Originalfic: DecoVerse - "Six White Horses", the DecoFiremen
The DecoFiremen - backstory on Davey (David Martin) Cleary, Company 14's driver/engineer.
Truth of it was, Captain Birch had saved his life.
No maybes, no probably-might-have; Captain Josiah Henry Birch of the New York City Fire Department had saved him, saved his life, and given him a far better chance than he ever would've had to start.
At least, a far better chance than he would've had after the fire.
Davey would cuss the life of anyone else who even dared to suggest it, but he kept in his heart that it was true, and when life started gettin' teeth it was Josiah he went to, first. Ought've been his Captain, and many times, Silky would do just fine. Josiah had brought him to Silky, and Silky's House at Company 14, and what Birchie thought was fit for trusting was good enough for him.
After all, Birchie had trusted him, from the day they'd met.
Davey remembered - like portraits in stained glass, like the light hanging in musty slants across the pews of some aging church - the life before, of green grass and silver and china at the table and his sister chasing him in the garden and his mother's smile and his father's kind eyes. Shattered light in his mind's eye. Naught but shattered light, now. It was glass in his hands, after. He remembered after as a succession of long shadows, of blurred faces, of the ghastly, empty sensation inside him that was like his own soul had been broken open and ransacked, and now fires frolicked as free devils in the rubble.
Fire. Davey remembered the fire. Merciless. The broken glass on the handwoven carpet. The way it felt when they carried him from the house and all he wanted was to go back, for the love of God and His Holy Grace, go back, because they crossed the threshold of the heat and flame and something inside him tore and that was that.
Davey does not, without some conscious effort on his part, remember the funerals, the laying of his family, his whole heart, into the dew-damp earth. He remembers a long drive. He remembers the house of many children. He does not remember their faces. Their laughter tore at him, and the sun went on rising and setting, and the moon waxed and waned, and fawns grew to yearlings and world cared nothing for the yawning gap inside him that he could not describe.
In the night that gap, a cavern between his ribs, filled up with the dreams of other children.
In the night the dream-lake reflected back the bones of the past and the heat-shimmer of what he would know later to be the future. There was always an itchy feeling, in the day-time, and he would hear a spoon clatter before it fell, and he would hear the nun smack the child before she even raised her open hand. Davey had ducked many times the strike of the sisters.
In his most beautiful dream he sat in the parlor with his sister and played at jacks, which was not a boy's game but he did so love his darling sister, and she was full of mischief like a boy and they had no other playmates. The long sun in the windows was warm, and the breeze soft like a kiss. His mother did needlework. His father read the Sunday paper. In his most beautiful dream, he could smile at his mama, and she would smile back, and his sister would say Davey you missed the bounce, and the newspaper cracked softly as his father turned the page and his eyes were so kind, so blue.
It was after his most beautiful dream - when he woke up warm for the first time since the does dropped their fawns under the tall trees - that there was another long drive, and another master of a house with locks, and this one with bars on the tall windows and bare unwaxed floors and not even the clever moon could slip in through the smokey glass. There were some children in this sprawling house. There were many men and many women. Davey had not understood why they had brought him to this place, except that there was always someone crying, or screaming, and he wondered if they all had lakes inside them filled up with the forgotten dreams of others.
Josiah had told him, long after, much later, in the deep sovereign woods of Wynantskill, that he had set fire to the dormitory of the children's aid society where they'd brought his orphan self, and that he had been found kneeling on the long slope of the lawn, eyes shut and face rapturous to the fire.
"It was warm," Davey had told him, in the shadows between the morning light. Men had been drilling in the yard. It was soon after breakfast. "It was just ... warm."
Mama, papa, lemme come home, lemme come home, I wanna go home...
Josiah had come to him in the lightless house, the county almshouse, had brushed the burly master aside with his eyes and come to him, his gorget shining like the sun, his shoulders broad, his wool coat brushed soft, and his leg clanking in a cripple's brace a half-step behind him.
"Ah, my son," Captain Birch (he did not know Captain Birch yet, his name or his place or his life), "my son, where've you been, lad?"
Davey was fourteen then, in a ragged chambray nightshirt, soothed only by the black lake inside him which was his only secret in the lightless house, and the only place he knew how to be real again.
Davey could not speak to him. Davey raised his eyes to meet the Captain's and saw, before him a blue dapple percheron with black legs and black flaring nostrils and livid black eyes, saw a war-horse straining at its collar, saw it black with soot. He saw, in the lake where his heart had left him, the face of a younger man tending that horse, saw wide hands stroking a boar's-hair brush across its broad back, soaking the sweat and foam from its flanks. In the lake he saw the horse's eyes in the face of the man before him.
