2
T
HE BUS CAME FOR THEM ON THE EAST SIDE
OF HOLT AT
seven-thirty in the morning. The driver waited, was turned sideways in the seat staring at the front of the trailer house. She honked the horn. She honked a second time, then the door opened and a young girl in a blue dress stepped out into the untended yard of cheatgrass and redroot, walking toward the bus with her head down, and climbed the metal steps and moved to the middle where there were empty seats. The other students watched her pass in the narrow aisle until she sat down, then started talking again. Now her mother came out of the trailer holding her younger brother by the hand. He was a small boy dressed in blue jeans and a shirt that was too big for him buttoned up to his chin.
After he had climbed aboard the bus the driver said: I shouldn’t have to wait for these kids like this. There’s a schedule I got to follow, if you didn’t know.
The mother looked away, peering through the row of windows until she saw the boy was seated beside his sister.
I’m not going to tell you again about this, the driver said. I’ve had it with you people. There’s eighteen kids I got to pick up. She swung the door closed and released the brake and the bus jerked down Detroit Street.
The woman stared after her until the bus turned the corner onto Seventh and then looked all around as if someone along the street might come to her aid and tell her what to say in reply. But there was no one else outside at this time of morning and she went back to the trailer.
Old and dilapidated, it had once been bright turquoise but the color had faded to a dirty yellow in the hot sun and the blasting wind. Inside, clothes were piled in the corners and a trash bag of empty pop cans was leaning against the refrigerator. Her husband sat at the kitchen table drinking Pepsi from a large glass filled with ice. Before him on a plate were the leftovers of frozen waffles and fried eggs. He was a big heavy black-haired man in outsized sweatpants. His enormous stomach was exposed below his maroon tee-shirt and his huge arms dangled over the back of his chair. He was sitting back resting after breakfast. When his wife came inside he said: What’d she do? You got that look on your face.
Well, she makes me mad. She isn’t suppose to do that.
What’d she say?
She said she got eighteen kids to pick up. She said she don’t have to wait for Richie and Joy Rae like that.
I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, I’m calling the principal. She isn’t allowed to say nothing to us.
She isn’t allowed to say nothing to me never, the woman said. I’m telling Rose Tyler on her.
IN THE WARM MID-MORNING THEY LEFT THE TRAILER AND
walked downtown. They crossed Boston Street and followed the sidewalk to the back of the old square redbrick courthouse and entered a door with black lettering spread across the window:
HOLT COUNTY SOCIAL SERVICES
.
Inside on the right was the reception room. A wide window was set above the front counter, and hollowed into the wood under the glass was a security pocket through which people passed papers and information. Behind it two women sat at desks with files stacked on the floor beneath their chairs, with telephones and more files on the desktops. Pinned to the walls were large calendars and official bulletins issued by the state office.
The man and woman stood at the window, waiting as a teenaged girl ahead of them wrote on cheap yellow tablet paper. They leaned forward to see what she was writing and after a moment she stopped and gave them an annoyed look and turned away so they couldn’t see what she was doing. When she was finished she bent and spoke into the gap beneath the window: You can give this note to Mrs. Stulson now.
One of the women looked up. Are you talking to me?
I’m finished with this.
The woman rose slowly from her desk and came to the counter as the girl slipped the paper under the glass. Here’s your pen back, she said. She dropped it into the hollow.
Is there any message with this?
I put it all on that paper, the girl said.
I’ll give it to her when she comes in. Thank you.
As soon as the girl was gone the woman unfolded the paper and read it thoroughly.
The couple stepped forward. We’re suppose to see Rose Tyler now, the man said. She got an appointment with us.
The woman behind the window looked up. Mrs. Tyler is with another client at the moment.
She was suppose to see us at ten-thirty.
If you’d care to have a seat I’ll tell her you’re here.
He looked at the clock on the wall beyond the glass. The appointment was ten minutes ago, he said.
