Together Apart (2 page)

"And how old might you be?"

I squared my shoulders. "I will turn fifteen in October."

Eliza's left brow arched, if but a sliver. "Do you attend one of the country schools?" she asked.

"We've been without a teacher since the ... since January," I stammered.

"Oh, my. Not Harmony School?"

My feet, badly frostbitten in the blizzard, prickled as if I were walking barefoot in a patch of thorny thistle. I lowered my head. "Yes, ma'am."

I could feel Eliza's eyes studying me, and after a bit she said, "I must be honest with you, Hannah. I filled the position earlier today, though I've been thinking that perhaps I might allow for two. Would it be possible for you to return tomorrow morning, prepared to stay on a trial basis through the end of the week?"

The thistle patch turned into a field of ticklish clover, and my eyes shot up. "I could be here by nine, if that's not too late?"

"Nine will be fine. And I've a question I'd like you to think over and answer for me when you return. If suddenly you found yourself quite alone in the world, your only assets a grand house and quickly dwindling funds, what clever, yet tasteful, endeavors might you undertake to support yourself? Turning this fine home into a boarding house or taking in wash are not the class of answers I'm hoping for."

Megan and Joey weren't anxious to quit the fairy tale book until I reminded them about the month of Sundays. We said our goodbyes to Eliza on the veranda, laced our muddy shoes, and then hurried down the steps. The rain had ended, and here and there the sky showed patches of blue. Though we followed the same sidewalks returning as going, the distance to Main Street seemed as if half.

I was greatly relieved when we reached the town square and found that Papa hadn't yet returned to the wagon. Hap and Hazard, Papa's team of Belgian horses, his pride, whinnied in greeting. I lifted Megan and Joey into the back of the wagon and told them to wait there, then dashed across the street, startled the bell above the door to Fowler's Emporium, and strode to the place on the wall where the handbill was tacked. Once it was in my pocket, I turned on my heel, hiccupped, and startled the bell once again on my way out.

We waited another hour for Papa. Megan and Joey bided the time napping, their heads resting in my lap. I bided my time mulling over Eliza's question.

***

"Did you trade for everything on your mother's list?" Papa asked when he climbed onto the seat of the wagon.

"Yes, sir," I answered.

Megan rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and before I could hush her with a finger to my lips, she said, "Hannah took us to a castle."

Papa seemed not to hear, and I was glad for this. I wanted to wait until after supper, when I had Papa and Mama together, to tell them my news.

The road west out of town quickly narrowed to the jarring double ruts of a wagon trail. Every mile after that, less traveled trails branched off to the north and south. The Union Pacific railway tracks ran alongside for the trail's distance. Here and there were farmsteads, some with sod houses, others with newly built frame houses. Nearly all had grand barns. And not a one was without a windmill, a scattering of scrawny trees, and fine fat chickens strutting in the kitchen yards. In the fifth mile we came upon Harmony School. Harmony, with its daydreaming windows—shattered. Its maps of mountains, deserts, and vast oceans—shredded by the wind. Its desks with sweetheart initials carved in the wood—splintered or removed. Harmony, with a gaping hole in its roof. My eyes hurt from the looking.

Papa mumbled under his breath then, and a moment later I saw what he was mumbling about. There, beside the trail, stood Isaac Bradshaw, skinny as a rail, his cheeks peppered with freckles, and rags tying his shoes to his feet. He tipped his cap to me. I felt my cheeks flush. I smiled and nodded.

I
STOOD THERE BESIDE THE TRAIL, MY HEART THUMPING AS IF A
six-footed rabbit was trapped inside my ribs, and stared after Mr. Barnett's wagon until it disappeared over a rise. Stared until Hannah disappeared over a rise. Hannah with hair the color of midnight. Hannah, who had danced on the prairie. Hannah, the girl who'd saved my sorry life. I was mighty tempted to chase after the wagon, ask Hannah how she'd been faring, but thought better of it. There'd been a warning in Mr. Barnett's scowl—stay away from Hannah or else. So I hog-tied my want and headed for the schoolyard.

The dampness from the grass seeped through the holes in the soles of my shoes, chilling my toes. This put me in mind of something Hannah had said during the blizzard. "Make believe your feet are loaves of bread, hot from the oven." I'd never been one to put much stock in make-believe, but I'd survived when others hadn't, still had my feet and hands when others didn't.

My empty stomach, not knowing the difference between pretend bread and real, begged and growled as I climbed the schoolhouse steps. "Soon," I said, and my stomach shut up. I stopped before going through the door and tried to recollect how many times I'd stood there before. Far too few. Plowing and planting had kept me away every spring. Harvest stretched into late fall. In between there were fences to mend, wood to chop, hogs to butcher, and any other chore my stepfather, Mr. Richards, could dream up so I wouldn't, as he put it, "Get too smart for my britches." If it hadn't been for my ma holding her ground now and again, Mr. Richards would have put a stop to my schooling by the age of nine or ten. As it was, I'd gone whenever I
could
—a day here, three in a row there.

When I stepped inside the schoolhouse, I half expected Miss Farnham to gawk over the top of her spectacles and frown, half expected the girls to giggle, half expected a spit wad to splat between my eyes. 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 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 mirror that hung on the wall.

To get to the main house, I didn't have to go back outside. A door on the first floor of the stable led to the room that housed the printing press, where I was to begin working the next morning. From there, a door led into a larger, longer room, which Eliza had said the Judge once used for his courtroom. I didn't know much about courtrooms, but to my way of thinking this longer room said "school." Tall windows lined each of the side walls. At one end the floor was raised to stumble height, like a teacher's platform or a stage. Newfangled gaslights hung here and there on the walls as they did in every room inside the main house, the gas hissing in from wooden pipes that not long before had been dug under the town's streets.