The Hell of It (2 page)

She took the bowl from his hands, seeming to understand that she wouldn't be allowed inside. “If you don't want me to come in, I can—”

“Never mind. The food is free.” He stood waiting.

Understanding bloomed on her face and she set to the bowl of mash, taking no note of the weevils. She'd downed it entirely in a matter of moments, upending the bowl to suck every last drop. She wiped her mouth more delicately than he might have imagined she would, and gave him a look of gratitude he'd always remember.

Then she handed him the bowl and moved on to the next house. Malen saw the door open, and the girl talk with the person who stood just out of sight. She cast a look back in his direction as a hand checked her breast for a brand, then pulled her inside.

There'd always been wharf-drift in Wanship. Young drabs knocking on slum doors. But since League reform, there'd been more of them. And younger. He was no economist, but it didn't seem to him that the levies and programs were helping the people who paid them.

Malen studied the bowl in his hands for a moment before returning to his chair. His son watched him as he settled himself and prepared to tell the boy what he'd decided. Before he could begin, Roth spoke.

“I can help, Da. I've learned some of the wharf games. I'm good at them, too. Give me a few thin plugs and I can turn them into silver, I know it.” An eager look shone on his son's face.

“No!” He surprised himself with the violence of his response. He supposed it had to do with letting Marta down where Roth was concerned. And wharf-drift.

The boy stared back at Malen, looking a bit afraid, but more than anything else, sad. Sad in the way one feels when they helplessly watch someone they love suffer. Malen knew that look. He'd seen it in his own reflection. It had stared back at him from the still morning waters of Wanship Bay every morning since Marta had gone to her earth.

“Roth,” he began, finding a soft tone and giving the boy an understanding smile. “I don't ever want you playing wharf games. Just remember that the people these
friends
of yours are fleecing are families like us. Every thin plug you take off them is a bowl of mash a father can't give his son.” He thought a moment, and added. “We're down. And we're going to be down for a while. But I want you to remember this: Any man willing to work, if he'll let go his pride, can find something to lift or push or drag, and someone to place a cold iron plug in his hand for doing so. That's a heavy net to haul, but you keep a stitch of honor for hauling it.”

His son looked back at him in a way that made him think he understood. After a long moment, Roth licked his lips and spoke. “The dock chamberlain was here.”

Malen's heart beat hard as if mule-kicked. And he began to silently calculate the day's date. He'd completely lost track of time inside the endless routine of scrubbing down the trawler decks, scrambling together whatever ingredients he could scrape up into barely edible mash, getting Roth to bed with a story or two, and sleepless nights with Marta on his mind.

Roth showed his father sympathetic eyes, worried eyes. “He says you're behind with rent. He says he's coming back in three days. With
help
. He says it'll be
coin or culling
when he comes.”

Pay the back rent or they'd be evicted; Malen had known this was coming.
There won't be time to earn a silver and three. Never mind find the work to do it.

But he didn't want these things to lay heavy on his son's young heart. A child should get to be a child, have imaginings, sing tuneless songs out loud and expect applause. He should get to chase daring adventures for no other reason than that they occurred to him. There'd be time enough later on for sober-mindedness.

Malen gave his son a comforting smile. “Here's the truth of it, son. Like I said, we're going to be down for a while. But it won't always be so. We'll get back on top.” He paused a moment, considering. “You may plant that seed in summer soil,” he added, reassuring his boy that sometimes things come later than they should. But they still come.

He reached across the table and took his boy's hand. “But until it yields up, you and me, we have to stay together. I don't mean just under the same roof. I mean up here.” He tapped the side of his own head. “We have to get set on the same plan. And more than just that, we have to get set on the way we're going to see that plan done. Understand?”

Roth nodded.

A long silence stretched between them. Malen was about to break the uncomfortable tension when Roth lowered his eyes and spoke words that broke his heart.

“Da, do you remember Bryen?”

“Sure I do. Good lad, as I recall.” He tried to lighten the mood, and said with a small smile, “Not much with a song, though. Boy sounded like a drunken loon.”

