When my legs and hands stopped trembling, I took a grip on the downspout at a corner of the roof and listened for sounds from inside the house. The wind moaned like banshees but there wasn’t another sound. I slung my legs over the cold slippery roof and wrapped my feet around the spout. I went down slow and careful, holding on with ice cold hands and ice cold legs until I was about twenty feet from the bottom. The spout was broken and covered with slick ice the rest of the way and slicker than grease. I lost my grip, slid, crashed through icicles, and landed in a snow drift. The wind was knocked out of my lungs and icy snow was down the back of my neck and up under my pants cuffs. It would have been easy to drift off into sleep and freeze to death. I remembered the bravery of Little Ike and Isaiah’s son. It was too soon to die. I moved both arms and legs. Nothing was broken so I got up and started for the creek, leaving deep footprints in the snow. The Reverend Burns would follow my tracks easy as pie; he would have the sheriff and men on horseback with dogs. I plowed through snow to the road where the snow was already trampled and wouldn’t show tracks. I ran through the town and along the road until the moon was almost down. I spied a farmhouse and a barn a quarter mile off the road. Just as it started to get light. There were no locks on the barn door and in one corner was a pile of hay.
I snuggled deep in the hay, warmed up and but couldn’t fall asleep for feeling bad about leaving Mary and Little Red; they were about the nearest I had to family. Rachel popped into my mind but I couldn’t think about her the same way I did Mary on account of Rachel was so pure.
In the morning, the farmer fed his animals, but I was deep down and crouched aginst the corner. He didn’t find me and after a while, I went to sleep and didn’t wake up until it was nearly dark. My stomach growled something awful and I was so thirsty, I broke through skim of ice on a bucket of water that was so cold, it hurt my teeth. It was better’n suckin’ on snow. There were a few kernels of corn left over from feeding the cows that softened enough in the water to chew. Cornmeal mush at the orphanage would have tasted good.
The row of trees beyond the bare fields marked the creek that most likely flowed into the river. A hard wind out of the northeast blew loose snow and ice crystals. I could hardly open my eyes. It helped to cover my face with the blanket, but it was hard to find the way. It was better in the trees, out of the wind, but the snow was deeper and walking was harder. The creek was frozen solid and walking was easier, but I was shivering with the cold. It was dark enough to see the Big Dipper and the North Star, aiming north towards the river. I hoped to sneak on a steamboat going down river, even all the way to Saint Louis. I could get a job and be a river-boatman. It must have been near midnight when I got to the river. It was froze solid. There weren’t any steamboats. I fell down on my knees and prayed, “I’ll be good and won’t have those impure thoughts no more. What can I do?”
I thought about Dr. Steele, but Chicago was a long way upstream and against the wind. Then out of nowhere, I thought of Mr. Birt and Isaiah and Rachel and that dinner with fried chicken and pie. Sandy Ford was home. I turned downstream, and ran a little ways to get the blood flowing. The river seemed to go on forever with nothing but but ragged dead looking trees along the river bank. There weren’t even animal tracks; the foxes and muskrats were all holed up in warm dens. The only sound was the crunch-crunch of my shoes on the snow until through the haze of my day-dream there was a long, shattering “creeeek”. The ice cracked and sank under my feet. There likely a warm spring nearby. I ran and ran until I got the staggers and fell down on solid ice. It was getting to be daylight again but things didn’t look any better. From out of that cold and misery came the smell of wood smoke. I sniffed, thought it was a dream, but got up on feet that I couldn’t feel no more and followed the smoke to a weather-beaten cabin on stilts above the high water line. I crawled up the steps and beat on the door. When the door opened, a double-barreled shotgun was about an inch from my face.
“Git outen of here unless you want your head blowed off,” a voice said.
He voice came from a face that was wrinkled and covered with folds of dry skin. One eye was white with cataracts. The other was rheumy and heavy lidded. There was white hair above the eyes. “Strangers ain’t welcome. Skedaddle on out of here before I pull this trigger.” “I can’t go no more,” said I. “You got a name?” The voice asked.
“Yes sir, I’m Tom Slocum.”
“Tom, ain’t a likely name. Why you sneakin’ around? You aim to rob an old woman?”
The person holding the shotgun was wearing a man’s heavy wool shirt and pants and smoked a cob pipe. She didn’t look like no woman.
“I ain’t sneaking no place except downriver to Sandy Ford or even Saint Louis.”
“In this weather?” She asked.
My teeth were chatterin’ so and I was shivering like anything. It was hard to talk. “I escaped from the orphan’s home.”
“You sure it wasn’t a jail you escaped from?”
“No Ma’am, it were the Presbyterian home run by Reverend Burns. It was a cruel place.”
