3
SAM
The bell over the door jangled as someone came into the store, making me jump. I was stacking cans, so deep in thought about how to get Ma and Meggie away from Kirk that I’d forgotten where I was, and daydreaming about finding fifty dollars tucked away behind the Campbell’s soup. No use asking me how the money got there or who’d left it – I hadn’t figured that out yet. All I knew was that fifty bucks would get the three of us a bus to Washington, some food, maybe even a room somewhere. Then I could get a job, and after that go back to school and study drawing like I’d always wanted to. And I wouldn’t have to look at Ma walking round with her eye swelled shut and her lower lip split open or see the dinner still splashed up the kitchen wall from three days ago that Kirk wouldn’t let anyone clean up. Leave that be, he’d growled at me when I’d tried to scrape it off. It’ll remind your dumb bitch of a mother to keep her mind on what she’s doing.
I often wondered what my life would have been like if my pa was still around. He and Ma both grew up in London, England. They met at a jazz club when he was twenty-one and she was nineteen; she was a waitress and he was a clarinet player. Her parents disapproved of him so they decided to elope, running away to America to find fame and fortune. But in the cramped third-class cabins of the Queen Beatrice, typhoid found them first. Pa didn’t even make it across the Atlantic, and Ma, already pregnant with me before they left, became so weak that the both of us almost died too.
I used to have a photo of Pa – it was him I inherited my crooked smile and sandy hair from – but a few years ago Kirk found it and burnt it. The only thing Kirk hadn’t managed to beat out of Ma was her English accent, which she’d half passed on to me. Even though the other kids at school used to tease me for it, I clung onto it because I knew it pissed Kirk off that I didn’t sound like him. I didn’t want anyone mistaking me for his son, not even for a second.
Someone coughed politely. I looked round and saw a tall, dark-haired guy standing just inside the door. He wore a khaki shirt and trousers and a peaked cap, his boots so shiny you could practically see your face in them. My head swam; for one crazy moment, I thought it was Carl Addison, come back from the dead.
Mrs Addison, who was behind the counter today, looked as startled as I felt. ‘Can I help you, soldier?’ she said.
The man held out a hand. ‘Mrs Addison? Ma’am? My name’s Private Tomlinson. I served with your son. He was a fine man and talked a lot about his ma and pa and the little store they had back home. I’m stationed over in England now, but I’m on leave and passing through the area, so I thought I’d call by and see it for myself.’
A smile broke across Mrs Addison’s face. She clasped Private Tomlinson’s hand, tears springing into her eyes. ‘Oh, Private, that’s wonderful. You’re most welcome here.’
Private Tomlinson smiled too, showing two rows of shining white teeth. ‘Please, call me Bobby.’
‘Bobby, will you come through to the back and meet my husband? He’d be very pleased to make your acquaintance, I’m sure.’
Bobby smiled again. ‘I’d love to, ma’am, if it’s no trouble.’
‘No trouble at all. And please, call me Jean.’ Mrs Addison turned to me. ‘Sam here can mind the store for a little while, can’t you, Sam?’
‘S – sure,’ I stammered, as Bobby turned his brilliant smile on me.
‘Is this another one of the family?’ he asked Mrs Addison.
Mrs Addison laughed. ‘Oh, no, Sam’s a local boy – he works here.’
‘You not letting him join up, then?’
‘I’m only seventeen,’ I said quickly. The last thing I wanted was Private Tomlinson thinking I was a coward.
‘Pity. The army could use more strong young men. You get a regular paycheck – thirty dollars a week – and three square meals a day.’ He winked at me. ‘And the girls just love a man in uniform!’
‘Now, you leave him alone.’ Mrs Addison swatted him on the arm, steering him towards the door that led through to the house. ‘We need Sam right here.’
I stared after them, Private Tomlinson’s words echoing through my head: …a regular paycheck… thirty dollars a week…
Thirty dollars a week. Thirty.
