The Ballad of James McKenna

Day Three: Fruit

Day Three
         Fruit
Word Count: 502

Jimmy wished that his father were still alive.

It wasn't that he missed him, which he did, or that his life had become a nightmare since his loss, which it hadn't. It was mostly that his Father's death had brought manhood crashing upon him much faster than Jimmy had intended, or had been prepared, for it to arrive. He had a family to take care of now, and they had just been thrust upon him without any notice.

Jimmy had always thought he'd marry, a woman of his choosing and at a time of his own designation, and start his own family, together with her. And he'd just assumed that his father would be there to show him how it was done. It was probably stupid--childish, even--when everyone had known that war was coming and, for Jimmy, that war had already come by the time he was thinking about women and marriage and children. It was proper for men to marry. And, not only that, it was what he wanted.

Father's death had ended all that. He didn't have the time or the funds to start a family of his own, not if he wanted to keep his Mother the way she deserved to be kept. And then there were his sisters' dowries--their hope chests to be sewn and pleated and pressed--all of which he was now expected to oversee. He was only twenty-eight.

His Father had always been something of a hero to him. They were the only two men in their family, surrounded by flouncing skirts and bouncing ringlets, and Jimmy had desperately needed his Father's example. Owain McKenna had been large and expansive, with a booming laugh. Half of Jimmy's memories were of his shining green eyes gleaming through a swathe of tobacco smoke, the deep grumble of his voice telling him stories of the Scottish Highlands and the Irish coast as he taught his son everything he knew about steam technology and electro-mechanicals. These were the good memories.

The bad memories were the ones that stole his Father from him. By the end, Owain was quite literally a shadow, confined to a wheelchair, his right knee shattered and a piece of shrapnel traveling along his veins directly toward his heart. He coughed a lot, his ruined lungs unable to take in enough air, and his bright green eyes dull with pain and laudanum poisoning. And worst of all, his voice, once so rich and so strong, was nothing more than a rasping whisper, barely audible above the clanking of his steam-chair. It had been Jimmy's last gift to him, that chair, paid for and made with parts from the Pinkerton's mechanical room.

Everything Jimmy had done since then--every rule he'd followed and crime he'd solved, every mechanical wonder he'd worked with and created--had been to live up to his father, who'd kept him solid and provided the nucleus for Jimmy's life and universe.

Jimmy could only hope that he was more like the good memories than the bad.