#decofire

[penaltybox14]

Decofiremen: Silky, the Sear, and the fever

@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. 

"You're here," Thomas says.  "Now."

"Aye," Birchy says.  "I am, now."

[penaltybox14]

@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."

[penaltybox14]

DecoFiremen: No happy choice

@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."

[penaltybox14]

Decofiremen: The leaving, and a return

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.  

[penaltybox14]

DecoFiremen: The left behind

@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.

[penaltybox14]

Decofiremen: Passing the Winter

@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.  

[penaltybox14]

Decofiremen: Soon Be the Dawning Days

@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.

[penaltybox14]

DecoFiremen: The House in the Bronx

@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.  

Your forgiving bastard,

(Truly)

Silky

[penaltybox14]

Decofiremen: The Leaving

@zeitheist the great thing about sleep deprivation is that now you get two chapters of Decofiremen.  @darknight-brightstar @squad51goals @its-skadi

As winter arrives, Antoine and Ellis are graduating.  Davey takes it ... not so well.

...

Autumn's back has broken, at last, on the rising edge of winter.  It's the season of woodsmoke and long coats, and the grown boys wear navy caps with short, hard brims and soft crowns.  Now the work turns more indoors: now the talk turns to technical work, to books and diagrams.  Now in the morning they break ice, they check the pumps, they learn to warm the engine.  At least - the lads do.  Davey tries to help them, but he is yet too short to pull himself up into the engine compartment, his arms too skinny to hoist the pig-axe and hammer it home into the water-troughs outside.

Antoine and Ellis will be leaving soon. 

Their training is up, they are soon to get their coats and their badges - soon to be off to the city and their new houses.  Antoine wants the Bowery - Manhattan, the bright lights and the throngs of people and newsboys and hot-dog stands on every corner.  He wants to ride the subway as much as he wants to ride the boards, Ellis says of him.  Antoine laughs and shrugs.  He wants to be elbow-deep in the action.  Ellis hopes for an outer borough posting - he wants to be on the water, or by the railyards.  He wants to be out in the open, in the comings and goings of the ports and piers. 

"You don't know yet?" Bertram asks, one evening in the dorm.  "You don't know atall?"

"No, not yet - they tell you when you get your coat."

Jules looks up from a technical manual.  "But what if you get somewhere you don't like?"

"Oh, they match you.  That's what I've heard, anyhow.  Captain Birch and Lufty - they send out letters to the houses and find the right spot."

"You got more faith than I do, Antoine, more faith by far."

"I just want to ride," Bertram sighs.  "I'm not much particular where.  I'd just like to get my coat and house, and ride."

"I'll drink to that," Ellis says, hoisting his coffee.  "For sure, I'll drink to that."

They do not have long to wait: the word comes at breakfast the next morning.  Capper isn't up on the high table with Lufty and Eddy and the officers, he comes in later, slow and deliberate - careful on his braced leg, but with a purpose that Davey can feel in his teeth, a bitter hope like medicine under his tongue.  He rings the mess bell in a pattern that Davey has never heard before, but it prickles the hair on the back of his neck, and coarsens his lips and quickens his heart. 

The lads all look up at once. 

Capper clears his throat, a shy look on his face as he looks at the papers in his hands.  There is a flutter in his voice, as if he has never done this before, as if he never finds it ordinary.  "Ellis Matthew Parker, Engine 316, Borough of Queens.  Fireman on the boards." 

The hall erupts in wild cheers - newer lads a step behind, older ones stamping their feet and clapping their hands.  Ellis looks shocked, and pleased.

Another pause, a taut lull in the applause.  "Antoine Patrice Vestre, Engine 10, Borough of Manhattan.  Fireman on the boards." 

Ellis whoops and high fives Antoine, whose face is shades of pink and red.

 Jules slaps him on the back so hard his hat comes off, and Betram brays with laughter.  "Well done, ya' son!  Well done!"

"You too, boy!"

Davey finds himself clapping, too, carried away in the breathless joy.  But suddenly they don't feel like his hands, and his voice is not quite his own.  Antoine is leaving.  Ellis is leaving.  They will not be back to Wynantskill - they will be gone.  Gone away, to the city, to the fire.  They are going, and he has no part in it. 

His heart caves, abruptly, with the thought that Antoine will never tell him stories of the north woods again, that Ellis will never whip up another quick magic trick to make him laugh when the hallway inside him gets too long and the breath of the night sky is too far away.  Capper is busy, up there, trying to quell the celebration enough to make the ordinary arrangements.  Davey's lungs split along the fault-lines of his quivering breath, and his eyes burn like smoke.

Out under the black sky on the wide sweep of the lawn, with the seething bones of the house ahead and the cool dark question of the lake behind him, his face was wet, with smoke or sweat, or dew, when he laid his head to the gentle soothing fingers of the grass, the kisses of the clover.  His throat had clenched and his eyes had poured out. 

He pushes away from the long table, even as Ellis reaches, and Antoine turns, and he runs.  Runs out the hall, down the steps, across the big yard, between the kerodiesels that slumber away the breakfast hour, through the brambles and the bracken behind the ladder wall, and down the narrow, frost-nipped path past the garden packed in leaf-litter and duck canvas, all the way down to the little fish pond where the naked trees arch, black-boned, like the memory of a cathedral.

He ought to be happy, he ought to be shouting and cheering, he ought to be - Home - the long dark hallway, where Lyddie sits at her piano, and sighs, and mother mulls cider over the big stove, and father listens while he recites poetry in the study, that leather-smelling and genteel place where he was so rarely allowed, where father took him serious as a young man, yet chuckled and ruffled his hair as a boy.  Home, its beams jeweled in embers, a skeleton haunting the night sky.  He had not meant to burn the children out of their safe snug beds, he had only wanted to be home again.

He sobs into the fractal, crystal edges of the little pond, and his rattling voice shatters the calm of the water, and he feels himself in another time, surfacing in a white room, a body anointed in ether and morphine, a soul and a sear that split the covenant of sooty hands.  A brother he has never known and known forever bends his head in ash and says he's sorry, he's sorry, God above, he is so, so sorry.

Capper won't find him here. 

But Antoine does.

"Davey."

He sniffs.  "G'way."

"Davey - "

"You're going anyhow."

"Oh, fella.  Oh, little fella."

Antoine slumps beside him.  A twig snaps.  The frozen ground refuses to yield and the frost sighs.

"It's not forever, you know."

Good night, my Davey. His mother says, Good night, my son.  Sweet dreams.

"It might be," he says, petulantly.  He bites his lip and squeezes his eyes shut.  He thinks of holding his father's book of poetry as if it were a sacrament. 

"I'm going to miss you."

"So?" The water is very still, and very dark. 

"So?  So I'm going to miss you, little fella.  I'm going to miss you, I'm going to write to you, and I'm gonna tell all my crew at the house about my little brother up in Wynantskill.  And when you get your coat and you come to ride the boards, I'm gonna tell the borough I'll be back, and I'll come see my little brother on his first shift.  'Cause I'm gonna miss you."

"What if you die?"

There is a long pause.  Antoine digs his boots into the dirt.  Or tries.  "Then God will have to miss you, too.  Because I'll tell God how you came to us, all skinny and white around the eyes, how you woke us all up the first night and Betram played his fiddle.  I'll tell the archangels to watch their wings, because you grew up fast, and I'll tell the horses above to watch their legs, because you grew up strong.  My whole house will miss you, little fella, little brother."

