Five

FIVE

the boy had just put his head down on his rolled-up trousers that he used for a pillow, his trousers with the money in the pockets, when he heard pounding on the trailer door and Bill was standing over the bunk with a flashlight.

Sleep was still in his mind and the boy opened his eyes and looked up into the light and said,
`What’s wrong?`
`Wrong? Nothing’s wrong, it’s time to go to work.`

Bill turned and left and the boy started to lie back, so hungry for sleep – it couldn’t have been an hour – that his eyes almost slammed shut, but Bill turned and pounded on the trailer again.
`Come on, boy – we got work to do.`
And that time it worked and the boy slid out of the bunk and put his feet on the floor and pulled his trousers on and went out to pee and eat a breakfast sandwich as Bill drove the truck to take him out to the field.
`How much money did I give you last night?`
Bill asked while they were pouring diesel into the tractor from five-gallon cans.

`I don’t know – I didn’t count it yet,` the boy lied. He had counted in the yard light coming through the window of the trailer before he went to sleep.  A hundred and forty dollars Bill had given him.

`I don’t want it back,` Bill said, reading his thoughts. `It wasn’t a lot, was it? Like a thousand dollars or anything?`
`No. I don’t think so.`
`I mean I don’t care. I just need to know so I can tell how much I won.`
`A hundred,` the boy said. `A hundred and forty dollars.`
`Oh. Jeez, I was hoping it was more. I wanted to go over twenty-one thousand – the way it is, I’m shy by seven hundred dollars or so.`
`You won twenty thousand dollars?`
`Almost. But Oleson, he won over twenty last year and I just wish I could have won more than he did- you know, just to say it when we’re sipping a beer and rub his ugly face in it.`

He left the boy just as the sun edged up and the boy started discing on a field that was a mile long. It was all he could do to stay awake and finally he stood and sang at the top of his lungs to keep from falling asleep. He had decided to hell with it and was going to stop the tractor and sleep when he saw Alice coming with the pickup to bring the forenoon lunch.

He was moving close to the end of the field and she drove round and waited where he would end the round.

She smiled at him and gave him cake and sandwiches and a Thermos of coffee, which he drank first while it was still warm, hoping it would keep him awake.

She did not leave while he ate this time as she always had before, but instead sat in the truck with the door open, while he sat on the ground leaning back against the wheel a few feet away chewing the food and staring out at nothing.

`Was there a woman?`
The question came so suddenly that the boy jumped. He looked at her. `What?`
`Woman,` she repeated. `Was there a woman?`
`I don’t know what you mean-`
`I mean last night at the bar. I know he played poker. He’s always a bad one for cards. And to drink now and then. I can understand that. But I want to know if had a woman there at the bar with him when you went in for him. Was there a woman?`

He looked out across the field again, chewed and swallowed. It was a meatloaf sandwich and tasted so good he didn’t want to swallow but keep chewing. `No. Just men.`

Alice looked intently at him for a moment, then nodded. `Good. I’ve put on weight these last two years and I worry that he’ll go to wanting skinny women. I read about it in a magazine, that men want skinny women with big breasts. Is that right? Is that what women want?`

Talking like this made him uncomfortable, made his stomach tighten, and he looked at her out of the corner of his eye and saw that she had been pretty before the weight, and wasn’t that fat and was still pretty, and he thought, I have never talked with a woman about breasts before and I am not a man to know what men want, but he remained silent and she kept talking.

`Of course you read all these things and they don’t mean Shinola but I did want to know if he had a woman at the bar. Especially if she was a skinny woman…` She let it hang and he realised that he was expected to answer again.

`No. no woman. Just men.` And he had to turn away because she was leaning forward and down from the cab and e could see the swell of her breasts above her dress and there was a little perspiration on them where they came together and he couldn’t stop staring at them, at the dampness of them.

`Well, that’s al for the good.` She straightened.
`Are you don eating? I better get back to the house and start cooking dinner.`

She took the bucket and the Thermos of coffee and drove off and he went back to the tractor and started it and began to disc. He worked all afternoon up to dark when he saw Bill coming for him and if he didn’t force his mind to think of other things it stuck on the way Alice’s breasts had looked with the faint sheen of sweat on them when she’d leaned down and asked if men liked skinny women with large breasts.

