She made me talk, whether I wanted to or not. She wanted to know about my music, she questioned me about the things that had happened to Joey and me since we left home, she wanted to know all about Kitty, about Howie, about Edward C. She would draw up a chair beside my bed, sitting astride it and listening attentively to everything I told her.
One afternoon as she sat beside me she drummed her fingers thoughtfully on the back of the chair, and when I stopped talking, she was silent too. Then suddenly she slid to the floor and sat cross-legged there, her face on a level with mine.
“What did you mean by that remark about earrings the first afternoon we talked together, Josh?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Just a silly idea,” I answered. I had never mentioned Emily to her.
“Come on. You knew someone pretty who wore earrings, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But she wasn’t a girl like you; she was a woman in the carnival down in Louisiana.”
“Did you love her, Josh?”
I didn’t answer right away. Then I said, “In a way I guess—I’m not sure. Maybe I was just lonely.”
She made little pleats in the loose end of a blanket that fell on the side of my bed; then she smoothed out the pleats and made them all over again.
“People—boys, that is—don’t love girls unless they’re pretty, do they, Josh?”
“I don’t know much about love and—and girls, Janey. But you don’t have to worry about how you look.”
She was thoughtful for a minute; then she sighed. “I tried on some earrings in the dime store this noon, Josh. I was right—they looked silly on me.”
She seemed awfully young to me at that moment. I wanted to be kind to her, kind the way Emily had been to me. “You don’t need earrings, Janey. You’re sweet and nice—and you’re pretty too. I guess it’s just older women who need earrings.”
She grew very red when I said that to her. I liked the blush that spread over her face and even to the part of her neck where her shirt collar lay open. But I could see that she felt awkward and self-conscious—she was no longer the poised little tomboy who talked about organized labor and how a man named Herbert Spence had felt about government aid for the poor. She looked much more like an unhappy little kid who didn’t know what to do next. I felt very tender toward Janey at that moment, and because I wanted to reassure her, I stretched out my hand to hers. When our hands met, she lifted mine and pressed her cheek against it.
She left abruptly after that and didn’t return until she and Gramma came over to prepare supper. We always ate, to tell the truth, considerably better when Gramma helped to cook the meal than when Janey did it alone. It was an especially good supper; Lonnie talked more than usual, and even Gramma smiled a little now and then. Once she pointed her finger at me and said, “Now if my girl gets to be a nuisance running over here every afternoon, you tell me and I’ll keep her at home.”
Lonnie glanced at me quickly and then at Janey. We had been very quiet, both of us, and at Gramma’s words I guess each of us became very red. I noticed that when Janey brought the coffeepot over to refill Lonnie’s cup, he put his arm around her waist and drew her to his side. She leaned down and kissed his forehead lightly. It almost seemed as if they said something to one another in those two gestures.
That night when we were alone Lonnie and I talked for a long time. We talked about Joey and the plans Lonnie was going to carry out if we found that my brother had not gone home. Lonnie seemed hopeful as we talked things over.
“At least we can pretty well rule out death by starvation or freezing. There’s been no little blond boy found dead, thank God, in any of the towns where I have contacts. I don’t think Joey would have gone much farther west; if he had a mind to get out of this part of the country, he’d head for Chicago and home.”
“Would he have tried to go back south, do you think? He liked Pete Harris and Edward C. and—and Emily. He might have decided to go back down there.”
“I’m in touch with Harris,” Lonnie answered. “If Joey turns up down there, Harris will let us know. He was pretty well worked up when I told him about Joey.”
“You made a long distance call to Baton Rouge, Lonnie?” I asked incredulously. My debt to him seemed to be growing fast. I wondered how I could ever repay it.
“Keep your shirt on—it wasn’t too bad. Anyway, we’re going to find that boy no matter what it costs, no matter if the rest of us have to live on beans.”