His heart is coming out at his eyes again, pinching his lips, clogging up his noise.  His face is hot, against the bleak, biting morning.  "I miss Lyddie," he says.  "I miss her and mother and father.  I miss them so much, I want to throw up.  I miss them so hard I want to run forever.  I can't get them back, and I can't get to them.  I just miss them."

Antoine lays an arm about his shoulders.  Cautiously at first and then, like a heron launching from the shallows of a river, Antoine draws him up close.  Davey can feel his heart coming out like the little darts that sneak deftly into the sky before the moon can catch them - he feels the light that will be Antoine's sear, someday, some soon-coming day.

"I'll write to you, okay?  Me and Ellis both, we'll write.  We aren't gonna up and forget you.  Only a fool forgets a brother.  Hear me, little fella?"

"I hear you."

"You feel like coming back, now?  Captain Birch sent me out to get you, says neither of us is getting our coats til we bring you back.  And I'll miss you like hell, little fella, but I did come here to be a fireman, get me?"

Davey laughs, a little spark bursting from his damp lips.  "Yeah."

"Come on, then."

Davey follows him - Antoine checking his long strides - back up the path.  Past the garden, waiting for spring to come.  Back through the brambles and the grass that sparkles in the mid-morning sun and the climbing wall and the kerodiesels, to the lads assembled out on the big yard, Lufty and Eddy and the officers, and Capper, in their finer clothes, Capper's gorget polished, his collar shining white against the blue of his coat, his brass buttons burnished high.  His hat slips askew when he turns toward them, and he is smiling.

[penaltybox14]

Decofiremen: The Letter

@zeitheist @darknight-brightstar @squad51goals Oh no more Decofiremen.  Is it still found family if you’re finding it again?  Do you get double points for that?

Or, Josiah is way in over his head.

...

Josiah sits at his desk a long time, and the pile of scrapped letters grows around him, and the bells pass the day away.  With the windows open to the big yard, he can feel like chill in the autumn air, the swift kiss of a one-time lover in the morning. 

Monroe is shouting at his team - quicker this, steadier that.  An engine coughs, groans, and finally turns over, to cheers and clapping - that'd be Lieutenant Jackson, who brought his new rank and a second kerodiesel up from the city back in early summer.  He keeps carefully and deliberately breaking the engines piece by piece, teaching the lads to put them back together again.  He will likely do something after dinner like pull the fan-belts or throw bacon grease into the pump levers - Josiah thinks the oakbellies would have a faint if they knew what Jackson was doing, but Jackson knows the kerodiesels like some men knew their horses, and Josiah trusts him.  

But what choice does he have?  He was shipped here to be masters of men who had more than a decade of service on him, and belts so heavy with commendation, so fat with brass you'd need a team three abreast to carry them.  He stands beside them some mornings and feels as if he ought to be in line with the lads instead.

Lieutenant T. Castor, Engine 27, Bronx Battalion District ...

No.  He crumples the paper and shoves it off the desk to where the waste-paper basket probably is, buried somewhere.  He taps his pen on the blotter, leaving little wet, smokey blobs of ink on the worn leather.  No, too formal, that.  When did he get so formal?  His fingers are callused and cracked, still thickest where they gripped the horse and axe.  There is a deep scar on his right arm where Chubs, their old bay gelding, bit him for not giving up a mint.  His left arm is a muddled, molten map, scoured of hair and curiously pale, so he pulls the sleeve down.  For the chill.  

Lt. Thomas -

Now what was Silky's middle name?  Did he ever know it?  

Lt Castor -

No, God, no.  They were on nicknames before they even hit the cobbles together.  Never so tough-tongued as a surname between them.  Thomas, he'd said, at breakfast.  I'm Thomas.  I about ran you over yesterday, I'm sorry.  Grab an extra biscuit, Eddy's recipe is the best.

Silky was almost eighteen, and he was wide about the shoulders but leggy, like a colt at Saratoga.  He had auburn hair and a broad, friendly face, and he didn't know his family, and he had been at the foundling hospital in the city and then Mary of the Assumption Home, which was in Nyack, and then he had gone to school with the Jesuits at Saint Joseph's in Rochester, and Captain Parson had come to see him about a month ago and asked if he didn't want to come and be a fireman, and Captain Parson seemed so awfully familiar well, he couldn't help but say yes.

Josiah found all of this out in line at the mess before they even sat down.

I'm sorry.  The brothers told me I talk too much.  Actually the sisters said that, too.  But I was the best at reading the Latin at Mass, they told me.  What's your name?

Silky - someone started calling him Silky sometime that winter, and Josiah can't recall why, but maybe it was during a card game, or maybe it was because he kept his hair slicked down with some sort of glue he got from the drug store in town, or maybe it was just because he could have talked the ladders into becoming trees again, his voice so smooth and his eyes so kind.  Silky had no enemies, had probably never had an enemy, except after card games in the wintertime.  That was Silky.  

Birchy!  We're doing ladder runs today - come let's be on my team.

I bet I can get Peps to hit the quarter-mile gate in a flat minute, Birchy, will you time?

Silky made a man want to be better, not to beat him, but because he cheered it so.  Which was why Silky was so often the second man on the line - he would push you, and you knew you couldn't, wouldn't ever need to, turn back.  No matter where the fire glows, the song said, we'll bring the bastard down.  And they would - when things shone, when his leg was solid under him, he could catch the humming edge of a thought before it hit Silky's tongue, and Silky rested in his amicable quiet, and the two of them brought terror and some begrudging respect to their captain.  

The sun was good, then.  The summer was high and the winter never cut through their coats.  They had grown up together, until the smoke came and the beam fell and neither of them was enough to see it coming.  

Through the ether and the pain, Silky's voice pulled him back, over and over, even when he wanted to leave, even when he wanted the echoes and the needles and the endless white - the white coats, the white sheets, the white, stark, sterile ward - to end.  Silky pulled him back.  Silky's hands in their white wrappings held his, and his Sear murmured as earnestly as his voice did.  Him that would persuade the devil to abandon his house, him that would settle a horse with his eyes.  

There were long days, endless days, when he wanted to fall forever.  Yet Silky pulled him back.

Silky had written him letters just about every week, after his promotion, when he was assigned to Wynantskill.  Eddy or Lufty Parker would dutifully leave them on his desk, where they stacked, precarious and unopened.  After a while the letters came every month, and Eddy stopped clearing his throat when he brought one, and Lufty stopped staring meaningfully at the pile, and Josiah had dumped them wholesale into a drawer to stop the burning in his chest when he saw Silky's precise Jesuit cursive on the envelopes.  

He'd put the key under the blotter.  So there is one less drawer to use.  So it is.

After the first night, young Cleary hasn't said much to anybody.  Antoine and Ellis have been pressing Lufty Parker to let him participate in some of the day's drills, and Jules keeps trying to coax the boy into one of the evening's baseball games.  Josiah sees him watching Betram Cochrane play the fiddle in the evenings, and remembers piano lessons, and a little girl with a pink bow and a dutch bob, and remembers chloroform and morphine and nursing sisters in dark capes and white hats.  The little fellow calls him Capper, which he ought to mind, but he can't bring himself to discourage.  He calls the boy Davey, or young Cleary, depending on who's listening.  

Outside, Antoine is lining up his team to race for the ladders.  He calls for David Cleary on the line, and Josiah hears Monroe sighing mightily and telling Antoine, again, that Cleary is not in training, Cleary is not even sixteen, and would you please stop asking.

