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Creeley wasn’t really all that young when his mother died. Old enough to still know her, though. And he remembers her enough to also forget her.
And it hurts, how the mind works that way.
It’s not like he wants to forget her – no, not ever. Not her blonde hair and the stray curls, not her rough and indelicate hands. Were her eyes green or brown? Hazel? He’s not sure whether she ever smiled – it’s an image he can’t recall. But he doesn’t remember her being a particularly sad woman, either. He has enough fragments of her to know she existed, along with a locket that he keeps close.
If he knew how, he would write down everything he knew before he realised he’d forgotten something else of her.
Her birthday was sometime in September. He remembers three candles on a shoddily-made cake a few weeks before she passed away.
A big tall man who he would later call ‘father’ strides into the godforsaken place he calls home. It stunk and creaked everywhere, but he didn’t know anything better, and the people seemed friendly and accepting enough. It was where they called home, but it felt like a coffin; a sign that they’d never be much more than what this place offered them.
It’s been three days since he lost her. And this big tall man walks in asking for her by name, and then he asks for Creeley. By name. They point him to his direction, a gangly and small, underfed body hiding against the walls. The man’s footsteps make him shake. And then he’s suddenly towering over him.
“Son,” he says – Creeley can feel the depth of his voice – “I’m gonna make you a man,” his voice strikes a fear like no other in Creeley’s heart, but Creeley was always easily frightened.
Turns out, it’s the only time he ever calls him ‘son’.
He takes him outside and Creeley doesn’t protest, no matter how much he wants to. His mother’s grave is only a few feet away, and he doesn’t know his way back here on his own, but something tells him he shouldn’t say that aloud. It might be the two boys waiting outside for them – the man grabs one of them by the neck of his shirt and pulls him up from it.
“Hold your head up, boy.”
The only thing Creeley has with him is his mother’s locket, hidden deep inside his pocket.
A week in and Creeley discovers he could cry a lot more than he thought possible. He wasn’t unfamiliar to bruises, beatings, and blood – you see plenty of things growing up the way he did – but it had never happened to him. And the pain – the ache of it all – keeps him awake every night, crying till his pillow was soaked through. Even his old man couldn’t believe it.
“Jesus, I didn’t know men could cry that much,” he says once, rubbing at the warm leather of his belt. “You a man, Creeley? Are you?”
So, it only takes Creeley a week to learn to cry quieter and quieter every night. It lessens the punishments, even though he stills gets his fair share considering the fact that he never does impress his father much regardless of what he’s doing. It occurs to him that maybe it’s just his existence that sets his father off, that causes him to lunge at him over the table, to grab him by his hair. He gets hit anyway and it probably doesn’t work the way his old man really wants it to. It only teaches Creeley to shrink further inside himself.
He has a brother called Seth who doesn’t keep his head low like he does, which he tries to learn from. Although, his gaze is always low. They witness each other’s crimes and suffer the same wrath. Sometimes, they take the blame for each other, but they’re not particularly close besides the fact that the man on the other end of their beating is their father. Creeley’s aware of the fact that they don’t even look related. Sometimes, he thinks he was just snatched up and stolen away – but for what? An inconvenience there, a burden elsewhere – all he ever was.
Sometimes, Seth shoots something out back and their old man laughs heartily and gives him a pat on the back that would have knocked Creeley over, but Seth has his feet planted in the ground. A boy named Lou – who isn’t anyone’s brother but is undoubtedly their father’s favourite – is cleaning out rifle off to the side.
“See, Creeley?” he turns to him then, his hand still digging into Seth’s shoulder. “Now, it’s your turn.”
He does that for a few years, but his hands are still too soft to save him from anything. And he probably still cries too much, but no one knows about that anymore. Just Seth. But that was an accident.
One night in September – Creeley’s taller, broader, and only slightly stronger at this point – he sits on the edge of his bed with his mother’s locket in his hand. He’d like to get it cleaned and is clever enough not to ask, and too scared to scar it if he tried himself. Instead, he just rubs the dirty surface of it on his shirt and holds it close for a second longer.
