“All right. That’s all I wanted to know. Thank you, sheriff. You can get on down to the jail now. I may have some customers for you before long.”
The man shuffled off, and the shoeman turned to us. “Now, you kids listen to me—one yip out of you and I’ll have you turned in for most any misdemeanor I can think of. I can have this young one shut up in a detention home, and you, my friend, you can loll in the county jail for a while and see how you like it. Now, I’m givin’ you a chance. You can take the overshoes. I’ll do that much for you, but I’m keepin’ the bill. I might just turn it in to the government—let ’em go to work trackin’ down the counterfeiters. So take your choice—git out with the overshoes or yip just once and see what happens to you.”
We were helpless and I knew it. He could tell almost any lie about us; he could trump up any one of a half dozen stories to get us into trouble, and he could produce a half dozen little rabbit-men who would let themselves be bullied into becoming his accomplices.
I had never wanted to strike another person so much in my life, but I realized that here was real danger. Here was a liar and a thief who had us at his mercy, and he knew it. We picked up the box containing the overshoes and walked out. Joey’s face was white; I expect mine was too. I glanced back just once, and the man was looking at us with half closed eyes and a hateful little smile on his mouth.
We got out of town as quickly as possible; we got out without saying a word to one another. Once out on the highway I glanced at Joey and saw tears all over his face. I was miserable as we walked down the highway together.
Finally I said, “It’s my fault, Joey. I had to impress a small-time gangster that I had money in my wallet. We could have paid for your overshoes with dollar bills and the old man wouldn’t have got any big ideas. I’m a stupid fool—there’s no doubt about it. I ought to be kicked from here to Omaha.”
Joey grinned as he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’m not goin’ to kick you while I’m wearin’ my twenty dollar overshoes, little brother,” he said, mimicking Charley’s patronizing tone.
We felt somewhat better because we were able to laugh. I knew it was pointless to dwell on our loss; I tried to get my mind on other things, but the shoeman’s meanness and sheer gall would flash back in my mind in spite of myself. Sometimes I clenched my fists and could almost feel the impact of my knuckles against his ugly face.
In spite of our loss we weren’t as poor as we had been at times that year. We still had Emily’s cookies and the bag of pecans, and Joey had over four dollars in his pockets. A few months earlier we would have felt wealthy with those assets.
Late in the afternoon, after a ten mile lift in a farmer’s truck and what must have been a five-mile walk on our own, we had a bit of luck in finding a place to sleep. It was a country school-house, and a thin curl of smoke from the chimney told me that a fire had been banked in the stove for the night. I figured if we could get inside we’d have a warm place to rest until morning.
To our surprise the door wasn’t locked. The latch was broken, and there had been no attempt made to bar entrance. Once inside we could understand the lack of concern over a lock; there just wasn’t anything of value to be taken. There were fifteen or twenty desks, a few of them broken down, all of them ink-covered and scratched. There was an ancient globe, a few dull-looking textbooks, and a stretch of blackboard on which someone, probably a teacher, had written, “Reduce to the lowest common denominator,” but whatever was to have been reduced was erased. That written command somehow amused me, sourly and unhappily. I didn’t quite know why.
The schoolroom didn’t look like much. I could imagine how kids hated being there. We poked around for a while, but there wasn’t much to see; besides, we were dead tired, and so we pulled a couple of desks up to the big stove and stretched our legs out toward the warmth. We took out four of Emily’s cookies and handful of pecans for our supper, and while we ate, we talked about one thing and another, both of us avoiding the painful subject of our humiliation in the shoe shop. Then as darkness filled the room, we wrapped ourselves in the blanket Emily had given us and made the dusty floor our bed for the night.
We slept heavily in spite of anger and worry. I woke up when the first light of morning began drifting in and got up quietly to stand at one of the grimy windows. I looked out at the morning for a long time, trying to think straight.