I sat up in the big rocking chair until bedtime. Lonnie pulled me up near the stove and sat astride one of the kitchen chairs.
“Janey likes to sit like that,” I said, smiling. I hadn’t intended to mention her name, but I forgot.
“She learned that from me. She’s always aped me since she was knee-high—she and the boy too.” He leaned forward and closed a damper on the stove. “She’s got to begin wearing dresses more and sitting like a lady now that she’s growing up. I must have a talk with her.”
“She’s a very intelligent girl,” I said weakly because it was not Janey’s intelligence that I was thinking about. I was still remembering the feel of her soft cheek against my hand.
Lonnie leaned forward resting his chin on the back of his chair. “She’s pretty fond of you, isn’t she, Josh?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I know I like her. Is that all right?”
He took that long deep breath I had noticed once before when it had struck me that he felt some weight inside his chest. His voice was cheerful, though, when he answered.
“Yes, it’s all right. Of course it’s all right. You’re both getting to an age when it’s easy to be fond of one another. Sure. It’s natural and right. It’s just one of those things, I guess. Makes me remember when I first allowed Davy to cross the street by himself and find his own way to kindergarten. I knew it had to be, but it wasn’t easy.” He paused a minute and then continued, “I have a lot of respect for you, Josh; I like you. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t let Janey spend so much time over here.”
“Yes. I know what you mean,” I answered.
“You’re over a year older than Janey. She’s never gone out with boys yet. You probably are a little more experienced in this business of dating.”
I laughed shortly. “I’ve never had a girl in my life. I’ve always been afraid of them. It’s nice not to be afraid of Janey.”
“What about the young lady down at the carnival—the one with the earrings?”
“Janey told you about that?”
“She mentioned it. She wanted to know if she could have a little money to buy some dime store earrings. That was because Josh had known a pretty girl at the carnival who wore them.”
I didn’t say anything. We sat there for a while.
“You don’t care to talk about the girl at the carnival?”
“I’d rather not,” I answered.
“All right, then, we won’t.” He smiled and got to his feet. “You’d better get to bed—we don’t want you to get over-tired. You’re still a little on the wobbly side.”
The next few days were much the same except that Janey wore dresses when she came over to see me and she sat on the chair in what I supposed Lorme had told her was a ladylike manner. We talked about lots of things, but we never mentioned earrings or love or a girl’s smooth cheek pressed against a boy’s hand.
Every day I watched for the mailman, hoping for a letter from home, knowing guiltily that I didn’t deserve one after all the weeks in which I had refused to write. But there was one thing I had to know even if I had to write and plead for a letter: I had to know if they had heard from Joey. More and more I leaned toward Lonnie’s idea that Joey might have gone home; more and more I hoped that idea was right.
“Maybe they’ll never forgive me,” I thought. “All right, I can take it. I can take anything if only I know that Joey is safe with them—if only I know the idea that Joey might have gone home; more and shelter.”
The letter came one stormy afternoon when I was alone. It
was addressed to Lonnie in Mom’s handwriting. I sat there in the quiet kitchen waiting for Lonnie to get home, turning the envelope over and over in my hands, seeing in my mind the room at home and the table where Mom must have sat as she wrote.
Janey was with me by the time Lonnie came home for supper, and we stood together, hardly breathing as he tore the envelope open. There was an enclosed letter which he handed to me. I clutched it as I listened to Lonnie read what Mom had written to him.
They had not heard from Joey since we left Baton Rouge. She told Lonnie that she watched every mail hoping to hear from one of us, but that it seemed as if a great darkness had gobbled both of us up. She thanked him for taking care of me during my sickness, and she begged him to let her know as soon as we had any word from Joey. Lonnie reread a part of the letter to himself; then he folded it slowly and shook his head as he placed it in his coat pocket.
When I unfolded the letter Mom had directed to me, Lonnie found an excuse for him and Janey to leave the kitchen and allow me to be alone. When they were gone, I just sat there in the half-darkness, holding the letter tightly, wanting to read it and yet afraid I couldn’t bear what she might have to say.
