Chapter Text
In Steve’s earliest memory, he is sitting on the floor, head tipped back between his mother’s knees as she brushes out his hair, humming a harvest song as she dabs tallow on his scalp and brushes and brushes and eventually he tips his head forward and she braids his hair tight-tight at the base of his skull. In his memory, it seems like she braids forever, but he knows he was a sick little kid who never got enough to eat and his hair was always breaking like strands of cornsilk. When she finally ties off the end of the braid, he just sits there, basking in her presence and the warm hands stroking gently from his temples to his braid. The gentle slide of her humming fades away.
It’s his earliest memory, and it always leaves him shivering because it’s his only memory of his mother before she got sick. After that, he remembers in bits and pieces the bitter cold winter that came and brought a cough that never seemed to leave her, until finally she was bundled away to the New York City Municipal Sanitorium for Tuberculosis because it was the only place that would take her that spring.
Eventually, he found his way to a crammed tenement in Brooklyn where no one cared if he was Tuscarora and five years younger than he said he was, as long as he kept his hair tucked up and paid his rent on time. If the subways and trolleys ran on time and he didn’t get winded walking, it only took him two hours to get to the sanitorium and sit for a time with his mother, on alternating Sundays, and whenever he resented a minute of it he made himself remember how much worse it would be, if he’d been shipped off to that awful Thomas School near Niagara.
On the tenth Sunday after he moves to Brooklyn, she smiles serenely as he hums her harvest song and brushes out her hair. The sanitorium won’t allow her any tallow, but the motions are mostly the same. Her hair is raven-dark against her ashen skin, and he tries to be gentle as he makes two loose plaits that frame her face and trail onto the blanket over her rattling ribcage. He finishes, and the smile she gives him is like the sun, as bright and warm as that earliest memory. She falls asleep with the smile still caught on her lips, to the feeling of his hands, too large for his slight frame but deft and warm, stroking gently from her temples to her braids. Her hair is still braided when she dies the next week.