MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

Winner Conclave Character Prize in Fiction

Leland James

It was 1929, the time of the Great Depression, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, times were hard and getting harder, like it is in any time for one person or another, depending on a wrong guess or just the luck of the draw. The luck of the draw back in '29 was bad for just about everyone.

    The man and his boy, dressed in coats that were near to rags, road into a town, no town in particular, on an ancient mule, the boy riding behind. Each held a bag with what was theirs in this world, the man a large grain sack, the boy a small sack that had once held potatoes, the bags balanced in front of them on the mule's back, the man and the boy slumped forward on the bags like two round stones different only in size. It was early fall, a taste of winter in the air. The town was small, quiet.

    The man tied the mule near the general store which had a sign on the door: "Back soon." The man bent forward, hunched into the door, like he was looking inside, and did something with the lock and entered.

    When the storekeeper returned, the man was waiting at the counter. The boy sat with their sacks on the wooden sidewalk outside.

    "How'd ya get in here? Yer not sposed to be."

    "Door, 'twas unlocked. Meanin' no harm. Thought somebody's here, mindin'." The man's face changed as he spoke, an angry, perhaps dangerous, face becoming a plea of innocence. One face jarred with the other. The storekeeper picked the former, not trusting the man's kind, displaced, vagrant.

    "Can't read?" asked the storekeeper.

    "No sir."

    "Well, watcha want?"

    "Tin a tabakca, that's all. But...." The man surveyed the counter, squeezed his mouth with his thumb and two fingers. "Maybe and, a slice a thet cheese there, make it two, and a ring a thet there bolona." The man's face transformed again, a sly look creeping into his eyes.

    "That'd be, let's see, near a dollar." The storekeeper raised his eyebrows, fixing the man with a questioning stare. "You got a dollar?"

    "Well, the man said, scratching his cheek, "I got me a box a thirty-ought shells, brand new. Had to sell my gun. Shells no good to me now. I'd trade. You'd get the best, I'd wager. Maybe you'd throw in an orange drink for my boy?" He removed a box of Remington 30-06 cartridges from his coat pocket and laid it on the counter. The storekeeper opened the box and examined the shinning contents. He pursed his lips, squinted at the man and said "OK."

    The man left the store with the food under his arm, wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string, the bottle of orange drink in his coat pocket. The man mounted the mule and lifted the boy up behind, both adjusting their bags and leaning forward against them as the mule moved slowly out of the town. With a slight straightening of his body, the man pulled the bottle of orange drink from his pocket. He opened it with his jackknife, took a drink and passed the bottle back to the boy. The food would be kept for day's end in case a welcoming farm wasn't found. The orange drink and the cheese and bologna wrapped in brown paper was more than they had some days. With luck, it would be there for them tomorrow. That was as much as there was of a plan.

    Early evening, the man and the boy arrived at the farmhouse of Homer Bell. Homer saw them from the kitchen window. He had just come in from the fields where he had worked a long day, from six in the morning until six at night, preparing a field for a second planting. He had walked most of the day behind a team of mules, pulling on the traces, pitting his strength against the mules, adding force to the plow, driving it into the ground. By leaning against the mules he borrowed power from the mules, a borrowing that he was paying back in stiff and sore more every year as he aged. But Homer counted himself lucky. His crops were coming in well and despite the hard times he was holding on, while folks in the west watched their land turn to dust. He heard of this on the radio.

    The man and the boy came slowly to Homer's door, hunched over their bags, the old mule walking slowly, the mule's only pace. The man sat up and surveyed Homer's place, the look on his face angry, bitter. The buildings were well maintained. There was a vegetable garden of neat rows, even a small flower box with morning glories outside the kitchen window, white and purple and blue.

    As the man gazed at the flower box, he caught that he was being observed, his face changing immediately, going blank like the boys. Homer noted two things, the sudden shift in the man's expression and the sole of his shoe coming loose at the toe. Homer shook his head, "the times."

    Homer did not often put things into words, but rather let his observations and his intuition settle in slowly and shape his actions, an intelligence outside the world of words. He responded to the world as if his next step was inevitable. A dirt road straight and well known. Homer let things he'd do or say come to him.

    "Wayfarer, Mother."

    "I'll set another place."

    "Better two, there's a boy."

    "Oh."

    "Yes," Homer said, nodding, and went out to meet the travelers.

    "Evenin'," said Homer.

    "Evenin'," said the man.

    "There's a room in the barn and a pump beside," said Homer. "You're welcome to wash up, water the mule. You can stay tonight. Had a hired man in the room before times got so bad. Can't afford help no more. Dinners near ready. You come in when you've washed. Don't be long."

