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Come autumn, Tozer wonders again at the company he keeps.
The leaves are dying rapturously in a blaze of red and gold, and Hickey too seems all alight with the season, the ruddy mud of his hair transmuted to copper in the crisping air. A sharper jaunt to his walk, a harder gleam to his eye. A keenness, as befits a creature made for making the most of lean times.
Tozer misses the easy pickings of summer, the days that passed so fat and slow it felt like you could just open up and take a honeyed bite out of time. How he reveled in complaining of the heat and the bugs and the mud, in licking the perspiration from Hickey’s skin, in dunking the both of them in the creek. In those days Hickey was to him a friend and a brother and more. Or less—for all matters of rank and category had melted from them. They were just men, and alive, and enough.
But summer is over, and Hickey is hiding something from him. Tozer knows him too well not to know; has lost the knack of blindness. He watches as Hickey slips off, here an hour and there two, squirreling away ever longer spans of time for what he calls thinking. His usual excuse, but not quite his usual habit of shirking. There’s some subtle difference in the texture of his evasion, some sense of purpose lurking beneath the surface indolence.
Tozer would like to put his trust in Hickey—there being no other place to put it. He would like to tell himself it was the bad times that whittled Hickey down to the shape that he was. The things that he did. But whichever way Tozer turns his eyes, he can’t unsee the past.
Still, haven’t they had better times for long enough now to drape Hickey in a softer skin? He may be a liar, a killer, a mutineer, and it may be his fault that Tozer is also all those things, but he is no less the man who butters Tozer’s toast and steals his socks and had, last Christmas, presented him with a mother-of-pearl tobacco box, of such fine make that Tozer suspected him not only of nicking it but of gifting it for the express purpose of borrowing it back—except that the mother-of-pearl had been so neatly defaced with the letters T-O-Z-E-R.
More importantly, Hickey’s body is the warm anchor that keeps Tozer moored at night, his heartbeat the lighthouse bell that calls Tozer home when dark dreams haul him back out to sea, to ice, to—
Tozer wakes to Hickey sneaking out of bed. That’s not so strange; he sometimes goes out to smoke, or stays in to pace, back and forth and back as though this cabin was the prison that they’ve so long evaded. Maybe it’s the cold tide of conscience come at last to lap at Hickey’s heels, to drive him to and fro.
But not, it seems, tonight.
Though they’ve only the one room, there is a rather nice painted folding screen—which simply appeared one day, no doubt by the same magic as the tobacco box—which they use to divide kitchen from bedroom, and which Hickey now uses to divide himself from Tozer. Behind it, there come rustlings and scratchings and scufflings and then the tiny sulfurous snick of a match sparking, and then more scufflings and scratchings and rustlings as Hickey’s backlit silhouette bends to some secret task. Tozer squints his eyes, strains his ears. But Hickey only hunches there like a mouse, and as quiet; the most Tozer can make out is a faint click-click-click as of some infernal clockwork, broken every now and then by a soft little curse.
Tozer finds himself drifting back to sleep to the suspicious sounds of Hickey hard at work.
In the morning he is roused by the tickle of Hickey’s beard on his neck, and aroused by the trajectory of Hickey’s fingers on his thigh.
“’S your turn to see to the chickens,” Tozer grumbles, batting him away.
“A bird in hand is worth ten in the coop,” Hickey says, which is not true except in the crudest sense. Which he proceeds to demonstrate.
“Jesus,” Tozer gasps in Hickey’s grip, then bucks into it. Hickey runs cold, and seems to consider it his due to warm his hands on whichever part of Tozer is nearest to hand—usually not this one.
It should be easy enough for Tozer to shove Hickey out of bed as deserved, give himself ten more minutes of shut-eye, yet somehow in the attempt he finds himself pulling Hickey closer instead. He thinks of magnetism, inconstant poles and doomed intent. He sets all thought aside.
His hands run blind and sure down Hickey’s body, cupping his backside, stroking the faint raised lines that remain from the stroking of the lash. Gives a good hard squeeze, out of which he gets a shudder and a retaliatory squeeze; he curses, he laughs, he sups the sour morning breath straight from Hickey’s smart mouth.
If once he felt shame rutting into the hand that did the devil’s work, working him now into a mighty wave fit to crash through heaven’s gate, it is a memory from a distant shore. He can look over his shoulder, but he can’t go back.
And when he opens his eyes in the here and now, all he sees is a man. His man. Hickey’s eyes are smiling. His hair’s all tousled. Both the sticky hand still cradling Tozer’s spent cock and the clean hand cupping Tozer’s cheek are warm.
