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Tex stretches her legs out in front of her, wracked with shifting, turning in place nerves as she swishes the wine in a thick glass. For once, she isn’t drinking. It’s spring. The wine is for Passover.
But really, it’s just her and MacCready on the floor of the trailer where Diamond City Radio broadcasts from. Months of planning, of held in excitement on her part, result in two friends (are they friends now?) who’d normally prefer splitting the bottle to regarding it as something steeped in religious symbolism.
Or maybe that’s just MacCready.
It’s the plagues that drag on for him and make him want a drink, a cigarette, some radscorpion venom to chug, a smile on his face as he collapses and drifts into oblivion. Her storytelling is subpar. Heck, it’s remarkably bad, and she sounds like she’s about to cry every five minutes or so.
He wants to hold her hand.
It isn’t until she lifts the wine to his lips and with a tenuous smile proclaims, “L’chaim!” that he feels--
something.
“I’m just cobbling together, like, the whole history of a People here. I’m sorry, MacCready. It’s gotta be the most boring thing I’ve ever done for someone.”
“At least you care.” Maybe he’s kidding, but there are two candles flickering on the nearby desk, and his eyes are brighter still.
“We can stop here, after this.”
And then she’s singing. She’s moving her mouth and making words and it sounds like low-pitched birds, but he has no idea what language it is.
Sure, MacCready's clueless, but it’s a song strung from Micah and Isaiah like little droplets, little tears clinging together to make a transparent necklace, something Tex is proud to wear because it only shows when she lets it.
“So you know, it means if someone had paid attention to what ties us together, maybe the bombs never would’ve dropped.”
“Shoulda, woulda.” It comes out more casual than bittersweet, which he regrets. “And I dunno, boss, that’s a little long winded for-- what was it?”
“Lo yisa goy el goy cherev, lo yilmedu od milchama.” She speaks it this time, fast and as though she’s been waiting to say it again, waiting on the edge of her seat to get that identity back, to scrape up the pieces of her.
“What’s it called?”
“...Lo yisa fuckin’ goy, Mac.”
“The language, boss.”
“Hebrew. It was called Hebrew.”
The turntable crackles, needle accepted into pressed wax rings, vibrating like an aural hug, like an allover warmth akin to the belonging that history offers.
“She’s not singing in it, though.”
“Nah, this stuff’s Christian. Gospel. Different, and exactly the same, y’know?” She sings along in a whisper. “Ain’t gonna study war no more, ain’t gonna study war no more.”
It goes without saying, MacCready thinks. War’s everything. Everything’s war. You can’t know it all, you can’t study it. You can’t stretch your arms over every dang battlefield when that’s all there is-- when every inch of the world is war.
He frowns.
“You don’t like my voice, do you?”
“I don’t like how sad this makes you.”
“I’m a Jew; it’s part of the package I signed up for when I converted back in college.”
“Your voice is fine, boss. It’s just weird as heck to hear a real person singing, and in a different language, no less.”
“Lo yisa goy el goy cherev,” she begins, in song again. “It’s an ancient language. My people have hurt in wars for millennia-- been hurt, and hurt others. Nothing really changes, huh? Everyone is complicit somewhere along the line.”
“No one is innocent.” He wishes that were a lie. He wishes life were as easy as comic book good and evil. He wishes she wouldn’t sing, but she does, and the truth is that it fills him with a spectacular sadness, one she can’t know.
“I studied the Torah for years and I barely remember a fuckin’ word of it now. Songs? Songs, I can do. Every seder was like a little musical.”
“Speaking tongues here again, boss.”
“A seder is what I’m sharing with you. A musical is-- a musical is fucking implausible. Wonderful. It’s history, it’s-- it’s just dead stuff, you know? Indulgent.” Theatre: indulgent, superfluous, nonsense? She shudders as she hears the words come from her own mouth. “No, that’s-- it’s not true. They were hope, musicals. They were humanity and language and everything was a song. You would’ve loved them.”
“Think so?”
“You know the power of hope, mister comic books.”
“I know how important it is to cling to a lie, just in case.”
“That’s called faith.”
“Uh... huh.”
“She was named Sister Rosetta Tharpe, by the way. The woman singing on the record.” The song ends, the guitar hushes, the choir dies. Tex replaces the needle on the outer ring of the record.
“I feel so bad in the morning. I feel so bad in the middle of the day,” she sings to MacCready. She’s no Rosetta Tharpe.
She doesn’t even have a guitar.