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.
4
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.
She watched us thoughtfully while we ate. “Do you smoke?” she asked me after a while.
If there had been any laughter in me, I would have considered that a joke. “Ma’am, if I had the money to buy cigarettes, I’d have bought something for us to eat instead of asking you,” I said.
She nodded. “All right then. You boys can stay the night here. I had to ask about smoking because I’m fearful of fire. But you can stay.” She paused a minute. “I think you’ll have to take a bath, though, and after you’re in bed, I’ll wash your clothes.”
A bath. I wondered if she knew what that meant to us. Joey and I washed with soap and hot water for the first time since we had left home. Our bodies were clean and refreshed and respectable in the suits of long underwear which the woman told us had once belonged to her husband. We lay in a soft bed that night under a feather comforter; we moaned a little before we slept, half in weariness, half in the wonder of being comfortable, and we refused to think of another day.
The lady let us sleep until almost noon the next day. Then she came in softly and laid our clothes, freshly washed and ironed, on the foot of the bed. She stood there looking down at us.
“Poor little fellows, you were dead tired, weren’t you?” she said. She raised the shades at the windows and then walked to the door. “Better get up and into your clean clothes now. I’ve a good breakfast for you. Maybe the sleep and food will give you strength to get to wherever you’re going.”
She had wonderful food for us—hot cereal and toast and cocoa. When I had eaten, I couldn’t believe how well I felt, how strong a surge of confidence built up inside me.
The woman wanted to know any number of things about us. “Do you have any parents?” she asked me.
She was kind and good. I didn’t want to be rude, but I began to feel wary and uneasy. I was silent for so long that she repeated her question. “I suppose so,” I answered. Then, ashamed, I said, “Yes—yes, we have.”
“Do they know where you are?”
“I don’t think so, ma’am.”
“You ran away, didn’t you?”
“No, ma’am. They knew we were leaving. At least, my mother knew that I was leaving. Joey decided to come with me at the last minute.”
“Were you in trouble?”
“Yes, ma’am. Too big an appetite.”
She shook her head and drew a deep breath.
“They must be suffering these days,” she said after a long pause.
I didn’t answer. The woman sat looking at us, frowning a little.
After a while she went to a table, and from the drawer beneath it she took out paper and envelopes and stamps. Then she beckoned me to come to the table.
“Now, write something to Mama,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, ma‘am; I can’t,” I told her.
“You can write, can’t you? You know how to read and write, don’t you?”
Her question made me mad. I had been an honor student in high school. “Yes,” I answered, “I know how to read and write. But I can’t. At least I—I just won’t.”
“You have a hard nature, little man,” she said quietly.
“I suppose you’re right. I hate to be mean after what you’ve done for us. I don’t want to be mean. But I don’t think you can understand. There’s just nothing I can say to my folks. Nothing. If Joey wants to write, he can.”
She turned to my brother. “How about it, Joey?”
“Yes,” he said, “I’ll write a note to them. But I can’t say I’m coming home. Josh and I are going to stick together.”
“Well, then, that’s the way it is. Anyway your mama is going to sleep better knowing that you’re still alive.”
Joey showed me what he had written. He told our parents that we were in Nebraska, that we were well and getting along just fine. They were not to worry, and he would try to send them a line once in a while. That was all. His letter really told them nothing of what we were living through; still, as the old woman said, it at least let them know that we were still alive. She gave Joey some stamped envelopes and made him promise that he’d write whenever he could.
We left that little house regretfully in the early afternoon. We had found cleanliness and rest as well as nourishing food in amounts that satisfied our huge appetites. We wished that we could stay with her, but we knew the rules: one night, one meal. Two meals at the most. After that we must move on. It was understandable. There was no reason why any charity or any person should look after us. We were on our own, and for people on their own, it was a one-night stand unless, by some chance, they had some money in their pockets.
We seemed to be in a cycle of good luck, for we had gone no more than three or four miles down the highway when a truck passed us, its big tires humming along the concrete. The driver threw up his hand as he passed us, and we gave him the hitchhiker’s gesture without really hoping that he might stop. Then we saw the speed slacken and the big truck edge over on the shoulder of the road. We ran toward it, hardly believing our good luck.
