Cedric lives a last time

Tidraed wrapped his fingers around a bar of the door and smiled sweetly. “Hallo, kid! Remember me?”

The shadows, stench, and bars made his friendly greeting a perversely ugly thing, like flowers growing out of the eyes of a skull.

Cedric feebly tried to match his smile to Tidraed’s own. “Last summer?”

“The bridge?” Tidraed prompted. “The chicken coop? ‘Member that?”

“Yes…”

Tidraed leaned carelessly on one of the crossbars, as if they merely chatted over a fence between two fields.

“Bet you wish you’d let me jump in the river that day, eh, kid?”

Cedric opened his mouth and closed it slowly without speaking a word.

“They tell you what I did?” Tidraed asked.

“Yes – ” Cedric’s voice was no more than a squeak. He coughed and repeated, “Yes.”

“Guess I took my foreman’s head for a nail,” Tidraed chuckled. “Tried to hammer it into his shoulders, what.” He waved a hand dismissively through the bars.

Cedric’s stomach heaved at the idea of a hammer punching through a man’s skull, cracking it open like the shells of the chestnuts he had been smashing upstairs, revealing the wrinkly meat inside. Worse was the thought that some men could laugh about it.

He looked helplessly back to Father Faelan, but the priest was occupied in a minute study of the bricks on the far wall. Cedric realized he was expected to stand alone, which proved that this situation was not considered too difficult for a twelve-​​year-​​old to handle. He would simply have to handle it.

He swallowed in a vain attempt to calm his stomach and resolutely turned his gaze back to Tidraed, straight-​​on, man-​​to-​​man.

Cedric had never looked a murderer in the eyes before. Nevertheless he already knew that the obscene merriment in Tidraed’s would haunt him forever. He could not conceive that this was the same man who had blithely hammered away at the chicken lady’s coop that hazy July morning, flinging off joke after joke from the side of his mouth that was not full of nails until Cedric’s belly had ached from so much laughter.

“What can I do for you?” Cedric asked stiffly.

“You do for me?” Tidraed laughed. “I don’t think no one can do nothing for me now, kid.” He poked his hand between the bars and pointed at Cedric. “I want to do something for you!”

“What?” Cedric asked uneasily.

“Teach you a lesson! See me? In here?”

“Yes…” Cedric whispered.

“That’ll teach you to mind your own business!”

His voice had gone harsh, and his smiling mouth snarled with bitterness and cruelty. Cedric saw that the laughter and merriment had been a mask for the angry man.

“If you’da just left me alone that day, we wouldn’t be here! Now two men are going to be dead instead of one worthless one! And that’d be one less widow and some less orphans in the world – thanks to you!”

His broad, callused hand darted between the bars again, perversely beautiful in its fluttering, like an ox with butterfly wings.

“And now they’re going to hang me, kid! Just how I don’t want to die! Just like my Da!”

The last words might have sounded like a sob, but Tidraed grabbed the bars at that moment with both hands and clanged them hard against the hinges.

Cedric leapt back, startled, but almost immediately he found himself leaning towards the man again. Something in Tidraed’s vain clattering of prison doors rang true with something in him.

“Did your father… do something like this?” Cedric mumbled.

Tidraed sniffed and lifted his head warily away. When he spoke his voice was cold, as though he had thought over his words long enough to drain all emotion out of them.

“My Da hanged his own self. When I was littler nor you are now. Maybe he woulda done, though.” The side of his mouth that never held nails curved up into a cruel half-​​smile. “If some goody-​​goody kid ha’ come along to talk him down and preach him a lesson and tell him to give his life away.” He leaned his forehead against the bars and added softly, “And then leave him all alone when the night come.”

Cedric flushed in shame and looked down at the floor. He had tried – a little – to learn what had become of Tidraed the last few times he had gone home, but he had to admit he had been relieved to have been unable to find him. He had done both too much and not enough.

Resolutely he tried to lift his eyes to the man’s, but he could not look past Tidraed’s hands. They hung limply over the crossbar, outside of the cell, but they could not escape the man any more than the man could escape what the hands had done.