I got paid to work at the store, of course, but it wasn’t much, not once Kirk got his hands on it. He made me give him half to pay for living on my property, as he put it, and the rest, which I kept in a coffee tin in the kitchen so Ma could use it for bills and food, usually disappeared into his pocket too. I’d tried keeping some back once, telling Kirk I’d had a pay cut, but he marched up to the store and demanded to know why Mr Addison was ripping his son off. It was the only time I could ever recall him claiming we were related.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and all that night looking for reasons not to go through with the plan that had started to form in my head. There were plenty of them, but when Kirk came crashing in at midnight, thumping up the stairs to the bedroom he shared with Ma, and I had to put my pillow over my head to block the sounds coming through the paper-thin wall, none of them seemed real important anymore. By the time Kirk had gone back downstairs to get another drink, leaving Ma sobbing softly, my mind was made up.
Usually, I went straight back to the farm after I finished at the store, but the next day, after I’d hung up my apron, propped up my broom and said goodbye to Mr Addison, I headed downtown to the National Guard recruiting office. I often passed it when Mr Addison sent me on deliveries, and there were always men queuing outside, waiting to sign up.
This evening, instead of walking past the line, I joined it, my heart thumping. Before I left the store I’d ducked into the storeroom to change my overalls for slacks and a shirt, and slicked back my hair. Mr Addison had grinned at me. ‘Got a girl, eh, Sam?’
I’d tried to grin back. ‘Something like that, sir.’
‘You can’t fool me. Ah, to be young again. Well, whoever she is, you treat her right, you hear?’
He was still grinning, but his words made my stomach twist. Was that a warning? Did he think I was like Kirk? I’d made my excuses and got out of there as fast as I could.
I looked at the other men standing in the queue, relieved to see that I wasn’t the shortest one there. The guy in front of me barely came up to my shoulder. As I shuffled into place at the back of the line, he turned. His eyes widened. ‘Sam?’
‘Jimmy Maplin! What are you doing here?’
‘Shhh.’ Jimmy frowned, indicating the other men with a sidewards glance. He was my age and had been in the grade below me at school – we’d become friends after we’d joined the baseball team. I hadn’t seen him for months.
‘How’s your ma? You still living with her?’ I said more quietly.
A shadow passed across his face. ‘Yeah. It ain’t good. She hardly leaves the house these days. The doctor gives her pills but they don’t do anything. How about you? You still living on your stepdaddy’s farm?’
Before I could answer, the line began to move; a guy wearing sergeant’s stripes was ushering us in through the doors.
Inside, we had to sit down at rows of desks like we were back at school. I noticed a guy to my left staring hard at me and Jimmy. He was big and square-shouldered, with a blond buzz cut and small, mean-looking eyes squashed up in the middle of his face like a couple of raisins pushed into a ball of dough. When he saw me watching him he held my gaze for a moment. ‘They letting kids in the army now?’ he said to his pal next to him, loudly.
‘Looks like it, Freddie,’ the other guy said, and they laughed. I stared at the top of my desk, trying to work out if I knew them. Could they be Kirk’s friends? I didn’t think so; Kirk only hung around with other bums. This guy was too well fed, and his clothes looked expensive. No, I didn’t know the guy, and he didn’t know me. Thank God.
The sergeant handed out a bunch of forms. After chewing it over for a moment, I wrote my birthdate down as May 1923. When we’d finished, the forms were collected back in and we were sent through to another room for a medical. Two years of hefting sacks of beans and flour and cornmeal at the store had left me with fairly decent muscles – the doctor barely looked at me before waving me through to the next room, where a dentist was waiting to check our teeth. ‘How old are you, sonny?’ he said, after he’d frowned into my mouth a while.
‘Twenty.’ My heart was beating so hard now it felt as if it was about to burst clean out of my chest. You idiot – that’s too old – shoulda said you were eighteen…
‘Hmmm,’ he said, but he let me get out of the chair. Jimmy was next. He shot me a worried look, but after a couple of questions, the dentist let him go too.
After that, those of us who’d passed the medical were sent back to the main hall. Eventually, the sergeant marched in and stood at the front of the room, his back ramrod-straight. ‘Welcome to the United States Army,’ he said. Someone whooped, and he added, real dry, ‘You won’t be cheering for long, son. This ain’t the Boy Scouts. Talking of which—’
He paused. Me and Jimmy, who were sitting next to each other, exchanged quick glances. I noticed Freddie staring at us again, a small smile playing on his lips.
‘Some of you don’t appear to have birth certificates,’ the sergeant said. ‘I want all those who don’t to stay behind. The rest of you, report back here at oh-six-hundred hours tomorrow morning for swearing in.’
