No Promises in the Wind (6 page)

“Maybe we shouldn't,” I said. “Joey and I don't want to take food you need.”

It was the man who answered me. “No, come on up to the house. A biscuit or two won't send us downhill much faster than we're goin' now. It's just that Josie wants to feed every hungry man who comes to the door. That's got to stop—but like she says, we can share with two boys.”

And so we went with them up the road to their place, which wasn't a lot better than the one we had left except there was a little furniture in the house. There was a shabby old rug on the living room floor, a few chairs, and a rickety-looking table holding a pile of newspapers and a few faded photographs. There was a little framed card on the wall with birds and flowers on it and the name of some Nebraska town in gold letters; there was also a picture of the presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt, which had been cut from a newspaper and pinned under an old-fashioned clock.

The woman went immediately to the kitchen where she began fixing something for dinner. Joey and I sat in the living room and listened to the man as he talked on and on of the hard times that were with us and the harder times we might expect later on.

He jerked his finger toward the newspaper picture on the wall. “Now that fellow—Josie puts some stock in what he says. Not me. Maybe he's got some new ideas—more than likely it's just hot air. Things have gone too far. I don't think him nor anybody else can do anything now. We're beat! We'd just as well give up and—”

“Ben,” the woman called from the kitchen, “they're just boys. Can't you talk of something a little more cheerful? We don't help ourselves with all this carryin' on.”

If he heard her, he paid no attention. “Last hog I took to market was a big one,” he continued as if the woman hadn't spoken. “Upwards of two-fifty it weighed. You know what I got for it? After shipping and yard expenses, exactly ninety-eight cents. That's what I got for it. Ninety-eight cents. And I had to take it—I had to take what I could get because I hadn't any feed for it. I'd ha' had a dead critter on my hands so I took the ninety-eight cents.” He had been handling a folded newspaper nervously as he talked, and now he threw it on the table with a gesture of disgust. “This is the kind of country you boys are in—a flat broke country that's growin' flatter broke. Banks have already foreclosed on half the farms in this county. Mine'll go in matter of months—everything we've worked for will be up on the auction block.”

Joey and I didn't say anything. We didn't know what to say. This angry, hopeless talk was so much like Dad's that it made me feel restless and uneasy. I don't think, though, that the man expected us to say anything; he didn't even care whether we were listening or not. He just had to talk.

He was starting in again about more troubles of the times when the woman came and stood at the door. “Ben, I want you to hush now, and get washed up for dinner,” she said quietly. “You boys can make good use of a pan of water, too. Now, come on, all of you, and get ready for a bite to eat.”

It was a good dinner. There were plenty of biscuits, and the woman kept asking us to eat more. She managed the conversation all during the meal, and I could see that she was determined to keep her husband off the subject of his hardships.

When we had finished eating, she pointed to Howie's banjo lying on our jackets, and asked if I could play it. I had been dreading the first time that I would have to hear those strings again, but I knew that reality had to be faced. I didn't have Howie's skill on the banjo by a long way, but I twanged a few chords and asked Joey to sing. It was a hard moment for both of us, but it pleased the couple who sat listening. I noticed that as the man watched Joey sing, his face grew quieter and less angry-looking. After a while he laid his arm on the back of his wife's chair, and his hand touched her shoulder. When Joey grew tired, they thanked him, and before we left, the man gave him a bag containing a half dozen large potatoes.

“These will help out for a few meals,” he said. He shook hands with us. The woman hugged Joey.

Then we were out on the road again. We got a ride from a farmer, a cheerful man whose friendliness reassured us, helped us to forget the crowd of men in a town not many miles away, men who had met us in the middle of the night with pitchforks. Our spirits rose on that ride. We had had a sheltered night and kindness from the couple we'd just left; we had a bag of potatoes and now a lift of several miles from a man who told us in a pleasant drawl that he guessed we'd find work of some kind or other in the next town. Times were bad, yes, he said, but he reckoned that times had been bad, off and on, for many a year and somehow people had managed to get by. He thought that two boys like us would get along all right, especially if we weren't afraid of hard work and low wages. It was good to find someone with a little hope. I told him so when he stopped the car to let us out and showed us the road to take into town.

After walking a mile or two, we decided that we wouldn't go into town that evening, that we'd camp out and go in the next morning when we were rested and fresh. Actually, we dreaded the town in spite of the farmer's reassurance—at least, I did. The angry snarls of the men in the railroad yards came back to my ears at the thought of a town. Anyway, the rain had stopped and the night was much warmer than the one before; a night in the woods would not be too uncomfortable, and it would delay for a while the facing of strangers in a town.

We had eaten one good meal that day, and it seemed extravagant to give ourselves the luxury of a baked potato that night. Still, we felt rich in having so much food, and since our hunger was never quite satisfied, we gave ourselves a treat, though we limited our meal to one potato to be shared rather than one each which we would have liked.

I dug a shallow trench and built a fire in it. Then Joey and I sat watching the fire burn down to a bed of blue and rosy coals, talking quietly together as we waited for our potato to bake. When the darkness grew deeper, our fire glowed with a radiance that made a little island of light in the night. A few spirals of smoke drifted upward occasionally as Joey added a pile of twigs or clump of leaves to the coals.

We felt perfectly safe there in the quiet woods with the beauty of our fire, the good smell of our roasting potato, and the comfort of being together. We didn't dream of danger, not even when we heard someone approaching, and the attack, when it came, filled us with as much amazement as it did fear.

Four or five boys were in the group that suddenly leaped upon us, big fellows with shaggy hair and harsh, high voices. They screamed at us, but I understood only part of what they said—just enough to know that they were hungry.