“We don’t have to go anywhere,” Tozer says, too sudden. Too serious.
“Is this still about the chickens?” Hickey furrows his brow.
“No—I mean, yes, the chickens can wait, but I’m talking about everything. All this. Us.” He’s not entirely sure what he’s saying, but it’s important. And he’s got Hickey by the prick as he says it, which ought to help his argument. “I know you—we—had plans for Hawaii, or San Francisco, all of that, but I’m saying look around, look how far we’ve come. We’re doing good right here.”
Hickey gives an exasperated sigh. But his member is not so easily unimpressed, and as words have failed him Tozer turns to touch. Sometimes he thinks this is the only language they truly share. Even when they get rough, it’s honest blood they draw.
He grips Hickey by the nape, by the hair, and Hickey lets himself be drawn into a kiss, hard and sweet and filthy. Hickey smears his handful of spend all up Tozer’s thigh and it should be disgusting—it is, actually; and it’s good.
Soon enough Tozer strokes a better sort of sigh from him, quick, hot, panting breaths—and then slows down. Pulls back.
“George Harris says he has more work for me.”
“I’ll congratulate you,” Hickey scowls, “after you finish the job at hand.”
“It’s come along well, hasn’t it. The workshop. Thompson’s offered to trade a goat for those axles, and then think: fresh milk, and butter and cream.”
“Who’s milking it,” says Hickey, pointedly, then trails into a gasp as Tozer sets to.
“I’ll need your help. In the shop, that is, now. I won’t be able to keep up,” and there—and just so—and Hickey spends with a bitten-out cry, jerking into his fist; now he’ll need help with the laundry, too, “if business goes on as it has. We’re building a—a name, here. A reputation. This could be better than Hawaii.”
Through the rippling aftershocks of his crisis, Hickey has the wherewithal to narrow his eyes.
“Alright, better than San Francisco. If we keep working at it, together. Could afford to build on another room, soon. And then a bigger workshop. We can have everything we want, Cornelius, if you’ll just...”
Hickey is quite back to himself now, though his chest still heaves; he props himself up on an elbow and primly sets to ruining the sheets by wiping himself clean with them. Annoyed but resigned, Tozer follows suit. Laundry day will have to come early. “Funny morning, this,” Hickey says thoughtfully. “I turn your spigot, and philosophy comes out. What are you really on about? Spit it out.”
Nothing for it now. “Look,” Tozer says. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed what you’re up to. I won’t ask the details—I don’t want any part in it, and I don’t want to know. I just want you to stop.”
Hickey smiles at him. A full crinkle-eyed lying steel-trap of a smile, one of his endless arsenal of smiles that are not smiles. His voice is light. “Precisely what is it that I’m up to, Solomon?”
“I don’t know what!” Tozer snaps. “You know what. I’m saying whatever it is, knock it off. You’ve been lucky so far, or all your marks have been careless, but what happens when you’re finally caught, hm? What prize have you been eyeing that would be worth losing our place?”
Hickey’s laugh rings full of scornful pleasure; he shakes his head in a great show of pity, and a strand of his hair flops over his eyes. “What an accusation!” he teases. “But you can’t haul a man in without proof, sergeant.”
It’s the lightness of his tone that incenses Tozer. “For God’s sake, this isn’t the Terror anymore. Stop messing about. There’s nobody left to mutiny. There’s no—no magic bear to chase! There’s only the two of us, we’re in the same fucking boat, and it can do without your rocking.”
Hickey folds his face into the smile that Tozer knows is meant to come off slick as greased sunshine, whatever you’d just said sliding right off its polish. But this time, there’s too much bile clenched behind the teeth.
“My rocking, your rowing, is that the gist of it?” he says lightly. “And I suppose you’ve not benefited at all from my schemes?”
“Oh, you did it all for me, did you? Did you? And that time in the north, when you chained me up like a—”
“Yes, yes, there we are—poor Saint Solomon paddling upstream by the honest sweat of his brow, beset by demons. But where’d you get the tools to start that honest toil, Sol? Which good fairy bought you the hammer and the saw? Which little birds dropped a coin here and a loaf there upon that window sill?” Hickey’s eyes are cold but he is still smiling, a sickle smile with a mind to reap. “Which fucking angel on high would stoop so low as to save our hides?”
For a moment, the air burns cold enough to crack between them.