I understand that. I’ll tell her you’re waiting.
They looked at the woman as if expecting her to say something else and she looked steadily back at them.
Tell her Luther Wallace and Betty June Wallace is here, he said.
I know who you are, the woman said. Take a seat, please.
They moved away from the counter and sat down in chairs against the wall without speaking. Beside them were boxes of plastic toys and a little table with books and an open carton of crayon stubs and broken pencils. No one else was in the room. After a while Luther Wallace removed a jackknife from his pocket and began to scrape at a wart on the back of his hand, wiping the knife blade on the sole of his shoe and breathing heavily, beginning to sweat in the overheated room. Beside him Betty sat looking at the far wall. She appeared to be thinking about something that made her sad, something she could never forget in this world, as if she were imprisoned by the thought of whatever that was. She held a shiny black purse on her lap. She was a large woman not yet forty, with a pockmarked face and limp brown hair, and every minute or two she drew the hem of her loose dress modestly over her knees.
An old man came out from a door behind them and limped across the room with his metal cane. He pushed the door open and went out into the hall. Then the caseworker, Rose Tyler, stepped into the waiting room. She was a short square dark-haired woman in a bright dress. Betty, she said. Luther. Do you want to come back?
We just been sitting here waiting, Luther said. That’s all we been doing.
I know. I’m ready to talk to you now.
They stood up and followed her down the hall and entered one of the little windowless interview rooms and sat down at a square table. Betty arranged the skirt of her dress as Rose Tyler closed the door and seated herself across from them. She set a file on the table and opened it and turned through the pages, reading each one rapidly, and at last looked up. So, she said. How have you been this month? Is everything going the way you want it to?
Oh, we been doing pretty good, Luther said. I guess we don’t have to complain. Do we, dear.
I still got this pain in my stomach. Betty laid a hand gently over her dress as if something was very tender there. I don’t hardly sleep at night, she said.
Did you see the doctor like we talked about? We made an appointment for you to see him.
I went to him. But he didn’t do me no good.
He give her a bottle of pills, Luther said. She been taking them.
Betty looked at him. But they don’t do me no good. I still hurt all the time.
What are they? Rose said.
I give the doctor’s slip to the man at the counter and he filled it out. I got them at home on the shelf.
And you don’t remember what they are?
She looked around the bare room. I don’t remember right now, she said.
Well, they come in a little brown bottle, Luther said. I tell her she got to take one every day.
You do need to take them regularly. They won’t help you unless you do.
I been, she said.
Yes. Well, let’s see how you feel when you come in next month.
They better start doing something pretty soon, Betty said. I can’t take much more of this.
I hope they will, Rose said. Sometimes it takes a while, doesn’t it. She took up the file once more and looked at it briefly. Is there anything else you want to talk to me about today?
No, Luther said. Like I say, I guess we been doing all right.
What about that bus driver? Betty said. I guess you’re forgetting about her.
Oh? Rose said. What’s the trouble with the bus driver?
Well, she makes me mad. She said something to me she isn’t suppose to say.
Yeah, Luther said. He sat forward and put his thick hands on the table. She told Betty she don’t have to wait on Richie and Joy Rae. She said she got fifteen kids to pick up.
Eighteen, Betty said.
It ain’t right for her to talk to my wife that way. I got a mind to call the principal about it.
Just a minute, Rose said. Slow down and tell me what happened. Did you have Richie and Joy Rae out at the curb on time? We’ve talked about that before.
They was out there. They was dressed and ready.
You need to do that, you know. The bus driver’s doing the best she can.
They come right out after she honked.
What’s the bus driver’s name? Do you know?
Luther looked at his wife. Do we know her name, honey?
Betty shook her head.
We never did hear her name. The one with the yellow hair is all we know.
Yes, well. Would you like me to call and find out what’s going on?
Call that principal too. Tell him what she been doing to us.
