Chapter One
The orphanage settled slowly after supper that night. Boards creaked beneath bare feet. Rain had come through the roof above the girls’ room again, and Clay had set three chipped bowls beneath the leaks. The smell of damp plaster and boiled turnips sat in every room.
Clay lay on his pallet beneath the window and listened.
Across from him, two boys shared a mattress so worn the ticking showed through in places.
One of them had his arm thrown over the other’s chest. Their feet were black with dirt.
At the end of the row, a boy Clay didn’t know well had cried himself to sleep into his pillow.
Those were the worst kind. The kind you couldn’t get to talk about it.
Clay turned toward the wall.
One month.
Franklin had not spoken to him since. He was so silent, the way old men get.
He spent days reading ledgers on his desk, counting sacks of flour, and spoke of beds as though boys and girls were no more than hay bales.
The man had begun to see people as numbers.
Clay supposed it was due to hard times, but hard times brought out the best in good men.
A man of courage would never tire, not when it came to God’s lost children.
Not the ones who needed love most of all.
Clay shut his eyes.
When the house had gone quiet, he rose. He pulled on his boots and trousers, tied his shirt at the throat, and slipped down from the attic, his footsteps quiet so he didn’t wake the others.
Outside, the rain had stopped. Water dripped from the eaves onto the packed ground. Beyond the orphanage, a lamp still burned in the kitchen of Mrs. Bell’s house. Clay would make sure to visit her soon, as she was getting too old to visit them as frequently as she had when he was younger.
Clay went through the garden with no lantern. He knew every place where the ground dipped, every root that rose from the soil. At the far fence he climbed over, catching his sleeve on a nail. The cloth tore with a small sound.
On the other side stood the old cottonwood.
Its trunk had split years ago after a hard wind.
One half had fallen toward the creek, but the rest of it still stood crooked and broad, with roots pushing above the ground like knuckles.
Clay had been coming here since he was eight years old.
At first he had only hidden marbles and a rusty button he’d found by the road.
Then Jesse had shown him how to hollow a place beneath the roots without letting rain collect there.
“Never put all you own under one roof,” Jesse had said.
Clay had asked him why.
“Houses burn, kid.”
Jesse had grinned when he said it, as if it were a joke. He had been seventeen then, big already, with dark hair that never stayed combed and a way of looking at a person that made them feel he knew what they meant, not just what they said.
Clay crouched at the roots and pushed aside a flat stone covered in moss. The earth beneath it was as dry as a bone.
He reached into the hollow and brought out an old biscuit tin, a bundle of oilcloth, and a narrow wooden box with a brass clasp that no longer shut properly. He sat beneath the cottonwood, set the things around him, and opened the box.
There were two pennies inside. A fishhook. A blue glass marble. A carved whistle that had cracked down one side. A little wooden horse with three legs.
Clay picked up the horse; it was not unlike the one he’d made that morning.
Its missing leg had broken off when he was ten. Jesse had said he ought to throw it away.
“It can’t stand,” Clay had told him.
“Then make it another leg, you big galoot!” Jesse had said teasingly.
Clay had whittled a peg from a twig and fitted it into the broken place. It had not matched, but the horse stood after that. He’d carved endless things since then, but horses would always be his favorite.
He set it down and took out the photograph.
It had faded around the edges and curled from damp, though he had wrapped it twice to keep it dry.
A photographer had come to the orphanage some years ago at the mayor’s request, and taken a picture of the boys.
Having their likenesses preserved had been something of an occasion; most of the children had never sat for a photograph before.
A charitable gentleman had paid for copies, and Clay had kept his ever since.
The photograph was still surprisingly clear. A dozen boys stood stiffly on the orphanage steps, their faces solemn beneath the bright sun. Clay recognized himself only because Jesse had written his name in pencil on the back. He was small and thin, his blond hair hanging into his eyes.
Jesse stood beside him, one hand resting on Clay’s shoulder.
On the far end of the row stood Franklin McKenzie.
Franklin was the only one smiling. He had never been a man for broad smiles.
But his mouth was turned up, and his eyes were not as hard and tired as they were now.
One of the little girls was holding his hand.
He looked at Jesse.
The memory came as plainly as if it had been laid out before him.
Jesse on the back steps, sewing up a tear in Clay’s coat with a needle too small for his rough fingers. Clay had been fourteen and angry over a fight. A bigger boy had shoved Jeremy into the wash trough, and Clay had bloodied the boy’s nose before anybody could stop him.
