1
St Joseph Poor Boys’ Orphanage, Spring 1963

Pip had been awake for hours when the flashlight snaked across the dormitory floor and picked out his bed and his face on the pillow.

‘Pip, git yer clothes on. I wanna innerduce you to someone.’

While the other boys slept, Pip pulled on his clothes and walked across the linoleum into the corridor. He carried his book in one hand and his boots by their laces in the other. There was a cluttered office outside the dormitory with windows on three sides, where a TV crackled and the two men were drinking whiskey.

‘Pip, this here is Mr Zachery. He’s looking to foster a boy—’

‘But it cain’t be jes’ any boy. Ah need a strong boy. Also, ah need a boy who cin read. Ah see ye got a book, son. Ye able t’ read?’

‘He’s the only boy on the premises who truly can.’

Pip stood blinking in the flickering light as Mr Zachery turned him about by the shoulder like a cut of beef. The old man’s beard was yellow with nicotine and the teeth were black within. It reminded Pip of something foul – a piss-hole in the snow.

‘Pip, Mr Zach askin’ if you can read. Why don’t you tell him ’bout your book?’

‘My mama give it me. It was her book. She tol’ me I was named after the boy in the story.’

‘What’s the book, son?’

‘Great Ex’tations, sir. Charl’ Dickens.’

‘Wal, ah don’ know ’bout that, but if ye cin read, ah gotta place for yer. Lemme feel yer muscles, son.’

Pip rolled up his sleeve and flexed his bicep. Both men laughed – ‘Snee, hee, hee!’ and ‘Hur, hur, hur!’

‘He’s small for his age, but he’ll grow. He’s a good kid. Edercated too. You wanna take him, Zach?’

‘He’ll do.’

‘But listen, Zach, you gotta look after this one or the poh-leece will be knockin’ on mah door. That’s three o’ my boys you misplaced now. I ain’t forgettin’ them twins a few years back.’

‘Twins . . .? Ah must have disremembered. Wal, ah cain’t help it if the little critters run away. Anyways, ah ’preciate the drink. Me ’n Pip gotta long drave ahid of us.’

Chairs scraped the floor.

‘Now then, Zach, here’s a pey-un. I need a signature, right here . . . and another one here.’

When he had signed, the man named Zachery pulled out a wad of dirty dollars. Licking his fingers theatrically, he began to count – ‘Twenny, twenny-farve, thurty, thurty-farve, fawty, fawty-farve . . .’ – until there was a jumbled hillock on the table. Then there was more counting and recounting until the men shook hands and the money was shovelled into a drawer.

Finally Pip was pushed gently but firmly from one man to the other, as casually as you might pass on a pair of discarded corduroys.

‘So long, Pip. You jes’ do what Mr Zach says and be a credit to St Joseph. I hope you’ll allus ’member the good times we had.’

Pip squatted on the office floor, his thin legs trembling as he worked on his bootlaces. Then he rose to his feet and followed Mr Zachery like a gangly calf at an abattoir along the silent corridors which he had mopped so often; down the granite steps, thirty-eight in all, each spangled like a starry universe, and into the courtyard of the St Joseph Poor Boys’ Orphanage, where they were consumed by the drizzle of the night.

Pip carried no bag but he shoved his precious book deep inside his jacket. He watched Zachery climb into the cab of a battered brown truck. The engine chuntered, then the old man leaned across to push open the passenger door. But Pip did not move.

‘What’s troublin’ you? Oh, the dawg. He won’t hurt you none. Name’s Amigo – bought him off a Mexie fer farve dollars. Jes’ push him aside and climb on up. Best git acquainted, we three.’

The inside of the cab reeked of tobacco and dog and old man.

Zachery peered through the murky windshield and the truck jolted forward, through the great iron gates, past blind tenement buildings and black warehouses, trundling through slumbering clapboard suburbs and into the lonely countryside.

Pip tried to settle but the seat was cold and rough, with ripped leather and horsehair stuffing, and all the while the hound, Amigo, inspected each part of his body in turn, finishing by thrusting a wet nose deep within his ear.

As they drove, Pip’s fingers stroked the cover of his mother’s book, soft and worn by years of his unconscious caress. The only sound was the groaning and thumping of the wipers and a sniffing and coughing from Zachery.

