But she'd yielded ground, and her son took advantage of it. 'Let me find out, then. I'll tell you everything once I get back. Mr. Butcher, he says he'll pay me like a regular sailor, not a first-timer, on account of he was friends with Pop.'
That was generous. Sylvia couldn't deny it. She wished she could have, for she would. Tears came to her eyes again. She was losing her little boy, and saw no way to escape it. There before her stood someone who wanted to be a man, and who was ever so close to getting what he wanted. She sighed. 'All right, George. If that's what you care to do, I don't suppose I can stop you.'
His jaw dropped. Enough boy lingered in him to make him take his mother's word very seriously. 'Thank you! Oh, thank you!' he exclaimed, and gave Sylvia a hug that made her feel tiny and short. 'I'll work as hard as Pop did, I promise, and save my money, and… everything.' He ran out of promises and imagination at the same time.
'I hope it works out, George. I pray it works out.' When a tear slid down Sylvia's face, her son looked alarmed. She waved him away. 'You're not going to get me not to worry, so don't even try. I worried about your father every day he was at sea, and I'll worry about you, too.'
'Everything will be fine, Ma.' George, Jr., spoke with the certainty inherent in sixteen. Sylvia remembered how she'd been when she was that age. And it was worse with boys. They thought they were stallions, and had to paw the ground with their hooves and neigh and rear and show the world how tough they were.
The world didn't care. Most of them needed years to figure that out. Some never did figure it out. The world rolled over them either way: it ground them down and made them fit into their slots. If they wouldn't grind down and wouldn't fit, it broke them. Sylvia didn't think it intended to. But what it intended and what happened were two different beasts.
It had rammed her into a slot, all right. Here she was, coming up on middle age, living from day to day, wondering how she'd get by, worrying because her only son was quitting school and taking up a dangerous trade. If there weren't ten thousand others just like her in Boston, she'd have been astonished.
But then savage anger and pride shot through her. I killed the son of a bitch who sank the Ericsson. I shot him dead, and I'm walking around free. How many others can say the like? Not a one.
She'd take that to the grave with her. Most of the time, it wouldn't do her one damn bit of good, not when it came to things like catching a streetcar or dealing with the Coal Board or going to the dentist. But it was hers. Nobody could rob her of it. For one brief moment in her life, she'd stepped out of the ordinary.
George, Jr., brought her back into it, saying, 'I'll go right on giving you one dollar out of every three I make, too, Ma. I promise. It'll be the same with this as it's always been with the odd jobs I've been doing. I'll pay my way, honest.'
'All right, George,' she said. He was a good boy. (She didn't think of him as a man. She wondered if she ever would, down deep where it counted. She had her doubts.)
He asked, 'What do you think Pop would say about what I'm doing?'
That was a good question. After some thought, Sylvia answered, 'Well, he always did like going to sea.' God only knew, that was the truth. Whenever the Ripple went out, she'd felt as if she were giving him up to the arms of another woman-the Atlantic had that kind of hold on him. She went on, 'I think he'd have wanted you to stay in school, too. But if you got this kind of chance, I don't think he'd have stood in your way.'
His face lit up. 'Thanks!' Almost as fast as it had appeared, that light faded. 'I wish I would have known him better. I wish I could have known him longer.'
'I know, sweetheart. I wish you could have, too. And I wish I could have.' On the whole, Sylvia meant that. She'd never quite forgiven her husband for having been about to go to a Tennessee brothel with a colored whore, even if he hadn't slept with the woman and even if being about to had saved his life. If he hadn't been on his way to the whorehouse, if he'd gone back aboard his river monitor instead, he would have been on it when Confederate artillery blew it out of the water. But if he'd come home from the war, if he'd been around every day-or half the time, as fishermen usually were-and if he'd kept his nose clean, she supposed she would have.
George, Jr., started for the door. 'I'd better go find Mr. Butcher and tell him. I don't know how long he'll hold the job for me.'
'Go on, then, dear,' Sylvia said, half of her hoping Fred Butcher wouldn't hold the job. The door opened. It closed. Her son's footsteps receded in the hallway. Then they were gone.