Antoine is going to make his captain gray, wherever he is assigned.  He thinks Antoine could be a driver - he is brave enough, to take the narrow streets at speed - but that he will have his own house someday, too.  Josiah should look to send him to the Bronx, where the tenements are so tight they seem to be held together with moss and mothers' shouting, where there will be many families who will need his courage and his kindness.  

Engine 27, Lieutenant -

No, no.  

Ellis is arguing that a growing boy needs exercise and fresh air, not just to sit on the sidelines.

Josiah pulls the key from under the blotter, then puts it back again.  Then pulls it out.  

In the drawer are more than a dozen letters, neatly sealed, which get thinner as the months draw out between them.  

He puts the key back again.

Silky sat by his bedside at Bellevue, his auburn hair loosed from its dapper glue to spring in waves around his temples.  Josiah had wanted so badly to leave, to shed his body, to tumble down some ethereal stairwell in a dreamless morphine sleep where the sun was bright and nothing hurt, where his leg would be straight forever.  But Silky held him pinned to the dark, smoking earth, and a part of him had hated him for it, and the hate was like an abscessed hoof, rank and hot.  He could never ride the boards again, he could never go back, yet Silky pulled him back anyway.  The selfish bastard, who had sweat and fevered with him when the sear broke.  

An evening breeze rustles the crumpled sheets, the abandoned lines, the empty words around him.  Ellis and Antoine are arguing for Davey's sake, and Monroe sounds close to giving in.  Good for them.  

He grabs the edge of the desk and heaves himself, haltingly, the few lumbering steps to the window, leaning out over Monroe's bald spot.  

"Captain Monroe!"

Monroe looks as surprised as the lads to see him, leaning, gritting against his leg, out the window.

No one can see how white his knuckles are in the long afternoon light.

"Monroe, for God's sake.  Just let the boy try for it.  Antoine, so help me, if young Cleary injures himself, I'll saddle a horse with your hide."

Antoine is grinning, his black eyes bright as apples.  

"Birch - "

"A boy needs to run, Monroe."

Monroe throws up his hands.  "Fine then!  Fine!  Let the little fellow break his face!  Let the state's hand come and flick us off the map like a horsefly!  Fine!  Antoine!  Line 'em up!"

Josiah smiles, and hauls himself back to his desk.

My old friend, he writes, I am so sorry I haven't written.  Please feel free not to forgive me.  But I must tell you about the situation I find myself in - you were always the cleverer of the two of us, Silky.  You could have talked the dead to dancing from their graves.  My right hand, whatever God you once believed in has seen fit to trade a boy just twelve his family for his sear, and now at fourteen, he has finally come to us.  Yes, he is too young to train, but he is too young for many things, and once, you told me that the Jesuits told you that God does not give us more than we cannot carry.  Well, my first and last friend, this is more line than I can drag by myself.  If you cannot bear to forgive my silence, Silky, than please bear to give me some advice.  They gave me my captain's coat because they did not know what else to do, and I am lost.  You were my brother from the day we met face-to-horse, and you shared the sear with me.  What am I to do with this boy?  I know that he is ours, he is our youngest brother, but I know we cannot replace his family.  But when I was lost, Thomas, and wanted to stay that way, you pulled me back, bastard that you were and are.  If anybody can tell me what to do now, that he is with us at last, it's you.

Your foolish and misguided friend, who apologizes for what it's worth,

Truly,

Birchy.

[penaltybox14]

Decofiremen: Davey, Learning to Run

It’s been rather a long week.  @darknight-brightstar @zeitheist @squad51goals

Young Cleary is learning to run.  In his taken-in trousers and the shirt with the sleeves too long, in the boots that he polishes and leaves at the foot of his bed just like the lads, he is learning to run, and he is coming alive. 

For a long time, he would shuffle quietly into Josiah's office, sit himself down, and scuff his shoes on the floor while Josiah did paperwork.  Sat softly with his hands folded, like a boy at school.  Lufty and Eddy had told him to teach the boy his Latin and his manners, but he was not sure how good he had ever been at either one.  He was mostly fists when he'd come to Wynantskill under Captain Parsons, and the daily lessons of Hudson Classical are much further from his mind now than the tutelage of the nights and the bells in the Bronx.  Mostly fists and a set jaw and a young man's bravado, the stubborn set of a fool kid who didn't know yet the kind of magic he carried in his heart.

Captain Parsons had told him it was rather like a box, and the fire was the key.  Eddy, then with more hair on his head and less on his ears, had likened it to the blossoming of kindling in the woodstove.  Lufty Parker, whose hard dark eyes belied his kind humor, told him it was distant bells and shouting in the dark coming near.  The fire would wake it, he said, just as the bells would wake him in the night-time. 

They were eighteen, him and Silky, when they got their brass and shipped down to the Bronx.  He was Birchy, then, and he was braver than he ever would be again in his life.  After the Sear came, after the fever scoured him and wrung him loose and threw him headlong into the sullen dark jaws of a half-century of smoke, he had tempered inside like good steel.  Alone, a man was only foolish.  Beside another, he could be brave.  So he was. 

He sent a letter to the little library in town, asking the librarian for good stories for a young fellow to read, and so she sent along - with regards - a book or two for a week.  They were stories about knights and foreign places, men who fell asleep for a hundred years and woodcutters a hundred feet tall, and young Cleary thanked him softly and then would read while Josiah did his paperwork.

At lunch and after dinner, Josiah would bother him about the stories.  He was no good teacher for a boy, and young Cleary was no forthcoming child.  He would say some things. 

Once, the librarian sent over a volume of horse stories.  Josiah had read it, a lifetime ago. 

"Mother used to read from this," Davey had said, turning the book over in his hands, touching the blue cover as if it would burn him, fingers lingering softly over the print of the horse - nostrils flaring - on the cover. 

"I had it at school.  I used to sneak it under the desk when the master wasn't looking."

"Did he catch you?"

"Course he caught me."

Davey had sort of smiled about that. 

Sometimes he would look out the window and Josiah would feel his Sear, stretching and deepening as the long afternoon shadows.  So used to Lufty and Eddy, and the trainers in residence, it startled him - balky and raw, it was, so unlike the others.  The sound of a stick snapping, boots on the staircase, the smell of grass and wool would startle him, and the Sear would flare like an ache.  It was like man stumbling out of heavy smoke into brutal daylight and blue skies - how the nostrils flared, the eyes strained, caught between a hell's twilight and a blessed daybreak.  It felt like being waked from a grave. 

It felt like Bellevue and the cotton-batting ether dreamlets leaking from between his teeth.

It felt like the trembling air chasing the clanging bells.

It felt like crying, sometimes.

It was the long hallway with the wallpaper.  It was the little girl, far away, who he could not reach. 

It was someone's mother reading stories to her children snug in bed.

Davey's Sear was a cacaphony and a catastrophe, and he still woke, most nights, his fear so brazen it would wake fifty years of horses from their stable sleep.  This end of the hallway dark, that end aflame, and no way out but awake. But awake, the house had fallen, and there was no way back.

Make him a house, Silky had said in his letter, which Josiah had braced in his ribs to read.  He had gasped the way a fish does on the docks or a rook does on his first fire, his first slack and bloodless face.  Make the boy a house to keep the rain and the wind off, til he grows strong enough to make his own. 

Josiah had left his house, on a fair morning, to save another, and the whole damned thing had come down on him, and he had never come back, not even for his own things, which their Captain had brought him when they finally released him from Bellevue.  Make a house, Silky had said, but Silky was still the same bright boy who elbowed him in line and apologized and said the brothers had always told him he talked to much. 