Finally I turned on the light bulb that hung from the kitchen ceiling and spread the closely written page out in front of me.
She asked me first to believe that she loved me and that she would never be happy until Joey and I were home. After that she talked about Dad. I wouldn’t know him, she said; he looked like an old man what with worry and anxiety and remorse for his boys. He had a job of sorts—not a good one and not steady, but it had saved his sanity, she thought.
Kitty had a job typing in an office down in the Loop; she sent her love to me and begged me to find Joey and come home. “Your sister loves you dearly, Josh. She suffers with Dad and me when we have no word from you.”
When she told me of her job, there was almost a hint of laughter in the paragraph—laughter had come so easily to her in the old days.
“Your mother is getting mixed up with some of the ruder elements of Chicago, dear boy. I answered an ad in the paper, and I am now giving music lessons to the wife of one of the city’s west side gangsters. She’s a quiet and pretty young woman, but she has very little aptitude for music. I think she is lonely and perhaps frightened. It is plain that she is paying for my company rather than for my teaching, but she has been very generous and kind. She has found five other pupils for me, and the money is a godsend....”
At the end of her letter she said, “Your dad has not had a full night’s sleep since you left, Josh. I beg you for his sake and mine to forgive and try to understand all that has happened. Without that forgiveness and understanding, neither Dad nor I will ever know happiness again.”
I had read the letter for a third time when Lonnie and Janey came back to the kitchen. It was raining harder than ever by then, a downpour that made the windowpanes look like lead as the rain beat against them. Lonnie lighted a lamp and sat down in the rocking chair beside the stove. He hated the glare of the bulb that hung from the ceiling, preferring the old kerosene lamp instead. It did give a softer, prettier light, but the night was so dreary that any light, glaring or soft, mattered little in the face of our gloomy mood.
Janey snapped on her radio which she had lately left with me so that I might enjoy it while I was alone during the day. A band was playing, and some rather silly female voice was singing something about life being a bowl of cherries. Janey stood listening for a minute; then, wrinkling her nose at the unseen singer, she hastily switched to another station. We leaned back in our chairs, not much interested in the radio until a phrase caught our attention. A man was talking, and he had just mentioned “the wild children of the road.” It seemed to be a program of editorial comment. I was interested right away.
“They are a growing army,” he said. “There are hundreds of them on the roads this winter; most of them are boys in their teens. There are a few girls too, not many—about one in twenty. Then there are scores of younger children, some of them so very young that one marvels at their survival. They come from all over the country, this children’s army. They come from the cities where the unemployment of a father often means too little food for too many mouths. They come from the farms where the incredibly low prices of produce have been as tragic for the farm family. They don’t know where they’re going or why. They simply move on—on to the next door for a handout or maybe a curse, on to the next packing box or sand cave for a bed.
“They hop freights, and in so doing dozens of them are killed or crippled. They hitchhike; they beg and steal and fight one another. They are half-starved, scantily dressed, susceptible to diseases brought on by malnutrition and exposure. They ought to be in warm and comfortable homes; they ought to be in school. Instead, they are struggling through an icy winter, lucky if they are able to stay alive from one day to another.
“Here in Omaha this afternoon police were summoned to a dilapidated barn just outside the city limits where the high winds that accompanied today’s severe rainstorm caused a wall to collapse, pinning a fourteen-year-old youth under a heavy oak beam. The boy was hospitalized as soon as he was removed from the wreckage; doctors say his condition is critical. Of the other eight children who had spent the last three days in the barn, five were found to be suffering from varying degrees of malnutrition. Two of them are twelve-year-old cousins who say their home is in Des Moines, Iowa; another is a ten-year-old boy from Chicago who looked, as one newsman put it, like a half-famished angel with a shock of blond hair and an old banjo which he clutched in lieu of a harp—”
I don’t think that I made a sound, but I felt a scream inside me. Lonnie said, “My God, my God, it’s Joey. It has to be Joey.”
