I thanked the man and said no, we’d have to be on our way.
“Where’s your way?” he asked. “Where are you goin’?”
It was a reasonable question. But I had no answer. I just looked up at him and shook my head.
“I thought so,” he said. He took a can of beans and tossed it on the ground at Joey’s feet. “Well, good luck, kids. You’d better hitchhike from now on. You’ll never be any good on trains after this. And if you want my advice, you better hitchhike home to your folks if you’ve got any.”
He walked off down the tracks without once turning to look back. Joey and I sat there watching him until he disappeared. Then we got up and, leaving the tracks, took off across a field, walking in complete silence but with our hands holding on tightly to one another. Never before had Joey been of so much worth to me as he was on that twilight trek across someone’s brown field. I kept thinking, “We’re just two now; there’s just Joey and me. Get used to it, because Howie is gone. We’re just two.”
We came finally to a ravine that cut through the field and to a footbridge that crossed the big ditch which was dry now, with a carpet of grass and weeds on its floor. The depth of the ravine afforded protection from the chilly wind, a wind that was sharper than it had been the night before in Chicago.
We threw our clothes and blankets and Howie’s banjo on a pile of leaves and sat down to rest. It was dark by that time, and the stillness out in that field was immense and terribly lonely. And then, worse than the stillness, came the faraway whistle of a train and the rumble of cars. A stab of agony went through me. I wondered if I would ever again be able to hear the noises of a train without hurting at the memory of Howie.
That night under the bridge, Joey and I cried together. It was the first time I had cried since I was a very small boy; there had always been a stubborn streak in me that refused to allow tears no matter how much I had been hurt. Not that night in the ravine.
Finally I made myself face the situation. I opened the can of beans with my knife and divided them between us. “We’ll eat, Joey, and then we’ll think things through.”
We felt a great deal better after we had eaten. The tramp-man’s gift restored some of the energy which fatigue and terror had drained from us. We leaned against the bank of the ravine and talked quietly together.
“Do you want to go home, Joey?” I asked. “Because if you do, I’ll hitchhike back with you and then strike out on my own.”
“You wouldn’t go home even if we got back to Chicago, would you?” Joey asked.
I thought of Dad’s face, of his anger. I pictured the contempt he’d have for my brief running away. I remembered Mom saying maybe it was best that I leave.
“I think I’d rather starve. I don’t want to starve, but it would be better than going back home. They won’t scold you, Joey; they’ll be glad to have you back. But me—I think I’ll take the chance on my own.”
Joey nodded. “I think I’ll take the chance with you,” he said.
I didn’t tell him that I was glad, but I was; deeply, gratefully glad. I said, “It’s going to be harder for us to find a job without—without Howie. It’s going to be rough. But maybe—”
There was still a maybe, still a thin hope. We had been so sure, so confident only twenty-four hours earlier. The future had looked so good as the three of us laughed under the el platform the night before.
We slept for a while, a troubled, restless sleep for me. It grew cold during the night, and toward morning we were awakened by a chill rain blowing in our faces. I got out an extra jacket for Joey and helped him to overcome the stiffness in his arms so that he could get into it.
We picked up our belongings and trudged through the wet meadow, hungry and still numb with our grief. I wanted to get to a town, someplace where there was a soup kitchen and maybe a chance of getting the job Howie and I had hoped to find. The memory, though, of that army of men meeting the train only a few hours before made me feel weak with despair. I wondered if there were any place in the world where Joey and I would be welcome.
Just a chance, I kept thinking, just one chance to dig a ditch or clean a cesspool—I wouldn’t ask to play a piano—just a chance to earn enough money for two good breakfasts.
We didn’t find a town that morning, but toward noon we came upon a ramshackle farmhouse, about as dreary a place as I had ever seen, even in the slum area where Howie had lived. The yard around it was hard-packed clay, and it was cluttered with all kinds of debris: piles of rotting boards, cracked dishes, some cast-off toys, broken-down chairs and other pieces of furniture. The only sign of life was a listless-looking white rooster which watched us indifferently for a minute and then took off on his long yellow legs. I had an idea that people as needy as we were had left this place, maybe with big plans, maybe telling themselves they knew they could make it.