"Young Cleary," he'd said at last, "you got to get outside sometime."

Davey had scuffed his shoes again, heel-toe, kick-shuffle.  Setting aside the book on Josiah's desk.  "Antoine said I ought to come to the yard."

"Antoine's a smart lad."

"Lufty says I'm too young to train."

"Well, I says you're too young to wilt away indoors."

"You do it." The boy says it to the floor, but the flash of his Sear is volatile, like an acid or a snake spitting poison.

Josiah has no answer for that.  It stings, and he deserves it.  It is what Silky would have said.  Build for him a house.  Josiah had built himself an armory and Eddy had had to stomp right upstairs and shake him like a spring-time rug all knotted up with the salts and the sands of winter shoes and dancing. 

"The grown boys, they don't hear it."  The bells.  The sparks.

"They will."

"How will they, Capper?"

"Fire."

"Is it the same, always?"  Do people die?  Do the hallways end in coarse ash and howling loneliness?  Davey's eyes are clear and deep as water. 

"Yes." Everyone dies.  Every house comes down.  You leave the house looking ahead, your arm in the rungs, and you don't look back.

"Fire's a bastard."  He coughs, to hide a little sob.  "Sorry, Capper."

"Fire's a bastard, is right.  But remember how I told you the story?  The point of it all, young Cleary, is we're not alone."

"You haven't even opened the window."

Every house comes down.  No fool builds a castle without a gate.

"Alright, my son, I'll make a deal: you go out and you spend some time getting your boots and your hands dirty, I'll open the window."

"Promise you'll come down, too."

"Tell you this.  We'll go it like firemen: you lead the way, Davey Cleary, and I'll follow.  You run the line out, and I'll crank the hydrant.  You run Antoine so hard he thinks his ribs'll break, and I'll open my window and shout you along, how's that?"

He is grinning.  His heart is wide with teeth.  Young Cleary is alert with something like a first secret taste of cider, as if he sees the two young men who won their brass and set upon the Bronx like cats and snow clear as history and something like a future.  Set a stone on which to place the hearth, and around the hearth you build the house.  

The boy is halfway out the door with a look back, a suspender slouching in eagerness down his arm.  "Capper, you coming?"

The promise is the stone he sets, like Silky says.  To build a house to run to.

[penaltybox14]

DecoFiremen: The Solstice

@zeitheist @darknight-brightstar @squad51goals @its-skadi The local snowstorm has inspired me!  It’s Solstice-time at Wynantskill, the start of the Dawning Days, when spirits are close by and spring is promised.

On the eve of the Solstice, the clouds broaden, and hang heavily in the sky.  Overnight, the temperature drops - the thermometer on the back kitchen door ticks down swiftly through the dark - and the wind howls a bitter song.  The snow seems to come all at once - one flake becomes one hundred, one thousand, until the whole of the grounds is swept away in a furious, frozen tide.  The high wind rakes its keening claws across the windows and the frost burns the glass.  Half a dozen times, Davey wakes to a lad stoking up the fire in the dormitory stove.  Once, he stirs to find Jules Menlo tucking another blanket over him.

He dreams aloft, where snowflakes are born from the laughter of the stars.  He sits with mother and father and Lyddie by the fireplace, in nightclothes, drinking hot cider with cloves and a fat cinnamon stick to stir with.  They are all together in the parlor, mother's sewing treadle and father's books, the piano, the curtains drawn.  Father is reading poems but his words are scattered, as birds, by the storm outside.  Mother sings the song about the turning season and the rising sun, the one where the day is only resting for the work of spring.  Father has brought home a little oak seedling, the root-ball wrapped in festive paper over the burlap, and it waits by the kitchen stove to be potted and tended.  In the dream above the clouds, the fire never leaves the fireplace, and the smell of books never bitters, and the hall will not grow long and dark, and he will not stumble.

The blizzard rages on.  In the morning, the electrics have gone, the world only goes so far as the wide front doors - even the steps are drifted, and the big yard has disappeared into a cloud of stinging white. 

"Put your sweater on, young fella," says Jules Menlo.

"And some extra socks," adds Bertram Cochrane.  Since Antoine and Ellis left for the city, they have become the senior lads at the grounds, always marshalling him about, fussing that his hair is combed and his teeth and nails are clean.  If the dry, rasping tongue of grief did not so haunt his long dreams as it does, Davey expects he might chafe more.  But if some days he wishes he were grown,  some days he yearns after their gentleness, like a young tree strives toward the sun.  He puts on his extra socks, and the sweater which is too large.

  The lot of them have to dig their way out to get to the mess.  They work in shifts, and the shovels are near as tall as he is.  But he digs along anyhow, with an extra hand and an elbow or two, and before long together they've cleared a path wide enough for four men to walk, and they are sweating, and they are hungry as wild things strayed down from the mountains.  They pile in through the doors of the main building and find the hall in splendor: ribbons, candles,seedling trees and boughs, empty cups beside the doors, fruit on the tables, smells of cider and eggs and pancakes, a right feast which Eddy and the captains, including Birch, have put together. 

"Glad to see the lot of you found your way out," Capper says, at the head of the hall, "else we'd have to start the holiday without you.  Seeing as the weather and the Solstice, we're giving you off training today - "

The grown boys roar their approval. 

" - but we'll be working to clear the way, keep the pipes warm and the whole place from caving on us."

"We're in!" Bertram shouts.  "We're in, Cap."

"Best you be.  Now come sit, come eat, we didn't do all this work for nay."

For twenty minutes without rest, they tear through breakfast, until at last they settle in and begin to talk and plan their day.  If the swarm of recruits were a body, Davey thinks, Betram would be the heart and the tongue, and Jules would be the brain and the guts.  Beside them, he feels small as he did with Antoine and Ellis, but he feels a rising in his heart, as if he could be such a young man some day, as if he might make his speeches like ballads, as if he might hone the strengths of men.  Maybe it's only the Solstice, he thinks.  Maybe it's only the magic of the Dawning Days, where spirits come to linger.

He takes three empty glasses, and slips away from the table.  He tries to be swift and he tries to bestill his heart, but Capper finds him, as Capper always does eventually. 

On the rare days it doesn't hurt so hard to think it, Capper makes him think of father, though younger, younger and wilder.  Father could always find him, when things were hard, when he would stare too long at a word, when he would whisper a line that struck him in some vibrant depth.  Father would take his glasses off, and put his hands on his slender shoulders, and say, I know my son.  What's wrong?

(Davey could not always tell him.  Capper told him, one afternoon in the office, that many of the lads who found their way to Wyantskill had always been a subtle kind of different, sometimes as the dark of a horse's eye, sometimes as the spark of a shoe, sometimes as swift as the passing of a winter sun.  Perhaps that was why some word would catch on his tongue, some tale would crinkle his lips.)

Capper limps harder, on stormy days, on days the winter has bitten and taken hold.  The sound of his coming is unsubtle, but Davey feels as if Capper was never one to shy. 

(Not, as Capper tells him, like Silky - the old friend, far away, who writes his letters on the backs of old fire department bulletins in graceful, looping longhand.)

Capper finds him, as he does, in the back kitchen, placing his three glasses on the window, where the Solstice sunset will - if it ever stops snowing - strike them clear.

"They say the spirits are close, this time in the year," Capper says.  He leans against the stove, his braced leg canted slightly to keep the weight off.

  "Can you tell Eddy not to move them, please?"

"I will.  But he'll know, I expect."

