Boneshaker

Three

Briar Wilkes closed the door behind the biographer.

She leaned her forehead against it for a moment and walked away, back to the fire. She warmed her hands there, collected her boots, and began to unbutton her shirt and loosen the support cinch that held it close against her body.

Down the hall she passed the doors to her father’s room and her son’s room. Both doors may as well have been nailed shut for all she ever opened them. She hadn’t been inside her father’s room in years. She hadn’t been inside her son’s room since… she couldn’t remember a specific time, no matter how hard she tried — nor could she even recall what it looked like.

Out in the hall she stopped in front of Ezekiel’s door.

Her decision to abandon Maynard’s room had come from philosophical necessity; but the boy’s room she avoided for no real reason. If anyone ever asked (and of course, no one ever did ) then she might’ve made an excuse about respecting his privacy; but it was simpler than that, and possibly worse. She left the room alone because she was purely uncurious about it. Her lack of interest might have been interpreted as a lack of caring, but it was only a side effect of permanent exhaustion. Even knowing this, she felt a pang of guilt and she said out loud, because there was no one to hear her — or agree with her, or argue with her — “I’m a terrible mother.”

It was only an observation, but she felt the need to refute it in some way, so she put her hand on the knob and gave it a twist.

The door drooped inward, and Briar leaned her lantern into the cave-black darkness.

A bed with a flat, familiar-looking headboard was pushed into the corner. It was the one she’d slept in as a child, and it was long enough to hold a grown man, but only half as wide as her own. The slats were covered with an old feather mattress that had been flattened until it was barely an inch or two thick. A heavy comforter flopped atop it, folded backward and tangled around in a dirty sheet.

Beside the window at the foot of the bed there lurked a blocky brown chest of drawers and a pile of dirty clothes that was pocked with stray and unmatched boots.

“I need to wash his clothes,” she mumbled, knowing that it would have to wait until Sunday unless she planned to do laundry at night — and knowing also that Zeke was likely to get fed up and do his own before then. She’d never heard of a boy who performed so much of his own upkeep, but things were different for families all over since the Blight. Things were different for everyone, yes. But things were especially different for Briar and Zeke.

She liked to think that he understood, at least a little bit, why she saw him as infrequently as she did. And she preferred to assume that he didn’t blame her too badly. Boys wanted freedom, didn’t they? They valued their independence, and wore it as a sign of maturity; and if she thought about it that way, then her son was a lucky fellow indeed.

A bump and a fumble rattled the front door. Briar jumped, and closed the bedroom door, and walked quickly down the hall.

From behind the safety of her own bedroom door she finished peeling away her work clothes, and when she heard the stomp of her son’s shoes in the front room, she called out, “Zeke, you home?” She felt silly for asking, but it was as good a greeting as any.

“What?”

“I said, you’re home, aren’t you?”

“I’m home,” he hollered. “Where are you?”

“I’ll be out in a second,” she told him. More like a minute later she emerged wearing something that smelled less like industrial lubricant and coal dust. “Where have you been?” she asked.

“Out.” He had already removed his coat and left it to hang on the rack by the door.

“Did you eat?” she asked, trying not to notice how thin he looked. “I got paid yesterday. I know we’re low on cupboard fixings, but I can change that soon. And we’ve still got a little something left around here.”

“No, I already ate.” He always said that. She never knew if he was telling the truth. He deflected any follow-up questions by asking, “Did you get home late tonight? It’s cold in here. I take it the fire hasn’t been up very long.”

She nodded, and went to the pantry. She was starving, but she was so often hungry that she’d learned to think around it. “I took an extra shift. We had somebody out sick.” On the top shelf of the pantry there was a mixture of dried beans and corn that cooked up into a light stew. Briar pulled it down and wished she had meat to go with it, but she didn’t wish very long or hard.

She set a pot of water to boil and reached under a towel for a bit of bread that was almost too stale to eat anymore, but she stuffed it into her mouth and chewed it fast.

Ezekiel took the seat that Hale had borrowed and dragged it over to the fire to toast some of the frigid stiffness out of his hands. “I saw that man leaving,” he said, loud enough that she would hear him around the corner.