“I know,” Tozer grits out. “God, you think I don’t know? Every time I told myself, this is it: our last bad thing. Just one more, and only because we must. And then there was another last thing, and another. I’m saying it’s enough. You can stop now. I don’t like to look back either. You know I don’t—I just—look, Cornelius, I forgive—”
Hickey bolts up and on reflex Tozer grabs for him, gets him by the wrist. It’s the wrong wrist; Hickey yelps and Tozer falters and they both have to look at it, then, the wreckage of that hand with which Hickey had reached too high.
Tozer has kissed that hand. He has just this morning taken it to his cheek and leant in to the mangled caress of the three fingers that remain.
He knows what that hand had been prepared to give, if only Hickey had been quicker with his knife and quieter with his tongue—that vain instrument with which he’d just had to play them all a parting tune before he set to cutting it out to feed the bear. One more morsel to sweeten the pot, on top of the living cuts of meat already chained to his boat: once a crew, then a mutiny, now an offering. Tozer among them.
How dense the fog was, then. How clear he saw Hickey.
“How generous of you,” Hickey says, snatching his hand free and springing out of bed. With that hand he smooths back his hair, cocking his head and giving it a rueful little shake. “But you needn’t give gifts no one’s asked for. A lesson I should’ve learnt by now.”
“Where are you going?” Tozer shouts, half-rising himself—but Hickey’s already shot halfway across the cabin, throwing himself into boots and trousers and out the door with the violence of a ricochet.
“You did say the chickens would want me,” he fires over his shoulder as he goes.
The door does not quite slam in his wake but it rattles, reminding Tozer that he’d meant to correct the alignment, which reminds him that he’d meant to nail Hickey down to help, which reminds him that one might think a man who was—among other things—a caulker’s mate, ought to be able to be counted upon to re-caulk his own front door. Tozer rubs his eyes. What were they talking about? Besides what they are always talking about, which is also what they are always not talking about.
He still remembers clear as ice the weight of the chain and the helpless fury of straining against it; of seeing himself as the same sad dog Hickey must’ve seen all along. A beast to slaughter.
What chain binds Tozer now, to this shabby cabin, with mossy eaves and sagging floor and cracks in the walls to which Hickey does not tend, and secrets he tends too well? Tozer could go. Leave behind the bloody tools, the dirty money, the bad company. He’s got two good hands, and humility enough to stoop to whatever honest trade will have him.
Even as he thinks it his eyes flick to the table, checking that Hickey’s knife lies there still; his ears prick to the window, checking that the hens have commenced their scolding. Those hens have never warmed to Hickey, even on the mornings when he feeds them on time. They know a fox.
What chain binds Hickey?
The hell with it. He doesn’t need Hickey. He needs a leak.
This, at least, proves an easy problem to solve. It’s as he’s shaking off and casting about for his trousers, and a for an excuse to delay going out to empty the chamberpot and getting right back into the argument with Hickey, that his eyes alight upon the folding screen. Click-click.
Drawing it aside reveals only an empty corner. But closer inspection reveals a loose floorboard. And prying up that floorboard reveals… naught but cold air and another line to add to the never-ending list of things that need fixing.
Tozer kicks the wall, for kicking’s sake—and a good foot-long piece of it falls off with a clatter. It’s a wooden lid, of sorts: a section of the log has been carefully sawn open, hollowed out, shut back up and sealed all around the edges with a caulker’s skill, such that you’d never know it was no longer a solid piece of wood until you put your foot in it.
What sort of bastard hollows out a log in the wall of his own log cabin? The same drafty walls he can’t be bothered to caulk? A rat bastard, that’s what, an incorrigible pest who doesn’t think of tomorrow, or thinks tomorrow he’ll be gone, who cannot stop gnawing at the foundations a sensible man might seek to build upon, who cannot even keep it to skullduggery and subterfuge without property damage—for God’s sake, there was a perfectly good loose floorboard right there.
For a moment Tozer is so livid he thinks to march out there and have it out with Hickey right this second. Let the chickens be clucking witness.
But first, a peek inside Hickey’s miserable little hidey-hole. Having come this far, Tozer almost doesn’t want to know. He puts his hand in slow as though expecting teeth. Or close enough: hook and grapnel, chisel and pick, jimmy and nipper and burglarious sundry. Or the cold hard muzzle of a gun. Or a pile of ill-got coin, which would explain the sound—and then what? The hand of the law may be spread too wide out here to pinch every thief between its fingers proper, but there’s men enough and rope enough to sort such little problems locally, as a matter of neighborly courtesy.
