11
The rain refused to fall.
For weeks, whenever home could spare me, I’d been earning a dollar a day at Ben Tanner’s. But due to the dry spell, Ben couldn’t hire me anymore.
Early one morning he said, “Rob, you’re a stout worker. However, with all this heated weather and no rain, there’s little to do here. I may even have to cut back George’s hours, and he’s worked for me over ten years. It smarts to say it.”
“I understand, Ben.” I did. It was so plain that it was hurting Ben Tanner to tell me.
“A coupling of two evils, Rob. Drought plus a depression. Sorry time for farmers. Pork and beef prices have fallen so low we near have to give it away. Same for milk. It doesn’t pay to place a pail beneath a cow.”
“Over the radio,” Bess said, “the news reported that farmers were dumping their milk onto the street.”
“We’ll be all right,” I said, “soon as it rains.”
“Looking on the bright side,” Ben said, “yesterday I was in the feedstore in town. Porter Ferguson is looking for a boy. Odd jobs. It won’t pay much. I told Porter about you, and he’s interested. Please go talk to him.”
“I will, Ben, and thank you.”
Leaving Ben’s place, I ran barefoot all the way to Learning, puffing to a halt at Ferguson’s Feed & Seed. The double doors were closed and locked. A noise behind me made me turn around.
“We don’t open until seven o’clock,” a small elderly man told me. He wore black arm garters, a starched white shirt, and half-moon glasses. “Seven is early enough.”
“Sir … are you Mr. Porter Ferguson?”
“Yup.” The old gentleman snorted. “At least I was when I turned off my alarm clock. And who might you be? A customer?”
“No, sir. I’m Robert Peck. Mr. Tanner, our neighbor, told me that you might hire a helper. I’m a bargain.”
Before answering, Mr. Ferguson selected a key from his collection to unlock the door. It opened outward, with a creaky sound. Then he faced me.
“You’re here early. I’m not open for business. S’matter? Can’t you tell time?”
Still out of breath, I panted, “Yes, sir.” I took in air. “I run all the way.”
“From uproad, all the way to here? You must hanker a job real bad. Nobody else reports at this hour. You must be related to a rooster.” He was struggling to brace a large barrel against the door, to hold it open. So I helped him do. “Good boy. You see things that need tending. You’re hired.”
“Thank you, Mr. Porter. Sorry, I meant to say Mr. Ferguson.”
“Well?” He seemed to be waiting. “Don’t you want to know how much I can afford to pay?”
“Whatever it is, I’ll welcome it glad.”
“Fifty cents a day. All day.” He shuffled toward the rear of the store, and I followed. “But you’ll work no harder than I do. ’Zat a deal?”
“A deal.”
We met hands.
As Mr. Ferguson opened the back door, he was greeted by a flock of small white-crown sparrows. Papa had called them skunk birds. Their tiny heads seemed to be wearing skunk-skin caps. The birds fluttered at Mr. Ferguson, chattering wildly, landing on his head and shoulders, then flying around his small frame.
“My friends,” he told me. “When you’re in the feed-and-seed business, popularity with sparrows comes for free. It’s a bonus.”
As my new employer was cackling at his bird-sized joke, his laugh was akin to a chirp. Or a bird’s morning song. I liked him.
“What’s your name again, boy? I forgit.”
“Robert Peck. I get Rob for short.”
“Yup. Very well, Rob. For starters, fetch a rag and tidy up around the crank of that turpentine barrel. Some customers I got store-trained so’s they measure their own into a carry can. One or two will drain part and slop the rest.”
I did it.
While I worked, the smell of the place made my nose hum. A good aroma, a mixture of malt, rye, oats, sunflower seeds, and black rolls of tar paper. As I moved along with a rag and broom, I inhaled citronella, putty, new rope, creosote, and linseed oil, plus a few dusty bales of excelsior.
“If you chance to scatter any grain or seeds,” said Mr. Ferguson, “don’t bother it. My sparrows are magicians. And they’ll make it disappear.” He winked. “Sometimes I even spill some on purpose.”
Never had I worked in a place with the music of so many birds. Everywhere I looked, a sparrow was pecking up a treat. Once in a while, a bird would relieve his bowels on the gritty floor, but the owner didn’t seem to mind. Nor did I, even though I was barefoot. Being a farmer, assisting Papa for many a summer, I’d stepped in worse.
At Aunt Matty’s, there was a religious picture on the parlor wall of some old saint surrounded by a flock of white doves. Who knows, he might have been kin to Mr. Porter Ferguson.
