Emerson · Felsberg, Mercer State
1715
Emerson woke to a thin gray light at the edge of the curtains and lay still listening to the house. A door closed downstairs, and a floorboard creaked after it. Wagon wheels rattled over the cobbles in the street while a merchant hollered at someone. Felsberg was awake before the sun again. It always was in the week the garrison rotated.
He sat up and stretched until his back cracked. Dressing took less effort than flattening his hair. His brown hair sprang back up every time he took his hands away. At eight years old he did not have the patience. He left it as it was.
The hallway smelled of bread and beneath the bread lay the older smell of coal smoke that had worked into the walls before he was born. His stomach growled before he reached the kitchen. The forge was cold beyond the kitchen. His mother was already at Anvil Row.
Every spring Felsberg’s garrison rotated and every spring the soldiers seemed astonished to learn that their kit needed mending. The men coming home brought worn-out buckles and mail with gaps where rings should have been. The men about to leave arrived with issues they meant to fix weeks ago and all of them wanted it finished at once. Most months his mother worked at the forge built onto the back of the house. During the rotation she joined the other military smiths at the big furnaces on the Row. She cleared the workbench before she left and tucked a note under her hammer.
Bread in the crock. Do not let your father cook.
Emerson pulled the note free and lifted the lid. There was enough bread for both of them. He looked at the cold hearth while he tore off a piece. His fire had come in this same room three years ago.
He was alone after dark and the hearth had gone out. A winter wind pushed the yard door open. He could shove it shut if he leaned his whole weight on it but he could not lift the bar into its brackets. The moment he stepped away, the door swung inward again.
Eventually he stopped trying. The doorway became a black mouth, much bigger than it ever looked by daylight. He no longer wanted to go near it. The cold coming through it smelled of wet ash and the empty yard. He remembered being brave. He also remembered how little good that had done.
Then he put his hands on the coals and orange showed beneath the ash. It was not a blaze. A few coals brightened at the bottom of the hearth just enough to show him the edge of the workbench. He sat before them with his hands held out and his back to the open door.
The glow stayed until his mother came home from the Row. She immediately checked his fingers for burns before she asked what happened. When he showed her, she held her own palm over the coals where his had been. Then she looked at him without speaking.
“Push-type,” she said at last. “Your grandmother’s affinity.” She banked the coals properly and went to bar the door.
“What’s it for?” he asked.
“It’s useful. Like a hammer.” She tested the bar with one hand. “Nothing that works costs nothing, Em. Somebody always pays for it.”
She put a broom into his hands. “Mind it’s you.”
Ash had spilled across the hearthstones. He swept it up while she watched the fire. That was how his family generally handled remarkable news.
There were crumbs on the clean workbench when he came back to himself. He brushed them into his palm. In the front room his father sat in the good chair by the window with a leather strap across his lap and an awl in his hand. His injured leg lay stretched out before him where nobody could pass without stepping over it. He never called it his bad leg. It was always the leg, as though it belonged to someone else and had been left in his keeping.
“Mother says you’re not to cook,” Emerson told him.
“Then you’d better leave me some bread.”
Emerson held out what remained of the loaf. His father tore off a piece and balanced it on his knee.
“That’s the third morning she’s gone before light,” he said. “There’ll be a fourth.”
“Will she be there all day again?”
“Until the work’s done. The men coming home have been somewhere hard enough to break their kit and the men going out want to know theirs will hold. Both lots think theirs are more important because they’re in a hurry.”
He set the awl against the leather. It went through on the second push. Emerson chewed and thought about the kinds of places that could break a soldier’s kit. He heard stories at the muster field and down by the harbor. What stayed with him were the mountain passes and the banners lifted against the sky. When he pictured those men, they always reached the other side. He never imagined any of them coming home with a leg like his father’s.
“Were you in a hurry when you went away?” he asked.
His father’s hands stopped.
“Everyone’s in a hurry,” he said. “That’s the whole business.”
He turned the strap over and examined the hole. Emerson waited for more, but his father only glanced at the crumbs clinging to Emerson’s sleeve.
“Go on. Out with you, before your mother comes home and sees what you’ve done to her workbench.”
“I brushed it off.”