We went inside and made a quick inspection. Nothing there. Nothing, that is, except a rusty old kitchen range, and that was a welcome sight.
We gathered wood and old papers from the yard, and in a few minutes we had a fire going that warmed our bodies and cheered our hearts. Joey almost embraced that stove for a while as his clothing dried. Gradually, the blueness left his lips, and he smiled at me. “Smells great, doesn’t it, Josh?” he asked, pointing to the smoke that swirled around the lids of the stove. It did. It smelled friendly and warm. It comforted the aching for Howie.
I went outside after a time, thinking maybe there might be a kitchen garden somewhere, that there might possibly be an overlooked hill of potatoes or a turnip or two. It was likely that people had been living there during the summer because their rooster was still roaming the place. Finally I did find a fenced-in lot that had evidently been a garden, but there were no overlooked potatoes or turnips in it. Nothing but weeds and crabgrass. Whoever lived there had made a clean sweep of everything edible. Everything, it suddenly occured to me, except the white rooster.
He was curious, that old fellow. He had come back to the yard and was studying me, cautiously, though, as if he sensed danger in the air. And truly there was danger for him at that minute, for I had a sudden vivid and ravenous vision of a boiled chicken dinner.
I made a dash for him, and he ran for his life. Neither of us was feeling too well that morning, but we were both desperate. We circled the house a couple of times with all the speed we could muster; finally he came to grief when he got tangled up in a mass of wire that had been thrown over the fence. I caught him there, and I felt a glow of elation that Joey and I would have food for the next several meals.
It took a long time to get our rooster ready for cooking. We found an old bucket in which we heated water to help remove the feathers. The same bucket had to be washed out and serve as a cooking kettle when I had at last done a pretty good job of getting the feathers removed. While I worked, Joey explored the heap of debris outside, finding a cracked china cup and a real treasure in the form of an old salt shaker with a packed and soggy mass of salt in the bottom. We dissolved the salt in hot water and saved the liquid to flavor our meat when it was done.
That rooster was, without doubt, one of the toughest fowls that had ever been hatched. We boiled it the rest of the day, testing it with our knife from time to time and finding the flesh just as tough and unyielding at twilight as it had been at noon.
The broth was pretty good, though; we took turns drinking it from the cracked cup, and though it wasn’t the best soup I’d ever tasted, it wasn’t too bad. The liver at least became tender after a few hours of cooking, and our rooster had a remarkably fine liver; I made Joey eat it while we waited hopefully for the rest of the meat to get done.
We enjoyed our meal, poor as it was, and that night as a cold rain pelted against the windows, we knew the wonderful security of a roof and a fire. It wasn’t our roof, of course, and I half expected that at any minute someone would appear and order us to be off. But such a time would have to be met when it came. For that hour of gathering darkness with the silence o
f the prairies all about us, I gave myself up to the warmth of the stove and the comfort of a pallet made of our blanket with our jackets rolled up for pillows.
Joey was soon asleep. I lay for a long time watching the trembling shadows which the light from the stove threw upon the ceiling. It occurred to me that in a nation of hungry people, I was almost as small and helpless as Joey. I knew that both he and I could be wiped out as quickly as Howie had been, and that very few people would ever know or care. I knew just as well, though, that Joey and I were going to tackle the days ahead of us together. We had lost Howie and the shock was still inside us; the knowledge that we were crippled without him was frightening. Still, we were not going home to eat food that Mom had bought with a day of ironing; I was not going to eat food that Dad would resent my swallowing.
I sat up for a while and looked down at my brother, wondering at the callous indifference I had so often felt toward him. That night I knew that the small boy stretched out on our makeshift bed was all I had in the world to make me feel a part of the human race. I leaned over as I had that last morning at home and tucked the blanket more carefully around his shoulders; he stirred a little in his sleep, moving closer to me, and when I finally slept, I was comforted by Joey’s presence.