"We put the glasses out," Davey says, "but I never thought of it before, really.  And at the county, there wasn't anything ... it was just days, after days after days."

Capper nods. 

"D'you suppose they will come?"  He pauses.  " - not for real.  I know that."

Capper shrugs.  "Real is as real does.  A body dies, a soul, a spirit - that I can't tell you.  My old Silky, he grew up with the nuns and the Jesuits, and they think a soul's an eternal thing that goes to live with God, if it's good, or with the Devil, if it's bad."

"Who decides?"

"Hm?"

"Who decides where the soul goes?"

"God, I suppose."

"I don't think that's fair.  Suppose god was angry with someone, and sent them off to the devils, even if they were good in the heart."

"Suppose so.  I don't know Silky's god.  I've never met him.  A body, that I've seen.  A soul?  I have a sear, and so do you.  So do Eddy and Lufty and the Captains.  All the young men will have their sear, in time.  Is that a soul?  I can't say."

Davey looks at the glasses in the window, at the winter draped beyond, like a shrouding. 

Gently, Capper asks, "Do you mean, are they gone forever?"

Davey bites his lip against the rising of his heart.

"You love 'em.  I had your dream, when you came.  I saw that hallway.  I know.  But I heard the music, too.  You loved 'em then and you do now.  That won't ever stop.  When I was in that house, with Silky - "

Davey feels the thin, sinewy sorrow now.  He knows the blazing beam and the white hospital as sure as Capper knows his long hall.  The grief is like a burn itself, raw and ragged.

" - after it came down, I thought everything else came with it.  They packed me off here and I had nothing but my brass and my broke leg show for it.  And I hated it.  I wasn't who I'd been, I wasn't who I thought I was going to be."

"Aren't you?"  Davey can feel himself in a body twice his size, and he can feel the boards rattle beneath his feet, and he can feel the breath of horses, and see the steam that rises from their backs under an iron sky.

"I am now.  I'm here now.  My point, my son, youngest of my lads, is what we love comes back, that I do believe.  Be is soul or spirit, be it quiet, be it loud, whatever form it takes, it does come back.  Like the sun, each day."

Davey nods.  The wind seems lesser now, though the snow is, if anything, thicker.  When he thinks of the parlor and the piano, his chest aches.  There is a space where mother and father and Lyddie ought to be, the space where wood fits in the stove, the place where words fill a fable, three empty glasses at a table. 

"Come on now.  Chores to be done.  The sooner we all get through, the sooner the sun will set and we can get to celebrating.  How's that sound?"

Davey rearranges the glasses on the sill one more time.  Somewhere, Bertram Cochrane is humming a tune, and he'd like to sing along.  

[penaltybox14]

Oh shit more DecoFiremen.  @zeitheist @darknight-brightstar

ed. note: oakbelly is a somewhat insulting term for an administrator/pencil-pusher, that is, someone who’s been sitting at an (oak) desk too long. 

"The oakbellies are gonna have your belts for this."

Josiah is slouched in a chair by the potbelly stove in the kitchen, his bad leg propped on a footstool.  His brace is propped against his chair, straps open, glistening in the low light, like it's resting, too.  Bad leg spits sparks, sounds sirens.  He tries to flex his foot and the sirens get louder.

Eddy fills a hot water bottle and sighs into the steam, twists the stopper and flops it on over Josiah's knee. 

"You heard me, Birchy?"

"Heard ya."

"They get word of this, they'll come up.  You know it."

"They won't know.  What can they do, anyhow?"

Lufty Parker, filling out his logs for the day, shakes his pen at Josiah and spatters the lot of them with ink.  "You ain't been at it long enough, son.  To know what they'd do."

Lufty's been at this the longest, of the three of them.  His hair and mustache are streaked with gray, and his body looks like a map of a district, patched with burns, pitted from bits of brick, his skin a calligraphy of scars.  Lufty has run young men through drills since before boxes and hydrants, and every man in the city has a story about him.  But his broad hands are gentle, and his eyes are dark and wise and kind.  It was Lufty who fingered the little fellow's shirtsleeve and said well, we'll have to take this in now, huh?

"No," Josiah says.  "They won't take him back."

Eddy opens and shuts his pocketknife.  It shines, bright as brass, in the small, warm, dim room.

"They can't take him back."

Lufty sighs.  "Them fellas up in the HQ, they're all about the rules, my son.  The rules say sixteen, and you know we got half the boys' homes and magistrates giving us the sideways eye anyhow."

"They've thought we were crazy since horses and buckets, Lufty," Eddy says.  "Hasn't meant anything to us, we still put out their fires."

"You dumb-sons think the state and the city don't lean on HQ?  You think if the state pressed hard enough, they wouldn't see fit to stamp this wisp out as searblown and hand him over?"

Josiah hurls himself out of his chair, forgetting too late that he is not twenty, that this is not the house in the Bronx with Silky grabbing for his belt, that his leg will not hold, and he sort of crumples gasping against the old table.  "Don't call him that.  Don't you dare, Parker, don't you dare say that of him."

When a man winds so tight he snaps, or when he comes loose and can't get back together, when the smoke and sparks are all he sees, when the sirens and the screams are all he hears, they call it searblown.  There are a few places trusted to take care of men who go mute, men who tremble in the daylight - soft and quiet places.  Not at all like Little River.  But Lufty is right - the little fellow, young Cleary, is too young to be their jurisdiction, and he would not go to some gentle, wooded place.  If it were the state was in a foul mood, they'd take him - and it wouldn't matter, then. 

One run  - a few years back - he went with Lufty Parker to the state hospital in New Amoskeag, and found a great big lad, tied up in a cold-sheet pack.  Two years at Wynantskill, they'd managed to get him talking again and honed his paranoia into something like a weapon, as deft as smoke and fierce as a pig-axe.  Still a strange lad, working down on the piers.  His captain wrote to say the lad had rescued three children from houseboat, three newsboys hiding out for the night that no one knew were there.  Boy's a bit of a madman, the captain wrote, but by god if I wouldn't put in for six more just like him.

But it wouldn't matter for the boy.  Josiah knows - he knows, after two years orphaned, after getting his Sear alone and bearing the fever, Cleary would not survive to sixteen if he were at the pleasure of the state. 

"Birchy," Eddy says.  "Birchy -" Eddy catches his elbow as he stumbles.  "Lufty's not saying that he is.  Lufty ain't saying that.  Right, Lufty?"

"Jesus.  No.  Birchy, I'm just saying, we got to tread light.  You dug yourself in on this one."

Josiah struggles not to lean.  He aches.  He wishes his leg could bear him rightly, and he wishes that Silky were here.  Silky was always the cooler head.  Even when before they had their coats and brass, Silky could put a peace on any fight.  Usually, ones that Josiah had started.

"What would you've had me do, Lufty?  Leave him to another couple years with the county?"

Alone.  Days, weeks, months, years, alone.  Knowing someone was out there.   Back at the House, swimming in the fever, striving to surface, struggling for the brightness.  Like shattering a window and the whole building gasping for it.  Back at Hudson Classical, when he could never keep still, when he sat with his books and flipped again and again through the pages as if they might tell him how to find what his body trembled for.  Back when he was a little boy and drew maps of pretend places, mountains and rivers and cities, always adorning them with a proper compass rose to point the way.  Mother and father had always thought him a little odd, his bedroom papered with maps in graphite and crayon. 

Young Cleary's eyes had brightened, there, in that small, empty room.