“Then you’ve nothing to worry about.” He said it so gravely that Emerson checked his sleeve on the way out.
Kira was on the roof of the Halvards’ woodshed. Of course she was. The shed was barely six feet high. She could ignore the tallest wall in the neighborhood for weeks and then scramble onto a low roof before dawn as though no one in Mercer had ever managed it before her. Now she sat on the eave with her heels knocking against the boards. Strands of dark hair hung loose from the tie at the back of her head. Against the white morning sky her jaw made a sharp line and there was a small crooked bump at the bridge of her nose. She had gotten that off this same roof.
Brice stood underneath with his arms folded. He was the smallest of the three of them. His light reddish-brown hair stuck out around his ears and he wore the look of a boy who had lost an argument twice. “She was up there when I got here,” he told Emerson. His quick light voice was pitched to carry. “She won’t say how long.”
“It isn’t a competition,” Kira said. Her voice was low and flat for a girl.
“You only say that when you’ve won.”
“You don’t have to stand there.”
“Yes, I do! If you fall with no one watching, you’re just a girl who fell off a shed. But if I watch then you’ll be a girl who fell off a shed in front of a witness. That’s better because in a way I am helping!”
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Emerson laughed. Kira grinned down at Brice. “Then keep your eyes open.” She turned to Emerson. “Come up!”
“There’s no ladder.”
“Use the barrel. You can reach the beam from the fence.”
He studied the way up. The barrel’s lid shone with morning damp and the fence rail beyond it sagged where the wood had gone soft. If the rail held long enough, he could reach the crossbeam. Kira shifted above along the eave to make room.
Emerson put a hand on the barrel and thought. He knew it took too long because Kira stopped swinging her feet. She never laughed at him when he hesitated. That somehow made it worse.
“It’s okay,” she said.
She slid off the eave to the crossbeam and the toe of her boot found the fence rail. The barrel gave a hollow knock under her hand as she pushed off it and landed beside him. Emerson drew breath to tell her he could manage. She was already climbing back up. This time she went slowly and called each hold as she took it.
“Here.” Her boot went to the spot where the fence rail met its post and she put her weight on it before she reached for the beam. “It holds if you stay close to the end.”
By the time she reached the roof, Emerson had one knee on the barrel. It rocked under him. He grabbed the fence and pulled. The corner of the beam scraped his shin hard enough to hurt. For a moment his belly lay across the edge of the roof while his feet hunted for a hold that was no longer beneath them. Then he got a knee over and dragged himself up beside her.
Kira edged farther along the eave without a word. He sat down carefully. His shin throbbed inside his stocking. Brice was looking up at them and Emerson would sooner have bitten his tongue than rub the shin.
“Your turn!” Kira told Brice.
“Someone has to be the witness!”
“You can witness from up here.”
“I can do that perfectly well from down here.”
He leaned his back against the fence. Kira let him. Emerson could see the neighboring roofs and the harbor. Masts crowded the water beyond the last houses. A gull cried somewhere among them and a gust carried the smell of fish up the lane. Inland, the mountain road climbed out of Felsberg and bent away between the slopes.
Kira pointed at a boat pulling clear of the pier. “That ship is mine.”
“That’s a fishing boat.”
“It’s mine until a better one comes in.”
Emerson looked past it to where the water brightened beyond the masts. They stayed until the lane beneath them grew busy. By midmorning they had gone their separate ways home.
The parade began at midday. Emerson’s father refused to arrive more than an hour early for something that happened every year. By the time they reached the muster field, the crowd along the wall already stood several people deep. His father walked slowly. Emerson shortened his own steps to match and tried not to look impatient. That was harder every time someone hurried past them. The place they found was a good deal worse than the one Emerson hoped for.
The parade always fell on the same date, the day the first muster had stood on that field and stopped taking pay to hold another nation’s land. Over the gate stood a gray stone statue of Borka, a head taller than anyone who passed beneath him. Every child in Felsberg had climbed his statue at least once. Its hands were worn smooth because of generations of children hauling themselves up.
Kira had been on the wall for an hour. Naturally. She had the best place and she sat with her legs dangling over the drop. She never once looked down.
“You’re slow,” she told Emerson.
