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’m not 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.
Four
On Friday morning, Briar rose just before dawn, like always, and lit a candle so she could see.
Her clothes were where she’d left them. She traded yesterday’s shirt for a clean one, but she drew the same pair of pants up over her legs and tucked the narrow cuffs into her boots. The leather support cinch dangled on the bedpost. She picked it up and buckled it on, crushing it more tightly around her waist than was strictly comfortable. Once it warmed to her body it would fit her better.
Once her boots were laced and she’d found a thick wool vest to throw over her shirt, she pulled her overcoat down off the other bedpost and slipped her arms through its sleeves.
Down the hall, she didn’t hear a sound from her son’s room, not even a quick snore or a settling twist in the blankets. He wouldn’t be awake yet, even if he was going to school—and he didn’t often bother.
Briar had already made sure that he could read all right, and he could count and add better than a lot of the kids she’d seen, so she didn’t worry about him too much. School would keep him out of trouble, but school itself was often trouble. Before the Blight, when the city was bustling enough to support it, there had been several schools. But in the aftermath, with so much of the population decimated or scattered, the teachers didn’t always stay, and the students didn’t get much in the way of discipline.