After an hour the small truck entered a huge forest, where the weary headlights created dancing shapes amongst the foggy trees. In Pip’s imagination the shadows took on the forms of dead men concealed behind every trunk, who lurched violently towards the windshield waving their elastic arms before disappearing again and again into the blackness. Why could Zachery not see them? Pip stared at the old man’s cadaverous face, illuminated by the glow of a cigarette, and imagined that he was one of them – driving deeper and deeper to his dead man’s lair.

‘Wal?’

‘Wal what, sir?’

‘Wal, the dawg tawk more ’n you . . . Ye know how t’ roll a cig’rette?’

‘No, sir.’

Zachery hauled on the brake and, with blackened thumbnails, prised open a battered tin containing a wad of tobacco and a scrap of apple to keep it moist. Then he patiently showed Pip how to roll a cigarette. ‘Pinch o’ baccy, lay it ’long the paper, roll it real neat. You watchin’ me, boy? Lick it here . . . Not too wet, dog darn it . . .’

Pip was a fast learner and glad of a diversion. With some pride he handed his effort over for inspection. Zachery turned the cigarette in his hands, sniffed at it, struck a match, exhaled a vast cloud of blue smoke, and they lurched on into the sodden night.

‘Wish ah could fill the truck with some o’ this rain. Don’t git too much where we’re headed. Now, ye gonna tell me how ye ended up in the Poor Boys’ home – or ’m ah gonna guess yer daddy ran off with someone ails, an’ yer mammy don’t wan’ ye no more?’

‘That’s a lie!’

‘Sho it’s a lie. That’s why ah’m standin’ in need of an explanation.’

Pip had never spoken of that fateful Sunday. Not to a soul at the orphanage, or to the childcare officers who had taken him there. But something about this strange night opened him up and he began to relate the tale of the drive to church, which started so happily, with hymns in the car and excited talk of his baby brother or sister curled snugly within Mama’s belly.

Pip heard his own voice far away, describing the details of how he had crawled into the very back of the station wagon to retrieve his book, so that when the signals failed and Papa drove straight into the path of a speeding train, Pip had miraculously survived, while his mama and papa had died in an instant, taking with them the sibling he would never know.

Having no other relatives, Pip had been passed by the preacher to St Joseph’s where, although he had not been mistreated, he had waited and waited for something to happen, never knowing exactly what it would be.

If he had been older than ten years when he arrived at the Poor Boys’ Orphanage, he might have been aware of some injustice at being labelled poor. Pip’s parents had not been poor – his father ran a busy general store and they had lived in comfortable rooms at the back of the schoolhouse where his beloved mother was head teacher.

Pip’s father had never trusted banks, and after his death, although the people searched and searched, no savings could be found. The store and eventually the schoolhouse were sold, but a number of parties came out of the woodwork claiming ‘evidence of unpaid bills’ or debts, which had ‘accumulated interest’. By the time they had taken their share and the pastor had paid the triple funeral bill, there was nothing left, and young Pip had been sent away with only the clothes he stood up in and Great Expectations in his hands.

And now he was almost fourteen years old, and when he looked back in later life, Pip would realize that he had entered a kind of limbo in the orphanage years, like a chrysalis wintering in an attic.

‘Dang burn it,’ Zachery whistled. ‘Sometimes life jus’ iden right.’

In the brief moment before he fell asleep, Pip imagined how he would tell the story to his father, getting every detail just right, and how sorry they would be for that poor family.

Pip dreamed of rumbling and jolting and an ever-increasing weight on his legs. He awoke to a ghostly dawn and the horrible realization that the story was true and he was that orphan, and that the weight on his legs was the sleeping dog, Amigo, who had drooled a copious quantity of saliva across his knees. His body ached, his throat was dry, his belly groaned for food. Then it came to him that the bearded man at the wheel, with drooping eyelids and cigarette hanging from lip, was named Zachery, and that for ‘severnty-farve dollars’ he had bought his life.

They lumbered to a stop at a gas station next to an all-night diner, seemingly nailed together with advertising signs. The rain had evaporated and a fierce heat was building like a threat.

‘Ah need some aigs and grits,’ muttered Zachery. ‘You sit right here with the dawg and don’t think about going noplace. Ye need t’ piss, ye step over to them bushes, y’ hear?’ He climbed down, slammed the door, stretched himself and spat on the ground. Then, seeming to soften a little, he wandered round to Pip’s side of the truck and thrust his bristly head through the windowframe. ‘Listen, boy, y’ know ah would take yer in if ah could. But see the sign? Clear as day, ain’t it?’

