Preacher's Boy

But they're a lot different, aren't they? I mean, we're America—Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. Then I thought about slavery and the Great War. But it was only the South that was wrong. Lots of Vermont boys fought and died to free the slaves. Good thing Pa was too young to be a preacher in that war. He'd probably prayed for the miseries of Johnny Reb.

Finally I couldn't stand it anymore. "But I don't understand, Pa. Why do you got to pray for our enemies?"

He was full red in the face now, but he looked me straight in the eye. "Because the Lord commanded me to," he said.

I couldn't say anything after that Could you? Pa's not one of these preachers always bragging he got a direct telegraph cable hooked up to Heaven. If he tells you, "The Lord commanded me to," you can't argue it, even if you want to. You know the man ain't given to idle boasts.

Anyhow, that all happened a while back. My immediate concern was the present. It was a perfect July afternoon. If the Devil has work for idle hands, he was waving his flag, beating his drum, blowing his trumpet to recruit the likes of me, a boy with nothing to do on a lazy summer afternoon.

I thought about heading up to Webster's orchard and pinching some green apples. But it's no fun stealing apples on your own. You got to have someone on watch and someone to creep to the trees, someone to giggle with and exclaim how close you come to being caught, someone to agree on how good they taste—those hard sour little stones that make your eyes water and your mouth pucker to a kiss. If Ma served them for supper, we'd swear she was out to poison us.

There was no use complaining to Ma that there was nothing to do. You can be sure she'd remedy that. And I had no wish to take Elliot fishing. He'd had enough attention to last him a couple of weeks. Or she might take a notion to suggest I read something besides a novel—something to improve my mind. Now, you know I like to read, but somehow the minute somebody suggests that reading might improve my mind, the best book in the world takes on the taste of castor oil. I don't want to improve my mind any time of year. In July it seems downright criminal.

I wandered out onto the porch, where most of the old newspapers are stacked, and looked at the ads for bicycles to daydream a bit. Not that it would do any good. I showed Pa the ad in last week's paper that said Nichols was giving them away, and he just laughed. "Nichols thinks twenty dollars is giving wheels away," he said. Pa makes less than ninety dollars a month. When times are hard (which times always seem to be), Pa gets most of his pay in produce. You can't help that if you're a preacher, but I didn't fancy Nichols taking a bushel of last year's root-cellar vegetables in exchange for a bicycle, new or used. Still, dreams are free, right?

When I start on a printed page, I tend to eat it down like a peppermint stick. It didn't matter that the Tyler Times I was reading was three weeks old. Nothing had changed in baseball. Boston was still battling Brooklyn for first place in the league. I swear. God makes you a Beaneater fan just to teach you patient endurance. Or make you suffer. One or the other. There is no joy involved whatsoever. Marion Clark "who disappeared in the arms of her nurse" was still missing, as was the nurse. In this issue of the Times, however, a new reward had been announced. Apparently the New York newspaper and other folks down there had put together a reward of $3,500 for the baby's safe return. Three thousand five hundred dollars!

Suddenly I was wide awake. I began tearing through the next stack. I needed to know if that reward was still being offered. I mean, it wasn't impossible to imagine that that so-called nurse might be lurking around Leonardstown right this minute. It was the perfect hiding place. No one from New York City ever came here. I couldn't find the most recent papers on the porch, but there was another stack of papers in the wood box by the kitchen stove.

I shuffled through them, my hands shaking. Tarnation. They'd found Marion Clark barely a week before and returned her to her grieving loved ones. Someone had already claimed that fortune. But, hey, here was another kidnapping. New York was some dangerous city. A boy this time. Seems he just wandered off from his parents. Next thing they knew, here came a ransom note demanding $1,000 for his return. So one way or another there was a fortune to be made in the kidnapping business.

Now if only someone would get themselves kidnapped in Leonardstown, I was sure to be the one to find them. Shoot! For $3,5001 could forget about a bicycle. I'd go for a whole fleet of motor

cars! I didn't consider kidnapping someone to demand ransom. Who'd want to take care of somebody else's brat while waiting around for them to get the cash together? Besides, I hadn't been an apeist long enough to commit crime on a scale that exceeded the Ten Commandments to that extent. If they caught you for kidnapping, you'd probably swing. Even if they didn't decide to hang you, they'd surely throw you in jail for the rest of your natural life. I didn't fancy either end. I turned the page and went back to staring at the ads for wheels.

