary's shoulder. "I do know, son, I do."
"I wished Antoine didn't have to hurt that way. Or Ellis. Or Jules or Betram."
"I dunno what it was like - " Josiah sighs. " - but for me, I had my mates around, and my pal, we got it together. I never would've got through it, without him."
"Thomas."
Josiah starts.
"Sorry, Capper. I read it on the letter. Eddy talked about him once, too."
"Silky."
"Capper?"
"Silky. That's what we called Thomas."
"Why?"
"I don't remember, really."
"What's he like?"
"Oh," Josiah says. "I'll tell you. You'd like him a sight better than me - for one thing, he's got two entire good legs and he could take you down to the fish pond. Second - "
Davey is kicking his legs again, scuffing the toes of his boots on the wooden floor.
"Well, I'll tell you. The day I met him, here at Wynantskill, he very nearly ran me down with a horse, a big old dapple grey gelding we called Chubby..."
Davey leans on his hands.
Silky's letter, half-unfolded, is by his elbow. I never really got the brothers' whole forgiveness bit, it says, but I do reckon it's a little bit like when you turn over the ash of a building, and you find a little green thing growing underneath.