I’ll make a phone call for you. But you have to do your part too.
We already been doing our part.
I know, but you need to try to get along with her, don’t you. What would you do if your children couldn’t ride the bus?
They looked at Rose and then across the room at the poster taped on the wall. LEAP—Low-Energy Assistance Program, all in red letters.
Let’s see then, Rose said. I’ve got your food stamps here. She produced the stamps from the file on the table, booklets of one, five, ten, and twenty-dollar denominations, each in a different color. She slid the packets across the table and Luther gave them to Betty to put in her purse.
And you received your disability checks on time this month? Rose said.
Oh yeah. They come in the mail yesterday.
And you’re cashing the checks like we talked about and putting the money in separate envelopes for your various expenses.
Betty’s got them. Show her, dear.
Betty removed four envelopes from her purse.
RENT, GROCERIES, UTILITIES, EXTRAS.
Each envelope with Rose Tyler’s careful printing in block letters.
That’s fine. Now is there anything else today?
Luther glanced at Betty, then turned toward Rose. Well, my wife keeps on talking about Donna. Seems like she always got Donna on her mind.
I just been thinking about her, Betty said. I don’t see why I can’t call her on the phone. She’s my daughter, isn’t she.
Of course, Rose said. But the court order stipulated that you have no contact with her. You know that.
I just want to talk to her. I wouldn’t have no kind of contact. I just want to know how she’s been doing.
Calling her would be considered contact, though, Rose said.
Betty’s eyes filled with tears and she sat slumped in her chair with her hands open on the table, her hair fallen about her face, a few strands stuck to her wet cheeks. Rose extended a Kleenex box across the table, and Betty took one and began to wipe at her face. I wouldn’t bother her, she said. I just want to talk to her.
It makes you feel bad, doesn’t it.
Wouldn’t you feel bad? If it was you.
Yes. I’m sure I would.
You just got to try and make the best of it, dear, Luther said. That’s all you can do. He patted her shoulder.
She isn’t your daughter.
I know that, he said. I’m just saying you got to get on the best way you know how. What else you going to do? He looked at Rose.
What about Joy Rae and Richie? Rose said. How are they doing?
Well, Richie, he’s been fighting at school, Luther said. Come home the other day with his nose all bloody.
That’s cause them other kids been picking fights with him, Betty said.
I’m going to teach him how to fight them back one of these days.
What’s causing this, do you think? Rose said.
I don’t know, Betty said. They just always been picking on him.
Does he say anything?
Richie don’t say nothing to them.
That’s because I been teaching him: Turn the other cheek, Luther said. When they smite thee on one cheek, turn him the other one. It’s out of the Bible.
He only has two cheeks, Betty said. How many cheeks is he suppose to turn?
Yes, Rose said, there are limits, aren’t there.
We come to the limits, Betty said. I don’t know what we’re going to do.
No, Luther said, otherwise I guess we don’t got too much to complain about. He sat upright in his chair, apparently ready to leave, to move on to whatever came next. I guess we been doing pretty good for ourselves. You get what you get and don’t have a fit, what I always tell people. Somebody told that to me one time.
3
H
E WAS A SMALL BOY, UNDERWEIGHT FOR HIS AGE, WITH
thin arms and thin legs and brown hair that hung over his forehead. He was active and responsible, and too serious for a boy of eleven. Before he was born his mother decided not to marry the man who was his father, and when he was five she died in a car wreck in Brush Colorado on a Saturday night after she’d been out dancing with a redheaded man in a highway tavern. She had never said who his father was. Since her death he had lived alone with his mother’s father on the north side of Holt, in a dark little house with vacant lots on both sides and a gravel alley out back that had mulberry trees grown up beside it. At school he was in the fifth grade and he was a good student but spoke only when called on; he never volunteered anything in the classroom, and when he was let out of school each day he went home by himself or wandered around town or occasionally did yardwork for the woman who lived up the street.
