else.
“No, ma’am. I promise.”
“Thank you, Odie.” Then she said, “If I could, I would leave, too.”
And I realized there were prisoners at Lincoln School who weren’t children.
“Good luck, Miss Stratton.”
“God be with you, Odie.”
I returned to the study, handed Albert the pillowcase, and he bent to the safe. The first thing he did was return my harmonica to me. Then he began throwing everything into the pillowcase—the money, papers, a leather book of some kind, and a couple of stacks of letters bound with twine.
“What do we need all that for?” I asked.
“If the Brickmans put it in here, it’s worth something.”
When he’d cleaned out the safe, Albert considered the gun he’d taken from Mr. Brickman.
“Leave it,” Volz said. “It will only bring you more trouble.”
Albert threw it in the pillowcase anyway and stood up.
“Time to go,” he said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WE REGROUPED ON the old parade ground under a glaring white moon. The buildings of Lincoln School rose square and black around us and cast great shadows. They should have felt familiar after all these years, but that night, everything felt different, huge and menacing. The air itself seemed unsettled, full of raw threat.
God be with you. That was the last thing Miss Stratton had said to me. But the God I knew now was not a God I wanted with me. In my experience, he was a God who didn’t give but only took, a God of unpredictable whim and terrible consequence. My anger at him surpassed even my hatred of the Brickmans, because the way they treated me was exactly what I expected. But God? I’d had my hopes once; now I had no idea what to expect.
“You all wait on the other side of the dining hall,” Volz said. “I get my automobile and pick you up.”
“There’s something I have to do first,” I said.
“What now?” Albert said.
“Can I have the key to the carpentry shop, Mr. Volz?” I asked.
“What for, Odie?”
“Please.”
“Just give it to him, Herman,” Albert said. “We’re wasting time.”
Volz took a small ring of keys from his pocket, detached one of them, and handed it to me.
“Behind the dining hall in fifteen minutes,” I said.
The carpentry shop, when I unlocked and opened the door, was a confusion of smells—varnish, sawdust, oils, turpentine. I turned on the light and went to a wooden cabinet along one of the walls. Inside were paint cans, arranged and stacked by color and purpose. I grabbed a can of black paint and pulled one of the brushes from the shelf above. I turned out the light, locked the shop, and hurried away.
The water tower, whose whitewashing had been interrupted by the tornado, was now fully painted, Samuel Kills Many’s parting sentiment completely obliterated. I stood at the base of one of the long legs, where the ladder was affixed, and stared up at the tank, which was clean and frost white in the moonlight. It was like the face of a naïve child turned toward heaven with nothing but pure expectation. I hooked the handle of the paint can into the crook of my arm, stuffed the brush into the waist of my pants, and began to climb. The catwalk that circumscribed the tank was a hundred feet above the ground. When I reached it, I paused a moment and looked down for the last time on Lincoln School. There was nothing but hardness in my heart. All I saw were the black shadows the buildings cast and how those shadows seemed to eat the earth where they fell. That was how it had been for me, too. Four years of my life eaten by darkness.
When I finished what I’d come there for, I left the paint can and brush and climbed down.
The others were waiting for me behind the dining hall, Volz with his automobile running.
“What was so important?” Albert asked, clearly irritated at the delay.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s done. Let’s go.”
It took us no time at all to reach the destroyed farmstead of Andrew and Cora Frost. Volz parked near the rubble of the house and we climbed out. The rest of us started for the riverbank and the canoe rack, but Emmy held back. She slipped her little hand inside the bib of her overalls and brought out the photograph I’d salvaged from the debris. She studied it, then stared at the pile of splintered wood where her life had once been but would never be again.
I put my arm around her and said as gently