We heated up more chicken broth the next morning for breakfast, and as we were taking turns at drinking from the cracked cup, I saw a man and woman coming toward the house. I braced myself for trouble and went to the door. Joey stood close at my side.
“Makin’ yourself at home, I see,” said the man as he came up to the porch. “How many are you here?”
“Just us two. I’m Josh Grondowski—this is my brother. We were wet and cold so we spent the night here. We haven’t hurt anything.”
The woman said, “Why, it’s just two boys, Ben, just two young boys.” She smiled at us. I don’t know whether I smiled at her or not, but Joey did, his friendliest smile, and you could see the woman liked him right away.
The man wasn’t so quick to be friendly. “Runaways, I suppose?”
I shrugged. “There wasn’t enough to eat at home. We’re on our way to our grandfather’s in Montana. He asked us to come.” The lie about a grandfather seemed a good thing in case this man wanted to make trouble. I doubted if he cared, though. He looked as if he had too many troubles of his own to care much about whether two kids were runaways or not.
“Well, I can imagine the old man’s real happy. Two more mouths to feed makes most of us feel privileged and cheerful these days,” he said sourly. “How you goin’ to manage to eat till you get there?”
“I play the piano pretty well—I’ve been hoping maybe I could find a job—I play pretty well,” I repeated, worried and unsure. The man’s face convinced me that I had said a ridiculous thing.
“So you want a job at playin’ the piano?”
“That’s what—it’s what I’d hoped,” I said.
“Well, young man, let me tell you somethin’. You got as much chance of findin’ a job like that around here as a snowball’s got of stayin’ hard in Hades. In fact, you got as much chance of findin’ any job at all as that snowball’s got.”
I didn’t answer. The man was making me realize that every fear of mine was real. His words were hard to take, but I knew that he was only honest. He probably hated that kind of honesty as much as I did.
“Where you from?” he asked after a minute.
“Chicago,” I answered. “We just got into this part of the country night before last.”
“Well, get on to your grandpa’s or back to Chicago—whichever is closest. You’re in a desperate part of the country here. We’re broke. We’re broke flat. This house and stove belong to me—tenants moved out last week—and the whole danged place ain’t worth thirty cents. Not with the stove throwed in.”
“We were sure glad to stay here last night,” I said.
“Have you had anything to eat?” the woman asked. Her eyes were kind. She was looking at Joey.
I knew there might be trouble over the rooster, but I supposed I’d have to face it. “We found a chicken, ma’am, and I cooked it. I hope it wasn’t yours?”
She shook her head. “No, we sold most of what we had. I cooked the rest and canned them. No use keeping chickens. Eggs ain’t worth the gas it takes to get ’em to town. No, I reckon that must have been one of the chickens the Helmses left behind. A right middle-aged one, I’ll bet.”
I showed her our boiled chicken, and she poked it with her finger. “I’ll put it through the meat grinder. It won’t help much, but maybe we can get a little nourish out of it. You boys can come on up for dinner.”
“Josie,” the man said sternly.
“We can give them one meal, Ben. You’re right in tellin’ them to head for their folks, but we’re goin’ to give them one meal. Biscuits and molasses and maybe something or other I can fix up out of this chicken. I guess we can share a meal with two boys.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t,” I said. “Joey and I don’t want to take food you need.”
It was the man who answered me. “No, come on up to the house. A biscuit or two won’t send us downhill much faster than we’re goin’ now. It’s just that Josie wants to feed every hungry man who comes to the door. That’s got to stop—but like she says, we can share with two boys.”
And so we went with them up the road to their place, which wasn’t a lot better than the one we had left except there was a little furniture in the house. There was a shabby old rug on the living room floor, a few chairs, and a rickety-looking table holding a pile of newspapers and a few faded photographs. There was a little framed card on the wall with birds and flowers on it and the name of some Nebraska town in gold letters; there was also a picture of the presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt, which had been cut from a newspaper and pinned under an old-fashioned clock.