I didn’t service any customers. Leastwise, not direct. My boss waited on every one personal, made change from the cash register, then ordered me to bear the grain bags to a wagon or a truck.
A lady tipped me a nickel. “Here you go, sonny,” she said. “But don’t spree it for peppermint. If you’re wise you’ll squirrel it away.”
“Yes’m. I certain will.”
It would be one more nickel into Mama’s old teapot, and eventual to the Learning Bank.
“Them salt blocks,” said Mr. Ferguson, “are all mixed up. Sort ’em out, and line ’em up proper, like soldiers. White together and brown alike. Even though a cow won’t give a hoot whenever she licks one.”
Straightening the big salt blocks made me sad. I’d always wanted to save up pennies, come to town alongside of Papa on the wagon bench, and purchase a block of salt for Daisy. She’d never had a one. For her, I planned to get a white one, to match her black and white hide.
Now it was too late.
No matter. Soon, because of my new job, I might save up and buy a weaned calf from Ben Tanner. Then, when she become a heifer, we’d match her with Beowolf. She’d lactate, to become a full-growed milker. And then Mama and Carrie wouldn’t have to drink black coffee.
Then I remembered. At home, there wasn’t any coffee. We’d run clean out of it. Mornings, my mother and aunt would be drinking hot water. They’d done it before. Gone without.
“Rob, take that chain to the back. Circle it neat beside another one you’ll see there.”
“Right,” I said. But I couldn’t lift the chain, or even drag it. That length of big-link chain must’ve outweighed three men. Yet I pulled at it and tugged for close to a minute without even giving it a scare.
Mr. Ferguson was laughing fit to bust. “Yup, I gotcha, Rob. It’s a gear chain for a mill. Weighs better than half a ton.”
My old boss was mere playing a prank on me, and wowee, did I ever tumble over it. After that, he asked me to relocate about a dozen rolls of black tar paper, which I could do right easy. It didn’t bother me that it coated my hands all black, because I had me a hunch that Mr. Porter Ferguson paid wages by measuring the dirt on a worker.
Maybe someday I’d own a store and be a friendly storekeeper like Mr. Ferguson. His extra pair of glasses was sitting on a countertop. So I hooked them over my ears and glanced at a mirror to see how I’d look. Smiling at myself, I said, “Yup.”
I’d managed to move the final tar paper roll when I noticed a customer entering the store. And he stopped my breathing. This particular patron was the shop teacher, Mr. Orr, carrying his umbrella. Nobody knew his rightful age. As a youth, he might have marched in the Crusades. All I knew was that his eyesight had dimmed and he was deafer than a stump. In other words, as Jacob Henry once said, ready to sit on the Supreme Court.
Just my sorry luck that Mr. Ferguson was busy in the back, jotting figures to his ledger.
“Anybody here?” Mr. Orr hollered in a voice that had learned to whisper in a sawmill, presuming that everyone else was earless, except himself.
“It’s Mr. Orr,” I said softly to my employer. “I think he might be looking for you.”
“Boy,” my boss said, “attend him. I’m too busy. See what he wants, and if you don’t know what it is, he won’t either, so sell the old skinflint anything else. Make him pay full price.”
“Me? You want me to wait on him?”
“Yup.”
I was sure in a pickle.
“Hello!” Mr. Orr hooted to all of Vermont and parts of New Hampshire. “Anyone here to service me?”
Long as I live (which could have proven that day to be a very short life), I’ll always pay homage to my favorite commodity among the entire inventory of Ferguson’s Feed & Seed. Tar paper! In a breath, I rubbed my blackened hands all over my face, put on the extra pair of Mr. Ferguson’s eyeglasses plus an apron, and (with white grain dust on my hair) paraded manfully forward to address Mr. Orr.
“Yup?” I asked.
Pop Orr near jumped out of his underwear. Or secretly disgraced it. Never had I seen so startled an expression. His eyebrows went scurrying toward his scalp, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down for several round trips. Then he blinked at me.
“Yup?” I repeated.
Cupping a hand to his ear, Mr. Orr squinted at me in total disbelief. Slowly he opened his mouth to speak.
“Porter, is that you?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to utter another word, one that might pack me off to prison, or to hang. Or worse, to have to suffer shop class again.
“You sick?” Mr. Orr inquired.
Again I nodded, and then faked a disgusting death-rattler of a cough in Pop’s direction. Mr. Orr could only mumble his next question.
“Good grief, Porter … what’s ailing you?”
Just before Mr. Orr, umbrella and all, went flapping like a goosed goose out the store’s double doors, I gave him the medical opinion he sought. A simple diagnosis. All I told him was two words.
“Black plague.”