I tried to make plans as I stood there. With Joey’s money we could eat a little for a few days; with luck we could catch a few long rides during the day and find a few warm spots where we could rest at night. It surely wouldn’t be too long until we’d reach Nebraska, and Nebraska meant Lonnie and Lonnie meant comfort and protection. Even as that thought came to me, however, I realized that Joey and I could not knock at Lonnie’s door some morning and say, “Here we are. Be a father to us.” I was not quite that childish. Somehow we had to show him that we were able to get along, that our need for him was only a need for friendship. In the back of my mind, though, I knew that it was the need of two kids who were fearful of a black abyss which they might have to face alone.
Joey stirred restlessly in half-wakeful sleep. “Will we have any breakfast, Josh?” he asked.
I couldn’t answer for a moment; then I called to him, telling him we’d better be getting on our way, that maybe we’d find something to eat farther down the road.
We had breakfast in the next little town. I made Joey eat an egg and toast and drink a cup of hot cocoa. I had only cocoa after I’d convinced Joey that I wasn’t hungry. A guy who could help bring about the loss of twenty dollars as I had done, could simply pull his belt a little tighter.
We walked long distances during the next few weeks, getting a lift now and then, usually in some farmer’s truck. Occasionally we got a fifty-mile ride, and on two or three red-letter days we were treated to a hot dog or a chocolate bar by some kindly driver. We found places to sleep—a hallway in the business section of a town, a rail-road depot, a haystack on a mild night; a few times some families let us have a bed for a quarter, but as Joey’s money dwindled, we saved every cent for food which was more important than a bed.
As the winds grew harsher and the snow deeper, I worried about Joey. The bitter February weather we encountered as we moved into Kansas was a threat to anyone as undernourished and over-tired as we were. Surprisingly enough, however, Joey’s health was better than mine. I developed a deep cough that grew worse with each day, and it was Joey who spent his last dime to buy cough medicine for me; it was Joey who begged at kitchen doors and brought food to me at times when my legs refused to go any farther.
The business of keeping alive became harder each day. We kept our spirits up by reminding ourselves that we were getting nearer and nearer to Lonnie; that was true, but we were paying a steep price for the fulfillment of our goal.
8
We got to Nebraska the last week in February, exhausted, penniless, and hungry. Joey tried to pick up a few coins by singing and accompanying his songs on the banjo, but icy winds made his fingers numb and the problems of people in general made them hurry past him without paying much attention to the plea that promoted his singing. He did get one windfall, though in the gift of some beef bones from a kindly butcher who heard Joey’s songs and helped him in the kind of coin a butcher could afford.
It was a precious gift, and we eagerly hunted one of the shabbiest houses we could locate—we tended to seek out people as shabby as we were—and we had the good fortune to meet an old man who agreed to boil the bones on his cookstove for a share of the soup. He was a gentle old man, very quiet and sometimes seeming a little dazed. He asked us no questions, but he frowned when I had a particularly hard coughing spell; later he picked up the broken shoes, which I had taken off to dry in front of the fire, and he spent a long time fitting cardboard soles inside them. When we were leaving, he gave me a pair of heavy gray socks and in the quavering voice of aged people, warned me about keeping my feet dry.
We asked d
irections many times, and every day we moved a little farther toward Omaha. I was burning with fever as we trudged on, but I didn’t let Joey know about that or about how much my lungs hurt. I suppose he just thought that I was mean when I snapped at him or ignored his questions. I should have told him how sick I was, but I didn’t.
We stopped one noon at a tar-paper shack near the rail-road tracks, and Joey asked the woman who came to the door if she could give us something to eat. I said nothing, but as I looked at her, it occurred to me that her face was burning with fever too. Her eyes were red and watery, and there were bright red fever spots on. her cheeks. She was terribly thin and feeble-looking; I almost knew that we had chosen the wrong place to beg.
The woman screamed at Joey as if he had committed some crime in asking for something to keep us alive. “What would you have me do?” she asked in a high, wild sort of voice. “Would you have me hand out food to every tramp when my own children have just one meal a day? Do you think I can stretch the little I have to feed tramp-children and see my own starve tomorrow?”