“He’s careful. It’s different.” Brice came up behind them out of breath. His mother had sent him for bread and he held the bag against his chest.
“You’re late too,” Kira said.
“I was picking something up for my mother.”
Emerson’s father planted his good foot and lifted him onto the wall. He set him well back from the edge where the broad stone was still cold under a thin early-spring sun. His father had marched across this field once. He knew where a boy wanted to sit and how far from the edge to keep him so his mother would never hear about a fall.
A horn sounded from the harbor road. The crowd leaned toward it and children rose onto their parents’ shoulders. Old soldiers made their way to their usual places along the wall by memory. One of them stopped at the wall beside Emerson. He was older than Emerson’s father and his mustache had gone white. He rested his forearm on the stone close by Emerson’s knee and looked out at the field. Then he looked at Emerson’s father. His father did not argue. He put his hands under Emerson’s arms and lifted him down.
“Father, I was here—“
His father walked him a few steps nearer the gate and planted his good foot again. The stone he set Emerson on lay in Borka’s shadow and it was colder. From here the statue hid the gate and the field. Whatever came through first would be halfway across before Emerson saw it. Back along the wall the old man set his other arm beside the first and stood in where Emerson would have been. Neither man said a word to the other. His father rubbed the leg once and turned toward the harbor road.
A faint tremor reached Emerson through the stone. Then he heard the marching of hundreds of boots striking in time. The first banner came around the bend. He leaned forward. His father’s hand closed over his shoulder.
Seven companies entered the field under seven Mercer banners with their edges faded by rain and salt wind. The men were not quite the soldiers Emerson pictured over breakfast. Their faces were darker from the months outdoors and their coats were clean but patched at the elbows. Some had fresh bandages under their collars. One man had a bad leg and hid it well enough that Emerson only noticed because he knew what a bad leg looked like.
Kira pointed at the fourth row of the fourth company. “That one’s the best.”
The soldier had a white scar through his right eyebrow. He looked straight ahead.
“How do you know?” Emerson asked.
“Because he isn’t smiling.” She said it so surely. “The smiling ones are showing off.”
Emerson studied the ranks. A man grinned when somebody in the crowd called his name. A soldier caught a flower without breaking stride and earned a loud cheer. Emerson nearly cheered with them. Then he remembered what Kira said and looked at the others.
They were there. Some men never looked at the wall. Their hands stayed close to their weapons and they marched across the field as though it were one more stretch of ground on the way to somewhere they had to be. None of them looked afraid.
Emerson thought of the barrel that morning and of standing there with his hand on the wet lid while Kira waited above him. These men would not have hesitated over whether the rail would hold. They would already have been on the roof. Perhaps that was how courage worked. You chose where you were going and you moved before everything that might happen could catch up. He watched the unsmiling men until he was sure of it.
The fourth company passed them. Sunlight flashed on a soldier’s belt and Emerson recognized the repair immediately. His mother used that type of repair when a buckle’s tongue had worn thin and there was no time to replace the whole piece. He leaned a little farther out while keeping his shoulder under his father’s hand. The soldier passed without looking up. A small piece of their house had gone out into the world on a man he had never met, and now it was coming back. He said nothing. He only knew that he wanted to see where it had been.
The crowd began to drift into the harbor streets before the last company left. Kira chose the long way home along the top of the wall and Emerson followed her. Brice kept to the wider stretch behind them and hugged his bag of bread.
“I’m going to be one of them,” Kira said.
“Obviously,” Brice replied.
She turned to face them and walked backward while the harbor lay below the wall. “I’m saying it. You have to say it aloud or it won’t happen.”
Emerson glanced at the edge. She seemed to know where it was without looking.
“Say it,” she told him.
“I’m going to be one of them.” His voice carried farther than he expected. A man in the street below glanced up and heat climbed Emerson’s neck. He kept walking.
“Good.” Kira looked at Brice.
“I’ll be standing nearby,” Brice said, “when you two have become them.”
“Still watching?” she asked.
“Someone has to.”
Kira laughed, her full unembarrassed laugh that was loud enough to turn heads in the street. She faced forward again and went on a few steps ahead, as she always did. Emerson followed her along the wall with the harbor shining below them. The whole summer still lay before them, long enough to feel endless.