They drove into the yard just as it turned dark and the boy was so tired he’d fallen asleep in the truck. Because he was dozing it took him seconds to realise what Bill said as they turned into the driveway.

`Damn,` Bill mumbled. `A sheriff’s car is here. I’ll bet Oleson was pissed about losing that much money and wants the law to get it back for him!`
Bill parked and they got out just as a deputy came from the house with Alice.

`He wants to talk to the boy,` Alice said to Bill, and the boy thought, Shit, the Mexicans were right. They have been looking for me.

`I got a report on a runaway and I heard you have a new hired kid out here,` the deputy said. He was tall and had a stomach that hung over his gun belt but his shoulders were wide and he looked strong. And mean, the boy thought – something about him had an edge.

`What’s your name, boy?` the deputy asked, and the boy gave him a phoney name.
`You got some paper with your name on it? A licence or something?`
`No.`
`I think your lying, boy. About the name. you come with me and we’ll straighten it out.`

`Hell Jacobsen, he’s a good worker. There ain’t nothing wrong with him.` Bill stopped him with a wave. `He busts his balls for me.`
`Fine. If he ain’t the runaway I’ll bring him back here. But there’s a poster and I’ve got to tell you he looks close to the picture. Get in the car, boy. The front seat.`

The inside of the squad car smelled like booze and puke and he settled into the seat with his knees near the shotgun bolted in the floor bracket and thought of how it would be to go home. He no longer had a home, in his mind, and if the sheriff had the right picture they would send him back and he didn’t think he could stand it.

The deputy drove in silence – breaking it only to make a report on the radio – until they came to a town, the boy fighting sleep all the way so that he missed the sign that said the name of the village.

`We get out here,` the deputy said, parking by a two-storey brick building and pointing to a side door. `Wait by that door. Don’t run.`

`I won’t,` the boy said, and for the first time actually thought of it. Maybe he could do that, could run.

The deputy locked the car and then came to the door, pushed it open and made the boy go up a set of stairs inside. They were cement steps with steel pipe for handrails, dimly lit by a bulb hanging at the top.

At the head of the stairs there was a steel door and on it was stencilled the word:

JAIL

`Inside,` the deputy said. The boy pushed at the door and then pulled when it didn’t open and went into a fifteen-foot-square room with a metal desk and a table with a coffeepot and hot plate on top of it and some filing cabinets along a wall to the right. On the left wall there were three steel-barred cell doors. Two stood open and one was closed with an old man sleeping inside on a metal-frame bed that folded down from the wall and hung on chains.

`Empty your pockets,` the deputy said. `There, on the table. Everything, and I do mean everything or I’ll kick your ass until it’s a ring around your neck.`

The boy had a dilemma about the money. He had an old pocketknife he’d picked up somewhere and some change and that was it except for all the money he’d made and what Bill had given him from the poker game, which he had kept with him, stuffed down tight into every tight pocket. He thought of holding the money back but the deputy sounded like he meant the ass kicking thing and if he searched the boy and found the money it might go worse for him.

He took the money out and put it on the table.
`What’s this?` The deputy had been watching while he drank a cup of coffee from the pot on the hot plate. `You’ve got a lot of money there, kid. How much is it?`

The boy said nothing, and stood looking at the money lying in a rumpled pile on the table.

`Come on, boy, save me counting it.`
`I don’t know for sure. I earned it hoeing beets and working for Bill. It’s all mine.`

`Well, yes, that’s one way of looking at it…` He scooped the money up, folded it nearby and put it in his pocket.

`That’s my money,` the boy repeated.

`Shut up, kid.` The deputy hit the boy in the shoulder. It was a straight jab and not nearly as hard as it could have been but the boy felt as if he’d been struck with an iron hammer/ he slammed sideways into the wall and fell down on one knee and thought, Jesus, I hope he never cuts loose on me.

`Way I see it, your folks want you back and there’s no mention of money-`
There was a phone on the desk and it chose that second to ring.

`Damn.` The deputy picked the receiver up and held it to his ear. `Sheriff’s office. Yeah. Yeah. No.` Here his voice changed, softened. `Well, I can’t leave just now, I’ve got me a fugitive.` He paused, listening. `How long is he going to be gone?` Another silence, then he took a deep breath. `I’ll be there in ten minutes.` He turned to the boy. `Get your ass in that middle cell.`

The boy moved from the wall to the cell, hesitated and was pushed through by the deputy. The door slammed shut behind him and the lawman left without speaking.