It was dreadful to watch her, to listen to her. The feverish brightness in her eyes made her look like a madwoman. Then as we stood there, not knowing what to say or do, she began to sob in the awful hysterical way Florinda had sobbed on the night of the fire.
I turned away, feeling some pity for her but more anger. “Just a plain No would be plenty to get rid of us, lady,” I muttered. “You needn’t go into details.”
But Joey was different. He went up to her and spoke in a low voice. “It’s all right,” he told her. “We know how hard times are.”
She pulled her apron up and hid her face in it, but Joey and I could hear her sobs as we walked down the snowy street. The experience shook us; we knew we had to try again at some other house, but the wildness of the woman we’d just left made us dread to ask anyone else.
We had just turned a corner at the end of the block when I heard her coming down the street and calling to us in the same hysterical voice. I wanted to run from her, but I couldn’t. We waited as she came up to us, bareheaded and without a coat in the freezing wind.
“You must come back; you’re hungry children, and I’ve sinned against others as unfortunate as my own. I can’t rest tonight if I have to remember that I’ve denied children because they aren’t my own.” She was pulling at Joey’s arm, but she seemed to be pleading with me. “You’ve got to listen. You must come back. Please. We’ll stretch our meal to help fill all of us.”
I didn’t want to go back with her, but I was almost afraid to refuse. She looked so desperate, so determined that we free her from her feeling of guilt. And so we thanked her and walked soberly back to the shack where children were standing at the windows gazing out at their mother and the two strange boy-tramps.
Inside the kitchen we sat at a bare table with six children lined up beside us. Quickly, the woman lifted the lid from a kettle of soup and poured more water inside. She had stopped crying, but she talked to herself in a strange way as she ladled the soup out into bowls. “We will eat,” she kept repeating. “We will eat, all of us. My hungry children will eat and another woman’s hungry children too. We will eat today, and maybe the Lord will provide for tomorrow.”
When we left the woman’s house, we followed the railroad tracks to the outskirts of town. Near the tracks we found a deserted shed and an empty oil drum in which we built a fire. I told Joey I thought we’d better rest for a day or two before going any farther; privately I wondered if I would ever be able to get myself out on the highway again.
The next day I was too weak to get up, so Joey went out begging alone. He had real luck at one house. A woman gave him a whole loaf of bread, fresh and brown from the oven. I was drowsy with fever when he brought the loaf in to show me, but as I fell asleep, I felt a kind of satisfaction that the bread would provide us with food for the next few days.
When I woke up, Joey was gone, and it was nearly dark when he returned. “You know the lady that gave us the soup—the one that cried so hard?” he asked. “Well, I took half of our bread to her. She was so happy she said to thank—” He stopped, frightened and amazed, I suppose, as I lurched toward him.
“You gave away our bread, you little fool? Here we are starving and you give away food enough to keep us alive for days—”
“She gave us food, don’t forget that,” Joey said gruffly, moving away from me.
“She gave us a bowl of thin soup. And I don’t care if she gave us beefsteak—we need that bread. You march yourself right back and tell her we have to have it.” I hardly knew what I was saying. There was just a burning anger inside me; no reason, no feeling of compassion or pity.
Joey’s thin face was hard as he faced me. “You can yell at me till you’re blue, and a lot of good it will do you. It was my bread, and I had a right to do what I pleased with it. And I’m not mean enough to forget people that have been good to me even if you are.”
Joey didn’t know how sick I was. He didn’t know. If he had only known, he would have handled me differently. But he didn’t. He didn’t know.
I struck Joey. It was the first time in my life I’d ever struck him. When I was little, I had been jealous sometimes and resentful, but I’d never laid a hand on him roughly. During the months we’d been on the road, I had come to love him more than anyone else in the world. But as he stood before me, defiant and angry, I forgot the years of training in decent behavior that I had received when I was young. The fever, the feeling of desperation, the red rage—all these things got the better of me. In that blind minute I struck a frail boy five years younger than I was, a boy who had once fed a hungry cat on a night that now seemed a hundred years away, a boy who had given a half loaf of bread to a woman and her hungry children.