Roth didn't see the smile, still looking down the way boys do when they share things that scare them. “When spring season began, his da lost their house. Couldn't pay the chamberlain. One day, they came—”

“Who came?”

His boy shrugged. “The chamberlain's men? Or maybe the mayor's? Could have been the League, I guess. But they came, and his da couldn't pay, and so they took him to the stocks.”

Malen kept the cringe off his face. The stocks were a debtor's prison.

Roth's voice thickened with grief and fear. “Bryen does wharf games to get plug money for his ma and sisters. Sometimes … sometimes he gets caught … and beaten down hard. And his oldest sister, Mery.” His son finally looked up, eyes glassy with tears, but holding on to some thin measure of boyhood toughness. “She got taken, too, Da. But not to the stocks. Someone got her. They make her go wharf-door knocking.”

His boy looked past him to the door where the drab had just eaten Malen's bowl of mash before going to the next house. When Roth's eyes returned to him, they were plaintive and needful. They pleaded for him to make a shim of sense of these things.

Malen didn't have an answer for this. Not one the boy would want to hear or understand, anyway. Work was scarce. And itinerant laborers needed a solid skill if they hoped to succeed when moving to a new city to find work—word was that crowds of men waited on what few jobs came along. Which meant moving inland wasn't really an option for Malen. And finding another port to scrub decks … that wouldn't make a life any more than it had here. In Malen's silence, Roth pushed on, seeming to think his da needed more information to offer a solution.

“Her ma can't stop it. The mack-men threaten to do the same to Bryen … and his little sister, Jemma.” Roth's words grew sharp with anger. “And the mayor's men don't seem to care, since she's not paying tax. Bryen and his family sleep in the nook beneath the Dyer's-side pier. His ma's afraid to leave her family to go find work. She's worried about what might happen while she's gone.”

Roth stopped, wiping his eyes with his sleeve and visibly holding down a sob. “She's got a tin cup. She sits outside the taverns along the lower harbor. Clean-boot places.” His son looked down again. “She begs, Da. She says mercies to passing folk, so that her other kids don't get taken. I've seen it. I've seen a plug or two drop in her cup. I've seen mean, drunken men lash her face for sport. Mostly,” and his eyes returned again to Malen, begging some relief, “mostly they ignore her. Mostly they walk by like she's wharf-drift. Like she's not there. Like they can't hear her or see that she's got kids … like me.”

Malen got up, went around the table, and put his large, rough hands on the boy's shoulders. He meant to offer some reassuring words. Fathers do that. They stand between childhood and the harsh ways of greedy men, whether those men wear uniforms or leathers with week-old meal-stains. Except that it was too late for reassurance. All this had already gotten inside his boy. There was nothing to be done about that. And Malen wouldn't lie or try to refashion hard truths his son had learned too young.

Instead, he hunkered down so he could look up into his son's face. “Listen to me. Your da won't let that happen to us. It'll be rough. But we're rough men, aren't we? We can handle anything. And I have an idea for us. It's going to mean parting with some things that will be hard to part with. But
things
aren't family. And your da knows a way—a hard way, mind you—but a way to keep us going a while.”

He tried a smile, and coaxed a return grin from Roth, who sniffed and nodded.

“Trust me a league more.” He squeezed the boy's leg to instill a smidge of confidence. “We're going to get through.”

And he did have an idea. A painful one. Risky, too. And it meant breaking a promise. But he'd come to believe that sometimes oaths and laws ceased to apply, like when stealing bread for a hungry child. Even the abandoning gods, who'd forsaken this world rather than govern it, wouldn't condemn a man for that, would they? Even they, whose charter of principles had led them to believe the world was lost, even they would have shown him some mercy.

*   *   *

Malen knelt beside his bed, his elbows resting on the thin straw mattress. Across from him, Roth had done the same, looking like nothing so much as a younger Marta. Between them, neatly laid side by side, were Marta's
nice things
. They were the small tokens that had made her feel pretty, made her feel more than a scullery maid.