"Oh, my boy," the Captain said, leaning as if to kneel before him. The hurt leg and its bitter harness of steal and leather held him back. Not his eyes. His eyes came forward. His eyes looked down and saw the lake. "My god, what's happened to you?"
Davey could only shake his head. He began to cry, then. He blew his nose on his nightshirt and he sobbed. The Captain staggered to him, slouched upon his bed and held him tight, and Davey wept the waters of his lake, because he saw the same in the Captain, he felt it, and this heart was verdant and sweet and fierce, and he stood at the shores of it watching flames saw and fall, and saw and fall, and was not afraid.
For the first time since the night of the fire, since mama and papa and Sarah her name is Sarah Sarah Sarah my sister where are they his mind went quiet, went still.
Even the thoughts of the master slouched in the doorway, which usually scratched at him like starving rats, were held at bay. The Captain had spoke level.
"Master Keeper," Captain Birch had said, "This boy is coming with me."
The master fingered his keys. "You ain't take no boys til them's sixteen, that's the rules, ain't they?"
"No one trains til they're sixteen. But he's coming with me, and if you've got a problem with that, Master Keeper, you can take it right up with Chief Darley in Manhattan."
The master had blanched and slunk away.
"I've been lookin' all over this county for the mad heart of a fireman. Never guessed I find it here."
At last Davey had been able to crack a word from his empty mind. "Fireman?"
"You got the sear, my son, youngest I've ever seen. The pictures in your head, the way you dream in others' eyes, how you know just when the Master Keeper's going to strike you with those damned keys of his ..."
"Fire..."
"Listen to me, close, David Cleary," the Captain said, shifting his careful weight on the sagging iron bed. "Listen close. Ever since the very first fireman locked eyes with the very first fire, and shed his blood on it, we've had the Sear, we've had the pictures in our minds, we've felt our brothers beside us in the heaviest smoke, and we've seen the dead before they fall, and caught them in our arms. You want to get out of this godforsaken place, David Cleary, you come with me. I'll bring you with me to the Training Grounds and we'll teach you to be a fireman, and there won't be any blaze you lock eyes with that'll have a chance in hell of making any other mother's son an orphan."
Davey would not have trusted the words, but for the hard smack of truth in his heart, pounding in his blood. It was like waking early, before the mist rose, when all that lay at the end of the broad lawn was the promise of dawn, the eyes of the world not yet open. The slope of this man's soul went right to the water's edge and lay down beside it, no matter how dark.
"Wanna go, sir." So soft he'd said it, so soft he wasn't even sure it had crossed his lips.
The Captain had smile his scarred smile, and heaved himself up, tilting on his braced leg. "It's Josiah, son. Captain Josiah Henry Birch. You got a long while yet to call me sir. Let's leave it at first names, for now. Got a long ride home. Let's get on to it."
The masters had given him walking clothes sized for a man, and two dollars. The standard for a fellow being sent back out into the world to make a life for himself. He'd balked at the autocar, at first. But he climbed in beside the Captain, and slept most of the long drive. All night and into the dawning of the next day, until they reached the gates of the Training Grounds. (Wynantskill, the Captain had told him. Upriver from the City.)
A gruff man with thick straw-blond hair had met them on the whitewashed porch of the main building. Where the Captain was tall and broad, this man was built stout as an ox, with a day's growth of pale whiskers on his jaw.
"They makin' 'em awful small upstate these days, Birchie."
"His family died in a fire, John. He found his sear some three odd years ago, if the records are right, and he's been in the County Asylum by Turner Lake since."
The ox-broad man stopped smiling then. Looked Davey right in the eye. It pierced him, like the doctor's fine scalpel slicing the black pustulent wound of a madman. Davey was trying not to cry and the man's brown eyes grew wide.
"That's right. Three damned years."
"What's your name, son?"
"Davey."
"Christ, Josiah, you got to warn me, I'd have set some damn breakfast aside for the boy, and clothes, god almighty lemme see if we got any uniform that'll fit him, not likely, maybe one of the lads can tailor something ..." The man named John (John Patrick Edison, he learns later, Lieutenant Edison, they call him Eddy at Wynantskill) is speaking hurriedly, " ... Davey, come on, are you hungry? Got to be hungry, all the way from Turner Lake. Bet Josiah didn't even feed you. I'm sure we've got something. Get you a proper coat, too. Can't be of age for training yet - "
"He's not."
"Christ on a spit-roast. How old are you, son?"
Davey has to think. There is a vast, charred expanse between the last memory of a birthday (mama, the cake decked in sugar daffodils, candles, Sarah at his elbow, papa's soft eyes) and these strange, safe grounds among the trees. "F-fourteen, sir."
"Fuckin' dirt-rutting sons'a bitches, don't they got any sense? Fourteen. Fourteen's a fine age, Davey. Welcome to Wynantskill, son." John Patrick Edison's eyes flash and his smile is crooked and swings across half his face like a fish darts above the water. "Welcome home."
