and threw it in the sink. Then she grabbed the ashtray and tossed it in the sink, too, where it shattered.
Irene’s hands pulled up instinctively to her heart in small fists. “Are you all right, Mummy?”
“What the hell do you care. What does anybody care.” Margaret slammed the plate with the sandwich on it in front of Irene. “Eat your sandwich. I made it for you. I’d never expect you to make your own lunch. I have to do everything.”
Irene hated tomato sandwiches. The bread got all wet with tomato juice. She took tiny bites.
“What are you staring at? What are you staring at?”
“Nothing,” Irene mumbled and lowered her eyes.
“He drinks, you know, your precious father.” Her voice rose to a scream and her hands were back in her hair, pulling and tearing. “Weak and dirty, the bastard! Weak and dirty!”
Irene sat very still, while Margaret took another gulp from the mug.
“Well, cheers! This stuff’s not so bad, after all. I might as well join him. That'd be a fine how-dee-do, wouldn’t it? Both of us drunkards. If he doesn’t care, why should I?” Margaret leaned forward. “Or maybe I’ll kill myself. Then he can take care of you.”
Irene tried to eat a little more of the sandwich and kept her eyes on her mother’s hands, paying attention to what items were within reach. A wooden spoon. A plate. The bread knife.
Margaret sat down at the table across from Irene, banging down the mug. Irene could smell the liquor in it. It was sweet and sour at the same time, smoky and medicinal, mixed with the scent of the tobacco.
“You know, if it wasn’t for you I could be free,” Margaret said. She leaned back in the chair, her chin tucked coyly into her shoulder, a slight smile on her lips. But the look on her face, this tense but teasing look, did not match her voice, which was full of jagged ups and downs and uncontrolled cracks. It sounded as if she might spit glass. “If it wasn’t 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