“You did, did you?”

“What did he want?”

A rattling dump of poured soup mix splashed into the pot. “To talk. It’s late, I know. I guess it looks bad, but what would the neighbors do about it — talk nasty behind our backs?”

She heard a grin in her son’s voice when he asked, “What did he want to talk about?”

She didn’t answer him. She finished chewing the bread and asked,

“Are you sure you don’t want any of this? There’s plenty for two, and you should see yourself. You’re skin and bones.”

“I told you, I ate already. You fill up. You’re skinnier than me.”

“Am not,” she fussed back.

“Are too. But what did that man want?” he asked again.

She came around the corner and leaned against the wall, her arms folded and her hair more fallen down than pinned up. She said, “He’s writing a book about your grandfather. Or he says he is.”

“You think maybe he’s not?”

Briar stared intently at her son, trying to figure out who he looked like when he made that carefully emotionless, innocent face. Not his father, certainly, though the poor child had inherited the preposterous hair. Neither as dark as hers, nor as light as his father’s, the mop could not be combed nor oiled into decent behavior. It was exactly the sort of hair that, when it occurred on a baby, old ladies would fondly disturb while making cooing noises. But the older Zeke grew, the more ridiculous it looked.

“Mother?” he tried again. “You think maybe that man was lying?”

She shook her head quickly, not in answer but to clear it. “Oh. Well, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I was just… I was looking at you, that’s all. I don’t see you enough, I don’t think. We should, I don’t know… We should do something together, sometime.”

He squirmed. “Like what?”

His squirming did not go unnoticed. She tried to back away from the suggestion. “I didn’t have anything in mind. And maybe it’s a bad idea. It’s probably… well.” She turned and went back into the kitchen so she could talk to him without having to watch his discomfort while she confessed the truth. “It’s probably easier for you anyway, that I keep my distance. I imagine you have a hard enough time living it down, being my boy. Sometimes I think the kindest thing I can do is let you pretend I don’t exist.”

No argument came from the fireplace until he said, “It’s not so bad being yours. I’m not ashamed of you or anything, you know.” But he didn’t leave the fire to come and say it to her face.

“Thanks.” She wound a wooden spoon around in the pot and made swirling designs in the frothing mixture.

“Well, I’m really not. And for that matter, it’s not so bad being Maynard’s, either. In some circles, it works out pretty good,” he added, and Briar heard a quick cutting off in his voice, as if he was afraid that he’d said too much.

As if she weren’t already aware.

“I wish you’d keep a better circle of company,” she told him, though even as she said it, she guessed more than she wanted to know. Where else could a child of hers seek friends? Who else would have anything to do with him, except for the quarters where Maynard Wilkes was a folk hero — and not a fortunate crook who died before he could be judged?

“Mother—”

“No, listen to me.” She abandoned the pot and stood again by the edge of the wall. “If you’re ever going to have any hope of a normal life, you’ve got to stay out of trouble, and that means staying out of those places, away from those people.”

“Normal life? How’s that going to happen, do you think? I could spend my whole life being poor-but-honest, if that’s what you want, but—”

“I know you’re young and you don’t believe me, but you have to trust me — it’s better than the alternative. Stay poor-but-honest, if that’s what keeps a roof over your head and keeps you out of prison. There’s nothing so good out there that it’s worth…” She wasn’t sure how to finish, but she felt she’d made her point, so she stopped talking. She turned on her heel and went back to the stove.

Ezekiel left the fireplace and followed her. He stood at the end of the kitchen, blocking her exit and forcing her to look at him.

“That it’s worth what? What do I have to lose, Mother? All this?” With a sweeping, sarcastic gesture he indicated the dark gray home in which they squatted. “All the friends and money?”

She smacked the spoon down on the edge of the basin and grabbed a bowl to dish herself some half-cooked supper, and so she could stop gazing at the child she’d made. He looked nothing like her, but every day he looked a little more like one man, then the other. Depending on the light and depending on his mood he could’ve been her father, or her husband.

She poured herself a bowl of bland stew and struggled to keep from spilling it as she stalked past him.

