and hard it hurt. The wild pig scarer stood behind her with his ever-present shotgun.
“Grub,” he said and nudged Emmy forward.
After not having eaten all day, even if what was in that bowl was no better than pig slop, I was ready to gorge myself. Albert and Mose and I dug into the meal with our dirty fingers. The potatoes were surprisingly tasty, with bits of salt pork and onions laced in. The pig scarer had Emmy give us a milk bottle filled with water to wash it down. He dragged one of the hay bales and set it just outside the entrance of the tack room and sat with Emmy beside him. While he watched us eat, he took a pint-size bottle of clear liquid from a pocket of his overalls and drank from it. I was pretty sure it wasn’t water.
When we’d finished every bit of the potatoes, Emmy took the bowl back and the man had her sit beside him again. It was going toward dark, and the pig scarer took a kerosene lantern from where it hung on the barn wall, lit the wick, and put the lantern on the dirt floor beside the hay bale.
“Who was blowing that mouth organ?” he asked.
“Me,” I said.
“Know ‘Red River Valley’?”
“Sure.”
“Play it.”
I did, and in the gloom of the barn, lit with just the little lantern glow, the haunting notes of that old ballad seemed like a heavy blanket of sorrow laid over us all. A great sadness came off the pig scarer. It was in his one good eye as he stared at the tack room wall, seeing something there that my own two eyes could not. It was also in the way he mindlessly drank the clear liquid from the bottle.
When I finished, he said, “Play it again.”
This time I watched him even more carefully, and I could see the alcohol was hitting him hard. I thought I’d play that song until he finished the bottle and then jump him. The shotgun lay on his lap, but the reflexes of a man deep into drink were unreliable. Maybe because I was thinking this, I didn’t play the tune with the same feeling I’d given it the first time, because the pig scarer suddenly cried, “Stop!” He put the cork in the bottle and stood up to leave.
“Are you going make us sleep on a dirt floor?” Albert asked.
The pig scarer considered this. I could see he wasn’t standing so steadily, and I thought about taking a run at him. Albert must have guessed my intention, because he put a restraining hand on my arm.
“Maybe we could have that hay bale to spread?” my brother said.
The pig scarer gave a nod to Mose, who got up and hauled the bale into the tack room. Then the man shut and bolted the door, leaving us in the dark.
“Night, Emmy,” I called.
“Night,” she called back.
We broke the bale, spread it out, and lay down. With the close four walls and the dirt floor overlaid with a thin mat of straw and a locked door to keep us in, this felt oddly familiar, as if I was back in the quiet room. I didn’t close my eyes right away. Not because I wasn’t tired. I was thinking.
The wild pig scarer had been deeply affected by the song I’d played. Whenever someone asked for a particular song, it was generally because the tune had special meaning for them. Sad numbers seemed to be especially meaningful. Something had happened to the pig scarer, something that hurt him. But it had also made him mad enough to cut off a second airing of the tune. There were still a lot of things about life I didn’t know then, but I knew this: when a man hurt really bad, it was usually because of a woman.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THAT NIGHT, MOSE wept.
I woke to the pitiful sound of his sobs and sat up. The tack room was streaked with moonlight slipping between the warped slats. I saw that Albert was awake, too, sitting with his back to the barn wall.
At Lincoln School, kids often cried in the night. Sometimes it was because of a bad dream. Sometimes they were wide awake and just wept their hearts out over some private sorrow. So many came to the school already beset by demons. For others, the horrible things done to them after they arrived were enough to give them nightmares for life. Mose was the biggest, strongest, most physically