Preacher's Boy

"He'll be all right, Mother," said Pa. "Now you come sit down and enjoy some yourself." She looked at me doubtfully, but she put another platter of cakes on the table, served herself, and sat down.

It felt lonely watching the five of them gathered around the table eating and talking and me across the room on the daybed with my solitary tray. Maybe it sounds silly, but I felt as far away from them at that moment as I had up at the cabin.

Occasionally, Ma would peer across the table at me and smile as if to ask how I was. But it just made me feel lonelier and less a part of them all to be singled out. I was drifting down past melancholy toward self-pity when Beth said, "I heard they were moving that man to Tyler today."

A shiver went through me. I didn't want to be reminded.

"What man?" Letty asked.

"Da bad man wha' stole Robbie," answered Elliot, proud to be the one who knew the answer.

My stomach lurched. I grabbed the chamber pot and fed it all my breakfast.

13. The Impossible Occurs

"ROBBIE!" BOTH MA AND PA WERE BESIDE ME IN A HOP. "Oh, it's all my fault," Ma moaned. "I should have known better than to give him sausage."

"It's all right, Mother." Pa was wiping my face with his big white handkerchief. He put it back in his pocket, gave me a wry smile, and took hold of the chamber pot I was still clutching. "Need this any longer?"

I shook my head and lay back against the parlor cushions.

"It smells bad!" Letty protested.

"I'll take care of it," Pa said, bearing my late lamented breakfast out to the privy.

"Excuse me," Beth said primly. "I seem to have lost my appetite."

"Robbie din' mean to. Di' you, Robbie?" Elliot was leaning anxiously over me.

"No, Robbie didn't mean to be sick," Ma said, watching my face and not Elliot's while she spoke to him. "Now go back to the table and finish your breakfast."

The girls were soon out of the kitchen, leaving Ma still looking worried and guilty and Elliot reaching over to the girls' plates and helping himself to their flapjacks.

Pa brought the chamber pot, scrubbed clean, back in and put it down beside the daybed.

"Pa," I began, not sure how to say what I needed to say.

"Yes, Robbie?"

"The—the man they caught has a girl, a daughter. Is anyone seeing to her while—you know—while—"

Pa sat down on the side of the daybed, smiling as though I'd said a kindly thing. "We surely will take care of her when we find her, but right now no one knows where she is."

"I think—well, they were staying in that old abandoned cabin—"

"Yes, that's what the man said. But Willie and I looked there—"

"It ain't her fault, Pa. She can't help he's her father."

"No." Carefully, he pulled the parlor cushions out from under my back. "No. She can't help that." He patted my shoulder. "Now, you just lie here and get a good rest. Don't you fret about the girl. I'll ask around. Do you know her name?"

"Vile," I said. It felt good to be stretched out flat again.

"Vile?"

"For Violet. Violet Finch."

I tried to keep a picture in my mind of Pa climbing the hill again like the Good Shepherd looking for the lost lamb. Finding Vile huddled up in the cabin, frightened and alone, and gently persuading her to come home with him, taking her small dirty hand into his big strong clean one—It didn't work. No matter that I'd brought on another headache trying to concentrate on Vile's rescue, by midmorning Pa had come home alone.