The driver was a thin, dark man with a tired look in his eyes. He smiled at us, a little wearily I thought, and he spoke in a kind of dry, toneless voice.
“Where to?” he asked.
“We’re just moving along. We’ll go anywhere.”
He didn’t seem surprised. There were plenty of people just moving along these days. “You from around here?” he asked.
“No. Chicago. We’ve been on the road since the first of October.”
“No folks?”
“No, we’re on our own.”
He seemed to be studying us. Finally he said, “I’m taking this load down to New Orleans. You want to go south?”
It was a bitterly cold day. I could have cheered at the thought of getting to a warm climate.
“Would you take us? I’ll help in any way I can.”
“Do you have any money?”
“Not a cent.” I expected this would end the deal. No money for food and room, no money to pay for the ride. I braced myself for a “Nothing doing, kid,” but I was in for a surprise.
“Well, I’ve been broke quite a few times myself—I know how it feels. Give the youngster a hand and climb in.”
The truck cab was warm, and the comfort of riding was a joy to our tired legs. After he’d asked us our names, the man looked straight ahead of him as he drove, and for miles he didn’t say a word. The drone of the wheels made Joey drowsy, and he dropped off to sleep, leaning against my shoulder. The man glanced at him once, and I noticed a kind of half-smile on his lips.
“Pretty young for a jaunt like this, isn’t he?” he asked, turning to look at me for a second.
“Yes, he’s only ten, but he was set on coming with me.”
He talked to me a little after that—asked where we had been and how we had managed to stay alive. He would acknowledge something I’d say with a nod occasionally, but I had the feeling that he was giving most of his attention to the road and his driving.
After we’d traveled about three hours, we drew over onto the shoulder again. “Have to rest a little,” the man said. “Long straight slab gets you hypnotized after a while.” When he got out of the cab, I followed him and let Joey go on sleeping. The man leaned against a front wheel and rolled a cigarette quickly and carelessly as if he’d done it for a long time. “What was the trouble about?” he asked curtly as if he were sure I knew what he was talking about.
I supposed he meant the trouble at home, but I just looked dumb and didn’t answer.
“You know what I mean. Why did you run away?”
I hesitated. The things that had happened at home shamed me. I had grown up believing that only ne’er-do-wells lacked food, that only people in homes of low standards shouted insults at one another, begrudged the food that others swallowed. Now Joey and I were from such a home. The music and laughter and love that had once been part of our lives had been
hopelessly shattered. I looked up at the man standing before me.
“I hate to talk about it,” I said in a low voice.
“You don’t have to, I suppose, but before we get too far, I’d like to know something more about the boys I’m hauling south. I don’t want the police on my neck for helping two runaways. Now why’d you tell me you had no folks—that isn’t the case, is it?”
I stared at the ground for a minute. Then I opened up and told him everything that had happened between Dad and me, how things had been going from bad to worse, how Mom had even agreed that it would be better for me to clear out.
He had a way of sighing deeply as if there were some heaviness in his chest. He ground out his cigarette as he sighed and made no comment on what I had told him. I got the impression that he wanted to change the subject.
“How old are you, Josh?” he asked abruptly.
“Fifteen.”
He nodded. “I thought so. What month were you born?”
It struck me as being strange that on a cold day in winter when half of the world was starving, this man would care about my birthday. It was none of my business, though, so I answered as if it were a perfectly natural question. “June—June twelfth.”
He took off his hat and pushed a lock of black hair back from his forehead. “That’s pretty close,” he said. “My kid was born in April of that year. His name was David.”
“He died?” I asked, and then wished that I hadn’t.
“Yes. He died. Five years ago. He was about as tall as Joey—heavier, though, and brown as a little Indian. Looking at you makes me realize how big he would have been. Well”—he turned and opened the door of the cab—“we’d better get on down the road. We’ve got a lot of miles ahead of us.”