Quickburned

Prodigal

Five years ago...

Caleb's feet took him to his Ma's house without conscious direction from his head after. It wouldn't be the first time he'd stumbled there, after a fight or half-awake from being out at the ranch all gorram day, and he was home, in Clearstone, the patterns of the place etched deep in his bones. The fact the last time he'd done such a thing was a dozen years ago didn't register to his body's memory at all.

He knocked his boots on the scraper by the door by reflex and set his hand to the knob. It wasn't locked; the door had never been locked in his life. Was no need, in this town, and his Ma had always lived by the maxim that people would treat you with the same amount of trust you gave them. If you came to Ma's door hungry, she'd feed you, naked, she'd clothe you. It might not be delicacies from Chiaroscuro or Realm silk, but you'd leave with a full belly and something on your back.

If anyone had tried to steal from Ma Raith they'd have half the town's kids on their tail before the day was out.

How then could one of Ma Raith's boys grow up to be such a scoundrel like you?

The accusing voice had dogged him since he found the dead in the alley. His fingers tightened on the knob, leaving bloody smears. Caleb let go abruptly and stepped back. Flutters of old memory, of his Ma threatening the brothers (always the brothers, the three of them Gabe, Jemmy, him, never Jack or the girls until Hana was old enough to rough and tumble) with slow death by skinning alive for getting dirt... everywhere. In the house. On the walls. On her floors.

Clean. He had to be clean before he came home.

Caleb left the door still closed and detoured around to the yard in the back and the pump there. Drawing water up from the caverns beneath the town was a familiar chore, and easier than it had been before, the pitted gritty mechanism yielding to adult strength.

"Shit, Raith," he told his reflection in the trough. The red light of evening glittered off the water's surface and painted a distorted circle of light on his face. "You been workin' a slaughterhouse? Not a good look fer ya."

He scrubbed gore from arms and face and hair until the water ran red and his flesh was numbed by its cold, from the deep caverns where the Pole barely touched. His shirt was stained beyond redemption, and shredded up the back he saw when he stripped it and vest both; they hung in tatters. His cravat was missing entirely.

There were half-healed wounds on his side and deep scrapes up his back he didn't remember owning before this morning. Raw rope burns decorated throat, chest, and wrists—none of it hurt, really, not the way his eyes told him they ought. He used the cleanest bits of his shirt to scrub the blood from them, hissing as it tugged and stung.

He ought to clean those proper.

He seized on the thought, held it like a lifeline. A goal, something to keep him moving, one foot in front of the other until... until he could figure out something else. Until he could shake whatever fog had stolen his memories and kept him hazy.

Ma had medicines.

He could borrow a shirt from Jack.

The back door into the kitchen swung open with the same creak of hinges. The creak which had forced the brothers to learn to climb in order to sneak in after dark, to slip into windows always open to the cooler breezes at night. Jemmie had been the best of them at it.

It was dark and cool in the kitchen, sunset turning the white-washed adobe walls an orange even deeper than the tiles on the floor. The oven's fire was dead and gone, though warmth lingered in the smooth curve of its dome when he laid a hand on it. The scent of burnt bread overpowered everything else; Ma's morning loaf was a brick of charcoal in the back of the oven.

She must be dead too, came the little voice, threading through the jumble of nostalgia crowding his skull. Otherwise she'd be here. Singing. Mending. Reading. You brought the fight home. You killed her.

"Might be she's out at the ranch," he said aloud. It sounded weak even to his ears.

Caleb fled the kitchen, the scent of abandoned bread on his heels.

He took the stairs two at a time, ducking reflexively as he came up to the second story; he'd been tall enough to smack his head there since he was twelve. The medicines were in the hall closet right near the loft along with the linens; opening the door was yet another reminder of the home he'd left and lost.

Mesquite, to keep away insects. Sage and juniper to keep the fabric fresh-smelling. Over it all, the crisp green of mint from a bottle Sati had spilled when he'd been seven that had never quite faded. Caleb breathed it in with a smile.

One of Jack's shirts was in the mending basket on the floor. There was a rip in the sleeve but it was otherwise sound, so Caleb threw it on over his head and let it hang around his neck while he reached for the medicine basket on the top shelf.

His fingers hit paper instead of bandages, crackling a little as he fished them out from between ceramic jars of ointments and medicines. It was a packet of letters bound loosely in twine, the string frayed from being re-knotted over and over again. Jemmie's name was on the first one. He flicked through the stack; they were all addressed to his dead brother.

"Oh, Ma," Caleb breathed. He picked up the basket of medicinals and took it over to the daybed, angled to catch the slanting sun still coming in the upstairs windows and spilling across the loft. There were two more packets of letters in the basket, one addressed to Gabe... and one to him.

It has been a month, mijo, the first one began. A month since you and your brothers left. I thought, at first, of course they will be back, they are always coming home when they are bored of playing at desperado. When they are hungry, or hurt, or tired of sleeping in sand. But this time you have not come back.

But I think of you always, mijo, my baby boy. I think of you, and I write, and I know you will never see these. For who can deliver letters to a boy running, a boy hiding?

It does not matter why you run. Or what you do when you are out there, in the badlands. I love you, Caleb. Always. You are my baby boy and I love you.

Caleb read through each and every one, though the light dimmed and his side began to ache and his eyes burned. And when he was done, if his face felt raw and his vision blurred through saltwater—well. There was no one to see, if the Boss cried.

Morning found him still there, sleeping beneath a blanket of inked love.