Boyd Joseph Drake

A Carpenter's Son

Boyd Joseph Drake was born on 12 March 1969 in Denver, Colorado, the second of three children of Matthew Drake and Helen Drake (née Marsh). His father was a carpenter who built and repaired houses across the city's older neighbourhoods. His mother taught at an elementary school in Aurora for thirty years and was the more patient of his parents, which in that household was not a high bar. Boyd's elder sister, Carol Anne Drake, was born in 1966, and his younger brother, Michael James Drake, in 1972.

The family lived in a brick bungalow in the Park Hill district with a basement workshop that Matthew treated as his own country. Boyd was allowed into it at eight, on condition that he touched nothing until told, and spent most of his childhood there learning to sand, plane, and fit by watching his father do it. Matthew was a good carpenter and a hard man to work for. He praised rarely, corrected often, and expected his son to know without being told when a joint was not right.

Boyd was an indifferent student and a capable one with his hands. At fourteen he bought a broken 1960s Schwinn from a neighbour's garage sale for five dollars, stripped it to the frame, and rebuilt it over a winter. He sold it in the spring for forty. It was the beginning of a habit that lasted the rest of his life. There was rarely a time afterwards when he did not have an old bicycle in pieces somewhere, waiting for his attention.

Learning the Trade

He finished high school in 1987 and went straight to work as an apprentice with a Denver firm that specialised in finishing and restoration work on the city's older buildings. He was good at it, and better at the finish than at the frame. He had his father's eye for a fit and none of his father's temper, and by his early twenties he was trusted with stairs, panelling, and the fiddly joinery that older carpenters preferred to avoid.

Denver did not hold him. He wanted out from under his father's shadow and out of a city where every job seemed to involve someone who knew Matthew Drake. In 1992, at twenty-three, he packed his tools into a pickup and drove to Seattle, where the building trade was busy and nobody knew his name. He liked the city at once, including the rain, and claimed for the rest of his life that he had moved there for it.

He met Grace Elise Lawson in 1994 at a wedding at which he was installing a hired dance floor and she was running the evening. She was twenty-four, from Tacoma, quick, funny, and the most organised person he had ever met. She told him the floor was crooked. It was not, and he proved it with a level, and she laughed and admitted she had wanted an excuse to talk to him. They married in Tacoma in the summer of 1996.

The House in Ballard

The couple bought a narrow two-storey house in Ballard in 1997, and Boyd turned its detached garage into a workshop within a week of moving in. Their daughter, Jenna Elise Drake, was born on 17 May 1998, and their son, Ethan Joseph Drake, on 3 August 2001.

Boyd worked as a finish carpenter for a succession of Seattle firms and, for long stretches, for himself, fitting out apartments, offices, and restaurants across the city. He was steady and well regarded and never particularly well paid. Grace's career in events was the more ambitious of the two, and the more demanding of her time, and it was Boyd who was at home most evenings and weekends with the children. He did not mind. He was a better father than he had been a son, partly because he had decided early that he would not be his own father.

Jenna took to the garage the way Boyd once had, and he taught her as he would have wanted to be taught: by letting her try, watching her get it wrong, and saying nothing until she asked. By her teens she was arguing with him about joinery and sometimes winning. Ethan, quieter and more interested in computers than in wood, Boyd understood less well and loved no less, and he spent a good deal of his son's adolescence trying to find things they could do together that did not involve a plane or a saw. Bicycles, in the end, were the answer.

His father died in Denver in 2009, and Boyd drove there for the funeral and stood at the graveside with a feeling he could not name, which was not quite grief. His mother died in 2014. After that his ties to Denver thinned to a Christmas card from Carol and the occasional call from Michael.

A Long Contract

By 2018 Boyd was forty-nine, his knees were going, and the work was getting harder to find. Seattle's building boom had brought in larger firms and cheaper crews, and the jobs he was offered paid less than they had a decade earlier. When a subcontracting agency approached him late that year about a long-term contract with Killerton Enterprises, finishing the interiors of a large residential development at a remote site, he listened. The pay was better than anything he had been offered in years. The details of the location were vague in ways he noticed and decided not to press.

Grace did not like it. They argued about it for a week and then agreed that he would go for the length of one contract, send the money home, and come back. Neither of them, at that stage, understood what the contract was.

Boyd crossed into Clivilius on 2 February 2019, one of a crew of Killerton-recruited finish carpenters assigned to The Arlington under a Dutch-trained foreman named Christophorus Aveskamp. He understood within an hour of arriving that he would never be going home. No one but a Guardian could cross back to Earth, and the journey he had just made was one way. He spent his first night on a cot in a tent in the Tent Community, sitting on its edge with his boots still on. The next morning he went to work, because there was nothing else to do.

The Arlington

The Arlington was two twenty-storey towers going up on a dusty plain beside a river, under a sky with no stars, at a pace he had never seen on any site on Earth. Boyd's crew fitted out the interiors: partitions, doors, stairs, cabinetry, and the joinery that turned bare concrete into homes. He was the oldest man on the crew by nearly a decade, and the slowest, and the one the others came to when something would not fit.

