No Promises in the Wind Read Free Page B

the years, but he was still fragile, a little too slender and delicate for the lean times. He was also beautiful, a golden child with a mouth that looked as if it had been sculpted, and great gray eyes under his shock of bright hair. I loved Joey’s beauty, but I wasn’t cured of the old resentment toward Joey himself. His birth had meant the end of happiness between Dad and me. I suppose I should have been a little wiser, but as the years went by, it didn’t occur to me to bring reason to my feelings. I just went on thoughtlessly, not exactly disliking my brother, but not liking him much either.
    I took Joey’s hero-worship for me with indifference just as for years I had taken such things as food and shelter and security for granted. It was obvious that Joey thought of me as a great guy. I was strong and husky; I knew things that made him feel I was pretty brilliant. I could do things he thought it would be great to do, and he didn’t seem to mind that I was often brusque with him, that I lorded it over him with an authority I had no right to claim. Maybe Joey accepted these things as the way of all big brothers. I don’t know. But I do know that a thrust of guilt sometimes hit me where I lived when I looked at his face and saw the eager friendliness there which I knew I didn’t always deserve.
    It was like that when I came upon him after my practice session at school. He was sitting in the alley back of our house, bending over something in the darkness. I couldn’t see what he was up to until I was almost on top of him. There he sat in the midst of dirt and trash, and directly in front of him was a lean alley cat which he stroked as it lapped milk from a rusty pan. A five-cent milk bottle was in Joey’s hand.
    â€œShe was just about starved, Josh,” he said quickly as if realizing that he must come up with an explanation. Joey knew well enough that milk was not for alley cats that fall. “She’s got babies, and she needs milk awful bad. You’re not mad at me, are you?”
    â€œWhere did you get a nickel for milk?” I asked sternly.
    â€œKitty gave it to me. She walked home from the elevated yesterday to save streetcar fare, and she gave me the nickel because she couldn’t buy me a present for my birthday last week. It was my nickel, Josh, honest. And the mother cat was so hungry.”
    â€œKitty’s in big business giving you a nickel when she’s just been laid off her job,” I answered. “And you listen to me, Joey—when you get hold of a nickel, you give it to Mom to help with groceries. I don’t know what Dad would do to you if he knew you’d bought milk for a mangy alley cat.”
    Joey looked scared. Petted as he’d always been, he still hadn’t wholly escaped Dad’s mean moods that year. “Are you going to tell on me, Josh?” he asked.
    I shook my head. “There’s enough trouble in our house without adding to it. Just don’t do it again. Just don’t ever do a thing like this again.”
    Even in what I felt was justifiable anger, my words struck something inside me. “A thing like this” meant feeding a starving animal, and I was making Joey feel that he had committed a crime in being compassionate. Once I had been as eager as he was to feed every stray animal that came near us. It was strange what poverty and fear of hunger could do to a sense of decency.
    I guess my voice softened a little. “Come on, Joey, let’s go inside. I won’t say anything about this.”
    We went inside to desolation. Mom was lifting boiled potatoes from the pan to a serving dish which she placed upon the table. Nothing else was there except glasses of milk at Kitty’s place and at Joey’s and mine. There was a cup of coffee at Dad’s place, nothing at Mom’s. Dad stood in front of the chair where Kitty was sitting, his face dark and forbidding. Kitty was