Joey fell and I froze in a kind of agony at what I had done. I stood there staring at him on the ground, still staring when he leaped back to his feet and faced me with blazing eyes.
Joey was not at a loss for words. “I’ve taken a lot from you, Josh, and this is the last. I’m through with you. I’m through right now and for as long as I live. I can take care of myself, and as far as I’m concerned, you can go to the Devil.” He grabbed his coat and the banjo; it was strange that I should notice it at such a time, but I felt glad that he was wearing his overshoes. When he went outside, he banged the door of the shed.
I don’t know how long I stood there. The fever brought strange patterns to my mind, thoughts that spun in circles, repeating themselves over and over as each circle was completed. “My brother is gone, my brother is gone,” whirled through my brain. And then, “Lowest common denominator, lowest common denominator, reduced to the lowest common denominator.”
When I opened the door, the twilight had become night. I think I called Joey several times; at least I tried to call him. Then I stumbled out and across the fields in a blind search for him. The half loaf of bread lay on the floor beside the oil drum we had used as a stove.
I had no plan of search for Joey, no sense of direction. I just struck out blindly and kept going except when a seizure of coughing threatened to tear my chest wide open. Whenever that happened, I’d lean against a tree or a fence until I was able to go on. Sometimes I’d think I saw a little figure that looked like Joey in the distance, and I’d run toward it only to find it was some stationary object that suggested a boy’s form in the darkness.
“He’ll come back—he’ll get over his mad spell and come back,” I commenced to tell myself after I’d searched for a long time. I decided I’d better go back to the shed, better be there when Joey got back. “I’ll apologize,” I repeated over and over again. “I’ll make it right with Joey.”
I tried for a long time to find the shed again, but I was lost. There was only black night around me and snow that had melted a little during the day and was now a shallow river of slush with a thin layer of freezing crust on the surface. My shoes were filled with water; neither the cardboard soles that the old man had fitted for me no
r the heavy socks he’d given me were of any use in keeping out the snow and water.
Panic hit me finally when neither the shed nor Joey could be found. There wasn’t a single lighted window in sight, not a doorway where I could find shelter. I coughed so hard that I finally lost my balance and fell. The effort to get up again was too much. “I guess I’m going to die,” I thought, and stopped trying to do anything about it.
I had heard that one’s whole life passes before his eyes at such a time,.but one segment of mine is all that I remember seeing. I seemed to go back to a time when I was a little boy, sick with croup or some childhood ailment. I was lying in Dad’s lap with my head against his shoulder, and he was rocking me in the big leather chair that Mom kept in front of the stove in winter. His arms felt strong and comforting; he patted my back rhythmically as he rocked, and he sang to me, an old Polish song of his own childhood. I could feel the vibration of his deep voice when I placed my hand against his chest. That was all there was to the memory. After that the light in my brain was turned out.
Voices came after a while, voices that sounded a thousand miles away. I had a sensation of being moved, of wet shoes and socks being taken off, and of warmth enveloping me. Once I thought I could feel wheels beneath me and could hear the sound of them on the road. Then I gave up and knew nothing at all.
When I woke up, I was in a bed with warm blankets covering me. There was winter sunshine coming in through the windows, and the fragrance of a rich, meaty soup was in the air. When a coughing fit hit me, the hand and arm of a man appeared; my head was lifted, and the hand placed a spoonful of sweet, tangy medicine between my lips. I swallowed, and the coughing stopped for a while.
Everything was silent except for the crackle of fire in a big stove that took up one end of the room. I was puzzled about where I was, but too tired and weak to care very much. I knew that someone was sitting beside me, someone whose hand and arm had lifted my head and given me medicine. Someone was kind.