They'd gotten to Wynantskill at the dinner bell, and the big yard was all of a sudden a rush of young men struggling to sort themselves into a mess line, and Eddy's voice booming at them something about being more a swarm of rats than a pack of wolves.  Eddy, one of the tallest men Josiah had ever known, and broad too, whose cooking as much as his bellowing raised the training ground in the morning.  Birchy, Eddy had said, eyeing the little fellow, they make sixteen a lot smaller these days.

Josiah hadn't the strength to explain, but Eddy understood, in that quiet, exhausted moment where the child hovered beside him, eyes wide.  Eddy understood at once that Monroe's report from Little River was a stone truth.  Well, he'd said.  Bet you're both hungry. 

"I couldn't leave him, Lufty.  You know I couldn't."

"Lufty," Eddy says, "I wouldn't have left him, and you know you wouldn't have, either."

Josiah feels an old challenge rise in his heart.  "He's ours.  If the oakbellies and the state say it's not by rule, then he's ours by right."

Lufty twirls his pen.  Scribbles a little in the margins of his log.  "Birchy, you're a catfish to handle when you're right, so I hate to say.  But no - I wouldn't have left him.  Of course not."

Half-satisfied, Josiah hobbles, slowly, pridefully, back to his chair.  "So, what'll you have me do, old men of the mess?"

Eddy kicks him, gently, in his good leg.  "Feed him up right."

"Fix him some proper clothes."

"Teach him his manners and his Latin."

"Eddy, you said you went to trade, not Classical."

"No more I did - but you've got a hand in it, too, Birchy.  He's ours, by right, that's what you said."

Josiah chuckles.  "Alright.  His manners and his Latin.  At least one'll come out right."

[penaltybox14]

Decofiremen: An Interlude

How Silky and Josiah got their sear.  Merry Christmas to @zeitheist, who always wants to see more of these two.  @squad51goals @its-skadi @darknight-brightstar

  They graduated the same sparkling April morning, before the dew had risen from the big yard, on the first day the earth warmed enough to smell the sunshine and go about in shirtsleeves.  Kidder Parson read their names off at breakfast, to hollers and cheers. 

Fireman on the boards, proclaimed their venerable captain, and the bell had chimed for them at line-up and inspection.  Here, they got their brass-buttoned coats, their shining dress gorgets with the leather cords and the rampant horse and flame embossed on it.  The weight of it all - coats, brass, their breath still asmoke in the early morning - made for Josiah to tremble some, and he looked to Silky, who was pale and whose auburn hair fell loose from its pomade grip.  Silky was smiling with just the corners of his brows and the fine edge of his lips. 

They would be alright.  They would go together, to the same house, to the Bronx.  They would be alright.  They knew their hoses, their hooks, their ladders, their horses, they would be alright.  

"Ever been to the Bronx?" Silky asked him, on the train.  

"I would've asked you the same.  Didn't you grow up in the city?"

"It's a big city, Birchy.  I was just a little one, then."

"D'you suppose they'll like us?"

"Us?  No.  Me?  Yeah, I'll wager.  You - "

Josiah had punched him, and they had laughed.  It was a shining day and the countryside sped past, through the hamlets and the villages, until they reached the city.

The Bronx in those days was still wild at the edges, but it was wilder still by the waters, where the rivers met and the islands plied their weary trade in stones and lost souls, where ships pulled in and commerce spilled out into the warehouses and the factories, onto wagons and onto freight cars and bound for all the starry points of the world.  It would not be a quarter-hour, hardly enough time for introductions, before their first call, and they came back hours later, sweaty and dusty, smelling of smoke and steam.  They would groom the horses.  

"D'you suppose every day is like this?"

"Can't say I hope so.  Would like to know our cap's name before the next time."

"I hear you."

They would groom the horses and peel the potatoes and mop the floors and make their beds.  And scrub the wagons and the engines, and hang the hose, and reel the hose, and sharpen the axes after dark when the shutters were drawn.  Bussy Jackson was a finer cook than even Eddy, and Pal Domino, their engineer, was the bravest driver either of them had ever seen or hoped to be.  Jack Hazel was the captain then, with a drawn face and salt and pepper hair and a mustache as silver as the feathers on a percheron's legs.  When he smiled, the room was an April morning, and when he scowled, it was a hurricane.  

"He reminds me of the brothers," Silky had said, over the back of a horse.  

"How?"

"Quiet-like.  Just so."

"Silks?"

"Yeah?"

"When d'you think we'll get the sear, like they said?"

"Soon enough, I guess.  Pass me the soft brush?"

One day in May, the summer came round to check things before settling herself in for the long haul - from 40 before the morning bells, to 80 at noontime, the sort of weather to give you chills and misery.  The sun was long and hot and damp and hungry from her hibernation, and even shirtsleeves were a misery by afternoon when the call came.  A factory near the terminal, with smoke showing - and when they pulled up, the heat was rolling off the building like a great and stupefying tide, and before they'd had the hoses unrolled and the hydrants open, a window on the top floor blasted outward and they could not tell which was louder - the scream of the horses or the screams of women, and men, from on high.  The faces and the bodies, waving frantically, blurred in the smoke and the toil of the heat.  A woman's dress went up, and then her hair, and then she came down - down five stories, to a sound like rotted fruit in burlap, and sound that shook their hearts.  

"On now, come on!" Captain Hazel was shouting at them, to pick it up, to get going.  And they dove headlong into the beast, a tamer with a water-whip into the mouth of a lion.  In the midst of it, the whining cry of steam boiling inside timbers, the bellows breath, the sheer sound of the fire crawling up walls, pushing at ceilings, wrenching floors from beneath.  The fifth, the fourth floors were gone for.  The third was going.  It took them a thousand sweating, choking minutes to pry open the doors of the second-floor workroom, to drag the last few frightened living souls from their entombment.

Josiah could feel it, rising inside him, bending at his bones, racing from skull to spine to finger and toe tips, he could see them, somehow, beyond even the bricks, and he could hear Silky, too, hear Silky's skull ringing with the rhythm of his own thoughts - get through, get the water on it, get through, get the people out, get through, get the water on it, get through.  He grabbed hold of those thoughts with his own, get out, get through, get out, and another hundred years found them stumbling out to the hot cobbles, to the sooty water draining in the horse-filth and mud, the drizzle from the ladder-hoses pelting them, gasping, gasping for each other's air, grasping for each other's shoulders.  The fever was already singing, and Silky was bowing to it like he knelt before his god, and Josiah came with him.  

That was the sear, then.  That was what no nights of stories round the hearth could brace you for, no caution that could steady you when you looked into the blaze and smelled its teeth and heard the screaming past your reach.  They tumbled into it together, him and Silky.  The fever shook them both, and they dreamed of horses and dragons, dry places where keening birds wheeled and dove with sky-cut talons and beaks as sharp as the words of a scholar.  Their nightmares sang hymn-songs into damp and dripping wells and the darkness sang back sweet water, sweet and sinking water.  You could fall into the water, dive into the dark and never come up again but he kept coming up, and sometimes Pal Domino was holding a cup to his lips and sometimes all he could find through the sweat and the shaking was Silky's pale hand.  He would struggle to wake, become tangling in Silky's dreams, and fall again.  Silky would appear, startled by his presence on a twilight beach where the wind swept away words and secrets lived in the water and the smoke rose from the island and blood seeped from the sand, which held the head of the day beneath them.  

For what they were told was a week and a day, they tossed in turn, they quivered and gulped, no sweet honey that could ease their rasping breath and no cool water that could slake their thirst.  