That night I couldn't get to sleep. As hot and stuffy as my third-floor room was, it was probably cold up at the cabin and dark as pitch. We wouldn't have a moon, even a sliver of one, till tomorrow night. Those raggedy quilts were all they had for cover. I ought to have told them to get some pine boughs or leaves to lay between themselves and the earth floor.

Where had they come from? Had they ever been respectable townsfolk who sat in a pew at the Congregational church or stood up to speak in a town meeting? It was hard to imagine. Still, they hadn't always hid out in abandoned cabins—just the two of them. Vile looked to be about my age, ten, or at the most eleven. She was born somewhere. Once she'd had a mother. I tried to picture a dirty, ragged woman and set her amongst them. It made me shiver despite the leftover heat the day had stored up in my room. I reached down and pulled up my summer quilt and snuggled under it.

Vile was for Violet. How did she go from flower to dirt? I'd never seen anyone so poor. The poorest child in Leonardstown had a roof over his head and a school to go to. Even the children whose fathers had died young from working in granite and whose mothers had too many children and no wages coming in could count on the town. The town still made sure you had a roof and food. It might be on the town poor farm where nobody really wanted to go, but still that was better than what Vile and Zeb had, wasn't it?

I might be a conscienceless apeist who didn't have to obey the commandments, but that didn't mean I had lost all human feeling. I decided to persuade Vile and Zeb to come to town. Pa would help them. What kind of work would Zeb be able to do? He didn't look smart enough to work in the quarry or in the stone sheds. It might have to be the poor farm, at least for a while. How could they be too proud to go to the poor farm? They were squatting in an abandoned cabin, stealing what food they had. Wasn't the town farm better than jail? Which was sure where Zeb was headed if he snatched one chicken too many. He wasn't oversmart. The law was sure to catch up with him soon.

I didn't sleep all that well. When I did fall asleep, it was to dream. In the dream I didn't have Ma and Pa anymore. I was living with Zeb and Vile. They made me do the stealing for them because I was smarter than Zeb, and Vile was a girl.

The night was hot and seemed to press in on me as I crept down to Mr. Webster's chicken house. It was so still, I could hear my own loud breathing. But then, just as I grabbed a bird, all the hens began to squawk, the dogs commenced to bark, and Webster came yelling out of the house with his shotgun.

"Don't shoot!" I was crying like a baby. "It's only me, Robbie Hewitt!"

Mr. Webster cocked his eye at me. It was clear he didn't recognize me. He raised the gun and sighted.

"Mr. Webster!" I cried out. "It's me, Robbie Hewitt, the preacher's boy!"

I heard the crash of the shot. Everything went black. Then I could feel a warm, thick liquid oozing up and spreading across my chest. I knew I was dead.

I sat up in bed. I couldn't breathe. I just sat there gasping for air. What I wanted to do was run down the stairs to Ma and Pa's bedroom and crawl into their big bed with them, but I couldn't do that. I was nearly eleven years old.

It was only a dream, I told myself. Just a bad dream. I forced myself to lie down again. Was it a warning dream like in the Bible? People got warned in dreams. Maybe it meant I shouldn't go near the cabin again, shouldn't let myself get messed up with the likes of Zeb and Vile. That was it. I'd just stay away, and they couldn't hurt me. I lay down and put my hand over my heart until I could feel that it was slowing back down to normal. Then I turned over and finally went to sleep.

8. Thou Shalt Not Kill

NEXT DAY I HELPED WILLIE WITH HIS CHORES. I COULD tell he was puzzled by my sudden attack of industry, but he wasn't going to ask nosy questions and scare me off. He chopped the wood himself. He said it took me too long, and I never split it even. He sent me to pull weeds from the carrot bed. We needed rain bad. I broke off most of the weeds at ground level, the ground was so hard and dry.

"I think we should water these vegetables some," I yelled to Willie.

"Can't!" he yelled back. "The well's low." He was right. It would be worse to have no drinking and cooking water than to lose a few carrots. He took another swing, cracking a log neatly down the middle. He set up one of the halves and split it.

"Say," I said, coming over to where he worked. "Why don't we hike over to the pond and take a dip after you're done?"