The jail was quie except for the rasping breath of the old man in the next cell, and the boy sat on the cot that hung off the wall. He breathed in deeply, then let it out and thought, Shit, he took my money. Maybe if I talk nice he’ll give it back to me…

`You get your butt out of here.`

The voice startled him and he jumped and looked across at the old man. He was still on his back, still had his eyes closed and appeared to be sleeping soundly.

`What?`
`Leave. Now. Jacobsen’ll be gone an hour at least while he gets sweaty-belly with Beverly Dalton. You can cover a lot of ground in an hour.` The old man still lay with his eyes closed, talking softly. `Get to the highway and start hitchhiking. Head west. Beverly and her husband, Clyde, live wast. You get a ride quick and you’ll be sixty miles away before that deputy gets back.`

The boy leaned against the wall. `Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’m in a cell.`
`Push on the door. It ain’t locked.`

The boy stood, pushed and the door swung open easily.

`It’s all for show. The locks don’t work and they haven’t had them fixed – going on two years and more. Now leave, I’m sick of talking.`

`But I’ll be a fugitive – a jailbreaker. He’ll come after me. I’ll go to prison.`
`Like hell you will.
`Well then, why don’t you run?`
`Because I am a studier of jails. It’s how I live. You’re young and there are other things for you to do … You’re also using up your hour by talking.`

The old man became silent then and the boy walked to the door without quite meaning to and opened it without quite meaning to and walked down the stairs and out the door and broke out of jail without quite meaning to and kept walking until he was at the edge of town and he stuck his thumb out when he saw headlights coming.

The car passed, and the next, and the boy felt that he should be worried but he wasn’t. he thought, That big son of a bitch took my money and I’m pissed. And it became a force that made breaking jail and running the right thing to do, a litany that helped him to keep his thumb out, and the next car stopped.

He almost didn’t get in. the car was a ’49 Plymouth and seemed on the edge of falling apart. That didn’t worry him as much as the driver did. He was a small round man with black hair so long it hung over his collar and over his thick glasses that shone so brightly in the light reflected from the dashboard that they seemed to glow in the dark. He did not look weird so much as like a stranger, like he didn’t belong anywhere. But it was the only car to stop and the boy felt there wouldn’t be another, so he climbed in and settled back into the passenger seat.

The man did not stop talking.
`I am American not yet but I will someday to be citizen. Enclish already I am knowing and nearly enough for testing: if you to ask what President with which date, I know, and how the Congress works, and already I have a fine car and a license to operate. Is this not a fine car?` Before the boy could say anything he continued. `In Hungary such a car would not be possible. It is a Plymouth and has a wonderful sufficiency in controls and handles. More than any car I have seen in Hungary. In Hungary such a man to have this car would be a very high official. Here I bought this car with just four months’ wages working at the Algonquin Hotel in the city of New York. So many dirty dishes I have never seen. Dishes they have for every little thing and they put dishes on the tables that are not even used. And still they must be washed…`

After a word or ten or fifteen the boy did not hear them any longer except in groups or if the man said something that caught his interest. ` … many fine women`, or `… the tanks used machine guns to shoot into windows`,

I am now really a fugitive, he thought. He was still exhausted and should have slept but fear kept him awake and his thoughts ran together. I have escaped jail and I am on the run and the son of a bitch took all my money so I can’t even eat, hundreds and hundreds of dollars more than I’ve ever had, more than I’ll maybe ever have again. The bastard took it all and they’re probably searching for me now and setting up roadblocks or something-

`Portland.`
The boy snapped back. His eyes had started to close and sleep was like a heavy quilt on his thoughts, coming down until the single word struck him. `What did you say?`

`I am going to Portland. That is in the state of Oregon. Where is it that you are to be?`
`Oh. Sure. Well, I have an uncle in Portland` - the lie came easily - `and he wants me to come out. I was working on a farm but the work ended so now I’ll go visit him for a while. Sure. Portland is fine. I’ll go out there and visit my uncle` - Shut up, he said to himself, you’re talking too much - `for a while.`

But the driver didn’t think it strange that the boy spoke so long and he merely nodded. `Company will be good to have.` If he thought it odd that a boy was hitchhiking at night across North Dakota he didn’t show it and went back to his incessant stream of words. He spoke now of New York City and how grey it was and how green the fields in the prairies were and how farmers in Hungary would not believe the farms in America, which he pronounced `Ammarreeca` , and the boy put his head back against the door and let the warm night air blow on his face and closed his eyes and went to sleep and there was not the slightest sign that the next day the man sitting next to him would be dead.