Hickey thinks himself too clever to work the field when he can work the men upon it. Hickey will take a noose around his neck as a laurel upon his head. And Tozer beside him, and all the townsfolk invited; the closest to a wedding two of their ilk can expect. And not even the first time, is it.
Tozer doesn’t expect to touch something soft. And thick—layers and layers, it feels like. Hickey’s swaddled his secret well.
“I meant it as a surprise,” says Hickey, a few feet behind him.
Tozer starts, leaping up and whirling around with the bundle in his hands. His attention is torn between Hickey—limned in light from the silently opened door, standing there like some sort of chicken shit saint with a furrowed brow and a feather stuck in his hair and all of one egg in his hands; he had, of course, stormed out without the egg basket—and the mystery on his hands which he might as well finish unwrapping. But it opens up only to reveal more of its own self, the same soft knitted material, until not very long later Tozer comes to the end of it with a delicate click-click-click of—knitting needles, dangling at the end of an unfinished sleeve. The secret wrapped inside drops to the floor, bounces, and rolls a little ways before reaching the end of its tether.
It’s a ball of yarn.
Tozer finds himself holding, incredibly, incredulously, a… a gansey. Just a plain knit gansey.
“Well?” asks Hickey, tilting his head. He is not quite smiling now. He regards Tozer with a solemn canniness, as if weighing the odds. “Tell me what you think.”
“I…” Tozer begins. He shakes his head, to clear it. Shakes out the garment fully, its needles giving him a poke and a cheery little clickity-clack. It looks innocent as day, not so different from the navy issue ones of old or those produced by dutiful fishwives and doting grandmothers—lumpier, perhaps—and yet it puts his heart at a knifepoint gallop. “You made this” he says, when he’s got his voice more or less in order again. “For me?”
“Who else would a sack like that fit? Could’ve saved a heap of time doing it in my size.”
“I never saw you so much as darn a stocking, back on the ship.” The wool is a marled grey. The pattern, now Tozer looks at it, is something like herringbone. He finds himself rubbing it like a fool, bringing it to his cheek. It’s only a little scratchy. “Since when do you knit?”
It strains his mind’s eye now to imagine Hickey, needles up, doing his knitting by the fire of an evening. But he did see it, didn’t he, just last night: a thief at work, stealing time.
Hickey shrugs immodestly. “You don’t know half what I’m capable of. I might’ve got you something finer, you know. I could have you in silk and velvet—if you hadn’t got so stodgy lately.”
“Come off it,” says Tozer, “who’s even got velvet to sell round these parts?” But he can’t stop grinning.
He reaches for Hickey, but Hickey shies away with a sly look. “Put it on. Mind the needles.”
Perhaps Hickey planned this, all of it. Perhaps it is all part of some larger trick, like a glacier raising only its pure white peak above the waves. But such worries are immaterial to the material Tozer pulls over his head, carefully, as if it really was silk and not dense hardy wool. For a moment he is contained, consumed, in a confines warm and safe and slightly stinking of sheep. Then he pops up through the top, and shakes his hair loose, and gives Hickey a gentlemanly bow. The needles stick him in the armpit.
“It looks well on you,” Hickey says. “I used one of your shirts for sizing.”
Tozer is no great judge of garments, he’ll admit, but he recalls how fine he used to feel in his marine reds. That sense of pride, of belonging. He looks down at himself, surveying the uneven stitches, the indeterminate shade of grey, and feels warmer than even wool might warrant. When he looks up at Hickey he finds his vision’s gone as fuzzy as the yarn, somehow, and he has to blink rapidly. Probably a bit of wool in his eyes.
“Cornelius, it’s… it’s…” Tozer sweeps him into an unwieldy embrace, graceless and sincere; Hickey very near drops his one egg of the morning. “Thank you.”
“The things I do for you.” Hickey puts his egg-free arm round Tozer’s waist, resting his head upon Tozer’s chest.
“I've got a present for you, too.”
“I know,” Hickey says. “It’s beautiful. Never thought I’d have my own desk.”
“It’s—wait, you found it?”
“You’re far better at building things than hiding them.”
It’s almost too warm. Too good. This is the sort of thing other people do, those who haven’t done the things they’ve done. Tozer has half a mind to forget the chores and the day’s labor waiting for him in the workshop, and tumble the two of them right back into bed, dirty sheets and all. Hickey can finish his sleeve there, in the daylight. Or they might see to some other pressing tasks, together.
But first: “Cornelius?”
“Hm,” comes the reply, the smile smug but as sincere as Hickey can be.
“Where did you get this wool?”