The Ballad of James McKenna

Day Two: Word Focus

Day Two
         Word Focus

Silk:
Word Count: 443

Jimmy once bought his mother a silk scarf, back when Father was alive and most of his paycheck didn't go to keeping them in homespun and stew. He'd furiously debated whether or not to purchase the dress hanging on the mannequin in the front window--it was brown, with little flowers picked out in green and red--picturing mother sashaying about Cincinnati looking like the Queen of England herself. But sense had finally won out--didn't he hate such fripperies and useless nonsense--and he'd settled on the far more mundane, but eminently more practical, scarf.

Mother had sold it when Father died, before she'd told Jimmy of their hardship, in order to spare him the additional burden of caring for a family. She had been so proud of Jimmy the day Pinkerton's had taken him on, so sure he would be the one to finally make something of himself and bring the McKennas out of their Irish squalor. She had been born to rotting potatoes and a cargo ship to the Americas; Jimmy, her first and only son, would bring her family's dream to fruition.

As it stood, Jimmy did not tell his mother just how much of his paycheck he sent to her each month. He kept just enough for the occasional purchase--maintaining one's appearance was necessary for maintaining one's social standing, after all--but otherwise lived on the job, Pinkerton's handling the financial details of his day-to-day existence. In the rare occurrence that he had no investigation, Jimmy lived with Nate in the latter's modestly upscale Chicago townhouse. If he knew he was going home to visit, he saved up all his coin just so Mother would think he had enough to be living off of.

Jimmy could have made some extra money as a Mechanical. He did have a gift with the tools and devices Pinkerton's used to conduct their investigations, and many agents would rather pay Jimmy to fix them than report to HQ that they'd broken a device in the field. Such expenses always came out of an Agent's pay, and they were hefty. In the case of an audichronicler, it was a whole month's salary to replace, and Pinkerton's did not do payment plans. But Jimmy could never bring himself to charge for doing what he loved so well; the reason Pinkerton's had hired him in the first place, his tinkering.

So he wore a threadbare coat, patched so many times he wasn't even sure what the original fabric had been, and shoes that had been resoled. But it didn't matter to him; not really. He had his duty, after all, and duty came first.


Sour
Word Count: 402

The candy is sour, causing his mouth to pucker in a most unseemly fashion, but Jimmy loves it. Lemon drops, fresh and packed into a brown paper cone, are his favorite; have been since he was a boy. They remind him of his father, who always seemed to have a bag of them stashed away somewhere in his great woolen coat. Father died a few years after the war, a piece of shrapnel working its way from his ruined knee all the way up to his heart. A lot of soldiers died that way. Jimmy had been lucky enough to escape the Great Hell unscathed; he'd not been allowed to join until his sixteenth birthday, only a few months before the Confederates had surrendered. Only a few months' worth of mopping up under Sheridan, clearing the Shenandoah, and he'd been home again. Or, more accurately, he'd been off to Chicago to join Pinkerton's.

There'd been an agent at Petersburg, apparently, and he'd seen what Jimmy could do. And he'd been impressed.

It pleases Jimmy to think of the pride in Father's eyes, his desperate attempts at hiding the tears prickling in their cloudy depths. The War did that to men sometimes. Too much smoke in the lungs and the eyes left them withered and corrupted, a token to remember the bitch by. Jimmy sometimes wondered if it would have been better for Father to die in the war rather than linger on for three painful years.

He pops another candy into his mouth, relishing the taste, the smell, the feel of the sugar between his fingers before he eats it. It isn't often that he has a moment to himself; not since the Tourist showed up in New York and President Hayes needed it solved quick. It is difficult to keep the image of dead bodies--masses, really, so mutilated they could hardly be called bodies and are well on their way to being impossible to call flesh--from turning his guts to bile, but if he focuses strongly enough on his memories and his Father, he can keep the horror at bay for a few hours, at least.

