If You Believe

Mariah strode briskly from the washhouse, a set of clean sheets wedged under one arm. In her other hand, she held a half-full wash bucket and a broom. Soapy water sloshed over the metal rim and splashed her feet as she walked.

She needed something to keep her busy while Jake and Rass were gone. Anything to keep her from thinking about the fact that she and Mad Dog were alone here.

Hard work, she decided, was the best defense to runaway nerves. So, bucket in hand, she headed for the bunkhouse. Today was cleaning day; it always had been, and she refused to allow her careful routine to be upset by Mad Dogs presence.

Shed carefully scheduled his showers—every night at seven-thirty—and he was always in the bathing room for at least thirty minutes. Thus, she figured she had at least half an hour before Mad Dog finished his shower and came looking for her.

And she knew from experience that she could clean the bunkhouse in less than twenty minutes.

When she came to the small, darkened outbuilding, she paused and set down her bucket and broom. Without bothering to knock, she pushed the door open.

Dark silence tumbled back at her.

She straightened her spine and went to the bedside table. Lighting a lamp, she looked around and made a quiet, tsldng sound of displeasure, then went to work.

The bunkhouse was small, and took no time to clean. She swept the floor, washed the window, swiped the dusty dresser, and shook out the curtains.

Then she paused, breathing hard, swabbing the sheen of sweat from her brow.

What now?

Glancing around the room, she saw a gray-white bag slumped in the corner. It was his bag, she realized instantly. The only thing hed brought with him.

She wondered what was in it, what he valued enough to carry from place to place.

"Maybe Ill just unpack for him," she said aloud.

Yes, that was reasonable. A friendly thing to do.

Cautiously she moved to the corner and kneeled down. She pulled on the fraying rope drawstring. The bag fell open. A threadbare black shirt, twisted into a tight, wrinkled ball, rolled toward her, hovering at the canvas lip.

She pulled it out, staring at it a long moment before she folded it and put it in the dressers middle drawer. One by one, she drew out his belongings—two pairs of faded, holey blue jeans, a patched flannel shirt, a ragged oilcloth coat, socks, and underthings. She folded and put them away, then opened the bag wider and peered in. A collection of tattered notebooks and loose sheets of paper lay in the bottom.

She pulled one of the notebooks out and it fell open.

She tried not to read it, but the words leapt out at her, drew her in.

The ravages of poverty are all around me, haunting the train lines with the pathetic, pitiful wails of hungry children, the quiet whimpering of desperate parents. The country is falling apart, one homeless, wandering person at a time. How can this, the greatest nation on earth, allow its people to go uncared-for, unfed?

There the entry stopped. Frowning, she flipped through to another page.

The winter of 92-93 was relentlessly cold for the thousands of men who camped along the boggy beaches of Lake Michigan. They worked for endless, backbreaking hours on structures that, once finished, would rise into the cloudy Illinois skies like the spires of a magical fairyland. Together, they dreamed, and the country, it seemed, dreamed right along with them.

But like all dreams, the much-anticipated Worlds Columbian Exposition of 1894

had a dark, nightmarish side to it. And like all nightmares, it has been pushed aside by the strident light of day, to be forgotten.

The fair opened on May first, and what a glorious opening it was. White-pillared palaces rose from a six-hundred-acre oasis of lagoons, courts, and plazas. The whole world gazed at the midwestern United States in awe. It ran for six months, then closed. The elegant, breathtaking white fairyland came down one piece at a time.

And what was left after the magic had run its course? A hundred thousand jobless, dreamless men, women, and children wander the cold, empty streets of Chicago, huddling around street corners and begging for scraps of food. They stand in endless, desperate breadlines, battered tin cups outstretched. Babies and young mothers sleep in open doorways and beneath damp blankets of newspaper.

Never has the chasm between progress and poverty been so hauntingly large in this country as it is today. We are in the clutches of an economic depression so carnivorous and insatiable, its eating the very fabric of our lives. We are sacrificing our children to it, our future. And no one, it seems, is listening. . . .

Mariah closed the book, shaken. His images were potent and unforgettable. Shed known, of course, of the depression that gripped the country, but she never dreamed it was so urgent, so bleak.

She swallowed thickly, feeling sick for the children— babies—living without food or shelter.

His words moved her more than she would have imagined possible, told her something about the man whod written them. These werent the musings of a carefree drifter with an easy smile. This article was written by a man who knew the taste of tragedy, the feel of it. Knew it as intimately as she knew sorrow and despair.