Silky, braver, came out of it first, and in his dream he took Josiah's hand and pulled him along, and Josiah followed because he would have followed Silky anywhere.  But they came to, together, grimy and reeking, staring at the pitched ceiling above them.  Their crewmen moved about the house, their thoughts a stinging echo to raw and weary hearts.  Josiah felt his soul consumed, and shining for it.  Silky reeled.  They marveled at the richness of the world.  

"Silks," Josiah spoke first, because his tongue would form no other word first.  "Silks, you alright there?"

"I'm here," Silky whispered back.  He rolled, then, to look at Josiah.  "I am here."

Josiah propped himself on an elbow, still spinning, the world too clear to look at dead-on, like the first bright day after a blizzard.  "You are?"

"Aye.  I am."

Josiah smiled, feeling the world peel back in wholeness, and curl forward like a tide.  "I'm glad."

Silky grinned back.

They would be alright.  

[penaltybox14]

@darknight-brightstar @zeitheist A wild blast from the past: DecoFiremen.

When they had first shipped him up here, going on years now, Josiah had barely moved from his desk, nevermind his office, or the administration hallway.  Took his meals and slept in his quarters, alone, and limped up and down the wide stairwell, day by day, bell by bell.  Did his ledgers and his logs, and left the young men's training mostly to Eddy and to Lufty Parker.  His job, they said, was to look after the place.  So he looked after.

Wynantskill.  He had grown up here.  Kicked out of Hudson Classical for a fight with another boy, when he was sixteen and too old and proud and strange - always strange, always high-strung - to high-tail it home, he went on his way.  Captain Parson, Kidder Parson, had dragged him out of the police station in Ithaca before a hearing to put him in the state asylum there.  Kidder Parson had slapped down some papers and spent the next hours - by carriage and rail - talking to him about being a fireman. 

He hadn't thought of being a fireman.  Captain Parson had asked him this and that, pointed questions that shucked him like a dockside plate of oysters, fresh and trembling.  The things he said were so familiar he could taste them.  Had he ever looked into the eyes of the fire.  Had he ever looked into the eyes of another and felt the hum.  Had the world ever seemed to split finely, nearly imperceptibly, like the 'grams of a stereoscope side by side - as if there was another world under this one that he couldn't quite get to. 

Had he ever dreamed of something he needed to find, desperately, but couldn't reach? 

And Josiah, eighteen and raw, had known of a sudden that Kidder Parson's face was a face he knew, but smudged in black and shining like the bed of a creek in summer, a flicker, a flash.  Coming off the carriage at Wynantskill, passing through the gate - the worn, chipped brick still warm as sleeping skin in the late summer sun - he had felt known, and shivered some. 

Kidder Parson told him about the Sear, about what he would come to know and understand.  In time.  He was a boy still, impatient, with a hundred years behind him and time feeling short.  Parson had a devil of a time with him, a holy hot-tailed devil of a time, but by the ladders and the lines he had grown, and when he was ripe they sent him down to the Bronx with a boy named Thomas Castor, who they called Silky, and their Captain gruffed and groused about getting a pair of probies at the same time, but there was nothing that could stop them.  There was not even time in their way, not then, as young men.

A factory fire, a brutal conflagration that, it seemed, had started from a single barrel of rags, had ladies and men alike screaming at the windows, shattering glass, leaping to the street below in a rain of blood and desperation, to break bone on the pavement.  A dozen crews to battle a monster that leapt in blazing teeth from the loading-dock's doors, that licked them like a sun-dog litter, and spat at the rainbows the hose-spray made.  That fire cracked the straining, glistening surface-tension of the dreams and the shadows, the Sear, and blown it wide til it streamed in tears and fever down his face, his lips, his hands.  Silky - Silky got it too, both caught up in each other's shattering. 

They had slept and sweat in quarters in their beds beside each other for a hand of days.  When the Sear came through, the crew was meant to be off until it broke and smoothed and began to course proper through their veins.  Their Captain, he recalled, would come to them.  Bussy Jackson had brought them water with honey and a pinch of salt.  Pal Domino had read to them stories of knights and lords and kings. 

But most of all he remembered Silky, and tumbling and stumbling, raw and burning up inside, to lay beside him on their narrow bed.  He remembered Silky's dreams, and Silky's ragged breath, and the way their voices seemed to intertwine.  He could remember the dreams of other men.  He could remember the dreams of the station-house and the horses.  He could feel every light in the district flick off, and on.  He could taste the tongues of his crew at dinner.  That was the Sear, then: to feel the blazing life of all the world beneath the sun and moon.  That was the Sear.

Alone.  He had been a stranger to the world before Kidder Parson and Wynantskill, and the City Fire, but trembling in bed with his bones a-shriek and wrapped in the minds of a million living and dead, he knew belonging.  He knew he fit, he had a place.  Alone would never be a word he would ever have to speak or know again. 

When they had come from it, their crew had cheered them, and Cap had toasted them, and Bussy Jackson cooked up a feast of pot-roast and potatoes.  His heart sang and so did Silky's, and he felt like he could've gone on a hundred runs without a breath.

But that was going on years ago.  That was when his leg was true.  That was when life was good and he was going to live forever.  That was when he stood straighted and groomed the horses with Silky and they talked about having their own companies someday.  That was before. 

After, when he'd come here, Silky had written to him.  He hadn't wanted to write back.  It took a long time.  It took til Eddy coming in, finally, and slamming down a stack of unread letters and unfinished papers and taking a stripe off him so hot he thought Silky could've felt it, back down in the Bronx. 

You're responsible, Eddy had said.  Whatever else, you're responsible.  Goddamn sure you miss the city and the run, but son, without us up here, there wouldn't be a city, 'cause it had've burned down long time ago.  So tighten up your straps and get your head in it, son.  No one does it alone. 

Eddy was right and he was ashamed.  He had shut them out, everything out, he had made himself a single spark, fading on the cobbles. 

So now he took to the job and while he still hobbled and his brace made him ache and keel, and his ribs sang a sorrow as the weather changed, he got out and he saw the lads at training, he got out to meals in the dining hall, he got out to watch the sun come up.  He opened the windows of his office and pored over reports and referrals. 

He's been looking at this one since fourth day-bell.  It can't be right.  But Captain Monroe is an honest sort, and not prone to exagerration.  Josiah can feel the shiver of fury and fear in his stiff, swift longhand.  David Martin Cleary, Monroe writes, has been an inmate of the County Asylum at Little River for two years, where he was confined by the court after setting fire to the Children's Home outside of Syracuse. 

He is fourteen, Monroe writes.  He was placed in the Children's Home after a housefire killed his parents and younger sister.  He has no known surviving family.  He is fourteen as of a month ago.

Monroe writes, more tightly: You better look at this one, Birch, I think he's got his Sear already.

Fourteen, Josiah thinks.  Fourteen, survived by no one, and got his Sear.  Fourteen, incarcerated, and alone. 

When Josiah remembers lying in fever-bed with Silky, dreaming other dreams, breathing the breath of ghosts, with their crew coming to them with kind hands and voices, he cannot imagine what it would have been like for it to break, unwarned, like a storm snapping an August day, without some buoy to cling to in the burning sea.  He cannot imagine he would have survived. 

He cannot imagine this boy.  But Monroe is a stern and stiff type, not easily perturbed, nearly impossible to rile.  Fourteen.  Could they be mistaken, and he only looks young?  But no, there's a demographic sheet attached, a loose copy from the County, and his family was a well-off one, he's no street boy with only a passing December to mark his years.