“You swing like you’re chopping wood,” Jesse had said.
“I knocked him down.”
“You did. Then his friends knocked you down.”
“He shouldn’t have shoved Jeremy.”
“No.”
“So I was right?”
Jesse tied off the thread with his teeth. “Being right don’t keep your ribs whole.”
Clay had looked at him. “What was I supposed to do? Just stand there?”
“No.” Jesse laid the coat across Clay’s lap. “You learn when to strike, and you learn what happens after.”
A few weeks later, Jesse had left for the army. He’d said he would write. He’d pressed his old whetstone into Clay’s hand before he went.
“Keep your knife sharp,” he had said.
Clay had waited for the letter.
It had never come.
He slid the photograph back into the box and closed the lid.
The creek moved black beneath the trees.
Clay sat awhile with his elbows on his knees.
He didn’t know precisely where he would go, though he’d said California.
Men came through Natchez with stories of that place—work on ranches, and land a man might earn if he had the strength to hold it.
There were trails. Wagon parties. Rivers to cross and mountains beyond them.
It was more than he knew.
He put the photograph into the oilcloth bundle, then returned the box and tin beneath the roots. The things could stay there. A man did not need marbles where he was going.
Clay went to see Mrs. Bell.
Her house stood close to the orphanage, white paint peeling from the porch rails. She was outside, smoking a pipe. She was the only woman he’d ever seen do that. Her hair was wrapped beneath a faded blue scarf. She looked over when Clay came through the gate.
“You’re up late.”
“So are you.”
“I’m old. My teeth don’t let me sleep.”
Clay leaned against the porch post. “You got a pipe for me?”
“I got a second pipe. Was Harold’s once, but I ain’t got tobacco for two.”
Clay smiled, and she studied him. “Franklin told you, then.”
Clay looked down at the wet grass around his boots.
“Word gets around,” Mrs. Bell said, softly now.
“Seems it does.”
She went inside without answering. Clay heard the cupboard open, then the scrape of tin against wood. When she returned, she had a small sack.
Mrs. Bell placed the sack on the step between them. “Three tins of beans. One of tomatoes. There’s salt wrapped in paper. Don’t let it get wet.”
Clay looked at the sack, then at her.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know that.”
“I can pay you when I find work.”
“You’ll pay me by eating it instead of starving proud.”
Clay let out a breath through his nose. “That sounds fair.”
“It’s as fair as it’s going to get.”
He took the sack. It was heavier than it looked.
***
By noon the next day, half the neighborhood knew.
Mrs. Bell had told Mrs. Alvarez next door, though Clay knew she would deny it if asked. Mrs. Alvarez told the blacksmith’s wife while buying lamp oil. The blacksmith’s wife told her husband. By the time Clay reached the smithy, Mr. Pike had a battered frying pan waiting beside the forge.
“It’s got a bent handle,” Pike said.
Clay picked it up. The handle leaned left, but the pan was solid.
“I can straighten it.”
“You can. But then you’d have to give it back.”
Clay smiled.
Pike grunted and reached beneath his bench. He brought out a tin cup, a cooking spoon, and a narrow pot with a lid.
“That one don’t leak,” he said. “I tested it.”
“You keep travel pots around?”
“I keep things. Sometimes they find a home.”
Clay ran his fingers over the blackened bottom of the pot. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I’ve got something else.”
Pike turned toward the rack along the wall. Among horseshoes and tools hung an old rifle. The stock was dark with age. A patch of wood near the butt had been mended with a strip of brass.
Clay knew it at once.
“Mr. Pike.”
“It’s a .44 Henry. Lever sticks if you don’t oil it. Sight’s a little off to the right.”
“I can’t take that.”
“You can shoot?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Course you can. Jesse taught you.”
Pike took the rifle down and held it out. “Jesse could hit a squirrel’s eye at thirty paces. Told me you weren’t as steady as him.”
“I was sixteen when he left. I’ve had a lot of practice since then.”
“Hope so.”
Clay accepted the rifle carefully. It was heavier than the old hunting gun he sometimes borrowed from the orphanage storehouse. The metal was cold in his hands.
“I don’t have money for cartridges.”
Pike nodded toward a small canvas pouch on the bench. “You’ve got some cartridges now.”
Clay looked at him.
“Don’t waste them showing off. Don’t point that thing at a man unless you’ve decided what comes after.”
Clay gave a short nod. “I won’t.”