There’s one day in September that is his mother’s birthday. He doesn’t know which one it is anymore.
With the most willpower he had ever mustered since he was brought to this place, he grabs his candle and moves slowly, quietly across the wood floors to the window. Nothing gives him away. The waning moon waits outside for him, making way for the stars to show across the plains of the land. He doesn’t dare open the window, so instead he puts the candle on the floor and folds his legs to sit next to it, looking at the locket between his dirty, calloused fingers.
A boy too soft, with blood and scars across his body. A boy too soft, who only misses his mother and wants nothing else than to remember her.
He sits like that for maybe an hour, eventually bringing his knees up and hugging his legs towards him. The floor behinds him creaks and he spins around, heart stopped dead in his chest. It’s Seth, looking down at him with sleepless eyes – there’s pity there, too, and it makes Creeley feel more hopeless than before. Creeley is frozen, twisted around looking up at him with the locket hidden away in the tight grip of his hand.
Instead of what he could have done, Seth steps to him and slowly lowers himself down to his level.
Seth knows that Creeley isn’t like him – he feels his father through his body, fighting against him – but he figures it’s what anyone would need. Damn it, if this isn’t what he needed. So he sits by his brother in silence. He waits for Creeley’s body to relax and unwind before they just sit there quietly, hearing each other breathe. Something glints from between Creeley’s fingers, and Seth realises what this is.
The candle nearly burns out to the bottom before he blows it out and mutters something Seth can’t hear under his breath, but then again, it’s not for him to hear. It's just for the distant star in the brightening sky. The candle is only a few centimetres of wax now, and Creeley will have to pay for it in an hour or so.
Creeley Turner was something of a messy mixture of fear and softness, emotion so deep he threw it up if he was shoved too hard. He was a collection of names his father had for him. He is words of assurance from his brother, words of warning before a storm, and his mother’s voice, dying quickly in his head. He is a collection of scars, missed shots, and the dead bodies of people he didn’t – couldn’t – kill.
A prison cell is not too different from the place he learned to call home. Hell, if anything, it was better than home.
The man who made him is rotting away somewhere, not here to see what he’s made. Or maybe this wasn’t his doing.
Because it’s in prison that Creeley learns what anger is. Creeley Turner finally – finally – learns how to take everything he’s ever suffered through in life, and everything he will suffer and turn it into anger. For the first time, he wants to put that into a gun, and he wants to fire it, and he wants to hit something. He wants to kill something.
Well, if he’s in prison for nothing, he sure would like to give them a real reason.
Creeley Turner is a mixture of the guilt of people he got killed and a mixture of his father’s leather belt wrapping itself around his back. He’s trying to find the right in this.
But he also knows he deserves the anger.
When they took him away, he thrashed and screamed – not because it was unjust, but because it was his brother who put him there. The scars on his side stung and the scabs opened up again, fresh red blossoming on his shirt; he gave them to himself as soon as he realised what was going to happen because of the way he opened his mouth. But not even he could have predicted how years of anger and the prospect of a new life could blow up across church walls.
They don’t let you have sharp things in a prison cell, but he doesn’t forget that he’s still waiting on a few more lines on his skin. Creeley never learned how to write, but he knows how to count. The stretch of his sides can acclaim to it.
It isn’t uncommon for men to cry in prison. But he’s too scared to try it, as if in fear that his tears would summon his father’s ghost.
His days in prison are cut short when he’s offered a deal; a debt he would end up paying back for the rest of his life in sums of blood and tears. When he asks them for some time to think on it, the man in the trim suit scoffs and says:
“We’re giving you an out – with pay, might I add – and you still need to think about it?”
“Yeah,” Creeley says, unfettered.
On that same September night, he wishes his mother a happy birthday sans locket and he's already made his decision. Prison made Creeley different, to say the least, but he stills gets a cold shiver up his spine at night, a sting in his side, and his eyes prickle with tears every now and then. It catches him by surprise, everything that’s bubbling up inside of him. Maybe leaving the prison walls wasn’t the best idea. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself.
But that’s fine. They’d tell him what to do with himself.
