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One For The Boy
I went back today. Down the winding, dusty road I’d walked as a child. The same huge oaks reached across the road to shade the returning wanderer.
The old store is still there at the crossroads. The roof is caved in and the porch leans to one side like the house of the crooked man in the nursery rhyme. A broken chair is there, perhaps for an old man to muse over better days.
I do not see the weathered boards and rusted tin. I see my father’s memory. I hear again the story he told year after year about this forgotten relic of the past.
“It’s called Richville,” he said. “I don’t know how it got that name. No one there is rich.” And he would smile a bit remembering.
It was a small sleepy place, drowsing in the hot
A rickety porch along the front of the store shaded the backless benches placed there for the spit-and-whittlers who dropped by when farm work was slow and the sun too hot.
Dad was there when the stranger came. The old men, bragging their day away, first saw the stranger when he topped the hill half-a-mile away. They feigned indifference but measured the stranger as he approached.
He made good time walking the dusty road under the blistering afternoon sun. They watched as the road dipped out of sight and were watching still when he reappeared and turned into the rutted drive leading to the store.
They were quiet as he came closer. He was a young man, better dressed than the average traveler. He wore knickers and a badly wilted white shirt. A jacket, thrown over one shoulder, added its burden on a hot day. His cap, which barely shaded his eyes, offered no relief from the burning sun.
A slight nod took in all the men on the porch, and he continued into the stuffy interior of the store. A squat man wearing a white apron rose and followed the stranger.
A young boy followed them as far as the screened door. Peering into the dim recess, the boy eyed the young stranger, mentally comparing the knickers and cap to his own clean, but patched overalls. The boy wore his shirt, the pattern bleached by many washings, with the sleeves rolled above his elbows neatly tucked into the faded overalls. A child stretching to be a man, dusty bare feet and ankles extended from the too short overalls and the boy’s neck and arms seemed too long for his body. Keen blue eyes followed the movements of the young stranger,
“Hot day,” said the proprietor.
“Yes, sir,” The stranger replied. “Anything cool to drink?”
“Soda Pop in that ice box there. Dig way down deep. Just filled the box.”
The stranger opened one side of the ice box and plunged his hand deep into the cool water. He seemed reluctant to move for a moment but finally brought up an orange soda. He wiped his face with the cool water, then on his dusty sleeve, before opening the bottle on the opener at the end of the box.
He flipped a coin onto the counter. Then seeing the boy peering through the screened door, he reached into his pocket and tossed another coin after the first.
“And one for the boy,” he said.
The storekeeper transferred the coins to his own pocket and called the boy, “Come on in, Tommy, the stranger just bought you a big orange.”
The boy nodded shyly to his benefactor as he scrambled into the store and helped himself to the cold soda.
He followed the two men to the porch and found a place on the wide steps. With his back to the men, he listened as they discussed the price of land, shook their heads and told how their fathers received land grants from President McKinley.
The orange soda was almost gone when Tom’s father nudged him off the steps. “Sun’s going down, Tom. We better get to the chores.”
Sitting backward in the wagon, his feet dangling over the dropped tailgate, Tom watched the young man on the porch until the wagon crested the hill and disappeared on the other side. The sweet, sticky taste of orange soda colored his tongue and lingered in his mouth and he wished his sister could have shared it.
Two days later, Tom’s father came home with news. The stranger had met with foul play.
“He had money to buy land. He must have shown it to the wrong person. They found him in Sycamore Pond with three rocks tied around his neck.”
Tom saw in his mind the young man flipping two coins on the counter and saying “One for the boy.” He tried not to think of the dark waters of Sycamore Pond.
My father’s voice would get husky when he came to this part and he would lead us down the road to the cemetery. There in the corner was a grave with three stones on top of it. The crude headstone, with only a date, was homemade. Dad would put a flower on the grave.
Dad died last year.
This year I took my daughter to the cemetery to a certain grave with a crude, worn headstone and three rocks on top. We put a flower on the rocks – one for the boy.
