The Drifter

“Build up the fire,” she had begged. “It’s too cold in here.”

The thought ignited an old, old memory that raised a bittersweet ache in his chest. The years peeled away and he was a boy again, sitting on the wet brick pavement in the moldering courtyard of the St. Ignatius Orphan Asylum of Chicago. Through a grille-covered window he could hear a little girl sobbing, sobbing.

Carrie. With shaking hands, Jackson had held the bundle of sweets he’d stolen from the pantry of the refectory. The sweets were never given to the children, of course. Brother Anthony and Brother Brandon saved them for themselves.

Holding a little cloth bag of gumdrops, Jackson started to climb. His feet, in worn and ill-fitting shoes, wedged into the gaps left by crumbling mortar. His wiry arms trembled as he pulled himself up. A sliver from the windowsill stabbed into his hand. He ignored the pain. At St. I’s, kids knew better than to cry over a sliver.

“Carrie,” he said, finding a toehold on the rain gutter. “Carrie, it’s me, Jackson.”

Her sobbing hiccuped into silence. Then she spoke, her little-girl’s voice clear as a crystal bell. “They locked me in. Oh, save me, Jackson. I’m so cold. I’ll die in here.”

“I couldn’t pick the lock,” he said apologetically. “I tried and tried.” He pushed the bag of sweets between the rusty bars of the window. “Gumdrops, Carrie!”

“Red ones?”

The silence spun out. A distant horn blew, signaling the end of the shift for Chicago’s dockworkers at Quimper Shipyards. The swampy smell of Lake Michigan blew in on a cold wind through the courtyard. “Carrie?” Jackson strained to see inside the locked room, but spied only shadows. “You all right?”

“No,” she said, the word muffled by a mouthful of candy. “What’s this, Jackson?”

“Something I made for you. Carved it out of firewood.”

“It’s a bird.”

“Uh-huh.” He imagined her turning it over in her small hands. He was proud of his work, his attention to detail. It was a dove; he’d copied the stained glass Holy Ghost in St. Mary’s Church. At Christmas and Easter, the brothers scrubbed the orphans up and paraded them to church, and Jackson had always spent the hour staring at the jewel-colored windows.

“Oh, Jackson.” Her voice came through the barred window. “I’ll keep it with me always.”

“I put a hole in the back so you can wear it on a string around your neck.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” she said, and he had the eerie impression she wasn’t speaking to him. “I just wanted to hold the baby, just wanted to be warm by the fire, but they blamed it all on me, put me here in the cold. I’m scared, Jackson.”

His legs began to tremble from the effort of holding himself up. “Carrie—”

“You there,” barked a deep, familiar voice. “Get down from there, boy!”

Jackson didn’t have to look back to know Brother Anthony stood below, flexing a knotted belt while his eyes gleamed with hell’s fury and his costly ring of office flashed in the light.

“Are you deaf, boy, or just stupid? I said get down.”

He tilted his head up. Just a short reach away loomed a drainpipe. If he could grab onto that, he’d climb up to the roof, maybe find a way down the other side. He leaned toward the rusty pipe, closed his eyes, and leaped. The ancient iron groaned under his weight, but it held. He began to climb, up and up, ignoring the wrathful commands of Brother Anthony. Jackson kept climbing toward the pigeon-infested ledge above him. How he wished he were a bird. He’d fly away free, soaring…

“If you won’t come down, I’ll give your punishment to that little devil-spawn girl you like so much,” Brother Anthony promised.

Jackson stopped climbing. His brief fantasy of freedom flickered and died. He blew out a long, weary breath. He slid down the drainpipe and dropped to the cracked brick yard, stumbling a little as he turned to face Brother Anthony.

The portly warden backhanded him across the face. Jackson’s head snapped to one side; he saw a spray of blood fly out. Brother Anthony’s ruby ring had cut him above the cheekbone.

He knew from years of observation that the warden would go easier on him if he cried and begged for mercy. But he’d never been able to plead. Instead, he wiped his bleeding cheek with his sleeve, then clawed off his shirt even before Brother Anthony commanded it. With a cold gleam of defiance in his eyes, Jackson turned, braced his hands against the wall, and waited for the first blow to land.

In the detention room, Carrie was strangely silent.

In the bathhouse, many miles and many years away from that moment, Jackson plunged his head into the lukewarm water and scrubbed hard, wishing he could wash clean the past. But he couldn’t, of course. The past would always be with him, just as the scar from Brother Anthony’s ring would always be with him. Just as Carrie would always be with him.