Josiah has not gone on a scouting trip in some time.  Often, it hurts too much, and the long travel winds him up.  But he's got to see this boy for himself.  He's got to bring him -

Home. 

Bring the child home.  

[penaltybox14]

Decofiremen: Josiah’s dream

@darknight-brightstar says I should number these but like, numbering is for squares, man.  @zeitheist @its-skadi

In the dream, where his leg is straight and true, he lights on the driver's seat of the engine - sometimes drawn by a team, sometimes one of the new kerodiesels, but whatever it is, it is red, and loud, and fast, and his heart quickens just to see it - and he looks down and Silky is there.  In the dream Silky is older: his jaw is sharper, his eyes just a little crinkled at the edges, and there is a promise of gray in his dark hair. 

In the dream it is autumn, with the sky so blue you had to thank it for being so beautiful, with the leaves off the city's skinny trees fluttering like cats and mice across the cobbles and the macadam. 

Silky's helmet has a white shield and a brass horse at the crest.  Josiah can never quite make out the station number - but Silky pats his sure, strong, unfettered leg and in the dream he says, what'd I tell you, Birchy, what'd I say?

Said we'd have our own house, didn't I? 

But this is the dream that never happened, and when Josiah follows Silky's gaze, the smoke swallows him, and he falls, and the beam falls with him, with Silky's cry and Silky's reach too late and too short, and when he wakes - sweating and gulping - there is no one around, nobody but him and his knotted, useless leg and the pain, always the pain he breaks his nails on the sheets to keep from screaming.

Eddy and Parker, and Monroe and Jackson and Kittredge, the resident trainers, are all fine men with fine strong sear who rode the boards and worked the lines and bore the weight into the belly of the beast, and they know.  They know the dream, because it comes to them and taps at the shuttered windows of their eyes and whispers, wake, wake up.  It's what you learn, when the sear settles - how to listen, how to witness, how to set aside the smoke and know.  That means some nights you wake with the visions of other men rattling about in your brain, and that means some nights you wake getting a pillow to the head from your bunkmate. 

They have the sense not to say much, or maybe they just don't know what to say at all.  Like the Battalion Chiefs and the District Captains at his promotion, when he stood there propped on crutches, teeth clenched and eyes wet. 

(Silky had been there, too, hadn't he.  Silky had got a medal on his belts, and Josiah got a captain's coat and a one-way ticket upriver.)

(Silky had ought to be the captain.  Like in the dream.  But that was the dream that never happened: Silky only sat beside him in the ward at Bellevue, and got a medal for dragging him out from under a beam that both of them should've seen coming down.)

He had taken the rank on his feet out of some kind of spite, the same restless tiger that had paced inside his chest since he learned to talk, maybe the same beast he had been born with. 

It was the tiger that had taken the boy from the county, wasn't it?  Toe to toe with the doctor and the ward-master, teeth set, his skin hot, his shoulders steadying for a fight, until they had grimly given in and handed the boy over.  Consider it a favor, Josiah had spat at them.  We'll take the lad and you won't worry 'bout him setting your place afire. 

Silky would have told him not to.  Silky would have kept the tiger in the cage and his blood from boiling.

(But Silky would have taken the boy, too.  The burned and bandaged hands that held his in the hospital ward would not have left the little fellow to his lostness among the addled and the empty men.)

Josiah hasn't dreamed of the beam or the dark that filled his eyes and lungs, or the pain of his shattered bone and scalded skin, in a long time.  He thinks that might be better than the dream where Silky boosts up to the driver's seat with him and says get on, the city's waiting.  The dream that comes so close it's like the moon kissing the midnight.  The pain he can reckon with: the pain is real.

(So is Silky, still, but far away.  Eddy says he ought to write.  But he can't find the words.)

The first night the boy stays with them, they bunk him in with the lads, who have gotten aa cory explanation and seem to take him as a younger brother.  Antoine Vestry and Ellis Palmer, who are close to being assigned their stations and sent down, settle the lads down and make sure the Cleary boy has a cubby to start and a place in the washroom amidst the rowdiness and swinging elbows.  They are kind young men, Josiah thinks, and they may even be wise sometime.

That first night, Josiah is caught by sleep like a sneak-thief, and finds himself already dreaming of a house he has never seen.  He looks behind him for Silky, but no one is there.  He looks ahead for their captain, but no one is there.  He smells the smoke, and somewhere, far off, a little girl is crying, and it's getting softer, and softer, and there is a roaring around him that he knows, the sound of a fire waking to its own heat and rising, finding the cracks in the walls and the gaps in the windows, sucking up all the air, feeding and growing and pawing at wood and carpet and plaster. 

He looks ahead for Silky, who isn't there, and he looks in his hands for the hose, but his hands are bare and empty. 

The house throbs with heat, and the walls begin to come apart, and he can't hear the little girl crying anymore, he can only see the boy, lost and coughing, stumbling away from him when he says wait, come back, it's coming down, you got to stop, it's coming down -

Eddy is pounding on his door but he is already awake, he is already into his brace as sure as he had clipped the quick-hitch to any horse, and he is banging into walls and coming down the stairs swinging on the bannister and trying to keep his bad leg out of the way of the rest of him. 

The lads are  all clustered around like worried birds, Antoine and Ellis first among them, along with Betram Cochrane who has the slowest times on the rigging because he always stops to help his mates, and Jules Menlo who seems to know what's wrong with an engine before the hood's even popped.  The lot of them sleep-mussed, chiding the boy, bantering among themselves.  The little fellow is at the middle of it all, rail-thin and ragged, pale as milk with eyes like a buck in the cross-hairs.  Josiah drops, clumsily, on young Cleary's bunk, and the boy in the long hallway, the boy sobbing on the wide green lawn, the boy calling for his sister in the dark, stares back at him.  

The hallway is the boy's hallway, the house is the boy's house.  It's the factory fire where him and Silky saw the panicked men leap from the belching windows only to strike the pavement like burlap sacks of bone and blood, where a woman was caught behind a door and cried out for them, but the choice was to breathe or to free her and they couldn't do both.  

"Wake up, son," he says.  "Come on now.  You're alright."

Young Cleary looks at him from twelve years old, from his hallway, which will be the place his dreams will live the longest.  Young Cleary comes haltingly into his body and his eyes.  He trembles.

The lads are bantering and he shushes them, waves a hand.  

"What ye screaming about, little fella?" Ellis asks.  

"Cap?" The little fellow rasps.  "Capper?"

Josiah nods.  

Antoine says they were only teasing.  Ellis nods.  

"You like music, little fella?"

They don't wait for the boy to answer.  Jules tells Betram to get his fiddle - "On your leave, Captain Birch."

Josiah remembers his own nights at Wynantskill, learning the fireman's song with Silky, with the lads, with Kidder Parson nodding along at the dormitory door.  "Don't keep us up all night, Bertram."

Bertram seems glad to have something to do with his hands, and he seems able to spin a tune from air, as if he is unspooling it from the night itself.

"Capper..."

He looks to Davey again.  

"Could you tell me the story from the train again?  About the fireman, and the horse?"

Davey seems to watch him from his hallway, as if he isn't sure yet which house to settle in - the one by the lake, which is only dreams and ashes, or the one neither of them knows yet, or the one here and now, the house made of lamplight and hopeful voices and a fiddle's melody.  Davey's eyes are full of ghosts he hasn't made peace with yet.  

"Alright," Josiah says.  "Alright, so, once, a long time ago, before there was a city - before there was even a dream about a city - there was a man, and a horse, and a fire..."