myself. I was thinking about Mr. Seifert, who was a good man, but it had got him nowhere. Thinking about all the kids who’d been taken from their homes and everything that was familiar to them. And thinking especially about Billy, who was weighing heavily on my mind. I’d vowed to be the shepherd for kids like him, but until Mr. Greene had asked about him, I hadn’t even noticed that Billy had gone missing.
“Think they’ll find him?” I whispered.
Albert’s bunk was next to mine. We weren’t allowed to talk after lights-out, but we could get away with it if we spoke quietly enough.
“Billy Red Sleeve? I don’t know.”
“I hope he’s okay.”
I heard Albert turn on his bunk, and even though I couldn’t see him clearly, I knew he was facing me. “Listen, Odie, don’t you go caring too much about other people. In the end, they just get taken from you.”
“Are you thinking about Pop?”
“Don’t forget Mom,” he said. Because more and more I did.
“Are you afraid I’ll get taken from you?” I asked.
“I’m afraid I’ll get taken from you, and who’d look after you then?”
“Maybe God?”
“God?” He said it as if I were joking.
“Maybe it really is like it says in the Bible,” I offered. “God’s a shepherd and we’re his flock and he watches over us.”
For a long while, Albert didn’t say anything. I listened to that kid crying in the dark because he felt lost and alone and believed no one cared.
Finally Albert whispered, “Listen, Odie, what does a shepherd eat?”
I didn’t know where he was going with that, so I didn’t reply.
“His flock,” Albert told me. “One by one.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
MONDAY MORNING, MOSE and I were assigned to work Bledsoe’s hayfields. At breakfast, Volz stopped by our table in the dining hall to give us the word. Albert and several other boys had been assigned to the German to help him slap a new coat of whitewash on the old water tower.
The water tower was legendary. Long before we came to Lincoln School, a kid named Samuel Kills Many had run away. Before he left, he’d painted across the water tower tank in bold black letters WELCOME TO HELL. Kills Many was one of the few kids who’d fled and had never been caught, and he’d become an important part of the mythology at Lincoln. They’d covered his parting sentiment with a coat of whitewash, but over the years the coating had faded and those bold, black words beneath, which resonated in the heart of every kid at Lincoln School, had begun to reemerge, ghostlike.
The morning was still and already hot, the air so sultry that it was like trying to breathe water. I knew the day would be a bastard, just as Hector Bledsoe had predicted, but I was worried less about that than the whereabouts of Billy.
“Any word on Red Sleeve?” I asked.
Volz shook his head. “It’s only been a day. Give it time, Odie.”
We rode in the bed of Bledsoe’s pickup, Mose and me and the others condemned to baling and bucking hay all day. We were quiet, as befitted a group of boys heading out to work under the control of a heartless farmer who would treat us like beasts. I thought maybe Billy Red Sleeve had the right idea. If I’d bolted with him, when we were caught, my punishment would most likely have been a night in the quiet room, and a pretty good strapping in the bargain, which, all things considered, might have been better than a whole day in the hayfields under an unrelenting sun, sucking in hay dust until it nearly choked me.
At noon, we broke from the work and jostled for a place in the shade under the hay wagon. We ate the dry sandwich Bledsoe’s wife had made for each of us and shared a water bag, and all of us lay dripping sweat and silently cursing Bledsoe and the day we were born. All of us, that is, except Mose, who could work hour after hour without complaint. It wasn’t because he had no voice to do the complaining—his fingers were plenty eloquent—but he seemed to revel in physical labor, in the way it challenged his body and spirit. Nobody faulted him for being the only one not miserable, because he was always quick to step in and help whenever one of the other boys needed a hand. Often, because of Mose’s mute acceptance, Bledsoe lay the hardest work on his shoulders.
I sat next