HOPERSVILLE WAS SLOWLY coming to life. As I strolled through the little makeshift village, folks were starting cook fires, men smoking their first cigarettes of the day, everyone stretching out their kinks and wiping sleep from their eyes. A few who knew me now, by sight if not by name, gave me amiable greetings.
When I reached the Schofields’ tepee, Mother Beal was sitting on an overturned crate, stirring something in the big cook pot that hung above the fire.
“Cream of Wheat, Buck,” she said when she saw me. “You’re welcome to join us.”
“I already ate,” I said. “But thanks.”
Mrs. Schofield came from the tepee, ushering the twins ahead of her. The kids made straight for the river, which looked like molten gold now in the slant of the rising sun. Their mother came to the fireside, and although she smiled at me, the gesture was cursory.
“Any sign of them?” she asked Mother Beal.
“Not yet.”
“Maybeth?” I asked.
“Went to fetch her father,” Mother Beal said.
“Where is he?” I asked, a dark fear taking shape on my horizon.
The women didn’t reply, but the looks on their faces nailed the sad truth to my understanding. Good money after bad.
“God only knows what he took to pay for his drink,” Mother Beal said. “He’s already sold off everything dear.”
“Maybe we’re wrong, Mama,” Mrs. Schofield said.
This was a plea rather than a statement, and it broke my heart to know the part I’d played in this recent and bitterly disappointing undoing of her husband.
Mother Beal made no reply but simply went on stirring the pot of hot cereal.
“Here she comes,” Mrs. Schofield said.
That Maybeth was alone was telling enough, but her whole demeanor—her head down, her shoulders slumped, her walk slow—was also a clear broadcast of failure.
“I couldn’t find him, Mama,” she said when she reached us. “I looked everywhere.”
I thought about her going alone into that blind pig and other places like it, searching in vain for her father, and every bit of the goodness I’d felt in giving that man our money drained right out of me. I considered confessing my part in visiting this misery on them, but I didn’t have the courage.
“He’ll come when he’s drunk up all of whatever he took for collateral,” Mother Beal said. “In the meantime, this Cream of Wheat is hot and ready to be eaten. Maybeth, will you call the twins?”
We sat in a glum silence while they ate their meal. Even the usually raucous twins seemed to feel the weight of their family’s despair and said not a word. I worked at trying to grasp the spirit of hopefulness that was one of the gifts of my time with Sister Eve. Instead, I found myself dwelling on thoughts about the skeleton of the Indian kid we’d buried on the island in the river, and about Mose, who’d sunk himself into a place beyond our reach and then had disappeared, about all that money I’d given away in a moment of stupid generosity, and finally about the fact that I was still a fugitive from justice and only one step away from spending my entire life behind bars. When darkness comes over your soul, it doesn’t come in light shades; it descends with all the black of a moonless night. In the faces of the women around that cook fire, what I saw was the vacant look of abandonment, and I knew it was all my fault.
“I’ll find him,” I said, thinking this might be a way to atone, but also thinking that it would be a way to escape the despair of that little gathering.
“I’ll go, too,” Maybeth offered.
We rose and set off together.
“HE DOESN’T USUALLY start his drinking until later,” Maybeth said as we walked. “It’s this whole situation, being stuck here with no idea how to get unstuck. He’s really a good man, Buck.”
I wished I believed that were so, but I knew the truth of the situation. I’d given her father the wherewithal to change his family’s dire circumstances, and all he’d done was head off on a tear. Good money after bad. I hated it when Albert was right.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so low,” she said. “It kills me to see Mama and Mother Beal working so hard to hold us all together. And then Papa goes and does something like this.”
I held Maybeth’s hand. Even though her face was clouded with worry, she was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and her ache was mine. My conscience was screaming at me to confess, but my heart was cowering at the prospect of falling out of her good graces. I wanted to help but had no idea what to do at that juncture. So I did what came naturally to me. I hauled out my mouth organ and began to play a tune, the liveliest that came to mind, Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.”
A few bars in, Maybeth began to sing, and I was amazed that she knew the words.
She was smiling now, singing how you wouldn’t find old man trouble around her door, and her face seemed more beautiful than ever. Then her eyes rounded wide, and I caught what she’d just heard—the sound of her father singing along in a drunken tenor. His voice came from a short distance away, somewhere in Hopersville. I kept playing, and Mr. Schofield sang right along, and we followed the sound of his warble to where he sat on an upended water bucket, his back against the raggedy wall of Captain Gray’s mostly cardboard shanty, keeping company with the captain himself. He gave us a broad smile and opened his arms in welcome.
“Will you look at this, Captain? My two favorite young people, glowing like angels in the morning sun.”
“Papa,” Maybeth said, her voice severe. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
“Not everywhere apparently,” he said, beaming. “For here I am, love.”
“Drunk,” she said and cast a cold eye that included the captain.
Mr. Schofield raised his hand in a solemn pledge. “I haven’t touched a drop today. If I’m drunk, it’s only with happiness. And there’s the cause.” He poked his finger at me.
Despite his protestation, he sure seemed stewed. But close as I was to him, I caught no smell of booze. I did catch the smell of gasoline, however.
“Our deliverer, Maybeth child. And the fruit of his generosity.” Her father reached down and touched a red, spouted, five-gallon gas can with SKELLY printed on the side. “This is our ticket out of Hopersville. Next stop, Chicago.”
Maybeth looked rightly confused. “You haven’t been drinking?”
“As I said, not even a taste. I went off this morning in search of a gas station. And then a store, where I bought a little gift for everyone, you included.”
He reached down to a brown paper bag, stuffed full, and what he drew out made Maybeth gasp with surprise and pleasure: a blue dress.
“It’s almost exactly like the one I gave Janie Baldwin,” she cried and, taking the dress, held it to herself as if appraising in a mirror how it might look on her. I was thinking that it might look pretty wonderful.
“Buck, I hope you don’t mind me using a little of your gift to gift a few others,” Mr. Schofield said.
“It’s your money now,” I told him.
“Well, then I don’t guess you’ll mind that I gave Captain Gray here a little gift, too. Enough money for a bus ticket to D.C. so he can join that Bonus Army gathering there.”
I didn’t know what a bus ticket to Washington, D.C., might cost. I just hoped there was enough left to get the Schofields to Chicago.
Mr. Schofield laughed. “I can see from your face you’re worried that I’ve blown the whole wad. Rest easy, Buck. I’ve done my calculations and there’s still plenty to see us all the way to Chi-Town.”
Captain Gray reached out to shake my hand. “And as for me, from the bottom of my heart and the core of my wooden leg, I thank you, Buck.”
Maybeth eyed me with amazement. “You have money?”
“Not anymore,” I said. “I gave it all to your father.”
I thought she was going to scold me for trusting cash to a man who knew the environs of a blind pig intimately. Instead, she leaned to me and, in front of her father and Captain Gray and anyone else who might have been watching, kissed me. Full on the lips. A long time.
“All right, all right,” Mr. Schofield said, lifting himself from the overturned water bucket and grabbing up his gas can. “Come along, Maybeth. We’ve got us some packing to do.”
He headed away toward the Schofields’ tepee, and Maybeth turned to follow.
And that’s when the reality of what I’d done hit me. Maybeth would be leaving. Maybeth would be gone.