Chapter 2
Araw Missouri town was where the train set them down at last.
It was little more than a single street of plank buildings, raised up out of the prairie as though by accident.
A church stood at one end, its paint already peeling.
A store. A livery with a sagging roof. The smell of horses carried clear across the road.
The boy stepped down onto the boards, his legs stiff from the long days of sitting.
The air met him with a smell of dust and sun-warmed wood.
Beneath it lay a green smell he could not name, the breath of the open country.
It was nothing like the city. There was too much sky.
Miss Cornwell formed them into a line along the platform.
She went down the row with quick, practiced hands.
She straightened a collar here. She licked her thumb and scrubbed a smudge from a cheek there.
The boy's paper tag had worked itself crooked.
She tugged it straight upon his coat. Then she gave the front of him a small pat, as if to settle both the cloth and the child inside it.
"Stand tall," she murmured to each of them as she passed. "Smile. This may be the day a family takes you home."
To the meetinghouse at the end of the street they were marched, two by two.
A crowd had already gathered there, more people than the boy had expected.
Farmers in worn coats, their hands thick and brown.
Their wives in faded bonnets. A few children of the town come to stare at the children off the train.
Their eyes moved over the orphans the way a man's eyes move over stock at a sale.
Weighing. Measuring. Pricing. The boy had seen that look before at the markets back home, turned upon hogs and horses.
It was the look of people deciding what a thing was worth.
He had not known until that moment how it felt to be the thing.
Along a low platform at the front, the children were ranged in a row.
A man in a black coat read aloud from a paper.
These were orphans of good character, he told the crowd.
Healthy and willing, in want of Christian homes, ready to be useful to those who took them.
The boy hardly heard the words. He was busy at the only work he knew.
He stood straight, his shoulders squared and aching.
He smiled until the muscles of his face burned with it.
It was a wide, hopeful smile that he did not feel anywhere inside.
Forward, the families came to look.
A round woman with kind eyes stopped first before the little ones.
She bent down to them, cooing, and lifted a small fair girl onto one hip.
The girl laughed, surprised into it. The woman laughed back, delighted, and carried her off without a backward glance.
A man with a gray beard swung the sniffling child with the rag doll onto his broad shoulders.
The child gripped his hair and crowed. One by one, the soft, pretty little ones were gathered up and led away into the bright morning.
The boy watched each of them go. He was glad for them.
Underneath the gladness, he was very much afraid.
Over him, the lookers' eyes passed and moved on.
He understood it in a dim and wordless way.
He was thin, and he was plain. There was nothing in his face to make a stranger's heart go soft.
Ten was a poor age to be standing in such a line.
He was too old to be cooed over and gathered up like a kitten.
He was too young to be of much real use in a field.
A woman did not look at a boy like him and ache to hold him.
He knew it. Still he kept the smile fixed upon his face.
Still he squared his aching shoulders and held them so.
The right family had only not yet come down the line, he told himself.
He had only to wait, and be good, and not despair.
The crowd thinned as the morning wore on.
The little ones were gone, every one. A handful of older children remained upon the platform, the boy among them. They no longer troubled to smile. The bright hope he had carried all the long way west had begun to ache. It was a dull pain, low in his chest, like a bruise pressed on.
Then a couple stopped before him.
The man was tall and hard, with a face like a closed fist. His wife stood a pace behind him, thin-lipped, her hands folded at her waist. Neither of them smiled.
Neither spoke a kind word to the boy or to one another.
The man looked him over slow, the way he might judge a horse he meant to buy cheap.
"This one," the man said at last. "How old?"
"Ten, sir," the boy said quickly, clear and polite, just as he had been taught. He made the word bright. He made it eager. He put into that one small sir every ounce of please-take-me a boy could press into a syllable.
The man stepped close.
One rough hand closed on the boy's arm and squeezed, hard, feeling for the muscle beneath the sleeve.
The boy held himself still and let it happen.
Then the fingers came up to his jaw and pried his mouth open.
The man turned his head to the light, the way he might check the teeth of a mule.
The boy stood and bore it. He fixed his eyes on a knot in the planking and did not let them fill.
Heat flooded his face, but he made no sound.