He took to Christophorus slowly. The foreman was nearly twenty years younger, exacting, and cold with men he did not yet trust, and Boyd, who had spent his childhood under a man like that, did not enjoy it. He began calling him "the Dutchman", partly as a joke and partly as a mild act of resistance, and the name spread across the whole project. Over the months that followed the two came to a grudging respect, chiefly over a run of staircases in Tower A that Boyd fitted without a single complaint from the quality inspectors.

The work kept him upright. The dry air split timber and cracked his hands, the hours were long, and the knees that had been failing in Seattle got worse, but the towers rose and he could see what he had put into them. When the first residents moved into Tower A at the start of July 2019, and the project was completed eight weeks ahead of schedule in August, he felt a pride he had not felt in his work for years. He wrote to Grace about it. The censors at the Portal Complex removed most of the letter.

The Invitation

By the end of the Arlington contract, Boyd had accepted that Bixbus was where he would live the rest of his life. There was more building than there were hands to do it, and the Bixbus Founding Architecture Project kept him on its crews. What he could not accept was living it without his family. In September 2019 he sent a long message through the Communications Centre to Seattle, telling Grace, Jenna, and Ethan as much of the truth as he was permitted, and asking them to come.

The family argued about it through the autumn. Grace did not want to go. Jenna did, and argued for it harder than Boyd himself. Ethan said little. By the beginning of December, Grace agreed. Boyd received the news with a relief so great that he went out to the river and sat by it for an hour.

A week later, on 8 December 2019, Grace died at home in Ballard of a ruptured brain aneurysm. She was forty-nine. Jenna found her.

Boyd learned of it two days later, in a short message that crossed in the next communications window. There was no question of his going back for the funeral. He had known since his first hour in Bixbus that the crossing could not be reversed, and he knew it again now with a force that kept him sitting on the ground outside his tent until it was dark. His children, twenty-one and eighteen, buried their mother without him. On the evening of the funeral he sat inside the tent with a photograph of Grace propped against a toolbox, and did not speak to anyone for two days.

Two Children and a Debt

Jenna and Ethan crossed into Bixbus on 5 February 2020. Boyd was waiting. He had prepared what he would say and said none of it. Jenna hugged him and was furious with him, and both of those things were plain on her face, and Boyd accepted both without argument. Ethan barely spoke for weeks.

Boyd believed, privately and for a long time, that Grace had died because of him. He had asked her to give up everything, she had argued against it for three months, and a week after she agreed she was dead. He knew enough to understand that an aneurysm did not work like that. He believed it anyway. He did not know, and did not learn for several years, that his daughter believed exactly the same thing about herself.

The first year was hard on all three of them. They shared Boyd's tent in the Tent Community, crowded, hot by day and cold by night, with a family on either side close enough to hear every argument. Boyd stayed on the construction crews through 2020, finishing interiors on new developments across the city, and came home to a tent where his son sat in silence and his daughter came in late from a workshop she had built in a shipping container. He did not know how to reach either of them. He did what he knew how to do, which was to keep working and keep turning up.

Benches

In 2021 he asked Jenna whether she needed a hand with a commission. She said yes, he suspected mostly to see what he would do. The job was a set of benches for the Bixbus Event Collective, and they spent two months building them together in her workshop by the river, saying very little. At the end of it they were able to talk about Grace for the first time. Jenna told him she had not forgiven him for leaving. He told her he knew. It was, both of them later agreed, the best conversation they had had in years.

Ethan came round more slowly. In 2021 Boyd found a bicycle frame in a salvage pile behind the Arlington site, brought it home, and left it in the corner of the tent with a box of parts. Ethan rebuilt it over a month without either of them mentioning it. After that they rebuilt bicycles together most weekends, and it was over a stripped-down frame on the tent floor that Ethan finally asked his father what their mother had been like when they first met.

Boyd left the Tent Community in 2022, when the Bixbus Housing Authority found him a small apartment near the river, close to Jenna's workshop. He kept working through 2022 and 2023, though his knees kept him off ladders and he took more of the bench work and less of the site work. He liked Elias Rocha, the Dunwich stonemason Jenna began seeing in 2022, almost at once, chiefly because Elias argued with her about joinery as fiercely as Boyd once had. He walked his daughter to the front of the garden at her wedding in October 2023 and noticed her mother's scarf on the arch and said nothing about it, because nothing needed saying.

Grandfather

Alina Grace Rocha was born on 14 June 2024. From that autumn Boyd called on Jenna most afternoons and took his granddaughter for long walks along the river in a pram he had rebuilt himself from salvaged parts. He told people it was to give Jenna a few hours' work. It was also, he admitted once to Ethan, the first time in his life he had been able to spend whole afternoons with a child without anywhere else he needed to be. Alina's first word was the name she had settled on for him.

Ethan married Naomi Evers in 2024, and their son, Leo, was born the following year. Boyd retired from the construction crews in the spring of 2025, at fifty-six, when his knees finally made the decision for him. He kept a workbench in a corner of Jenna's workshop and a stand of half-rebuilt bicycles in his apartment, and he took on small repair jobs for neighbours when he felt like it.

By 2026 Boyd was fifty-seven, a widower and a grandfather of two, living a few streets from both his children in a city that had not existed when he turned forty-nine. He still thought about Grace most days. He still sometimes thought about Denver and Seattle, and about the life he would have had if the agency had never called. But on the afternoons when he walked along the river with Alina asleep in the pram, he found he did not think about those things very much at all.