One was a thin silver ring, something she'd carried with her into marriage. It had been her mother's wedding ring. Marta's father had been lost at sea—a deep-water sail-fish man—and so her mother had graciously given it to Malen to present to her daughter as her betrothal ring.

Beside it lay an ivory pinch-comb. Pinch-combs were a fashion for folks with clean boots. Not wharf-drift. He smiled fondly at the memories of Marta wearing it. She'd always put her hair up most delicately when she wanted to feel feminine, allowing a curl or two to fall out of the comb to gently caress her neck. He half-believed the whole purpose was so that he could softly remove the comb when their talking was all through. That was a fine moment, feeling her hair tumble down over his rough hands and across her neck and shoulders. What he wouldn't give to feel it one more time.

Next to the pinch-comb lay a thin rosewood flute.
Recorder
, Marta would always correct him. It might have been a hand and a half in length. Plenty big for her small, delicate fingers. The instrument had six holes on top, two beneath, and held a bit of luster still. No surprise. Every full and perfect moon, Malen took out the flute and with slow and deliberate care rubbed it with a rose-oil rag. He never tried to play, or even put his lips to it to touch where Marta's lips had been. Pity that Roth had never gotten to hear one of her evening tunes. Never rushed, they seemed to keep the meaning of the instrument's name—Marta had liked to remind Malen that recorder also meant
rememberer
.

In some ways, even more than the pinch-comb, the recorder alluded to a life they'd only ever dreamed about. While scops played taverns all along the wharf, talented musicians found their way to courts, or better still, conservatories. Marta had enough of an ear to understand the value of well-played notes. Enough of an ear to know that well-played notes were more than music. And there were colleges in Masson Dimn, Vohnce, and elsewhere that taught the truths inside those notes. When she'd played her little flute, Malen had heard her poet's heart reaching out for that understanding.

The last of her nice things was the hardest to look at. And would be the hardest to part with. He gave Roth a long look, trying to keep the regret from his face. With trembling hands, he fingered open the tiny clasp and drew back the lid. The pleasant smell of cedar filled the small space between him and his son as they looked down on a used pen set. Used, as in not new. Marta had never had the chance to put it to her own use.

It had been a gift he'd intended to give her after Roth was born. Since their first meeting, she'd talked about writing down poems and thoughts and fables of her own making. She practiced on him in the evening hours when they'd lain together in bed. She'd liked the musical way of words, and thought someday it might be a delight to write down her best efforts and fashion them into a book. But a poet's tools were expensive to come by. Especially when three days in ten she and Malen were boiling free butcher bones to make broth for supper.

He tenderly touched the pen. The vial of ink was so small it might scarcely have held enough ink to write a single sonnet. And the clever sander had been fashioned to look like the face of Angeline, the fabled muse of lilac and lion. He'd meant to encourage her to pen her poems. He'd meant to see to it that others could hear the music in her words. It was a
thank you
for standing beside him, one she'd never known about. She went to her earth before he could give it to her.

She would have liked it. She would have put her hair up, so it could be taken down. He smiled sadly, and looked up into the face of his son, still a picture of his mother.

“Are you sure, Da?” Roth asked.

Malen felt like crying. Emotions swept through him at dizzying speeds, upsetting even an old trawler-deck man. “They're nice things. Your mother's things. But like I said, things aren't family. If she were here, she'd hesh me for dawdling then slap my ass to get to a skiller and price them in for coin.”

Roth's mouth quirked in a sweet smile. Probably over his
ass
comment.

“Besides,” Malen said, “it's the memories they stir that matter. And a sorry set we'd be if we needed them to keep her in mind, wouldn't you agree?”

The boy nodded. “Are you going now? Aren't the skillers all closed? Anyone taking a pawn at this hour isn't going to give you good trade.”

It was true. Reputable skillers kept reputable hours, even on the wharf. Men who traded goods by moonlight were pushing ill-gotten gains or buying cheap what had been stolen. Roth knowing this was just another sad reminder of their circumstance. It made him wonder if his boy had guessed at his true intent—where else did you go with
nice things
in these hours of evening?