Dimly after a minute I began to hear the words from the radio again. “... aroused the compassion of many citizens of Omaha who tonight have opened their homes to these desperately needy children. A few of the wild boys of the road are in good hands tonight. But they are only a few. Hundreds of others are out in the fields, on the highways, in the poorer sections of towns and cities. They are raiding garbage cans; they are burning anything they can find in an effort to keep warm. Not since the Crusades have so many children suffered so cruelly. And this is the United States of America in the year of our Lord, 1933.”
Lonnie was pulling on his coat. “I’ll go to the radio station. See what they know. They can surely tell me what people to contact next. I’ll find him. I’ll find that boy if it takes all night—all week—”
“Let me go with you, Lonnie,” I begged.
“Don’t be a fool, Josh.” His voice was harsh. “Do you think I want you going into a relapse when we don’t know what to expect about Joey? You stay right here. I’ve got enough to worry about.”
He hurried outside, and through the din made by the rain we heard the sound of his old car as it sputtered into action. Janey put her hand on my arm. “He’s all worked up, Josh. He was like this the night we found you. He almost took my head off when I asked him a few questions about you that night.”
I sat down, suddenly very tired. “We’re causing him trouble and expense—we’re making him worry. I hate to think about it,” I said.
She sat down beside me on the bench behind the stove, and we clasped hands; somehow it seemed the natural thing to do. The room was shadowy in the lamplight.
“Do you want me to talk or be quiet?” Janey asked.
“Be quiet,” I answered.
“Do you want me to stay here or go over home and leave you alone?”
“I want you to stay here—I want you very much, Janey. Just stay here like this.”
She nodded, and we sat there for a long time, close to one another without moving. Gramma came over later to iron the shirts in a big laundry basket which Lonnie had carried in for her earlier, the work that gave her a chance to earn a little money to help with expenses. I thought Gramma might not like it that Janey and I were sitting together with our hands clasped, but s
he seemed to feel it was all right. She said to Janey, “It’s like when we had our Davy with us. You’d sit there behind the stove holding each other by the hand—you remember?”
Janey nodded and smiled at the deaf old woman; then she turned to me. “She’s right, you know. Davy and I used to sit like this. Especially if one or both of us had been scolded. We’d just sit here holding each other’s hand and staring in front of us. Lonnie and Aunt Helen used to say it was unnerving. I think, unconsciously, we meant it to be that way.”
“You liked him a lot, didn’t you?”
“I adored him. He was just enough older to make me feel that whatever he did was right. Anything, of course, that didn’t interfere with me. We fought once in a while. Not often, but when we did, it was a bloody fight.”
We didn’t say anything more. I watched Gramma take a hot flatiron from the stove and push it slowly back and forth along a white shirt sleeve, making little inroads at the top of the cuff, pressing slowly and heavily across the cuff itself. The rain continued to beat against the windows, stubbornly persisting, I thought, long after you’d think there couldn’t be any more water to come down. It seemed Lonnie had been gone an age; I wondered what could have happened. I wondered if it could have been a mistake, if by some cruel chance there could have been another boy from Chicago who was clutching an old banjo.
We waited hour after hour. At nine Janey remembered that we hadn’t had supper, and so she filled bowls with soup and the three of us ate a little. At ten she and Gramma hung the long rows of shirts, each on its separate hanger, in Lonnie’s bedroom, ready to be packed and delivered the next day. Then Gramma drew a shawl around her shoulders and motioned to Janey. “We must go, honey. It may be late before Uncle Lonnie gets home. You have to get to bed.” She came over and, to my surprise, bent and kissed my forehead. “My prayers have been for your little brother ever since you came, Josh; tonight they will be the same,” she said. It was strange that I had ever thought of her as being grim.