The Lone Western Wanderer

Prologue

Clay McCall sat on an upturned flour barrel.

He felt a cool breeze through the window behind him as he shaved curls from a piece of pine.

He held the wood between his knees and worked slowly with the blunt blade, turning it with his other hand, the shape transforming beneath the knife.

Gradually, a wooden horse emerged. Its legs were too thick, so he pared them down.

Its head was bent a little as though it had found grass.

Three children watched from the dirt: Bill, Mary and Tucker.

“Will it stand?” Tucker asked.

“It will if you quit breathing down my neck.”

“I ain’t breathing down your neck.”

“It’s an expression that means you’re near enough that I can smell what you ate for breakfast.”

Tucker looked offended. “I didn’t have no breakfast.”

The boy’s cheeks had gone hollow last winter. He was nine. He wore a shirt with one cuff missing and trousers tied up with rope at the waist. Behind him, little May sat with her bare feet tucked beneath her skirt. She had a runny nose and a strip of old blanket pinned around her shoulders.

Clay put the knife down.

“Well, can you smell mine?” he asked.

“Beans!” May said.

Clay smiled. “Correct!”

“That is all we ever have,” Tucker groaned.

“Not true.”, Bill objected, scratching at a rash on his leg. “Last Tuesday we had beans with salt pork.”

Tucker scowled. “No pork in mine.”

Clay considered this. “Then someone stole your pork.”

“Who?”

“Likely a very small, very hungry thief.”

May gave a quiet laugh. Tucker was still studying the wooden horse.

Clay set it on the barrel. The horse leaned slightly, then settled on all four legs.

“There,” Clay said.

Tucker reached for it.

“Hold on. It’s not finished,” Clay said. “What does a horse need?”

“A rider,” Bill said.

May lifted her hand. “A feed tub?”

“And a name,” Tucker said.

Clay nodded gravely. “You cannot ride a horse without a name.”

“I’ll remember that!” Bill said.

Clay began to carve another hunk of pine. The children pressed close again. Rain had beaten the backyard into hard gullies. A fence at the far end slumped inward where two boards had come loose. Beyond it stood the washhouse, black with damp along the lower planks, and the gray roofs of Natchez.

The orphanage had once been a respectable house, or so Franklin said.

He had run it for as long as Clay could remember, but he had no memory of it being so.

It was a long, two-story building with peeling white paint, a sagging porch, and windows that rattled when it was windy.

Too many children, and too few beds. The younger ones slept two and sometimes three to a mattress.

The older boys were put in the attic when there was room, and on the floor of the schoolroom when there wasn’t.

The kitchen roof leaked. The privy stank in summer. In winter, the coal stove was kept low to spare fuel, and boys woke with their breath white in the dark.

But it was home.

Clay had slept in the attic since he was ten.

He had learned which floorboard creaked near the stairs and which window could be opened with a bent nail when the heat became too close.

He knew where mice ran behind the walls, and he knew how to catch rainwater from the broken gutter in a clean bucket before the roof dirt collected there.

He kept watch over the younger children who cried after nightmares.

He blocked out a little rider and worked around the head to build a crooked hat.

“That is supposed to be me,” Tucker said.

“It is supposed to be whoever owns the horse.”

“Then it’s me.”

“Fine. You’ll have a very handsome face.”

Tucker frowned at the wooden figure. “His face is a lump.”

“You’re a hard one to please.”

May reached toward the shavings. “Can I have a doll?”

“I made you one.”

“Benny took it.”

“Boys don’t like dolls,” Tucker said. “Benny put it in the stove.”

May’s mouth opened.

Clay turned his head toward the kitchen door. “Benny did what?”

“He said it was cold,” Bill said.

“It was cold,” Tucker said, as if this settled the matter.

Clay rubbed a hand over his jaw. Benny was five. He had spent the winter coughing. The boy’s fingers were often blue in the mornings.

“All right,” Clay said. “I’ll make another.”

May watched him. “With hair?”

“With hair.”

“Yellow hair.”

“Yellow hair costs extra.”

“I’ve got a button.”

She dug beneath her blanket and brought out a brass button, green at the edges. Clay recognized it. It had come from one of his old shirts.