Cedric supposed Tidraed was right-​​handed, as most men were, and must have held the hammer in his right hand. Nevertheless Cedric could not tell one from the other – the innocent from the blameful. He could not have told Tidraed’s hands from the hands of any other man.

“You can’t blame him for drinking then,” Tidraed muttered. “If a man can’t live and ain’t allowed to die, that drink’s the only thing getting him through the night.”

He might have been talking to himself; Cedric never looked into his eyes to know. But his hands seemed to be speaking, seeking: they had come to life, waving and flicking themselves at Cedric in mute accompaniment to Tidraed’s words.

“I hope you never learn, kid,” Tidraed said softly. “It’s a little like being dead, ’cause you don’t feel nothing, except your body keeps going around doing stupid shit like what I done, and you end up in here.”

With those words Tidraed seemed to remind himself where he was, and the hands fell limp again and shamefully withdrew between the bars.

Cedric’s hand leapt up and followed one of them through, grasping it and clinging to it tightly before it had fallen too far away.

Tidraed choked and jerked reflexively on his arm, but Cedric held fast, and after that first instant he did not truly try to pull his hand away.

“What the hell are you doing, kid?” he spluttered.

Cedric’s face was growing almost painfully red, and he had a sickening feeling that he was making an absolute fool of himself. He also had a second feeling that was telling him it was not the moment to worry about being a fool.

“I – don’t know!” he stammered. “Your hands were – I was just thinking – ”

He was only learning the reason himself as he tried to explain it – or perhaps he was fabricating a reason even then. It was not his reason that had inspired his hand.

“I was just thinking, perhaps people treat you differently now, and – perhaps people refuse to touch you, or… are afraid to.”

Cedric only noticed then that he was holding Tidraed’s right hand. It was ridged with calluses from edge to edge. It was the hand in which he held his hammer.

“So I just wanted to make certain somebody did,” he concluded weakly.

“Right,” Tidraed said in a shaky, high-​​pitched voice. “Just like on the bridge, you had to make certain somebody told me not to jump.”

“No…” Cedric said thoughtfully. At least he had the advantage of five months’ reflection to provide an explanation for his actions that day. “I think I wanted to make certain you knew somebody cared whether you did or not.”

Tidraed was silent for a dreadful moment.

“You know what?” he finally quavered. His hand was slickening and beginning to shake out of Cedric’s grasp, perversely stronger the less it pulled and struggled. “You’re a weird kid, coming up with shit like this.”

“Sorry,” Cedric mumbled.

“You know what else?” He laughed feebly. “I guess this is the last time I’ll ever hold a kid’s hand.” Just then the hand slipped away. “I still ‘member the last time I ever did before that, though. We had a loft for the girls to sleep, and Big Girl used to climb down by herself, but Little Girl – ”

Tidraed clanged the bars again, but even ringing iron could not dampen his anguished sob.

He turned back into his cell, and kicked and scuffed his feet, and sniffled and swore and wiped his face on his sleeve.

Cedric still stood stupidly at the grate. He did not know whether he dared leave. He did not consider the absurdity of a condemned men being obliged to dismiss a squire of a king, brother of a queen, and son of a great lord. Nor did Father Faelan make so much as a cough.

When Cedric thought he could bear no more, Tidraed turned suddenly and returned to the bars.

“You could do one thing for me, kid,” he said roughly to hide his embarrassment.

“What?”

“I hope my kids don’t never learn what happened to their Da, but if they ever do – I mean, if you ever find ‘em, you tell ‘em their Da was thinking about ‘em when he died, and – he’s sorry!” he sobbed.

This time he did not bother with the bars. His body fled as far as it could into his cell. His sobs shook his body as if his very soul was trying to get free.

“I shall tell them, if I ever see them,” Cedric said, loudly enough that he hoped he would be heard. “I shall… try to find them,” he added softly, remembering in time that his interference might not be what Tidraed would want for his children, after what it had cost him.

Tidraed did not seem to have heard either promise. He sobbed and swore until the swearing won over the sobbing, but he never looked at Cedric again. And then, until Father Faelan stood and came to lead Cedric away, he sat sniffling on the edge of his cot and stared down at his own big hands.