Shame was a lesson he had learned long ago and in hard places. He had learned to swallow it down whole and let no one see.
"Sound enough," the man said over his shoulder to his wife. "Strong arms for his age. He'll grow."
"Does he eat much?" the woman asked. She spoke as though the boy were not standing there at all.
"He'll earn what he eats," the man said. "Or he'll go without."
The couple turned to Miss Cornwell and the man with the black coat.
There was talk the boy could not quite follow, low and brief, the words passing over his head. A pen was dipped in an inkwell. Names were set down in a ledger. No one asked the boy his name. No one, in all of it, spoke to him at all.
It was finished in less time than it took to draw a bucket of water.
The man folded the paper into his coat and turned away.
He did not glance back at the child he had just acquired.
And the boy understood it then, with a child's terrible clarity.
He had not been chosen. There had been no choosing in it, no wanting, no glad heart.
He had been bought. He was a sound purchase, the way the swaybacked horse was a sound purchase. Nothing more than that. Nothing warmer.
"Come along," the man said. "Wagon's this way. Don't dawdle."
Once, the boy looked back over his shoulder at Miss Cornwell.
She caught his eye across the thinning crowd.
She gave him a small, tired nod, almost an apology, almost a blessing.
Then she bent again to her book and her remaining charges.
There were children yet to place, and the long day was getting on.
A woman in her trade could not afford to grieve over one boy among so many.
The boy understood that, too. He turned and went.
He followed the hard couple out into the street.
Craw was their name, he gathered from the few words that passed.
Esra and Greer Craw. They had a farm some miles out from the town, the man said.
There was work waiting on it. They had come a fair distance for a strong pair of hands.
The boy walked behind them to a buckboard wagon hitched to a swaybacked horse with a hanging head.
He was told to climb up into the back. He sat among the sacks of flour and the coils of new harness leather.
They had been bought on the same trip to town that had bought him.
He climbed up and sat down among the sacks.
With a creak and a jolt, the wagon rolled. The little town slid away behind him, the meetinghouse and the platform and Miss Cornwell with it. Soon, the whole of it was no more than a smudge of roofs against the wide sky.
Glad he ought to be, he told himself.
A home was his now, of a kind. A roof. A place.
He had not been sent back down the line, as the scarred boy on the train had been sent back twice.
Surely that counted for something. Surely it was a beginning.
And surely, the boy thought, if only he worked hard enough.
If only he made himself useful enough, and quiet, and good.
Then the cold faces in the front seat might, in time, soften toward him.
People could come to love a thing that served them well.
He had seen a man fond of a good dog. Why not, in time, a good boy?
To that thought he held as the miles unspooled. He held to it the way a drowning man holds to a floating board.
The land opened out around them, brown and rolling, stitched with rail fences gone gray.
Crows lifted in a black scatter from a stubbled field and settled again.
Neither of the Craws spoke a word, not to him, not even to one another.
There was only the creak of the wheels, the plod of the tired horse, the wind in the long grass.
Hugging his thin knees against the chill, the boy watched the road dwindle behind him.
It does not matter why they took me, he thought, so long as they keep me. He said the words over to himself, silently, a charm against the cold. He said them until they almost felt true.
Toward dusk, the wagon turned down a rutted lane.
At its end stood a low farmhouse, gray and unpainted, weathered to the color of an old bone.
Behind it loomed a barn, larger than the house itself.
Its great door hung dark and open. A dog barked once from the yard and was hushed by a word from Esra.
In no window of the house did a lamp burn.
There was no warm square of light to say a family lived within.
There were only gray shapes against a graying sky.
The boy looked at the dark house and the darker barn, and waited to be told what would become of him.
"That's the place," Esra Craw said, without turning his head. "You'll sleep in the barn. We'll start you at first light."
The bright hope the boy had carried all the long way west flickered low at the words. But it did not yet go out. He gathered it close inside him, small and stubborn and warm. He would not let the dark and the cold of the place put it out.
Useful he would be, he swore to himself as the wagon rolled into the silent yard. So useful that they could not help but come to love him in the end.
He did not yet know that being useful and being loved were two different things. He did not know he would spend the whole of his boyhood learning the bitter distance between the one and the other.