The sun as coming through the back window of the car and cooking the back of his head. The boy had not had a haircut for weeks now  and his hair was thick shaggy and the sun heated the hair and seemed to bake his head and it was this which awakened him.

His thoughts came back slowly. He saw he fields going by the car and felt the stiffness in his neck and the heat on his head and saw that he had drooled on his shoulder. He wiped the side of his mouth and remembered at the same time that he was a fugitive and then he turned to see the driver glance at him and smile.

`You are awake. So hard you slept I thought you were dead. I stopped at a place that was open for food and you slept without knowing.` He took a sip from a paper cup and nodded to a bag between them on the seat. `There is coffee for you there and some of the round pastries…`

The boy opened the bag and found a paper cup of coffee, which he drank. It was cold and too strong, bitter, but it cleaned his mouth and made him more alert. He looked in the bag again and saw at least a dozen doughnuts, the kind dipped in sugar with the granules sticking to the sides. And he was so hungry, starving, that he ate six of them without thinking, as a dog or wolf would eat, cramming them into his mouth and barely tasting or chewing them.

`An appetite is good,` the driver said. `But do not make yourself ill-`

And he died.
Later the boy would try to place the sequence of it all in his thinking, the way it happened, and by doing so he hoped to find out in some manner why it would happen. But at the moment, the Hungarian’s death came so fast that there was no time to think.

There were pheasants all over North Dakota. Somebody had told the boy that they were imported from China years before, for hunters, and they had increased until it was hard to drive a mile without seeing two or three on the road. In the mornings they came from the brushy fencerows, where they lived, to the shoulders of the roads to gather small pellets of gravel for their gizzards.

Normally when cars roared past the pheasants simply crouched and froze. Now and then they would jump into flight away from the shoulder and sometimes they would jump up and fly in front of the vehicle. Usually, when they hit a car, they rose slowly enough so they hit only the bumper, or grille, though such an impact could cave in a grille or actually dent a fender or smash a headlight.

But if everything went wrong they would jump a little early, fly a bit higher and hit in the middle of the windshield.

The Plymouth had a two-piece windshield with a brace down the middle, and a large cock pheasant timed it precisely to leave the ground and strike the windshield in front of the driver’s face.

At slower speeds the damage might have been a cracked windshield and a dead bird. But the Hungarian was happy with the car and the morning and sipping coffee while he drove and he had accelerated to nearly eighty miles an hour. At eighty miles an hour a four-pound bird hitting a windshield exerts enormous force. Still, had the bird hit the windshield to the side it might have only broken the glass a bit and bounced off.

But when the pheasant saw the car coming, it turned directly away from the vehicle at the last instant and so was in line with the car when it struck, presenting a much smaller area for impact.

The pheasant blew through the windshield like a cannonball. The car was immediately filled with feathers, and a spray of blood and pheasant guts covered the boy. The shards of glass stripped off the skin and outer surface of the bird but the piece remaining weighed almost three pounds and this chunk of gore, filled with bone, hit the exact centre of the Hungarian’s face at effectively eighty miles an hour.

It did not kill him instantly. The force of the bird snapped his head back and broke his neck and cut off all motor responses to his body. His right foot had been directly on the accelerator but he had turned it slightly just before the impact so when his leg jammed down, the foot slid off the pedal and the accelerator popped up and the car began to decelerate.

All this in less than a second.
The boy looked up, saw the feathers and splatter across the windshield, turned to see the bird hit the man’s face and felt the car begin to slow. All in a second.

For another second, a little more, the car stayed in the same path. The driver’s arms had not moved and did not move for several beats and the car held its course down the highway.

But it was just for a moment. Then the body relaxed, the left hand let go and the right pulled slowly, released, pulled down and the steered the car – still doing close to sixty – off the road.

In this part of North Dakota there were no ditches. That was all that saved the boy. The road went to shoulder and then to prairie and the car hit the tall grass, then crossed that into a ploughed field, slamming into the furrows and ruts so hard the boy was thrown against the ceiling.

