Boneshaker

“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?”