Father's pride means a lot to Jimmy; it's the only thing he has left of him except his memories. And the taste of sour on his tongue, the tingle of lemon in his nose, and the rough feeling of sugar beneath his fingers.


Sepia
Word Count: 310

There is a single picture in Jimmy's wallet, sepia brown and gray. It is of his Mother and Father and his three sisters, all of them younger than he by at least eight years. Mother and Father had other children, but cholera took them or scarlet fever, and it was only after the epidemic had passed that they had tried again. It still made his Mother cry sometimes, to remember those lost children, all of them sons, leaving Jimmy as the only boy to carry on her husband's name.

He stares at it sometimes, when he is feeling lonely, and the memories are strong enough to overcome even his stringent attention to reason and science. Annibel must be, what, twenty now? Jimmy wondered if she had suitors. He didn't get back to Cincinnati near as often as he wanted to, because earning enough money to take care of them took a lot of work.

How old was this picture? Jimmy had forgotten. He wasn't in it and Father looked whole and hale, as Jimmy preferred to remember him, and sometimes even managed to, so it must have been at least thirteen years old. It was torn and wrinkled, fading away at the edges, but it is one of his most beloved possessions.

Jimmy has never had the occasion to add another photo to his collection. For all that he expected himself to be a gentleman, Jimmy never found a woman who had enough fire for him. He didn't want one of those squeamish lasses who blushed or fainted at the site of a table leg, or shied away from hard work and scholarly genius. Bluestockings they called them, women who loved to learn and engage their minds without regard for societal whims, or its prejudice against a woman of learning. He longed for one. A woman worth a sepia photograph.


Scream
Word Count: 267

He sometimes hears them scream. At night, when he is sleeping, and most wants to escape from them, they cry out to him. They beg him to remember, and in the begging, he cannot forget. By day, when the sun is shining and investigations occur, they are silent, they are dead spirits waiting to be avenged. It is at night, the time when the moon is bright and the stars glow, that they walk, feeling lost and forgotten, and they become afraid.

Jimmy wishes they would be silent and leave him be. They should not be plaguing him with their screaming. Not he, who was spending his time and spilling his life to avenge them. No, he thinks, they should scream to their killers, but perhaps they are too soulless to allow their ghosts to haunt them.

Other men would turn to the drink, or perhaps to vices of the flesh, to steel themselves against the horrors of these nightly wails. Jimmy does no such thing. It wouldn't be dignified, proper, or even moral. Worse, it would be weakness, a weakness that was inexcusable at that.

Better to deal with the screams than sink into debasement in order to escape them.

It was best, of course, to exorcise the spirits by avenging them. That was the best cure for the screaming. And that was precisely what Jimmy did, for it was his job. An agent of Pinkerton's always got his man.

But perhaps it was apropos that their motto was 'we never sleep'. As long as the screaming went on, it was, in Jimmy's case, perfectly true.


Savor
Word Count: 242

Jimmy savors his time in the mechanical room. It isn't often that he gets to spend any time there. No agent gets to spend too much time in the Chicago office, not even those who were hired specifically for their talent with mechanicals. But when he does get to be there, perhaps for no more than a few days at a time, it is a joy. It is perhaps the happiest he can feel, losing himself in the cogs and gears of the greatest designs the greatest minds of their nation had to offer.

There is order in machines. An order conspicuously absent in his life, and in so-called civilized society. It is perhaps this more than anything that convinced Jimmy to adopt the strict code of conduct he has wrapped about himself. So rarely did he get his reminder from the machines, of just how beautiful life could be with parts working in cohesion, coming together to create something marvelous and perfect in its symmetry and design. There was so little he could control, so little in his life that spoke of beauty and order, but what he could bring to himself.

There is order in rules. And he savors order as he savors his machines. They are one in the same for him. And in a world with so little of both, or in which what little exists is corrupt, Jimmy needed as much to savor as he could get.