He took it from her palm and examined it.

“A fine button,” he said.

“It was my mama’s.”

Clay knew it was not. May had been brought in at two years old with no memory of her mother. But he did not give it back.

“This doll will have the finest yellow hair in Mississippi.”

May smiled. She had a gap where one of her front teeth had fallen out.

Clay bent over his work again. The wood smelled clean and sharp in his hands. It was one of the few things he liked about the place: there were always broken crates, ruined chair legs, and scraps from repairs. Things that other people threw away could become something.

Footsteps sounded on the porch. Not. children’s feet. Clay kept shaving the little rider’s hat, the back of his neck tightening. Visitors meant chaos, whether they brought good or bad news. The door creaked.

Jack Horton waited at the open doorway, hand resting on the porch rail.

He was Franklin’s clerk, though clerk made him sound grander than he was.

He kept the ledger, collected donations when there were any, and went into town for flour, lamp oil, and coal.

He had a narrow face and sandy whiskers.

Today he wore his good coat, buttoned despite the mild air, and a black hat pulled low.

The children saw him and went quiet.

Jack did not look at them. His eyes settled on Clay.

“Mr. McKenzie wants a word.”

Clay set the knife on the barrel. “Franklin? What does he want?”

“In his office.”

Tucker drew the horse close against his chest.

Clay stood. At nineteen, he had grown taller than Jack by an inch or two, though he was lean enough that his shirts hung loose from his shoulders. His blond hair had fallen into his eyes. He pushed it back with the heel of his hand.

“May,” he said, “do not let Tucker trade that horse for marbles.”

“I would never,” Tucker said.

“You traded your shoes for marbles.”

“They were poor shoes.”

“And now you have one less pair.”

Clay looked at May. “Keep the button safe. I’ll need it.”

She closed her fist around it.

Then he followed Jack inside.

The hallway smelled of boiled cabbage and old ashes.

Children’s voices came from the schoolroom at the front of the house, repeating sums in a tired chorus.

Clay passed the dining room, where two long tables stood bare except for tin cups turned upside down to dry.

The windows had been patched with paper after the last hard wind.

Jack led him to Franklin’s office at the end of the hall.

Franklin McKenzie sat behind a desk made of dark wood.

It had belonged to the founder of the home, a minister dead these twelve years.

Franklin had kept it polished even as the rest of the building came apart.

Papers lay in neat stacks before him. There was an ink bottle, a pen, and a small brass cross mounted on a piece of walnut.

“Take a seat, Clay,” Franklin said, not meeting his eye.

Clay remained standing.

Franklin’s forehead tightened a little. His hair had gone gray at the temples.

He was forty-seven, though he seemed older in the weak light from the window.

Clay remembered him differently. Franklin with his sleeves rolled up, carrying two sick boys to the infirmary after the fever.

Franklin laughing when Clay had fallen through the chicken coop roof at eleven.

Franklin teaching him letters at this very desk when Clay had been too restless to sit in the schoolroom.

That man had thinned out over the years. Times were tough, but these days, Clay suspected there had never been too much room for gentleness in him in the first place.

Jack shut the office door behind them.

Franklin looked down at the papers. “We have received notice from the county. They intend to send six children here by the end of the month.”

Clay waited.

“The McCready place outside of Fayette burned down. Their parents are dead. The youngest is not yet three.”

Still Clay waited.

Franklin put both hands flat upon the desk. “So, there aren’t enough beds.”

Clay’s face did not change. He looked past Franklin to the wall, where a map of Mississippi had curled loose at one corner.

“I know,” he said.

“You are nineteen now.”

“I know that too.”

“And you’re able bodied. You have skills. You can find work.”

Clay gave a small breath through his nose.

“You have got my work picked out for me, then?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll be the one to find it. I’ll start asking around, and perhaps next year—”

Franklin looked at him directly. “You have one month.”

The words settled in the office. From upstairs came the drag of a chair, then a child’s sharp cry that quickly cut off.

Clay looked at the brass cross on the desk. He could see dust caught in the carved lines of it.

“One month?” he asked.

“I would give you longer if I could.”

Clay turned his eyes back to him. “You would, would you?”

Franklin’s jaw flexed.