His grandfather, Walter Kephart, was a white-haired man of seventy-five. For thirty years he’d been a gandy dancer on the railroad in southern Wyoming and northeastern Colorado. When he was almost seventy he got pensioned off. He was a silent old man; he would talk a good deal if he’d been drinking, but he was not a drunk and generally would take a drink at home only if he were sick. Each month when his pension check came he’d cash the check and spend an evening drinking at the Holt Tavern on the corner of Third and Main, where he would sit and visit with other old men in town and tell stories that were not exaggerated so much as they were simply enlarged a little, and then he’d remember for an hour or two what he had been able to do in the long-ago oldtime when he was still young.
The boy’s name was DJ Kephart. He took care of the old man, walking him home along the dark streets in the night when his grandfather was finished talking at the tavern, and at home he did most of the cooking and cleaning, and once a week washed their dirty clothes at the Laundromat on Ash Street.
One day in September he came home from school in the afternoon and the old man said the neighbor woman had been over, asking for him. You better go see what she wants.
When did she come?
This morning.
The boy poured out a cup of cold coffee from the pot on the stove and drank it and started toward the woman’s house. It was still hot outside, though the sun had begun to lean to the west, and the first intimations of fall were in the air—that smell of dust and dry leaves, that annual lonesomeness that comes of summer closing down. He walked past the vacant lot with its dirt path leading to a row of mulberry trees at the alley and then the two widows’ houses, both set back from the quiet street behind a dusty stand of lilac, and came to her house.
Mary Wells was a woman just past thirty with two young girls. Her husband worked in Alaska and returned home infrequently. Slim and healthy, a pretty woman with soft brown hair and blue eyes, she could have done all the yardwork herself but she liked helping the boy in this small way and always paid him something when he worked for her.
He knocked on the door of her house and waited. He thought he should not knock a second time, that it would be impolite and disrespectful. After a little while she came to the door wiping her hands on a dish towel. Behind her were the two girls.
Grandpa said you came over this morning.
Yes, she said. Will you come in?
No, I guess I better get started.
Don’t you want to come in first and have some cookies? We’ve been baking. They’re just fresh.
I drank some coffee before I left home, he said.
Maybe later then, Mary Wells said. Anyway I wondered if you had time to work in the backyard. If you don’t have something else you need to be doing right now.
I don’t have anything else right now.
Then I can use you. She smiled at him. Let me show you what I have in mind.
She came down the steps, followed by the two girls, and they went around the corner of the house to a sun-scorched garden beside the alley. She pointed out the weeds that had come up since he’d last been there and the rows of beans and cucumbers she wanted him to pick. Do you mind doing that? she said.
No, ma’am.
But don’t let yourself get too hot out here. Come sit in the shade when you need to.
It’s not too hot for me, he said.
I’ll send the girls out with some water.
They went back inside and he began to weed in the rows between the green plants, kneeling in the dirt and working steadily, sweating and brushing away the flies and mosquitoes. He was accustomed to working by himself and used to being uncomfortable. He piled the weeds at the edge of the alley and then began to pick the bushbeans and cucumbers. An hour later the girls came out of the house with three cookies on a plate and a glass of ice water.
Mama said for you to have these, said Dena, the older girl.
He wiped his hands on his pants and took the glass of water and drank half of it, then he ate one of the big cookies, eating it in two bites. They watched him closely, standing in the grass at the edge of the garden.
Mama said you looked hungry, Dena said.
We just baked these cookies this afternoon, Emma said.
We helped, you mean. We didn’t bake them ourselves.
We helped Mama bake them.
He drank the rest of the water and handed them the glass. There were muddy prints and streaks on the outside.
Don’t you want these other cookies?
You eat them.
Mama sent them for you.
You can have them. I’ve had enough.
Don’t you like them?
Yes.
Then why won’t you eat these?
He shrugged and looked away.