The woman went immediately to the kitchen where she began fixing something for dinner. Joey and I sat in the living room and listened to the man as he talked on and on of the hard times that were with us and the harder times we might expect later on.
He jerked his finger toward the newspaper picture on the wall. “Now that fellow—Josie puts some stock in what he says. Not me. Maybe he’s got some new ideas—more than likely it’s just hot air. Things have gone too far. I don’t think him nor anybody else can do anything now. We’re beat! We’d just as well give up and—”
“Ben,” the woman called from the kitchen, “they’re just boys. Can’t you talk of something a little more cheerful? We don’t help ourselves with all this carryin’ on.”
If he heard her, he paid no attention. “Last hog I took to market was a big one,” he continued as if the woman hadn’t spoken. “Upwards of two-fifty it weighed. You know what I got for it? After shipping and yard expenses, exactly ninety-eight cents. That’s what I got for it. Ninety-eight cents. And I had to take it—I had to take what I could get because I hadn’t any feed for it. I’d ha’ had a dead critter on my hands so I took the ninety-eight cents.” He had been handling a folded newspaper nervously as he talked, and now he threw it on the table with a gesture of disgust. “This is the kind of country you boys are in—a flat broke country that’s growin’ flatter broke. Banks have already foreclosed on half the farms in this county. Mine’ll go in matter of months—everything we’ve worked for will be up on the auction block.”
Joey and I didn’t say anything. We didn’t know what to say. This angry, hopeless talk was so much like Dad’s that it made me feel restless and uneasy. I don’t think, though, that the man expected us to say anything; he didn’t even care whether we were listening or not. He just had to talk.
He was starting in again about more troubles of the times when the woman came and stood at the door. “Ben, I want you to hush now, and get washed up for dinner,” she said quietly. “You boys can make good use of a pan of water, too. Now, come on, all of you, and get ready for a bite to eat.”
It was a good dinner. There were plenty of biscuits
, and the woman kept asking us to eat more. She managed the conversation all during the meal, and I could see that she was determined to keep her husband off the subject of his hardships.
When we had finished eating, she pointed to Howie’s banjo lying on our jackets, and asked if I could play it. I had been dreading the first time that I would have to hear those strings again, but I knew that reality had to be faced. I didn’t have Howie’s skill on the banjo by a long way, but I twanged a few chords and asked Joey to sing. It was a hard moment for both of us, but it pleased the couple who sat listening. I noticed that as the man watched Joey sing, his face grew quieter and less angry-looking. After a while he laid his arm on the back of his wife’s chair, and his hand touched her shoulder. When Joey grew tired, they thanked him, and before we left, the man gave him a bag containing a half dozen large potatoes.
“These will help out for a few meals,” he said. He shook hands with us. The woman hugged Joey.
Then we were out on the road again. We got a ride from a farmer, a cheerful man whose friendliness reassured us, helped us to forget the crowd of men in a town not many miles away, men who had met us in the middle of the night with pitchforks. Our spirits rose on that ride. We had had a sheltered night and kindness from the couple we’d just left; we had a bag of potatoes and now a lift of several miles from a man who told us in a pleasant drawl that he guessed we’d find work of some kind or other in the next town. Times were bad, yes, he said, but he reckoned that times had been bad, off and on, for many a year and somehow people had managed to get by. He thought that two boys like us would get along all right, especially if we weren’t afraid of hard work and low wages. It was good to find someone with a little hope. I told him so when he stopped the car to let us out and showed us the road to take into town.
After walking a mile or two, we decided that we wouldn’t go into town that evening, that we’d camp out and go in the next morning when we were rested and fresh. Actually, we dreaded the town in spite of the farmer’s reassurance—at least, I did. The angry snarls of the men in the railroad yards came back to my ears at the thought of a town. Anyway, the rain had stopped and the night was much warmer than the one before; a night in the woods would not be too uncomfortable, and it would delay for a while the facing of strangers in a town.