Pregnant. God Almighty, Carrie was pregnant.

She had awakened briefly this morning. Like a petulant child, she had turned up her nose and complained about the sour smell of the vinegar and herbs, but she seemed to breathe easier after the treatment. He had managed to get her to eat a bit of bread sopped in warm milk and flavored with cinnamon and sugar.

“You’re good to me,” she had murmured. “You’re always good to me.” And she’d reached her hand out for the bottle of tonic she needed.

“I left it on the boat, honey.”

He’d taken her hand in his. Her fingers tightened into a fist, and she knocked his arm away. “I need it, Jackson. I need my medicine now.”

Resigned, he’d rowed out to the schooner. He planned to bring her in to dock anyway. He’d paid the harbormaster, then returned to Carrie. He should have talked to her about the pregnancy, talked about what it would mean to bring a baby into the world. Their world. Instead, he watched her grab the bottle, watched her drink greedily until her eyes grew dazed with a sated look.

“Save a little of that,” he said. “The doctor wants to know what’s in your medicine.”

“I need it,” she mumbled, visibly calmer. “I always do.”

He’d sat with her and held her hand until she slept again. All in all, it had been an easy day with Carrie. Not every day was like that. Her moods had always been unpredictable, but lately her spirits had spiraled downward at an accelerated rate. He supposed the pregnancy explained that, but what the hell did he know of female things?

For that matter, what did he know of anything the future held for him and Carrie? He knew better than to expect love and security, a settled life, a home. That was something that didn’t happen to people like them. They were too desperate, too damaged. He would simply drift along with Carrie, taking each day as it came.

He’d never done a lot of planning for the future. He’d always lived for the moment. Decisions that had altered his life had turned on a single moment. A three-year stint on a whaling ship? He’d gone simply because his bed in the flophouse where he was staying had been lumpy. Ownership of a broken-down seagoing schooner? He’d won it with a single hand of cards.

Good or bad, it was the way he had lived. If you don’t expect anything out of life, he reasoned, then life won’t have a chance to disappoint you.

It was enough to simply stay ahead of the law. Drifting along had never bothered him in the past, though today it preyed upon his mind. There was something about that lady doctor that made him wish he could be something more than a wanderer. Made him weary of always being on the wrong side of the law—even when he was trying to do right. If he could get Carrie away to a safe place, maybe they could start over again, settle down, get a house and some land like regular folks.

He dried himself with a clean towel and wrapped it around his waist. The timid deaf girl called Iona had set out some shaving things for him. Peering into a small, oval mirror, he lathered up. He’d gotten careless the past few days with Carrie being so sick. He had to stay clean-shaven because the Wanted poster showed him with a beard.

His mood rose a couple of notches. The likeness and its screaming headline hadn’t been posted in Seattle, so he guessed the search wouldn’t reach this far north. Not anytime soon, he figured.

By the time they traced him here, he’d be long gone, thanks to a lucky hand of cards dealt at a tavern on Yesler Way in Seattle. A timely quartet of queens had won him the schooner.

The thought of the boat almost brought a smile to Jackson’s face. He’d always dreamed of having a boat. When he was a boy, he’d stolen a copy of Treasure Island—everything worth having was stolen. Late at night, burning a contraband candle in the boys’ dormitory at St. I’s, he had devoured the adventure story with his eyes, his mind, his heart. Against all odds, he had learned how to dream. Ever since reading that book, he’d wanted to sail away, wanted the freedom, wanted the sense that he was in control of a world of his choosing.

Jackson T. Underhill had never found that. Not yet. He was still looking.

The whaling ship had not been the answer. He’d hated the tedium, the rigid pecking order among the crew, the sick cruelty of the second mate, the grim violence of the hunt. As in all the things Jackson had done in his life, he’d gleaned important skills from the experience; then he’d moved on.

The schooner was a new—if leaky—start. But it had problems. The damage done by the lady doctor was only the beginning. Once he’d docked the boat, the harbormaster’s assistant had given him a depressing litany of repairs to be made before she was seaworthy again.

If he could just get her running well enough to make it to Canada, he’d take his time, maybe make a plan. He had only the vaguest idea where he would go; all he knew was that he needed to find a place where Carrie would feel safe, where his face wasn’t known, where a man could be judged by the hard work he did, not by a past he couldn’t change.

He cleaned off the razor, wiped his chin, and turned to reach for the pile of freshly laundered clothes in the dressing room.

Instead of the clothes, he saw a woman’s backside.