Sylvia sighed. She muttered something she never would have let anyone else hear. That helped, but not enough. She pulled a whiskey bottle out of a kitchen cabinet. A fair number of states had made alcohol illegal, but Massachusetts wasn't one of them. She poured some whiskey into a glass, then added water and took a drink. Whiskey had always tasted like medicine to her. She didn't care, not now. She was using it for medicine.
She'd medicated herself quite thoroughly when the front door to the flat opened. She hoped it would be George, Jr., coming back all crestfallen to tell her Fred Butcher had given someone else the berth. But it wasn't her son; it was Mary Jane, back from helping her teacher grade younger students' papers. Sylvia's daughter even got paid a little for doing it. She made a better scholar than her brother. That would have been funny if it hadn't been sad. A boy could do so many more things with an education than a girl could, but Mary Jane seemed to want to learn, while George, Jr., couldn't have cared less.
'Hello, Ma,' Mary Jane said now, and then, as she got a better look at Sylvia's face, 'Ma, what's wrong?'
'Your brother's going to sea, that's what.' Without the whiskey in her, Sylvia might not have been so blunt, but that was the long and short of it.
Mary Jane's eyes got wide. 'But that's good news, not bad. It's what he's always wanted to do.'
'If he'd always wanted to jump off a cliff, would it be good news that he'd finally gone and done it?' Sylvia asked.
'But it's not like that, Ma,' Mary Jane protested. She didn't understand, any more than George, Jr., did. 'He needs a job, and that's a good one.'
'A good job is a shore job, a job where you don't have to worry about getting drowned,' Sylvia said. 'If he'd gotten one of those, I'd stand up and cheer. This-' She shook her head. The kitchen spun slightly when she did. Yes, she was medicated, all right.
'He'll be fine.' Mary Jane was fourteen. She also thought she was immortal, and everybody else, too. She hardly remembered her own father, and certainly didn't care to remember he'd died at sea. She went on, 'Things are a lot safer than they used to be. The boats are better, the engines are better, and they just about all have wireless nowadays in case they run into trouble.'
Every word of that was true. None of it did anything to reassure Sylvia, who'd seen too many misfortunes down by T Wharf. She said, 'I want him to have a job where he doesn't need to worry about running into trouble.'
'Where's he going to find one?' Mary Jane asked. 'If he goes into building, somebody could drop a brick on his head. If he drives a truck, somebody could run into him. You want him to be a clerk in an insurance office, or something like that. But he'd be lousy at clerking, and he'd hate it, too.'
Every word of that was true, too. Sylvia wished it weren't. Mary Jane was right. She did want George, Jr., in a white-collar job. But Mary Jane was also right that he wouldn't be good at one, and wouldn't like it. That didn't stop Sylvia from wishing he had one. She knew the sea too well ever to trust it.
W hen Jefferson Pinkard went down to the Empire of Mexico, he never dreamt he'd stay so long. He never dreamt the civil war would drag on so long. That, he realized now that he understood things here a little better, had been naive on his part. The Mexican civil war had started up not long after the Great War ended. The USA fed the rebels money and guns. The CSA sent money and guns and-unofficially, of course-combat veterans to prop up the imperialists.
Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Jeff took a sip of strong, black coffee. The coffee had been improved- corrected, they said hereabouts-with a shot of strong rum. Alabama was officially dry. The Mexicans laughed at the very idea of prohibition. Some ways, they were pretty damn smart.
He finished the coffee as the artillery barrage went on. The front line ran quite a ways west of San Luis Potosi these days. Mexican-built barrels had driven back the rebels, and the damnyankees didn't seem to be helping their pet Mexicans build armored vehicles. Maybe they would one of these days, or maybe they'd just import some from the USA. If they did, a lot more greasers would end up dead, the front line would stabilize or start going back, and the civil war might last forever.
A Mexican soldier in the yellowish shade of butternut they wore down here politely knocked on Pinkard's open door. 'Yeah?' Pinkard said, and then, ' Si, Mateo?'