Joey had had no dealings with thugs or hoodlums; he made the mistake of holding on to the bag of potatoes as fiercely as if he stood a chance against those boys who were almost men. One of the attackers knocked him flat, and when I ran to his rescue, all four or five of them took out their venom on me, enraged, I guess, at anyone who had a bite to eat while they starved.

They left us after a few minutes, taking with them Joey's bag of potatoes and the baked potato too, which they raked out of the ashes. They took our blanket and our extra clothes; one of them picked up Howie's banjo, looked at it a moment, and then for some unexplained reason, threw it contemptuously back on the ground.

When they were gone, we dragged ourselves together and started out for the highway. Joey was more frightened than physically hurt, but my forehead was bleeding from a deep cut and my eyes were almost swollen shut. When we got into town, a policeman bawled me out for fighting. He didn't make us get out of town, though. He even let us sleep in the jail that night.

I
noticed after a few weeks that I was thinking of nothing but food. Even the hopes of finding a job dwindled to the point of being extinguished altogether. But the question of the next meal was always with me, pressing and immediate.

There had been many other interests in previous years; even in the midst of very difficult months at home there had been time for other interests. There had always been the dream of playing in an orchestra, dreams of the recitals which I would one day give, of the praise and acclaim my art would inspire. With Howie I had sometimes planned to run away, to roam the world (always with money in our pockets), to see sights and have adventures and come back heroes. There had been sports and school and teachers, good and bad; there had been books and an occasional movie where we always watched each feature twice at least. There had been girls, which was a secret interest, but a very real one. I often wondered about girls, at their soft prettiness, their grace, their capricious little ways. Sometimes I had stared at the mass of bright curls belonging to the girl who sat at the desk in front of me, and new music had come into my mind, gentle, whispering music that a boy with the solemn name of Josh Grondowski might sometime play for the girl he loved.

Not anymore. There were no dreams now, no hopes, no interests except in finding food enough to keep Joey and me alive. Sometimes we'd get a bowl of dishwatery broth at a soup kitchen and we'd be told, “Just one meal. One meal is all we have for tramp-kids. We've got our own to feed.” And then we'd hide out in a doorway or a railroad depot or a city park, and the little sleep I'd get would be troubled with the problem of where to find a bite of breakfast, how to go about the business of searching or begging or stealing.

We almost starved before I went to the garbage cans. I'd read in the papers back home of people doing that; I didn't believe I could ever bring myself to it. But I did. I made Joey stay inside a warm doorway, and I went around to an alley back of a restaurant. There were two men and a woman pawing through the cans. There were rats too. The rats were brazen enough, but we four humans tried to ignore the presence of one another. I found some frozen bread and two steak bones with a little meat still on them. I washed the bones in the lavatory of a public rest room; then Joey and I found a sheltered place in a vacant lot where we built a fire and warmed the food. Joey ate it gratefully, but each bite sickened me as I remembered the garbage cans and the rats and the shamed people who couldn't look at one another. I swore I'd never go back for that kind of food again, but I did, many times. I had to do it. One thing I was proud of, though: I never allowed Joey to go with me. Never.

But I had reason to feel ashamed on another score. I turned coward when it became necessary for us to beg. The humiliation of begging was as hard for me to bear as hunger, and it left deeper scars. And though I spared Joey the indignity of the garbage cans, I
did
let him take over the hateful business of going from door to door.

Joey never complained; he assumed that begging was his role rather than mine. “It's better for
me
to do the asking, Josh. I'm younger and they'll give to little kids where they won't give a scrap to big guys.”

He was right, of course. People would look at his thin face with the big shadowy eyes, and they'd share whatever they had with him. He was often casual about the reaction of people to him.

“The lady cried—I guess she was real sorry for me,” he told me indifferently one night as he spread out his gift of bread and an apple. Once he was given an old sweater; another time a warm cap. People found it hard, I think, to turn Joey from their doors.

Begging was, indeed, much more effective with Joey doing the job, but I finally realized that I was hiding like a scared rabbit and allowing a ten-year-old boy to face the humility because I didn't like it. After that I did my share. It was terrible, and I never became accustomed to it. However, night after night Joey and I started out, sometimes taking alternate houses, sometimes trying our luck on separate blocks.

One night a girl came to the kitchen door when I knocked. I had a fleeting impression that she was very pretty. I don't really know what she was like, for after that first glance I couldn't look at her again. I looked past her and muttered, “I hate to say this—but I'm hungry.”

Her voice was nice. I heard her say, “It's a boy who's hungry, Daddy. May I give him something?”

A tall man came to the door and looked at me. “Yes, Betsy, by all means. Give him some of our roast,” he said, and then he walked away.

In a few minutes she came back to the door with a little cardboard box containing food that smelled wonderful. I wanted to look into her eyes and thank her, but I couldn't. I took the box and just stood there for a few seconds, hurting because I was forced to beg, to stand before her deprived of confidence.

The girl spoke to me then in a very low voice. She said, “I hope things will be better for you soon. I feel so ashamed that I have food when the times force boys like you to go hungry.”

I'll never know her name, and I'll never know if she was really as pretty as that first glance told me she was. I know only one thing about her, and that was the fact that she fed my hungry stomach and laid a kind of healing balm on a part of my spirit that was raw with the beating it was taking.

There were many times when I was ready to give up during the cold weeks of November, times when I really believed that Joey and I would have to wander out into some open field and let the cold finish us off. But always at such times something turned up, something happened which seemed to say “Not yet, not yet,” and we would find food and rest and the spirit to go on.

It was like that the night we stopped at a tiny farmhouse somewhere in Nebraska, and a very old lady asked us to come inside. She gave us supper at a little table in the kitchen where a good fire burned and a kettle poured out steam from its copper spout.