Before We Were Yours(19)

Gabion comes out, and I pick him up too, and their weight pins my feet to the floor. Queenie’s shawl binds tight around my shoulders and squeezes into my skin.

Zede puts me in charge again, and he brings the boy, Silas, onto the Arcadia. Unfolded, Silas is taller than I thought. He’s skinny as a rail, but he’d be handsome if it weren’t for the busted lip and the shiner. If he was hoboing trains, like Zede said, he’s lucky the railroad bulls didn’t do worse to him.

He hikes himself up on the porch rail, like that’s where he means to stay.

“You watch after them now,” Zede tells him.

Silas nods, but it’s clear enough he ain’t happy about it. A Cooper’s hawk flies by looking for prey, and he watches it pass, then keeps his face pointed toward Memphis.

Zede leaves food behind—a bag of cornmeal, a bundle of carrots, ten eggs, and some salt fish.

Silas watches as Zede climbs into his boat and disappears.

“You hungry?” I ask him.

He turns my way, and it’s then I remember I’m in my nighty. I feel the sticky air touching my skin where the neck pulls low from the babies on my hips.

Silas looks away, like he noticed. “Reckon.” His eyes are dark as midnight on water. They reflect everything he looks at—a heron bird fishing nearby, branches drooping from a half-broke tree, the morning sky with its foam-white clouds…me. “You cook?” The way he says it makes it sound like he’s already decided I can’t.

I lift my chin, square up my shoulders. Queenie’s shawl cuts in deeper. I don’t think I like Silas much. “Yeah. I can cook.”

“Pppfff!” Camellia spits.

“You hush up.” I set down the little kids and push them toward her. “And watch after them. Where’s Lark?”

“Still in bed.”

“Look after her too.” Lark can slip off quick and quiet as a whisper. One time, she laid up in a little clearing by a creek and fell flat asleep, and it was a whole day and half the night before we found her. Scared Queenie clean outa her mind.

“Reckon I better make sure you don’t burn the place down,” Silas grumbles.

I decide it right then: I don’t like this boy at all.

But when we go through the door, he looks my way, and his split lip turns upward on one side, and I think maybe he ain’t so bad.

We light a fire in the stove and cook the best we can. Between Silas and me, neither of us knows much. The stove is Queenie’s territory, and I’ve never cared a thing about it. I’d rather be outside watching the river and its animals and listening to Briny spin stories about knights, and castles, and Indians out west, and far-off places. Briny’s seen the whole world, near’s I can figure.

Silas has seen a bit himself. While we cook and sit down to eat, he tells tales about riding the rails, and thumbing his way across five states, and scratching up food in hobo camps, and living off the land like a wild Indian.

“Why ain’t you got a mama?” Camellia asks as she finishes the last of a hoecake that’s just a little bit burnt on the edges.

Lark nods, because she wants to know too, but she’s too shy to ask.

Silas waves a fancy silver fork that Briny dug up in the sand by the wreck of an old riverboat. “Had a mama. Liked her all right, till I was nine. Then I left and ain’t seen her since.”

“How come?” I look hard at Silas to see if he’s teasing. As much as I miss Queenie already, I can’t imagine being away from your mama on purpose.

“She married a fella that liked drinkin’ whiskey and handin’ out whippin’s. I took me a year of that, and I figured I was better off makin’ my own way.” The sparkle leaves his eyes for a minute, and there’s nothing left but dark. But quick as it’s there, he shrugs and smiles, and the little dents come back in his cheeks. “I struck off with a harvest crew that was movin’ through. Went clear up to Canada, pickin’ apples and combinin’ wheat. After that was over, worked my way back south again.”

“When you was just ten?” Camellia smacks her lips to let him know she’s not believing a word of it. “You done all that? I just bet.”

Smooth as a cat, he turns in his chair, lifts up the tail of his faded-out shirt, and shows us the scars across his back. All five of us jerk away from the table. Even Camellia hasn’t got a smart-mouthed answer now.

“Be glad if you got a nice mama and daddy.” Silas looks hard at her. “Don’t ever get it in your head to leave them behind, if they’re good to you. Some sure enough ain’t.”

We all go quiet for a minute, and tears build in Lark’s eyes. Silas sops up the last of his egg and drinks a swig of water. He looks at us over the rim of the tin cup and frowns like he can’t figure what we’re so long faced about. “Say, li’l bit”—he reaches out and tweaks Lark’s nose, and her lashes flutter like butterfly wings—“did I ever tell you about the night I met Banjo Bill and his dancin’ dog Henry?”

Just like that, he’s off on another story and then another. Time goes by in a wink while we finish the last of the food and then clean up the mess.

“Your cookin’ ain’t half bad.” Silas licks his lips after we’re done washing dishes in the pail on the porch. By then, Fern’s got her dress on wrong side out, because she’s changed herself out of her nighty, and Gabion’s running around half-naked, looking for somebody to clean him up after he sneaked to the outhouse off the back of the shanty all by himself. It’s a good thing he didn’t fall right through into the river. There’s no bottom on a shantyboat outhouse, just the water.