She let up some on the shotgun and put her face down closer to me. “Land sakes, you are just a boy and about plumb froze to death. Come in.”
I crawled in and got close to the fire. “Now you tell me about yourself,” she said.
I told her about Pa dying and the Reverend taking me to the home and even about reading the Indian book to the boys. She never heard of the book, but her face softened some. All the speechifying wore me out and I went sound asleep.
I woke up under a wool blanket and a quilt. The shotgun was in the corner.
“Set up a bit so’s I can put this piller behind you,” she said.
She spooned hot soup with bits of meat, carrots and onions into my mouth. Nothing ever tasted so good. Then I went back to sleep.
When I woke up sunbeams were dancing on the walls and my outer clothes were on a line strung across the cabin. I got up and was about to bust. She pointed to the chamber pot and got busy at the stove while I peed. She took down my clothes off the line and I put on the old flannel shirt and weekday pants.
“Come eat,” she said.
She put out a bowl of beans with molasses and onion and bacon and a big piece of cornbread. When I finished the first bowl, she ladled out more until I couldn’t eat another bite.
“Tell me your name again.”
“Tom Slocum.”
“Where you fixin’ to go?”
“I don’t rightly know, Sandy Ford or St. Louis.”
“That’s a long way even for a strong man, let alone a skinny boy,” she said.
“No matter, I gotta go.”
“You rest up. Stay another day.”
I split a bunch of logs and carried them up to the box by the stove. She told me about the good times they had on the river before the war. “Abner made a good living trapping beavers and muskrats and selling fish but went in the army when Lincoln called for troops, even if he was too old. The old fool got hisself killed at Vicksburg. A cannon ball cut him in half. There wasn’t even enough left for a burial.”
She looked kind of dreamy. “General Grant has been good to us wider women. The guvment sends me a pension every single month.”
That night after supper we played poker with jacks and deuces wild. When I won a hand, she let me smoke her pipe, but I got dizzy. She reminded me of Aunt Alice. I coulda’ stayed and kept her company and done chores, but I had to get far away from the orphanage. It’s amazing how a full stomach and a warm place to sleep can buck a person up. It hit me that it was because of the old lady’s goodness that she took in a total stranger. Aunt Alice and Pa both had said that it was important to be charitable to folks. Right here was an example of how simple hearted kindness can help a person. All those thoughts about being a doctor came rushing back. I just had to find out what happened to Doc in the Chicago fire.. Mr. Birt would know about the doctor and might give me a helping hand but Aunt Alice had always said it was bad to go looking for charity. It wasn’t easy knowing the right thing to do.
In the morning she gave me bacon wrapped in a pancake and a mason jar of hot soup. At the door, she hugged me. “I was hopin’ maybe you could stay a spell.”
The sun and wind was at my back. For a few hours it was easy walking. I made good time. The snow and black scraggly trees along the river bank looked dead and cold as the North Pole. Pretty soon the cold seeped in the back of my neck and my hands and feet got cold no matter how hard I stomped or swung my arms. When I judged it was about noon, I drank the cold soup and ate the bacon sandwich. It didn’t warm me none. The wind picked up and blew bits of ice and snow. When afternoon come on, the sun was so bright, my eyes commenced to water and hurt. I squinched them tight but it didn’t do no good. I wandered into the trees through what must have been a swamp but was some lost. The river mainly went south and west, but not in a straight line. When gray clouds rolled in it got harder and harder to tell which way was which. The clouds brought hard, dry snow. After a while, the trees and old snags looked like dead people rising up from a graveyard. One old tree looked like Pa and another Aunt Alice. When the lady in the blue dress drifted over the ice, I called “Mother” and tried to follow. I stumbled along any old way until the feeling came over me that the trees and woods and the shoreline looked like Sawmill Lake two or three miles upriver from Sandy Ford. My eyes had gone all blurry from the driving snow and it could be the lake or a wide place in the river. I got to running and sniffling like I had gone crazy until I hit a frozen stick and fell flat on my face. It wasn’t a stick but a frozen human hand sticking up from the snow. I got down and dug until there was another hand inside a ragged shirt sleeve and a face. It was a darky and I never seen such a face, ever. The lips were drawn back in a horrible suffering grin, exposing a gap between the front teeth. His eyes were wide open, like they were looking right through me. The rest of him was frozen solid in the ice.
I lit out like that Darkie was follerin’ with that awful grin and those staring eyes. The blanket got lost and a low branch snagged my cap. I run hard and fast but the snow got deeper and the goin’ was harder and harder. Every tree branch looked like an arm reaching out to grab me. I stumbled and run faster, tripped and went down, then got back up and run some more. I came up against a pole fence and pitched head over heels into a drift. After a while, it wasn’t cold at all and the snow was comfortable and soft. Way off in the distance a dog barked.