I’ll eat one, Emma said.
You better not. Mama sent them out for him.
He doesn’t want them.
I don’t care. They’re his.
You can have them, he said.
No, Dena said. She took the two cookies from the plate and put them down in the grass. You can eat them later. Mama said they’re yours.
The bugs’ll get them first.
Then you better eat them.
He looked at her and then went back to work, picking green beans into a white-enameled bowl.
The two girls watched him work, he was on his knees again crawling, his back to them, the soles of his shoes turned up toward them like the narrow faces of some strange being, his hair dark with sweat at the back of his neck. When he reached the end of the row the girls left the cookies in the grass and went back inside.
A
FTER HE WAS FINISHED HE TOOK THE BEANS AND THE
cucumbers to the back door and knocked and stood waiting. Mary Wells came to the door with the two girls.
My, look at all you found, she said. I didn’t think there were that many. You keep some of them yourself. Now, let me get you some money.
She turned back into the house and he stepped away from the open doorway and looked out across the backyard toward the neighbors’ yard. There were patches of shade under the trees. Where he stood on the porch the sun shone full on his brown head and on his sweaty face, on the back of his dirty tee-shirt and the corner of the house. The girls were watching him. The older one wanted to say something but couldn’t think what it should be.
Mary Wells came back and handed him four dollars folded in half. He didn’t look at the money but put the bills in his pants pocket. Thank you, he said.
You’re welcome, DJ. And take some of these vegetables with you. She handed him a plastic bag.
I better go then. Grandpa’ll be getting hungry.
But you take care of yourself too, she said. You hear me?
He turned and went around to the front yard and started up the empty street in the late afternoon. He had the money in his pocket and the bag of green beans and two of the cucumbers.
When he was gone the girls walked out to the edge of the garden to see if he’d eaten the cookies, but they were still in the grass. There were red ants crawling on them now and a line of ants moving away in the grass. Dena picked up the cookies and shook them hard, then threw them out into the alley.
A
T HOME HE FRIED HAMBURGER IN AN IRON SKILLET AND
boiled some red potatoes and the green beans Mary Wells had given him and set out bread and butter on the table together with the sliced cucumbers on a plate. He made a new pot of coffee and when the potatoes and beans were ready he called his grandfather to the table and they began to eat.
What’d she have you doing over there? the old man said.
Pulling weeds. And picking vegetables.
Did she pay you?
Yes.
What’d she give you?
He drew the folded bills from his pocket and counted them out on the table. Four dollars, he said.
That’s a lot.
Is it?
It’s too much.
I don’t think it is.
Well, you better hang on to it. You might want to buy something someday.
After supper he cleared the table and washed the dishes and set them to dry on a towel on the counter while his grandfather went into the living room and turned on the lamp beside the rocker and read the
Holt Mercury
newspaper. The boy did his schoolwork at the kitchen table under the overhead light and when he looked in an hour later the old man was sitting with his eyes shut, their paper-thin lids crosshatched by tiny blue veins and his dark mouth lapsed open, breathing harshly, and the newspaper spread across the lap of his overalls.
Grandpa. He touched his arm. You better go to bed.
His grandfather woke and peered at him.
It’s time for bed.
The old man studied him for a moment as if trying to think who he was, then folded the paper together and set it on the floor beside the chair and, pushing against the arms of the rocker, rose slowly and walked into the bathroom, and afterward went back to his bedroom.
The boy drank another cup of coffee at the kitchen sink and dumped the dregs in the drain. He rinsed out the pot and turned off the lights and went back to bed in the little room next to his grandfather’s, where he read for two hours. Through the wall he could hear the old man snoring and coughing and muttering. At ten-thirty he cut the light out and fell asleep and the next morning he got up early to make their breakfast and afterward went to school across the tracks to the new building on the south side of Holt, and at school he did willingly and skillfully all that was required of him but didn’t say much of anything to anybody throughout the day.