“You’d rather escape? I understand that. There’s not much keeping you here, and maybe when you’re a grown man you’ll up and leave,” she said, dropping the stoneware bowl onto the table and inserting herself into the chair beside it. “I realize that I don’t make an honest day’s work look very appealing; and I realize too that you think you’ve been cheated out of a better life, and I don’t blame you. But here we are, and this is what we have. The circumstances have damned us both.”

“Circumstances?”

She took a deep swallow of the stew and tried not to look at him. She said, “All right, circumstances and me. You can blame me if you want, just like I can blame your father, or my father if I want — it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything. Your future was broken before you were born, and there’s no one left living for you to pin that on except for me.”

From the corner of her eye, she watched Ezekiel clench and unclench his fists. She waited for it. Any moment, and his control would slip, and that wild, wicked look would fill his face with the ghost of his father, and she’d have to close her eyes to shut him out.

But the snap didn’t occur, and the madness didn’t cover him with a terrible veil. Instead, he said, in a deadpan voice that matched the empty gaze he’d given her earlier, “But that’s the most unfair part of all: You didn’t do anything.”

She was surprised, but cautiously so. “Is that what you think?”

“It’s what I’ve figured.”

She snorted a bitter-sounding laugh. “So you’ve got it all figured out now, have you?”

“More than you’d think, I bet. And you should’ve told that writer about what Maynard did, because if more people knew, and understood, then maybe some respectable folks would know he wasn’t a criminal, and you could live a little less like a leper.”

She used the stew to buy herself another few bites to think. It did not escape her notice that Zeke must’ve spoken to Hale, but she chose not to call attention to it.

“I didn’t tell the biographer anything about Maynard because he already knew plenty, and he’d already made up his mind about it. If it makes you feel any better, he agrees with you. He thinks Maynard was a hero, too.”

Zeke threw his hands up in the air and said, “See? I’m not the only one. And as for the company I keep, maybe my friends aren’t high society, but they know good guys when they see them.”

“Your friends are crooks,” she said.

“You don’t know that. You don’t even know any of my friends; you’ve never met any of them except for Rector, and he ain’t so bad as far as bad friends go, you even said so. And you should know: It’s like a secret handshake, Maynard’s name. They say it like spitting in your hand to swear. It’s like swearing on a Bible, except everybody knows Maynard actually did something.”

“Don’t talk that way,” she stopped him. “You’re asking for trouble, trying to rewrite history, trying to shuffle things around until they mean something better.”

“I’m not trying to rewrite anything!” And she heard it, the frightening timbre in his freshly broken, almost man-sounding voice. “I’m only trying to make it right!”

She swallowed the last of the stew too fast, almost scalding her throat in her hurry to be done with it, and to quit being hungry so she could focus on this fight — if that’s what it was becoming.

“You don’t understand,” she breathed, and the words were hot on her nearly burned throat. “Here’s the hard and horrible truth of life, Zeke, and if you never hear another thing I ever tell you, hear this: It doesn’t matter if Maynard was a hero. It doesn’t matter if your father was an honest man with good intentions. It doesn’t matter if I never did anything to deserve what happened, and it doesn’t matter that your life was hexed before I even knew about you.”

“But how can it not? If everyone just understood, and if everyone just knew all the facts about my grandfather and my dad, then…” Despair crackled through his objection.

“Then what? Then suddenly we’d be rich, and loved, and happy? You’re young, yes, but you’re not stupid enough to believe that. Maybe in a few generations, when plenty of time has passed, and no one really remembers the havoc or the fear anymore, and your grandfather has had time to fade into legend, then storytellers like young Mr. Quarter will have the final word…”

Then she lost her voice from shock and horror, because she suddenly realized that her son had only barely been talking about Maynard at all. She took a deep breath, lifted her bowl up from the table, and walked it over to the basin and left it there. It was too much, the prospect of pumping more water to clean it right then.

“Mother?” Ezekiel gathered that he’d crossed some awful line and he didn’t know what it was. “Mother, what is it?”