Truth of it was, Captain Birch had saved his life.
No maybes, no probably-might-have; Captain Josiah Henry Birch of the New York City Fire Department had saved him, saved his life, and given him a far better chance than he ever would've had to start.
At least, a far better chance than he would've had after the fire.
Davey would cuss the life of anyone else who even dared to suggest it, but he kept in his heart that it was true, and when life started gettin' teeth it was Josiah he went to, first. Ought've been his Captain, and many times, Silky would do just fine. Josiah had brought him to Silky, and Silky's House at Company 14, and what Birchie thought was fit for trusting was good enough for him.
After all, Birchie had trusted him, from the day they'd met.
Davey remembered - like portraits in stained glass, like the light hanging in musty slants across the pews of some aging church - the life before, of green grass and silver and china at the table and his sister chasing him in the garden and his mother's smile and his father's kind eyes. Shattered light in his mind's eye. Naught but shattered light, now. It was glass in his hands, after. He remembered after as a succession of long shadows, of blurred faces, of the ghastly, empty sensation inside him that was like his own soul had been broken open and ransacked, and now fires frolicked as free devils in the rubble.
Fire. Davey remembered the fire. Merciless. The broken glass on the handwoven carpet. The way it felt when they carried him from the house and all he wanted was to go back, for the love of God and His Holy Grace, go back, because they crossed the threshold of the heat and flame and something inside him tore and that was that.
Davey does not, without some conscious effort on his part, remember the funerals, the laying of his family, his whole heart, into the dew-damp earth. He remembers a long drive. He remembers the house of many children. He does not remember their faces. Their laughter tore at him, and the sun went on rising and setting, and the moon waxed and waned, and fawns grew to yearlings and world cared nothing for the yawning gap inside him that he could not describe.
In the night that gap, a cavern between his ribs, filled up with the dreams of other children.
In the night the dream-lake reflected back the bones of the past and the heat-shimmer of what he would know later to be the future. There was always an itchy feeling, in the day-time, and he would hear a spoon clatter before it fell, and he would hear the nun smack the child before she even raised her open hand. Davey had ducked many times the strike of the sisters.
In his most beautiful dream he sat in the parlor with his sister and played at jacks, which was not a boy's game but he did so love his darling sister, and she was full of mischief like a boy and they had no other playmates. The long sun in the windows was warm, and the breeze soft like a kiss. His mother did needlework. His father read the Sunday paper. In his most beautiful dream, he could smile at his mama, and she would smile back, and his sister would say Davey you missed the bounce, and the newspaper cracked softly as his father turned the page and his eyes were so kind, so blue.
It was after his most beautiful dream - when he woke up warm for the first time since the does dropped their fawns under the tall trees - that there was another long drive, and another master of a house with locks, and this one with bars on the tall windows and bare unwaxed floors and not even the clever moon could slip in through the smokey glass. There were some children in this sprawling house. There were many men and many women. Davey had not understood why they had brought him to this place, except that there was always someone crying, or screaming, and he wondered if they all had lakes inside them filled up with the forgotten dreams of others.
Josiah had told him, long after, much later, in the deep sovereign woods of Wynantskill, that he had set fire to the dormitory of the children's aid society where they'd brought his orphan self, and that he had been found kneeling on the long slope of the lawn, eyes shut and face rapturous to the fire.
"It was warm," Davey had told him, in the shadows between the morning light. Men had been drilling in the yard. It was soon after breakfast. "It was just ... warm."
Mama, papa, lemme come home, lemme come home, I wanna go home...
Josiah had come to him in the lightless house, the county almshouse, had brushed the burly master aside with his eyes and come to him, his gorget shining like the sun, his shoulders broad, his wool coat brushed soft, and his leg clanking in a cripple's brace a half-step behind him.
"Ah, my son," Captain Birch (he did not know Captain Birch yet, his name or his place or his life), "my son, where've you been, lad?"
Davey was fourteen then, in a ragged chambray nightshirt, soothed only by the black lake inside him which was his only secret in the lightless house, and the only place he knew how to be real again.
Davey could not speak to him. Davey raised his eyes to meet the Captain's and saw, before him a blue dapple percheron with black legs and black flaring nostrils and livid black eyes, saw a war-horse straining at its collar, saw it black with soot. He saw, in the lake where his heart had left him, the face of a younger man tending that horse, saw wide hands stroking a boar's-hair brush across its broad back, soaking the sweat and foam from its flanks. In the lake he saw the horse's eyes in the face of the man before him.
"Oh, my boy," the Captain said, leaning as if to kneel before him. The hurt leg and its bitter harness of steal and leather held him back. Not his eyes. His eyes came forward. His eyes looked down and saw the lake. "My god, what's happened to you?"
