for you, I could be long gone.”
Irene kept her head down and said nothing. Try as she might, she couldn’t think of a single thing to say, and the kitchen pulsed with silence waiting to be broken.
“I want to ask you something, Irene. Look at me.” The hysteria was replaced with a slightly taunting tone, cool and low.
Irene looked up, warily.
“I’ve been thinking. How would you feel about going into the orphanage? Maybe you’d like that. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and think it might just be for the best.”
Irene felt all the blood rush into her face. Intuitively, she knew her mother would not send her to an orphanage, but she also knew her mother required something of her at this moment. She must respond to these words in a particular way, a way that showed she felt the same thing Margaret herself was feeling.
Their gaze met. Irene knew she would lose something if she let herself slip down this hole. She also knew that if she didn’t jump herself that her mother would push until she fell. She put her head down on the table, resting her forehead on her fist. She could hear herself, as though it wasn’t her at all, sobbing loudly. “I don’t want to go away! Don’t send me away!” Hiccups in the sobs. “Please don’t make me go away!”
“Oh,” Margaret said, and then again, “oh.” She placed her hands flat on the top of the table as though she needed to feel the cool surface to tell her where she was.
“I’m sorry, darling,” she said, and she came around the table and stroked Irene’s head. “What am I thinking? Don’t pay any attention to me. It’s just that I’m so mad at your father, you just don’t know. I wouldn’t dream of sending you anywhere. You’re mother’s little kitten. I just thought you might be unhappy here. You know I want you to be happy, don’t you? You know I love you?” She spoke quickly, the words so light they almost flew out of her mouth.
“I love you too, Mummy.” Irene’s breathing slowed. Her tears dried. “It’ll be okay. It will be. We’ll be okay.”
“Sure, baby. You and me. We’ll work it out somehow.” Margaret smiled that glorious gleaming smile. She slapped at her hands, shaking off crumbs or dirt that only she could see. “Now eat your lunch. You were so late getting in from school, it’s almost time to go back.”
Just before Irene left the house her mother came up behind her.
“Listen, Irene, you and I have our little secrets, don’t we, even from your father?”
“Yes, Mummy.”
“And we don’t need strangers knowing about our business, do we?”
“No, Mummy.”
“Good girl. You come straight home after school now. No lollygagging.”
Irene closed the door and heard the lock turn. She walked down the street, her tunic and hair still damp from her walk home. The sidewalk felt uneven beneath her feet, but she didn’t mind going back, because she could stay at school until three-thirty. Of course, she’d have to tell Ebbie she wouldn’t be able to come over on Friday. It was quite clear her mother needed her at home.
1930
No.
The word waits for David wherever he goes. No at the gate, no at the door, no at the path, the portal, the window. A thousand faces, a thousand inflections, but always the same word. No. And sorry. How sorry they all are, these people who will not give him work, will not give him shelter, will not give him food or warmth or hope or comfort.
The boy knows it isn’t that they will not, it is that these people can not help him, and he sees by the look in their eyes that it shames them to have to say no.
Sometimes he gets lucky though.
“Any work I can do for you today, ma’am?” he says as he stands on the porch of the house, his hat in his hand.
“No work today. Sorry.”
“Chop wood? Fix the roof? I noticed you got a fence post tilting. Chicken roost looks like it leaks. I could fix that.”
“Can’t give you more’n dripping and bread.”
“I’d be obliged, ma’am.”
And if he does a good enough job, his head dizzy from hunger and his arms weak with fatigue, then maybe the woman will let him sleep in the shed or on the porch. He wakes up in so many different places that every time he opens his eyes he is surprised. It is hard, sometimes, to tell which is the dream and which the waking.
He grows to need things less. He pulls his belt tighter. Sleeps in the hobo jungles. Sleeps in ditches. Sleeps in the rail cars and the roofs of trains, tied down so he will not fall and be crushed beneath the steel wheels. He sleeps in barns and creeps away like a fox, with a chicken feather hanging from his cap, before first light.
If good fortune smiles David sleeps on bedbug-infested mission cots, eats their watery soup and stale bread and is grateful for it.
“Are you saved, son? Are you a lamb of Jesus?” says the man in the uniform of Salvation’s army.
“Yes, sir. I am tonight,” he says.
He eats beans and bread and beans and ketchup and beans and beans from a hundred different relief houses. He learns to eat fast and as much as he can, as much as they will give him at one sitting, for he never knows when he will eat again. More than once he eats from trash cans behind restaurants, brushing away the flies from half-eaten baked potatoes and pork chop bones. His father will forgive him, he knows, but the disgrace in him is deep sometimes. Only the sight of other men forced by circumstance to live the same stray-cur life saves him from falling into the pit of wretchedness.
David has been on the road for five months. He has travelled east until the land touched the sea, and then turned and started back again. He thinks about going home, and then he passes through Manitoba. Sees the skeletal cattle, the skyscraper tall clouds of dust, and he keeps on going west. He finds a letter waiting for him in Vancouver, general delivery, where he’s written his family they might catch him. Standing in the park at the corner of Hastings and Hamilton, the West Coast sky hanging iron-heavy and the air thick with humidity, he keeps his back against a tree to protect the ink on the page from the relentless drizzle and lets the tears spill from his eyes. Isaac writes there is another baby on the way and the land is cracking, mottling the earth like the back of a dying sun-baked turtle. They do not ask him to come home but send their love, his father says be careful. Be a good boy. He feels the weight of love behind those words. They mean he carries his father’s dreams with him. And his blessing.
He folds the letter and tucks it inside his shirt.
The park is full of men doing nothing, the occupation they all share. They stand and smoke and try to stay cool in the steaming shade. He has learned a great deal about men in the past months. How frightened they can be, and how fear can turn to rage in the time it takes to swallow a mouthful of moonshine. How kind they can be to strangers, and how cruel. He has learned a man can fall into depths of depravity if he is hounded by despair. Drugs. Alcohol. The infliction of pain on the weakest. He learns how despair follows shame, which in