When he leaves, Eggers Hyde tells him he chose the outfit himself. He hands him a gun and his mother’s locket.
Now he knows what it feels like to be the person behind the gun when whoever’s in front of him croaks out the last of their life. And he’s the one to end it, because he’s paid to.
And he’s good at pointing his gun in the right direction.
He’s close to Seth – he can feel it in the air and he pretends it doesn’t bother him, like the anger in him doesn’t gather between his eyes and shoot through his hands every time he pulls the trigger.
One day he meets a girl called Bessie. When she stands in front of him, with her palm outstretched and her hand on her hip, he sees a fighting woman and sees himself in her. They’re similar that way, he learns, except for the fact she can read. It sparks an envy inside of him, but he needs her now in more ways than one. It’s fanciful, the fact that even after Seth stands in front of him and he points his gun at his own brother, that he thinks maybe she could teach him to read. How to write his own name, at least.
Although the gun is pointed at Seth, it’s Seth who pushes his own forehead against it.
Creeley earns back the steadiness in his arms when he fires his gun six times in a row – when he hits all six of his targets while Seth cowers in front of him a few days later in the centre of town. Maybe this is how his father felt, all power and height.
He’s not his father.
What he hadn’t planned on is ending up back inside a cell. He just kicks back there and finds that it’s not too terrifying, except for the fact that he can’t keep his body moving, and that Eggers Hyde is expecting something. He needs a way out without him, but he only sees a way out from him.
Perhaps he hadn’t planned on a visit from Bessie, either. It’s a pleasant surprise, and he thinks they’re two helpless people who are just biting their way through to solace. Does she know it like he does – that they’ll never find it?
He steps up to the bars and finds out that she means a lot to him, only he won’t say it or show it. He knows that because she’s not as scared as he is and she says it out loud to him, the vitriol carefully laced with the care they have around one another; the care that wrapped the ribbon around her waist and the care that brought her standing in front of him here. And what he doesn’t say out loud is that he feels guilt – for a lot of things – mainly, for the fact he’s strung her along in this.
She’s the sheriff’s daughter and that’s his leverage – she says it like it’s a bargaining chip and not a vital piece of background information or a key cause of her pain and suffering.
So, the locket weighing heavy in the folds of his clothes, he hands to her.
“You – uh. You hold onto it for me til I get out, okay?”
It’s the only promise he can make right now, probably. Bessie meets his eyes and he’s not sure he deserves this, but there they are again. A mixture of failures and wrongs, meeting each other in Wyoming fashion. He tells her he wanted to be a teacher and she laughs; it’s a kind laugh, hopeful and wistful all at once. But in the back of her head, she distantly reminds herself to teach him to write his own name.
It’s nearly October, and they hope to be far away from here soon. She tries to give him back the locket and he’s angry about it, thrusting it back into her own grasp. He stands next to his brother less than a day after he shot at him. And Eggers Hyde is gone, but there's someone bigger holding the ropes now.
The town is bound to them in a strange, suffocating way. Bessie’s room does as a temporary place to stay and neither of them can promise anything better but their own hope that they’ll be gone soon enough. Soon being tomorrow, or next year. Another September.
They’re lying in the candlelight waiting for sleep when he asks:
“Hey, can I have that?”
She looks at him quizzically to see him eyeing up the locket on her neck. She looks at him wide-eyed for a second before he calms her.
“It’s her birthday. I mean – sometime, this month. I just – uh —”
In an instant, it’s her calming him instead, softly telling him that it’s all right. She sits up and takes it off, placing it softly in his palms. He sits up next to her and tries to thank her but nothing comes out but a choked sob. Her fingers brush against his side before she gets out of bed, saying nothing of it.
He watches her move across the small room they call home. The record player – of course; he smiles to himself. And when she’s back by his side, he wraps her up in his arms with the necklace in his hand and her own mother’s voice serenading them. And they find themselves content in this moment and in this town, and he only hopes that Bessie is with him for the many Septembers they’ll live through. Perhaps, the best sort of solace either of them could ever hope for is here, right now.
He'll take it.