    "Obliged," said the man, "for me and the boy."

    Homer nodded and went back inside.

    Homer sat at the head of the table, his wife and two girls, neither girl yet twelve, on one side of the table, the man and the boy on the other. "We'll bow our heads," Homer said. "Lord, times are tough. Help us and all them that need it even more, and we're thankful for what we got."

    The supper was plain, white beans and ham, greens from the garden cooked in vinegar. "Mr. Rhodes, did I say your name right?" said Homer's wife. "Where are you and your son headed? Home, I hope, or to some relatives...."

    "Mother," Homer cut in. "Mr. Rhodes don't need to be bothered with your cureosity. His business be his own. He'll be gettin' on first thing tomorrow. I'm sure he's needin' an early start. You can pack him and his boy a sandwich fer their breakfast. That way they won't need to be held up on our account getting'around."

    The man nodded.

    No one spoke while the rest of the supper was eaten. The man pushed back and reached in his pocket and pulled out a jackknife, new, still in its box. "I'd like to give ya this knife as payment for the vitals and the place to bed. I thought I'd lost mine and got this one new, and then found mine after all."

    "Got a jackknife," said Homer. Thank ye anyway."

    "You could trade it."

    "No, I'll not be takin' anything for feedin' ya."

    The man nodded and put the knife back in his pocket.

    "Mary Louise," Homer said, "it's time we have readin'."

    The older of the girls left the room and came back with a book, Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey. She sat back at her place and opened the book, removing a slip of paper marking a page. Homer rose. "I'll do the chores, while Ella reads. You can call me, girls, quick, if anything happens in the story I ain't heard before. Though I doubts it." The girls giggled. "I'll throw yer mule some hay, Mr. Rhodes. You can sit fer the readin'. Sure there's little of that for the boy, as yer travelin' these days."

    In the barn, in the hired man's quarters at the back, Homer looked quickly into the grain sack the man had left by the bed. Homer found in the bag, these things of interest: a display card with six shinny buttons, pink, for a lady's or girl's dress, and six 30-30 Winchester cartridges, banded, looking, like the buttons, new, right off the shelf. There was also a paint scraper filed thin, the kind of tool that could be slipped between a door and its frame to depress a locking bolt and gain entry. Homer leaned his head for a moment on his fist and stared at the buttons and cartridges.

    Later, after the man and the boy had left for the barn, and his family was in bed, Homer took the shotgun from where it leaned against the wall beside coats hung on a row of nails. From a shelf above, he took two red 12-gauge shells from a box and loaded the gun. He moved a rocker from another room to sit beside the kitchen's wood stove facing the door. With the shotgun across his lap, Homer began to rock slowly in the chair. One might have thought to look at him that he was deep in thought. But Homer was not thinking anything, just rocking and watching the door.

    Homer watched the man and the boy leaving the yard on their mule. They rode out as they had come in, the boy behind, both slumped on the bags balanced on the old mule's back, the mule at the same plodding pace it had entered the yard the evening before. They had egg sandwiches and a small bottle of milk, the day beginning better than most.

    When the man and the boy were gone from sight, Homer crossed to the barn. He stood in the doorway a moment and then walked slowly to his workbench. Homer was a careful man and knew his bench well, the place for each tool, the jars of screw and a tin of bent nails taken from scrap wood to be straightened. Near these had been three packages, banded like the cartridges in the man's grain sack, of new 16-penny nails, each pack a dozen. A package of nails was gone. Also a hoof knife.

    Some men might have thought they misplaced the nails, or used them and forgot. The hoof knife would turn up. What with times so tough, so many worries, a man might remember wrong. Homer was not such a man. He was a man who moved slowly and carefully, well organized in accordance with a lifetime of down-to-earth labor. He knew the nails and the knife were missing, and nothing else. All right.

    At breakfast Homer's wife commented that it sure was sad to see men like Mr. Rhodes, especially with a child, just seeming to wander. No place from, really it seemed, anymore, and no place, really, to go. Homer nodded and rose from the table. "I'll be down in the east forty," he said, "all morning. Have one of the girls bring water 'bout ten. it. Cup a cool water 'ill go well."

    Homer stood for a moment outside the kitchen door, looking at the sun now just above the horizon. Winter was not all that far away and there was much work to do, and a world of uncertain weather and maybe crop failures or a mule gone lame. A world of work and uncertainty. Homer let the man and the boy slip from his mind and looked to the day ahead. Work to be done and always some trouble.