It was indeed as clear as day:

NO COLORED ALLOWED BY ORDER OF MANAGEMENT

Pip waited with the panting dog. He figured he could jump down and head cross-country and he might not be caught. But the fact was, old Mr Zachery was pretty much the only person he knew in the world. He watched the old man take a seat in the bright diner, smoking more cigarettes over steaming mugs of coffee as the waitress brought him huge trays of food. As new customers arrived or left, Pip caught faint snatches of Country music from the jukebox inside.

A memory came to him of his father in a checked shirt on a holiday morning, singing loudly and breaking into little dance moves as he fried pancakes for the three of them. Pip’s father was always cheerful, but that was a special day when father and son were heading off with a packed lunch to fish in their secret place near an old stone bridge. ‘Pop and Pip time’, his mama called it. It seemed then that the future would keep running on for ever like the endless water beneath his toes.

In the hot truck, with Amigo smouldering against his body, it suddenly struck Pip that if he looked at the big map of America pinned to his mother’s classroom wall, he would not have the slightest idea where he might be. And even less idea of where he was headed.

‘All righty, boy. What’s that? Y’ been cryin’? Jes’ when ah got yer a bacon roll with ketchup ’n everthang. Yer wan’ Co-Cola or Sebmup?’

He handed Pip a cold soda and a bag of steaming food, and tossed a scrap to the dog. Then Pip became aware of his hunger, which was the ravenous hunger that only a teenager knows.

Zachery refuelled and the old truck clattered on mile after mile, swallowing the endless ribbon of the road. Now they were in sparsely populated cotton country, where skinny dogs barked from dusty yards and skinnier kids swung from tyres in trees, and endless fields were spotted with the upturned buttocks of migrant workers.

‘Ah bin thinkin’,’ said Zachery. ‘Seems ah owe yer some expl’nation ‘bout what ah got in store for ye. Me ’n mah family live ’bout four more hours from here. Ain’t nuttin’ special ’bout Dead River Farm – fawty-farve acres of thirst an’ dust. My wife, Lilybelle, ain’t in good health. Ah mean she cain’t raise from her bed. That’s why ah need a good strong boy like you, see? We give yer a place to lay yer head ’n all the food ye want. In return, you look after Lilybelle like she’s yer own momma, Gawd rest her soul.’

He hawked and spat out of the window. ‘Mah poor Lilybelle cain’t do nothin’ fer herself no more, so you gotta clean her, an’ lift her, an’ help her do all the things any human needs t’ do. Way it works at Dead River – if Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. Most ’f all you gotta read t’ her, y’ hear? Tha’s why ah picked you outta all the kids ah coulda chose. If there’s one thing Lilybelle love, it’s a story. She laikes romance ’n all that, or ye cin start right away with that book yourn.’

‘Dickens.’

‘Yeah, Dickends . . . Things work out, y’ cin help out on the yard, then ah might even roll a few nickels yer way. How’s that sound, boy? Partners?’

He spat on his palm and reached out a mustard-coloured hand. Pip said nothing.

‘Cain’t hear ya, boy.’

Pip thought he detected a faint twinkle around the old man’s eyes. What choice did he have? Surely life with Zachery and Lilybelle and Amigo would be better than the hard regime of the orphanage. However, that damaged boy was a long way off trusting another adult. He kept on staring at the outstretched hand, gnarled and leathery as a coalman’s glove. But he would not shake it.

Zachery chuckled. ‘Snee, hee, hee! Ah laikes a fella who knows his maind. You shake when yer ready t’ shake an’ not a day before.’

He brought his hand sharply back to the wheel, swerving violently to avoid a blaring eighteen-wheeler. The stream of curses from the old man’s mouth would have cleared a church in an instant. When he had recovered, he lit the freshly rolled cigarette that Pip handed him.

‘One last thang ah gotta tell ye,’ said the voice within the smoke. ‘Kinda warning, ah guess. You best stay clear of mah son. He’s nainteen years now and . . . wal, ah don’t rightly know what goes on in that gallumpin’ head o’ his. He don’t do nuthin’ for his momma. He’s got hisself in with a crowd ah don’t care for – too much liquor, too many guns. Heed mah warnin’, boy . . . You jes’ stay outta his way and Erwin won’t do ye no harm.’