`Goddamn!`
He was thrown up and down, from side to side amid flying doughnut, coffee, feathers and pheasant guts and blood as the car slammed through the ploughed furrows in flying dirt and dust to finally, finally come to a stop.

The boy realised he had closed his eyes and he opened them now. The inside of the car was a mess and he wanted more than anything to get out but the driver was leaning back against the door jamb, his face a pulp.

`Goddamn goddamn goddamn…` It was a whisper and he didn’t know he was saying it, knew only that he had to do something and didn’t know what or how or anything.

He reached across the car and touched the Hungarian’s arm, pushed with his finger, but there was no response and he saw now that the driver wasn’t breathing any more and knew that he was dead.

`God -`
The motor was still running and he turned the key off, amazed at how incredibly silent it became. Somewhere nearby he heard a meadowlark call from a fence post, then nothing and he thought, What am I going to do?

Help, he thought. I need to get help. But he didn’t know why. The man was clearly, awfully, messily dead – there was nothing to be done for him. And the boy was a wanted man; he thought that way, not a wanted boy but as a wanted man.

He pulled down on the door handle, opened the door slightly, sick now at the sight and smell of the mess that the inside of the car had become; wanting to puke, he stood out of the car, away from it.

A pattern came into his thinking. Not so much ideas as a pattern of what had to be done. He would have to leave. There was nothing of him in the car and it would help nobody if he was found. He would have to leave and when he came to a place with a phone he could call the police and tell them of the accident and they would come and, well, do whatever they did. That didn’t matter.

What mattered, what he saw in the pictures in his mind, was that he had to leave and he slammed the door and moved away from the car and looked back to the road and saw that no cars were coming. He trotted to the side of the road and began walking and for the first time looked down at his clothes. The trousers were all right but the T-shirt was spotted with a little blood.

`Damn!`

Well, nothing for it. He had no other clothes, had nothing. The sheriff’s deputy had taken him from Bill’s without his clothes. He took the T-shirt off and thought his face must be spattered too. While walking, trotting really, he spat on the shirt and used it to clean his face.

Shirt still off, he had moved along the road for ten minutes, then another five, a good mile west of the wreck, maybe more, when he heard the sound of a car coming, the slick whine of tyres on asphalt. He wondered if he should try to hide but there was nowhere to go – the fields went flat away from the road, nothing higher than a dirt hump for at least a mile, maybe more.

So he kept walking. Whoever it was must not have seen the car off in the field – how could they miss it? – or if they saw it didn’t care and he tried to make himself what he wasn’t, tried in his mind to be neither part of the wreck nor a fugitive.

The car slowed. He didn’t turn but it slowed and came to a stop next to him.

`Going to Clinton?`
The boy turned. An ancient woman wearing a pair of bib overalls and a work shirt sat in the front seat of an old Dodge – the boy guessed a ’34 or ’35: one of the old black ones. He only knew of them because he’d once watched a boy who had one try to make it into a hot rod.

`Sure,` he said. `Clinton, sure. How far is it?`
`Upwards of thirty mile,` the woman said. She was round. Not fat but round. `Too far to walk in a day but I’ll give you a ride most of the way there if you like. My name is Hazel.`

`Thank you,` the boy said, and opened the front door and got in, thinking. How can she have gone past the Plymouth sitting out in the field and not seen it? Sitting there with a boy in it and not seen it? But before they’d gone a mile he found out why.

The woman sat, looking straight ahead, a round head in the front seat, and she didn’t talk and she didn’t look left or look right. She concentrated on her driving, grasping the wheel with an almost frantic grip, both hands, and when she got the car up to thirty miles an hour she stopped accelerating. Thirty it was, thirty it would be as they ground along.

The boy leaned back in the seat – resting his bare back on the upholstered fuzzy cloth, it seemed to be woven with dust built into the fabric – and watched out the side window at the fields crawling by but didn’t see anything. His eyes burned in the wind coming through the open window and he thought, I have nothing but crap for luck. I make some money and the law takes it away. I get a ride and … He thought suddenly of the Hungarian man and how he looked, dead, and felt ashamed for complaining about his luck. If he’d lost the memory at least  he’d got away from the law and hadn’t been sent home. Home? He thought. He had no home. Not any more. He’d never had much of one but now it was all gone – from his thinking and, he hoped, from his memories. His luck wasn’t that bad; he’d got away from the law and wasn’t hurt in the wreck and he was moving…

Moving slow, he thought, looking out of the corner of his eye at the lady and at the speedometer seemingly glued on thirty. But moving. It could have been worse.

