“It sounded logical to you?”
“It was the only way we could stay together as a family.” She frowned. “I would be all right, but it would be terrible for Julian and Freda. I don’t think Freddy cares one way or another. And Tommy is only six. He needs the rest of us.”
“Where did you go?”
“Saul rented a farmhouse. It’s RFD 3 Box 80, Princeton. It’s off the Depue Road, all by itself at the end of a little dirt road. It’s about two and a half miles from Bureau crossroads.”
“Nice place?”
“Kind of shacky, but there’s lots of room. Forty acres. Everything had grown up weeds and bushes. It had been empty a long time. They said we couldn’t attract any attention. Our name was going to be Farley. And we had moved there from Chicago for Saul’s health. We were going to farm it. We all had to practice the name. He put the Cadillac in one of the sheds and nailed up the door. He walked out and hitchhiked and came back the next day with an old pickup truck. He made a kind of workshop in another shed. When it was time to go back to school, he had our school records. He came back to the city and got them and he changed the names so you couldn’t tell. They had driver’s licenses and he fixed up birth certificates for us and everything. He said we were going to be the Farley family for the rest of our lives, and we shouldn’t ever tell.”
“Did you mind that?”
“Nobody minded much. Anything is okay with Momma, the way she is. It made-me feel bad that I couldn’t write to my friends. They’d never know what happened to me. It was hard to get used to it being so quiet all the time. But after a while it didn’t seem so quiet. You just heard other things. Wind and birds and bugs.”
“Did your mother or Saul try to find work?”
“No. Saul would go away once in a while and be gone overnight. He’d go in the old truck. We all worked fixing the old place up for winter. Then one day when we came home on the school bus there wasn’t anybody there. That was… just three weeks ago today. We thought they’d gone off in the truck. Saul came back alone in the truck and he wanted to know where Momma was. We told him she was gone when we came home. I looked and found that a suitcase and a lot of her clothes were gone. Saul cursed and stormed around. He said we’d just have to all sit tight and wait for her to come back. It bothered him a lot. I’d wake up in the night and hear him walking around downstairs.”
“He did beat you up?”
“He was upset and he’d been drinking. All night maybe. He came into my room before daylight and he woke me up and handed me my coat and told me to come along and not wake the other kids. He said he had something to tell me about my mother. We went out to his workshop place. He had wired it for lights and he had a space heater going. He acted strange and he kept looking at me in a funny way. He had me sit down on the cot and he sat and put his arm around me and he was kind of half crying. He said he was pretty sure that she had been gone so long now, she was never coming back.
“I told him I thought she’d be back and he told me she had threatened to go away for good because they hadn’t been getting along. He kept rubbing his hand up and down my arm. He said there was just the two of us now to take care of everything. He said I was just like a regular mother to the other kids. He said I was a better mother in every way than she was. He said we had to stick together. I said I’d better go back to bed and I started to stand up, but he got my wrists and pushed me down flat on the cot. He lay down beside me and put my wrists around behind me and held them there in one hand, hurting me.
“In a funny whispery little voice he said everything was going to be wonderful. He said he loved me, and we were going to be a little family, just him and me and little Tommy, and we were going to leave soon and drive to Mexico in the Cadillac, just the three of us, and he was going to divorce Momma and marry me and we’d live in a big house with a swimming pool and have servants. He said that on the way out of town when we were fifty miles away he’d call the welfare to take care of the other three and they’d be in good hands. He kept stroking me with his free hand and I was starting to cry and begging him to stop. He kissed my neck and told me I was his little darling and he had been watching me ever since we’d left Chicago, and he had just one more little thing to take care of and then we would go on a wonderful trip. Then he opened my coat and pushed his hand up under my pajama top and started squeezing and rubbing me. It scared me so I yanked my wrists loose and I hit at him and kicked him and he fell backward off the cot. I tried to get by him and get out but he grabbed me and pulled me down and then he got up and picked me up and threw me back onto the cot. He said I was old enough and big enough for it, so I better relax and enjoy it, because I was going to have a lot of chances to get used to it. I remember scratching and biting and kicking at him and all of a sudden he was on the floor again, kneeling, all hunched over, looking up at me and holding onto himself.
“His eyes are funny. They’re sort of pale brown but when he gets mad they look yellow. Golden almost. He stood up slowly and when I tried to dodge around him he hit me in the mouth with his fist and knocked me down. He picked me up and hit me a lot more times, holding me with one hand and hitting me with the other. It all got blurred. He let go of me and I fell down and he kicked me a couple of times and went away and left me there. It was getting light. Pretty soon I could get up and I went back to my room. I didn’t see him. I locked the door. Mr. McGee, I knew that if I went down to the road and hitched a ride into Princeton and told the police, he’d go to jail and the welfare would get us. And I knew if I stayed there, he’d keep at me until he got what he wanted. When the kids knocked on the door to find out about breakfast I said I was sick and I told Freda and Julian to help Freddy get breakfast for everybody. I stayed in there all day. After everybody was asleep, I sneaked down and got something to eat. I knew I was safe because I could hear Saul snoring. You can always hear him all over the upstairs part after he’s had a lot of beer. I took food up to my room. Monday morning when Freddy knocked at my door I said I was better but I wasn’t well enough to go to school. I’d remembered about Mrs. Stanyard. He reminded me, saying I better not go to her. I had the money I’d been putting away to buy baby chicks in the spring. I heard the truck go rattling out about two o’clock, so I got dressed and left and cut across lots and came out on the Depue Road and followed it to Route 26 and walked to the crossroads where I’d heard you could get the bus to Chicago.
“The waitress at Sheen’s was nice. She let me lie down in back on a couch in a room off the kitchen, and she brought me things to eat even though I couldn’t pay for them. I told her I fell downstairs. She said her boyfriend had a bad temper too. I think that when… Momma comes back everything will be all right again. But he couldn’t have stolen all that money you said.”
“He had to steal something.”
“What do you mean?”
“What did seven of you live on for four months?”
“Oh, it was hardly any rent way out away from anything in that shacky place, and we’ve always had that four hundred and thirty-three dollars every month.”
“Not since August first, Susan. The company is holding four checks right now. The January one will be the last one made out to your mother. In February it starts to come directly to you, if they can manage to find out where you are.”
She stared at me and even with the puffed lids she opened her eyes as wide as I had seen them. “But, I thought that was where she got the money to… to go on a vacation!”