Together Apart Read Free Page A

But there wasn't anybody there, only the busted desks, the cannonball stove lying on its side, and a heap of splintered rafters and shingles that'd once been half the roof. At the make-do chalkboard, which was nothing but a plaster wall painted black, I rubbed out "Isaac slept here" with my sleeve and wrote, "Isaac's moving on." That done, I headed for the one dry corner to fetch my gear.
    I lifted the moth-eaten wool blanket from the straw pile that had been my bed for nigh onto a week, shook out the dust, and spread the blanket on the floor. Lined up next to the straw pile were my real pa's woodworking tools. I turned each tool over in my hand—block plane, brace, calipers, chisels, and gouges—before laying them on the blanket. The hammer I held for a minute, tightening my grip on the handle that'd been worn smooth by my pa's hand. Next I piled on the few duds that weren't already on my back. The socks, in particular, smelled a little rank. On top of it all, I set my real pa's shoes—good, sturdy shoes that didn't need rags to hold them together.
    I folded two corners of the blanket over my gear. I knotted the other two corners in the fashion of a sling, then poked my head and one arm under the knot. The knot resting on my shoulder, leaving my hands free as birds, I set off down the road for Prairie Hill.
    Pa's tools clicked and clacked and my shoes flipped and flapped as I hiked along. I pulled my harmonica from my hip pocket, cupped my hands about it, and made up a tune as I kept time with the clack click, flap flip. It was a lively tune, and it got livelier as I stretched out my strides. But when I passed a farmer hunched over a breaking plow, my music slowed to a funeral pace. That farmer had been me six days before.
    I'd been busting sod, opening a new field so Mr. Richards could plant some flax. Back and forth, sunup to sundown, trudging through clods and dung, my eyes fixed on the oxen yoke until it felt like the yoke was sawing into
my
shoulders. There wasn't any music in this work, at least none I could hear. Other men heard it. I'd seen it in their eyes when, at the end of a long day, they'd lift a hand to their brow and look out over their land.
    I'd tried using Hannah's trick, make believe I was anywhere but in that field, but the only picture that'd come to mind, the only sound I'd heard, was acre after acre, year after year, of lonesome, backbreaking silence. I'd tried again, tunneling deeper into my noggin. Deeper still, and I heard something. A raspy whisper? I reeled the whisper in as if it were a stubborn, bawling calf at the end of a rope. When I'd dragged it close enough, yanked the lasso tight enough to choke, it bellowed, "Is this how you spend your second chance?"
    I ran away from Mr. Richards's house that very night, but not before begging my ma to come with me. Her eyes had watered. "Go if you must, but I cannot. My place is with my husband, for better or worse," she'd said. I told her worse was all she had to look forward to, but she only looked away and said there was more to it than I knew.
    Ma had smuggled food to me those first days I'd holed up at the schoolhouse, but Mr. Richards must have found her out because there'd been no food for the last three. No matter. I was on my way to a home-cooked meal and a bed that wasn't just an oversized bird's nest.
    Down the wagon trail a piece, the click clack, flip flap was joined by another, louder, click clack, flip flap, then louder still and mixed with a belch of locomotive steam. I blew hard into my harmonica, ran my mouth up and down the scale, and then waded through the tall grass that separated the wagon trail from the tracks. Standing as close to the tracks as a fellow dared, I braced myself like a runner about to begin a footrace. The iron horse neared. The earth shivered. Closer still, and I took off, my arms pumping and the tools clacking madly. Double time, triple. The engine edged past. The coal tender. One freight car, then