He closed his eyes for a moment, just a moment – or so it seemed – and when he next opened them the car was stopped and when he looked out he saw he was parked in front of a small farmhouse and the old woman was no longer in the car.

 He opened the door and stood away from the car and looked around. It had once been a functioning farm, but years earlier. There was an ancient barn that needed paint and something to prop up the sagging roof. A brick silo with a wooden roof half gone. Some wooden sheds and an outhouse and a small white house that was the only thing in good repair. The farmhouse looked freshly painted and seemed to have an almost new roof and a neatly painted picket fence and a neatly mown rectangle of grass in front. Out back was a garden with clean rows of lettuce and carrots and beans. Everywhere else, out around the house and by the barn and sheds and lying out in the fields around the house, were parked old pieces of farm machinery. Most of it dated back to horse-drawn days: cultivators, swatters, corn and potato planters, seed drills, trip rakes and John Deere mowers. The boy had watched his uncles use horses and knew something of working them and that some farms still used in the winter when tractors were hard to start, but this equipment was so old the wheels had wooden spokes and iron tyres, so old the wood was rotting.

`You’re up.`

The boy turned and saw the old woman coming out of the house carrying a work shirt.
`You seemed tired and I saw the blood on your shirt and figured you for a nosebleeder so I let you sleep. Figured you needed rest. I took you shirt to wash.` She walked while talking and was in front of the boy and handed him the shirt. `This is one I … had. You take it and cover yourself. I’m cooking some food and I won’t feed a person unless he’s properly covered.`

She had the strangest way of talking in clipped sentences that never seemed to want an answer. The boy put the shirt on and buttoned it. It was too big by a size nut he rolled the sleeves up and tucked it into his trousers and followed her back into the house.

The inside was like a picture he’d once seen in a library book of a fairy village. There seemed to be glass cases or shelves in every corner and they were all filled with knick-knacks; tiny porcelain figurines and animals, little bouquets of porcelain and glass flowers, painted plates, small silver spoons, ironed lace curtains and a crocheted tablecloth on a hardwood dining table in the middle. Off to the back was a kitchen, and a small doorway at the right led to what the boy supposed was a bedroom, but this main room, this sitting-dining room dominated the house. It was like a museum. On one wall thee was a large tinted colour photograph of a young man in a pilot’s uniform with a flight helmet and raised goggles on his head. Across the picture diagonally there was a narrow black satin ribbon and on the wall next to it was a framed newspaper obituary and a telegram with a black star on it.

`He was my son,` the old woman said, and then disappeared into the kitchen and came out with a bowl of stew and corrected herself.

`Is my son, - he is Robert and he is my son, not was. He was a pilot in the Pacific. Flew one of them P-38s and there was a fight and the Japs shot him down-`

Hazel put the stew down and looked at the picture, her eyes tearing. `He was something. When it rained of a hot day Robert would take off all his clothes and sit in the yard in a puddle. Just sit there laughing.` Her eyes changed, grew hard. `I didn’t even get the body back. The son-of-a-bitch army kept it and wouldn’t give it back to me. They said he was missing. They said they couldn’t find him. Bullshit. ``That’s all lies,` she spat, her voice a hiss. `That’s lies they tell when they don’t want you to know what really happened. He’s probably in one of them secret camps. Where they keep them after the war.`

She turned and went back into the kitchen and came back with bread. `I get magazines with stories in them. I read about them camps – the ones where they keep soldiers so they don’t bring diseases back to this country…`

She trailed off and gathered bowls to put on the table and when she had placed them she looked at the boy. `Hands.`
`Pardon?`
`I want to see your hands, see if they’re clean. I won’t feed those with dirty hands.`

The boy held his hands up and she took them and turned them over, then back. `Wash,` she said. `In the kitchen at the sink you’ll find soap and water. Wash them good or you’ll take sick.`

He went to the kitchen and it was like stepping back into the past. On the left side there was a big wood cook stove with warming ovens sitting high above the cooktop, all black, trimmed in shiny nickel. Near it, beneath a window looking out on the fields with their old farm equipment, there was a sink with a red hand pump. By the pump was a bar of Lava soap and hanging on the wall next to the window there was a coarse cotton towel. He washed his hands thoroughly and splashed water in his face, dried with the towel and went back into the front room.