Fuck. My birth certificate was back at the farm, in the tin box where Ma kept all her documents. If I had to fetch it they’d see I was only seventeen. So much for my grand plan.
Freddie shot me a triumphant grin as he left the room with the others. Game’s up, buddy. There were five of us left, including me and Jimmy. The sergeant stalked around the room, brandishing more pieces of paper. ‘These are age verification forms,’ he told us. ‘You need to take them home to your parents, get them to sign it in front of a notary, and return with it at oh-six-hundred hours tomorrow, signed and notarised. Is that clear?’
One kid scraped his chair back and walked straight out the door, his face red. I took a deep breath and held out my hand for my form. So did Jimmy. Once we were a safe distance away from the office, I let out a whistle. ‘Shit. What are we gonna do?’
Jimmy glanced behind us as if he thought someone might be listening. ‘I know a guy. He helped a pal of mine to get into the navy, and he was only fifteen. But—’
‘But what?’ If I couldn’t come back tomorrow with my form signed and notarised, there was no way I’d earn enough to get Ma or Meggie away from Kirk. Not now, not ever. I needed that thirty dollars a week more than I’d ever needed anything my whole life.
Jimmy chewed his lip. ‘He’ll want money. A lot of money.’
‘How much?’
He told me, and my heart sank. We stood there for a moment. I scuffed my toe against the sidewalk, thinking about what life would be like if I stayed here in this shitty little town and let Kirk carry on beating Ma whenever he felt like it.
Thinking about what he might start doing to Meggie as she got older.
‘You really wanna do this?’ I said.
Jimmy nodded, looking hard at me. ‘Yeah, I do. I – I gotta get outta here, Sam. My mom – she’s driving me crazy.’
I’d never met Jimmy’s ma, but I’d heard people talking about her when we were in school – how she had some sort of sickness in her head that made her crazy religious, and mean with it. It was why his pa had upped and left, and Jimmy often came to school with weals across the palms of his hands where she’d gone at him with a switch. ‘She was tryin’ to beat the devil outta me,’ he’d told me once.
‘Yeah, I gotta get away from here too.’ Suddenly, an idea popped into my head. I tried to push it away at first – it was as rotten as an old tooth – but deep down, I knew it was the only option I had. ‘I reckon I can get half the money, if you can get the rest.’
‘I can do that. Meet me back here in two hours?’
I nodded.
I didn’t go back to the farm. There wasn’t a cent in the house – Kirk had taken it all last night when he went drinking. Instead, I headed to the store. It was closed, but the storeroom window round the back had a loose catch that could be opened from the outside if you knew how; Mr Addison kept saying he’d get round to fixing it but he never did. And I happened to know the Addisons were out of town this evening, visiting Mr Addison’s sister.
The window was just big enough for me to wriggle through. I landed on a pile of flour sacks, sending up a cloud of white dust. I stuffed my fists into my mouth, terrified someone would walk past and hear me choking and sneezing.
When I’d gotten myself together, I stood up, brushing flour off my clothes, and crept into the store. The huge till, covered in ornate black and gold scrollwork, sat on the counter. Mr Addison kept the key on a little hook underneath. At first, I couldn’t find it. When my fingers finally closed around it the cold metal burned against my skin like a brand.
Taking a deep breath, I opened the till. The drawer sprang out with a ding!, revealing the week’s takings inside. I reached in, then snatched my hand back, feeling sick. I couldn’t do this. The Addisons were like family to me.
Then I remembered the way Mrs Addison had laughed as she told that soldier yesterday, Oh, no, Sam’s just a local boy. I’d thought she’d meant it kindly, but perhaps she hadn’t. Perhaps what she’d really been saying was: Thank goodness, because you should see the excuse of a man who calls himself his father. And I thought about Ma’s face – those purple-brown bruises she’d wear for weeks – her sobs coming through the bedroom wall last night.
I counted out what I needed, taking a little extra for Ma; I’d leave it somewhere Kirk wouldn’t be able to find it. Slamming the till shut, I stuffed the bills in my pocket. I stole back through the store like a ghost, wriggled out the storeroom window and ran all the way back downtown to the street corner where I’d said I’d meet Jimmy, brushing the last of the flour off my clothes as I went.