Davey could only shake his head. He began to cry, then. He blew his nose on his nightshirt and he sobbed. The Captain staggered to him, slouched upon his bed and held him tight, and Davey wept the waters of his lake, because he saw the same in the Captain, he felt it, and this heart was verdant and sweet and fierce, and he stood at the shores of it watching flames saw and fall, and saw and fall, and was not afraid.
For the first time since the night of the fire, since mama and papa and Sarah her name is Sarah Sarah Sarah my sister where are they his mind went quiet, went still.
Even the thoughts of the master slouched in the doorway, which usually scratched at him like starving rats, were held at bay. The Captain had spoke level.
"Master Keeper," Captain Birch had said, "This boy is coming with me."
The master fingered his keys. "You ain't take no boys til them's sixteen, that's the rules, ain't they?"
"No one trains til they're sixteen. But he's coming with me, and if you've got a problem with that, Master Keeper, you can take it right up with Chief Darley in Manhattan."
The master had blanched and slunk away.
"I've been lookin' all over this county for the mad heart of a fireman. Never guessed I find it here."
At last Davey had been able to crack a word from his empty mind. "Fireman?"
"You got the sear, my son, youngest I've ever seen. The pictures in your head, the way you dream in others' eyes, how you know just when the Master Keeper's going to strike you with those damned keys of his ..."
"Fire..."
"Listen to me, close, David Cleary," the Captain said, shifting his careful weight on the sagging iron bed. "Listen close. Ever since the very first fireman locked eyes with the very first fire, and shed his blood on it, we've had the Sear, we've had the pictures in our minds, we've felt our brothers beside us in the heaviest smoke, and we've seen the dead before they fall, and caught them in our arms. You want to get out of this godforsaken place, David Cleary, you come with me. I'll bring you with me to the Training Grounds and we'll teach you to be a fireman, and there won't be any blaze you lock eyes with that'll have a chance in hell of making any other mother's son an orphan."
Davey would not have trusted the words, but for the hard smack of truth in his heart, pounding in his blood. It was like waking early, before the mist rose, when all that lay at the end of the broad lawn was the promise of dawn, the eyes of the world not yet open. The slope of this man's soul went right to the water's edge and lay down beside it, no matter how dark.
"Wanna go, sir." So soft he'd said it, so soft he wasn't even sure it had crossed his lips.
The Captain had smile his scarred smile, and heaved himself up, tilting on his braced leg. "It's Josiah, son. Captain Josiah Henry Birch. You got a long while yet to call me sir. Let's leave it at first names, for now. Got a long ride home. Let's get on to it."
The masters had given him walking clothes sized for a man, and two dollars. The standard for a fellow being sent back out into the world to make a life for himself. He'd balked at the autocar, at first. But he climbed in beside the Captain, and slept most of the long drive. All night and into the dawning of the next day, until they reached the gates of the Training Grounds. (Wynantskill, the Captain had told him. Upriver from the City.)
A gruff man with thick straw-blond hair had met them on the whitewashed porch of the main building. Where the Captain was tall and broad, this man was built stout as an ox, with a day's growth of pale whiskers on his jaw.
"They makin' 'em awful small upstate these days, Birchie."
"His family died in a fire, John. He found his sear some three odd years ago, if the records are right, and he's been in the County Asylum by Turner Lake since."
The ox-broad man stopped smiling then. Looked Davey right in the eye. It pierced him, like the doctor's fine scalpel slicing the black pustulent wound of a madman. Davey was trying not to cry and the man's brown eyes grew wide.
"That's right. Three damned years."
"What's your name, son?"
"Davey."
"Christ, Josiah, you got to warn me, I'd have set some damn breakfast aside for the boy, and clothes, god almighty lemme see if we got any uniform that'll fit him, not likely, maybe one of the lads can tailor something ..." The man named John (John Patrick Edison, he learns later, Lieutenant Edison, they call him Eddy at Wynantskill) is speaking hurriedly, " ... Davey, come on, are you hungry? Got to be hungry, all the way from Turner Lake. Bet Josiah didn't even feed you. I'm sure we've got something. Get you a proper coat, too. Can't be of age for training yet - "
"He's not."
"Christ on a spit-roast. How old are you, son?"
Davey has to think. There is a vast, charred expanse between the last memory of a birthday (mama, the cake decked in sugar daffodils, candles, Sarah at his elbow, papa's soft eyes) and these strange, safe grounds among the trees. "F-fourteen, sir."
"Fuckin' dirt-rutting sons'a bitches, don't they got any sense? Fourteen. Fourteen's a fine age, Davey. Welcome to Wynantskill, son." John Patrick Edison's eyes flash and his smile is crooked and swings across half his face like a fish darts above the water. "Welcome home."