Hazel was sitting at the table waiting for him. There were two empty places set on either side of her and he moved to sit to her left but she stopped him.
`Sit here, on my right. That other one is for Robert.`

He nodded and moved round the table to the right and sat and pulled the chair up to the table and it did not seem strange in some way that the other chair and place setting were for Robert. The picture was up there and Robert looked down on them and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to be sitting at the table eating. The food was simple – stew and cold cuts of summer sausage and homemade bread and butter. The boy thought of how the Mexicans had eaten, all taking from the one pot, and of how he had eaten at Bill’s, off the tailgate of the truck. He wasn’t sure how to eat here, so he waited.

Hazel took a piece of bread and buttered it in a sure rhythm, as she must have buttered it all her life. He waited until she had taken a piece of summer sausage and put it carefully on half of her buttered bread, watched while she slowly cut the bread in half to make a sandwich, placed the empty half on top of the other half and then put the sandwich in the centre of her plate.

`You make yourself a whole sandwich,` Hazel said softly. `You take two pieces of bread, and butter one side of one piece. Then put meat on it and the other piece of bread…` Her voice was even and carefully enunciated, as if she were talking to a small child. As she spoke she took another piece of bread, buttered half of it, made a half sandwich and put it on the plate beneath the picture.

He did as she told him, working slowly though hunger was tearing at him now. He’d eaten only the half dozen doughnuts before the accident and they hadn’t dented the emptiness in him. The bread was cut thick and he rubbed the butter evenly on one piece, took two slices of sausage and made a sandwich. He started to take a bite but saw that Hazel still had her sandwich on her plate and had now clasped her hands in front of the plate. The boy hesitated but did the same.

`Heavenly Father,` she began, paused, took a breath and finished, `please bless our food and the three of us we pray in Jesus’ name amen.`

She ladled stew into the boy’s bowl, took up her food and began eating in silence, chewing each bite carefully, looking not quite at the boy, staring past and out the small windows through the lace curtains. Twice Hazel looked up at the picture of the pilot and down at its sandwich with such a look in her eyes that the boy half expected the sandwich on the plate to have a bite taken out of it but when they were done the pilot’s plate was untouched.

Hazel took the dishes away, including the one below the picture, and then came back without speaking and went outside.

The boy waited a moment and when she didn’t come back in followed her out and they left the yard and went to a small shed, where Hazel rummaged around and came up with a bucket full of tools: wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, a grease gun, a hammer and some cold chisels.
`Got to work on the swatter,` she said. `It needs fixing.`

She left the shed and walked across the yard to one of the rows of old farm machinery. At one end stood a large implement with a wooden paddle wheel out to the side, on a platform. On the front of the platform was a sickle bar with teeth for cutting grass or hay or grain and at one end of the platform there was a rack with machinery on it and a metal seat with holes in it that led out to a long wooden tongue with places to hook a team of horses.

`This is a swatter,` Hazel said, putting the bucket of tools on the ground. `It cuts grain and binds it into shocks. It needs tightening and greasing.`

`I saw one before,` the boy said. `On my uncle’s farm. He said he used to pull it with horses but didn’t use it once he got a tractor.` He looked around. `Do you have horses here?`
`No.`
`Oh.`
`We will, though. Come maybe this fall or next when Robert comes home we’ll be getting a team and we need all this equipment ready to go.`

And the boy knew then she was maybe crazy, and he didn’t care because it was not the evil kind of crazy like his parents but the soft kind.

`Help me here. Hold this wrench. While I tighten.`
The boy took the handle of the wrench and held it and when the nut was tightened they did another and then another and the old woman showed him how to use the grease gun to grease all the certs on the machine and a rag to wipe the grease off and then on to another machine, a corn planter, and then a mower and then supper with Robert again and then to sleep on the porch and breakfast and working on machines another day, then another, until the boy felt like he belonged to the old farm and the old machines that would never be used.

But he didn’t mind. He was a fugitive now, had broken out of jail and was safe here and felt close to Hazel and while there wasn’t any money to earn there was food and a place to sleep without worry and it all could have lasted for ever and maybe would have lasted for ever, he thought, except that the county fair came to nearby Clinton.

And so did Ruby.