Together Apart Read Free Page B

two, then five. Half the caboose. I reached up and into the swirl of sooty wind. Grabbed the bill of my cap. Tipped it just as the caboose sped past. I waited there beside the tracks until I'd caught my wind, then set off again for Prairie Hill.
    ***
    I smelled the town before I got there. This wasn't altogether disagreeable. Prairie Hill was growing fast—a "boom town," folks called it. There was the spicy stink of the livery stables and street-sweeper's dung heaps, but there were also the stick-to-your-ribs smells of bakeries and eateries and meat markets, the thought of which caused a river of spit to float my tongue.
    I heard the town nearly before I got there, too—the metal clang of foundries and blacksmith shops, the echoing thwack of carpenter hammers, the bark of a peddler hawking his wares. It was my kind of music, and I was about to join the band.
    The sun was sinking by the time I reached the wooden sidewalk that marked the beginning of Main Street. I sat myself down and fished my pa's shoes out of the blanket. I held one up before putting it on. It threw a shadow of heroic size. Ma had saved the shoes for me, even though it meant Pa'd had to go shoeless into the Hereafter. She'd said they had too much wear left in them to waste. I'd been stingy about wearing them because I didn't want to walk holes in the soles before my feet got big enough to fill them.
    I'd learned a thing or two since running away from Mr. Richards's farm, and one of those things was that, to be seen as a young man and not as an ignorant farm boy by the townsfolk, you had to wear decent shoes. I'd been shown the door in several business establishments before getting the chance to apply for a job. The place where I'd most hoped to find work, Boggs Furniture Makers and Undertaking Parlor, was one of them. When Mr. Boggs figured out I wasn't there to buy one of his handcrafted wooden cradles or chifforobes or coffins, he threw me out on my ear, the soles of my shoes flapping.
    I'd worn Pa's shoes the next day, and some few of the proprietors had at least let me say my piece. Mr. Hertzel, the wagon maker, had said he'd consider me if I came back in the fall after his boy had started up his studies at the university over in Lincoln. Sons, fathers and sons, was another lesson I'd learned. Establishments with names that ended with "and Sons," as in "Preston and Sons Home Builders," weren't
likely
to give someone else's son a second look.
    I'd finally nailed down a job earlier that day, and in a most unlikely place. I put my harmonica to my mouth and played my way up Main, past the millinery, dressmakers, druggist, and barbershop. When I got to the corner of Main and Fourth, I stopped and looked up to the northernmost window on the second floor of the Ackerman Hotel. That was the room where Ma and I had holed up in the weeks after Pa died. I was a runt of only five, but I remembered, and the thing I remembered most was the bedbugs. I scratched an itch in the middle of my back then played my way around the corner.
    A boy, young enough to be wearing knee-high britches, fell in behind me. I switched my tempo to a march, and the one boy was soon joined by two more. They paraded after me as far as the place where the wooden sidewalk veered off to the right. One hollered after me, "Don't go that way. My ma says the Widow Moore is crazy, that likely as not she eats boys for her supper."
    "Crazy as a fox," I hollered over my shoulder, then broke into a run. Halfway along, I almost tripped on a loose sidewalk board. I hammered the board flat before moving on.
    ***
    Before announcing myself to Mrs. Moore, Eliza, I ducked into the stable and climbed the stairs to the sleeping room above to drop off my gear. Eliza had said I was welcome to sleep in the house, but the stable room suited me just fine. It had a cot and a table and two chairs, one of these chairs being overstuffed.
What more could a fellow want?
I thought as I slicked down my hair in the fancy