Jack shifted near the door. “Clay, the home cannot keep—”

“That wasn’t my question.”

Jack’s face reddened.

Clay stood with his hands at his sides, the cut on his thumb from carving still bright and fresh. Franklin had told him once that a man ought not to speak angrily if he could help it. Angry words were easy to spend and hard to undo.

He had remembered that. He wished, at that moment, he had not.

Franklin said, “You have been a help here.”

“Kind of you to notice.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Then why send me away?”

“Because Tucker sleeps on a pallet near the stove. Because there are two infants sharing one cot in the girls’ room.

Because the roof over the attic will not hold another winter if I cannot find money for repairs.

Because every week someone comes to this door with a child and no place else to leave them. ”

Clay’s gaze dropped to the floorboards.

There was a dark knot in the wood near his boot.

He had tried to pry it loose when he was small.

Jesse had caught him with a nail in his hand and boxed his ear for it.

You split that board, Jesse had said, and old McKenzie will know it was us.

Clay had asked how he would know. Jesse had only pointed at the nail.

Clay had not thought of Jesse in a long while.

For a moment, Franklin seemed about to speak. Then he took a folded piece of paper from the desk drawer and held it out.

Clay didn’t take it. “What is that?”

“A letter of reference. For work. It says you are honest—that you can handle livestock, mend harness, work wood, keep accounts, and read.”

“You wrote all that?”

“I did.”

Clay took the paper. The seal was dark red wax. His name was written across the front in Franklin’s careful hand.

He slid it into the inside pocket of his shirt.

“Thank you,” he said, biting down anger. Clearly, this had been in the works a while. Franklin had wanted him gone longer than he might admit.

Franklin nodded once.

Clay turned toward the door.

“Clay.”

He stopped.

“You need not go far,” Franklin said. “Natchez has work at the river docks. The mills may take you. Speak to Mr. Booth at the livery. Tell him I sent you.”

Clay had his hand on the knob.

“I’m not staying in Natchez.”

Franklin’s brows drew together. “Where will you go?”

“I’ll find out.”

Jack moved aside to let him leave.

The hallway seemed narrower than before. Clay walked through it without looking into the schoolroom or up toward the attic stairs. He went out the back door, and straight to the washhouse.

The children were waiting.

Tucker had dirt on one cheek. May still held the brass button. Benny stood beside them in a shirt that was too large for him, his pale hair sticking up at the crown. He had heard enough to understand something was wrong.

“Are they putting you out?” Tucker asked.

Clay stopped.

Children did not need much explanation. They lived close to the facts of things.

“Not today but soon,” Clay said.

“Why?”

“We need beds for little ones.”

“I’m little,” Tucker said.

“You are getting large and troublesome.”

Tucker looked down at his bare toes.

Clay crouched in front of him. “Listen. Nobody is putting you out. Do you hear?”

The boy nodded.

Clay took the small horse from Tucker, checked the legs, then handed it back.

“I’ll be here a month,” he said. “That is enough time to make May a doll that can’t be burned in the stove.”

“What doesn’t burn?” May asked.

“Well, that’s a good point. Stone?”

“I don’t want a stone dolly.”

“Then you’ll have to guard the doll from Benny.” Clay winked.

Tucker looked toward the house. “Where will you go?”

Clay followed his gaze. The orphanage rose behind them, tired and crooked in the afternoon light. One of the upstairs windows was open, and a sheet hung out of it, gray with washing.

He had nowhere. Not truly.

But he had one month. He had his hands. He had a knife, a few coins beneath a loose floorboard in the attic, and the old place beyond the hill where he had hidden things since he was small.

He looked down at Tucker.

“West,” he said. “That’s where people go.”

“California?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s far.”

“So I have heard.”

“Will you find gold?” Tucker asked, wide eyed.

Clay picked up the shaving knife from the flour barrel and folded it shut.

“If I do, I will buy this place a new roof.”

Tucker smiled despite himself.

Clay headed for the back door. Before he went in, he looked once toward Franklin’s office window. The curtain was drawn.

Then he went upstairs to the attic and began sorting what was his. He’d have to take as much as he could fit in a pack. His time here was coming to an end.

He let it sink in.