“You don’t understand,” she told him, even though she felt like she’d said it a thousand times in the past hour. “There’s so much you don’t understand, but I know you better than you think I do. I know you better than anyone, because I knew the men you mimic even when you don’t mean to — even when you have no idea what you’ve said or done to startle me.”

“Mother, you aren’t making sense.”

She slapped a hand against her chest. “I’mnot making sense? You’re the one who’s telling me wonderful things about someone you never met, building up this great apology for one dead man because you think — because you don’t know any better — that if you can redeem one dead man you might redeem another. You gave yourself away, naming them both in one breath like that.” While she had his full attention, before she lost the element of shock that was holding him quiet, she continued. “That’s where you’re going with this, isn’t it? If Maynard wasn’t all bad, then maybe your father wasn’t all bad either? If you can vindicate the one, then there’s hope for the other?”

Slowly, then with stronger rhythm, he began to nod. “Yes, but it’s not as daft as you make it sound — no, don’t. Stop it, and listen to me. Hear me out: If, all this time, everyone in the Outskirts has been wrong about you, then—”

“How are they wrong about me?” she demanded to know.

“They think everything was your fault! The jailbreak, the Blight, and the Boneshaker too. But they weren’t your fault, and the jailbreak wasn’t a big ol’ act of mayhem and nuisance.” He paused to take in some air, and his mother wondered where he’d ever heard such a phrase.

“So they’re wrong about you, and I think they’re wrong about Grandfather. That’s two out of three, ain’t it? Why’s it so nuts to think they’ve all been wrong about Levi, too? ”

It was exactly as she’d feared, laid out in a pretty, perfect line. “You,” she tried to say, but it came out as a cough. She slowed herself down and did her best to calm herself, despite the awful crashing of her son’s dangerous, innocent words. “There’s… listen. I understand why it looks so obvious to you, and I understand why you want to believe that there’s something of your father’s memory worth saving. And… and maybe you’re right about Maynard; as likely as not he was only trying to help. Maybe he had that moment, that break when he realized that he could obey the letter of the law or the spirit of it — and he was chasing some kind of ideal, right into the Blight, and into his grave. I can believe it, and I can accept it, and I can even be a little angry about the way he’s been remembered.”

Zeke made an adolescent squeak of disbelief and held out his hands like he wanted to shake his mother, or strangle her. “Then why haven’t you ever said anything? Why would you let them stomp all over his memory if you think he was trying to help people?”

“I told you, it wouldn’t matter. And besides, even if the jailbreak had never happened, and he’d died in some other, less strange way, it wouldn’t have made a difference to me. I wouldn’t have remembered him any different for any last-minute heroics, and, and, and… Besides,” she added another fierce defense, “who would listen to me? People avoid me and ignore me, and it’s not Maynard’s fault, not really. Nothing I could say to defend him would sway a single soul in the Outskirts, because being his daughter is only a secondary curse on my head.”

Her voice had crept up again, too close to fear for her own satisfaction. She beat it back down, and counted her breaths, and tried to keep her words in a tight, logical line to match and beat Ezekiel’s.

“I didn’t choose my parents; no one does. I could be forgiven for my father’s sins. But I did choose your father, and for that, they will never let me rest.”

Something salty and bright was searing a deep, angry streak in her chest, and it felt like tears clawing their way up her throat. She gulped them down. She caught her breath and crushed it into submission, and as her son walked away from her, back toward his bedroom where he could close her out, she tagged after him.

He shut the door in her face. He would’ve locked it, but it had no lock, so he leaned his weight against it. Briar could hear the soft whump of his body pressing a stubborn resistance on the other side.

She didn’t yank the knob, or even touch it.

She pressed her temple against a place where she thought his head might be, and she told him, “Try and save Maynard, if that will make you happy. Make that your mission, if it gives you some kind of direction and if it makes you less… angry. But please, Zeke, please. There’s nothing to retrieve from Leviticus Blue. Nothing at all. If you dig too hard or push too far, if you learn too much, it will only break your heart. Sometimes, everyone is right. Not always and not even usually, but once in a while, everyone is right.”

It took all her self-restraint to keep from saying more. Instead, she turned away and went to her own bedroom to swear and seethe.