‘You’re last in pickin’ beans,’ Dove told him.
‘But I was the first to vote for Hoover,’ the old man snapped more now like a youthful rat than an ageing mouse – ‘’n the first to admit I was wrong.’
‘Hoover is a great man,’ the Michigan farmer was certain – ‘but he’s too far ahead of his time. The whole Republican Party is ahead of its time.’
‘I lived through Hoover myself,’ somebody agreed. ‘It give me real strength. Now I can live through anything.’
The kitchen-hant came blowing a whistle. All hands quit on the second’s split. Dove stepped over the sack gingerly.
By the time he got to the mess hall the hant had put on a greasy beany just to direct traffic. Mexicans to the right, Negroes to the left. But Dove he directed straight ahead, to where the white Americans ate at the longest board of all.
‘Pappy wouldn’t approve this kind of carrying-on,’ Dove realized, ‘mixin’ Cath’lics ’n Protestants this way.’
‘Where’s the Reb table?’ his friend came asking.
‘Take the elevator, Yankee,’ the hant instructed her.
Dove got a slab of cornbread in molasses and a stack of beans piled so neatly they appeared to have been counted one by one. When he considered how many he had picked he felt that, percentage-wise, he was getting a bad count.
‘Everyone always gets more than me,’ he complained, and the girl pushed her plate before him again.
‘Why you so good to me?’ Dove asked.
‘Because I want you to be good to me,’ she told him so frankly that he felt he must be doing her a favor and cleaned up every crumb.
‘Everybody got to eat,’ somebody lamented, ‘everybody got to die.’
Dove had hardly finished his third helping when they heard the Man to Houston whistle. ‘Let’s scram out of here before that fool makes us chop down that tree,’ the girl urged him – ‘Put that stuff in your pocket, Red.’
Dove shoved the cornbread into his jeans and they ran for it.
Most of the cars were empties and came clattering past too fast to chance. They waited, flat on their stomachs on the under embankment until the ore cars, whose ladders hung lower, began sliding by.
Dove counted them coming. ‘It’s plumb mass-dark and they’re travelin’ fast,’ he warned her.
‘It’s the last one to Houston before tomorrow night,’ she answered. ‘You comin’?’
Straddling the car, Dove saw its sides were merely chutes slanting straight to the rails. She piled past him and over with a victor’s cry and he caught her wrist as she felt no floor. She pulled him powerfully over but his free hand caught the iron edge and held.
Just held. Then froze like floorless death itself on the iron.
He could not pull her up. He could not let her go. Her double-grip on his wrist, pulling the ribs out of his side, informed him if she were going he was coming with her. The wheels glinted green lightning in the black, he heard pebbles clicking against her shoes in the roar. His right hand no longer held the iron: the iron held the hand.
Her little stricken face, lighted briefly, tried to tell him some last something. Dove caught her overall strap in his big buck teeth and hauled, neck backstraining till she got her fingers onto the side and drew herself onto the edge. He steadied her though his arm trembled to the shoulder.
She was caked with coal-dust, fright had hollowed her eyes. When the train slowed to go into a hole for a passenger train he helped her down. ‘It sayz keep off all trains not in motion,’ he reminded her. Her trembling turned weakly to laughter then.
They rested their backs on the lee side of a heap of coke. There she let her laughter turn to sobbing.
‘What’s the matter, friend?’
‘Run,’ the girl told him, struggling to her feet. Dove put an arm around her shoulders.
‘Where you think you’re going?’ He pulled her back down.
‘Run.’
‘Mebbe you better just cry,’ he suggested.
She found that so easy that she kept it up too long, like a child.
‘What you chokin’ yourself up for?’ Dove finally asked.
‘Lost my jacket,’ she remembered.
‘If you’d been wearin’ the jacket—’
‘I know’ – she assured him that she knew where she’d be if she’d been wearing something he could not have gripped.
Her breath began drawing slower, soot and sleep sealed her eyes.
Her face in sleep looked furtive yet innocent, like one already punished for a crime she hasn’t grown up to commit. When she was old enough to commit it she’d find it.
Her hand on his own pressed his in sleep. He let his hand fall between her knees then moved it up till it cupped her and rested there.
She stirred and he took it away.
‘Keep it right there,’ she told him, ‘I owe you that much.’
Lanterns and flashlights passed and repassed down the rails, building shadows on the box car doors. Railroad crews didn’t care how many climbed aboard once the engineer had given his warning toot; but it made them look bad to have the strays lounging the cars like tourists when a train wasn’t moving.
‘The name is Kitty Twist,’ the girl told Dove, ‘—not my real handle of course. It’s just what they took to callin’ me in The Home. I’m seventeen almost eighteen ’n I’ve run from five homes. I’ll keep on runnin’ till I’m eighteen. Then I’ll marry a good pickpocket and settle down.’
‘I better look this man over,’ Dove told her uneasily, and wandered down the track, inspecting the cars from grab-iron to stirrup-ladder. When he was satisfied he whistled for her, helped her into the car he had picked, and shut the door. One beam shone, dancing slenderly whenever the long car trembled after shunting.
‘Red,’ she told him in the dark when the car began at last to roll, ‘put your hands under me before these boards pinch my little hump clean off.’
With both hands cushioning her pine-knot bottom, Kitty Twist wriggled comfortably until she grew warm. She didn’t mind that Dove’s own narrow behind was freezing.
‘I love you, baby,’ he told her because having saved her life he supposed he ought to. ‘I’ll buy you play-pretties and posey flowers. I’ll learn me a trade ’n take care of you.’
He felt her cold little lips and her small cold mouth, her little cold hands that felt so greedy.
‘Daddy, you’ll never have to work,’ Kitty Twist told Dove. ‘I’ll work hard ’n give you all my money.’
He couldn’t see her smiling too knowingly in the dark.
‘The poorer people are the more likely they are to help you,’ Kitty told him the next morning after they had once again left engine and cars in charge of the crew. ‘Pick the first unpainted shack you see.’
She followed Dove into a littered yard and waited while he rapped the door of a knocked-together-by-hand house the color of soot. A soot-colored wife came to answer.
‘My brother took hisself a small fall, M’am,’ Dove pleaded, ‘Would you allow him to worsh up at yer pump?’
‘Whut he sayin’?’ the woman looked to Kitty for help.
‘He wants to know can I wash up in your house.’
‘Come in, child,’ the woman invited Kitty, holding wide the door.
Dove waited in the yard humming softly—
Until Kitty came out scrubbed and shining, a band-aid on her cheek and a half a bar of Ivory soap in her hand.
‘Oldfolks wasn’t fooled for a minute,’ Kitty reported. ‘Called me “Sis”’n set me down in the tub ’n scrubbed my back ’n made me wash between my toes – Look’ – she revealed white anklets – ‘And would you believe it? She sung to me the whole time.’