Now where to put it? It was usually best to find a place that was either high or low. Since I couldn’t reach too high, I decided to look low. Putting my feet back on the floor, I again felt the floorboards creak and bow. Maybe one was loose enough to pull up. I took tentative steps around the room until I felt one that had a little more bounce than the others. I knelt on the floor, and with a fairly easy push and pull, the floorboard popped up enough for me to get my fingers under it and pull it up. It would have been the perfect hiding spot but for one thing. There was already something there.
I pulled the something out, slow and gentle, and held it up to the moonlight. It was a Lucky Bill cigar box and inside were papers and odds and ends. There wasn’t light for reading, but I could tell that the papers were letters, thin and folded neat. One bigger page looked like a map. The odds and ends clanked inside the box.
“You find what you need?” Shady called from the bottom of the stairs.
“Yes, sir.” I slipped the papers into the cigar box and shoved it back into the floor space. My flour sack keepsake bag fit snugly beside it. Then I replaced the floorboard and crawled into bed.
“Good night, then.”
I didn’t answer right away but I could tell he was still standing there. “Pastor Shady? How far do you think it is to Des Moines?”
There was a pause and I wondered if maybe I’d been wrong and he’d walked away.
“I can’t say for sure. But you see that moon out your window?”
“Yes, sir. Plain as day.”
“Well, Des Moines is a lot closer than that moon. Fact is, I bet a fella in Des Moines can see the same moon you’re looking at right now. Doesn’t that just beat all?” His voice was shy and tender. “I’ll be right down here if you need anything. Will that be all right?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. That’ll be all right.”
The pillow was cool against my cheek. It felt good giving in to sleep. Still, I brought to mind what I’d seen: the cigar box, the letters. Since Gideon had stayed with Shady, maybe this had been his room. Maybe I’d found Gideon’s footprints after all.
The breeze died down. But in the calm of the night, my body still felt the movement of the train.
First Morning
MAY 28, 1636
What kind of addlepate starts school on the last day? I’d been asking myself that question since waking to the sound of pans clanking downstairs and the smell of bacon and coffee rising upstairs. My stomach growled, reminding me that Hattie Mae’s meat loaf sandwich had become a too-distant memory.
Then I remembered the Lucky Bill cigar box. With a buzz of anticipation, I sprung out of bed and found the loose board, only to have Shady call upstairs.
“Miss Abilene, you’re burnin’ daylight. Breakfast is ready.”
As much as I was itching to get more than a moonlit look at what was in the box, I knew better than to keep a cook waiting. I left the box under the floorboard for safekeeping and checked to make sure the compass was still around my neck. I put on my one change of clothes, a blue dress with yellow daisies. The daisies were a little faded but not so bad you couldn’t see them. Then I splashed some water on my face and ran my fingers through my hair. It felt like straw but was the color of a rusty nail. Wearing it short, I never fussed with it much, but I did look forward to that “proper bath” Shady had mentioned the night before.
The stairs emptied into a small back room. More of a porch, really, with a black cookstove, a washtub, and a cot. It appeared Shady could do his eating, bathing, and sleeping all in one place. There was a plate of biscuits, slightly burnt, and bacon, just as warm and pleasant as you please, on the cookstove. Having someone cook my meals made me feel like I was at a fancy hotel.
“There’s some of Velma T.’s blackberry jam in the cupboard,” Shady called from the big room with the bar top and pews. I spread on a modest amount and set it on a pink glass plate, the kind that came free in bags of sugar or flour or laundry soap.
Since there was no table, I took my pink plate into the big front room. With the light of day shining through those stained-glass windows onto the gleaming bar top, I didn’t know whether to kneel down or belly up. Shady was tinkering at his workbench as I ate my breakfast. He was looking real close at a tiny something, cleaning it off with a wire bristle brush. “What’re you working on?”
“The letter L,” he said, squinting at his task at hand. “Hattie Mae’s been writing her column for almost twenty years; it’s no wonder that typewriter’s about give out.” He blew on the metal key and eyeballed it from a distance. Wiping off the piece with a cloth, he placed it beside the typewriter. “Now she can get back to her whos, whats, and wheres and I can get the L out of here.”
Gideon hadn’t told me that Pastor Howard had a sense of humor. Seemed nobody had told Pastor Howard either, as he didn’t let on like he thought it was funny.
I finished off the last of my biscuit. It was hard going down, as my mouth had gone dry. Maybe if I made myself useful, I wouldn’t have to go to school. I’d been in and out of schools before, but I’d always been in the protective shade of my daddy. Here I was alone and exposed to the heat and clamor of the day.
A bell started clanging from a distance, jarring me out of my thoughts.
“Better get on over to school. You don’t want to be late.” He studied the splayed-out typewriter in front of him. “Here’s a couple things for you to mind while you’re there.” He handed me the letters P and Q.
I studied them. “If I took these, it’d sure leave Hattie Mae in a pickle and a quandary and she wouldn’t be able to type either one.”
Shady smiled a half smile. As I put the letters back on the table, I noticed that day’s newspaper lying off to the side. It was folded open to “Hattie Mae’s News Auxiliary.” I picked it up and read the line at the bottom. All the whos, whats, whys, whens, and wheres you never knew you needed to know.
I headed out, giving the cowbell above the door a mournful clang as I left.
Sacred Heart of the Holy Redeemer Elementary School
MAY 28, 1936
You’d have thought I’d be used to this by now. Being the new kid and all. I’d been through this umpteen times before but it never gets any easier. Still, there’s certain things every school’s got, same as any other. Universals, I call them. Walking into the schoolhouse, I smelled the familiar chalky air. Heard fidgety feet rustling under desks. Felt the stares. I took a seat near the back.
My one consolation was that I knew these kids. Even if they didn’t know me. Kids are universals too, in a way. Every school has the ones who think they’re a little better than everybody else and the ones who are a little poorer than everybody else. And somewhere in the mix there’s usually ones who are pretty decent. Those were the ones who made it hard to leave when the time came. And sooner or later, it always came.
I guessed I’d never find out who was who around there, it being the last day of school and all. The books were already stacked on shelves for the summer. The blackboard was just that: black. No math problems. No spelling words. Then a girl with a rosy round face spoke up.
“I bet you’re an orphan.”