Heading Out to Wonderful Read Free Page A

The boy laughed again, then stepped forward and held out his hand, watched as it disappeared in Charlie’s broad palm. “Pleased to meet you, Sam. It’s a real pleasure. Call me Charlie.”
    “I’m going to call you Beebo, sir. Okay?”
    “Whatever suits you, son. Whatever you think best.”
    Sam returned to stand by his father’s leg. Will picked up a butcher knife, wiped it down with a clean cloth.
    “I’ll work for free.”
    “Free work is worth exactly what you pay for it.”
    “I’ll work for free for one month. Then you’ll decide what you want to do. If you still want me around. I’m worth it, you’ll see.”
    “Why would you do a fool thing like that?”
    “I mean to settle down here, Mr. Haislett. I’ve seen enough of the world. I just want my own little corner of it. A place to feel at home again.”
    “And where’s home?”
    “Nowhere, now. Came from up north. Born out in Ohio.”
    “Why’d you leave?”
    “You know the story. Came back from the war. Daddy dead. Mama moved in with relations. Family scattered. So I went traveling. Saw the country, looking for I don’t know what. Yes, I do. Something wonderful, I guess. Someplace special. I saw Brownsburg. I’ve been here thinking hard on it for a week.”
    “Let me tell you something, son. When you’re young, and you head out to wonderful, everything is fresh and bright as a brand-new penny, but before you get to wonderful you’re going to have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, stop and take a good, long look, because that may be as far as you’re ever going to go. Brownsburg ain’t heaven, by any means. But it’s perfectly fine. It’s all right.”
    “I mean to stay. I’ve got nobody and nowhere I want to be. I need something to do with my days.”
    “And money don’t mean nothin’?”
    “Like I said, sir, I have nobody. I have what’s in my suitcases. I mean to find a house, make a place to lay my head and all that takes money and it takes work, and butchering is what I know.”
    “Slaughtering?”
    “Everything. I can slaughter a cow so fast she looks as peaceful as if she died in her sleep. They say it makes the meat sweeter, more tender when the animal goes quickly and peacefully.”
    “Hell. I don’t know. Tell you what. It’s almost dinner time. Go in there and get some of that beef and cut us off some steaks and come home to eat with us. My wife Alma’s smarter than me. She’s a schoolteacher. She’ll know what to do. I’ll call her now.”
    Charlie stepped into the cool of the meat locker, listening to Will speak in hushed tones on the wall telephone. He picked a side of beef and swung it out and onto the butcher block without even getting his shirt dirty. He opened up the leather pouch holding his knives and laid them out one by one on the counter.
    “I’ve got my own knives.”
    “That I can see.”
    “From Germany.”
    He picked out a knife, tested the blade against the side of his thumb.
    “T-bones? Sirloin? Tenderloin?
    “T-bone. Pan steaks. You know.”
    “Bone in?”
    “Yes. But thin.”
    “How many?”
    “Four.”
    Using a knife and then a hacksaw for the chine, Charlie cut four steaks, pulled on the roll of white paper over his head, tore off a square and wrapped up the steaks as neatly as a Christmas package.
    “That’ll do?”
    “That’ll do fine. Let’s go eat. We’ll ask my wife what to do about you. She’ll know. She knows everything.”
    They stepped into the day, now hot, and Will carefully locked the door behind him.
    All around them, in the hot stillness of Brownsburg at noon, people were sitting down to their dinner. They walked along Main Street. It was the kind of town that had only one of everything it had, and a lot of things it didn’t have at all. They didn’t talk.
    They stopped in front of a tall Victorian house, neat as a pin, with zinnias growing around the steps that led up to a high porch, gingerbread trim fretted and heavy with wisteria