40 Patchtown: A Novel by Damian Dressick

Author:Damian Dressick [Dressick, Damian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bottom Dog Press
Published: 2020-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

It ain’t till the next morning that we finally get our tent from the union. Two scruffy fellas I ain’t never seen before heave it off the back of a horse wagon onto the scrubby patch of ground Lottie and the twins cleared out of rocks and sticks. I shout up to them if they’ll help us to get the thing set up, but they’re already jockeying the wagon back through the woods out to Patchtown Road.

I get Lottie and Frankie to give me a hand with driving the stakes into the dirt and Mr. Paul comes over and pitches in with the poles, so it don’t take too long before we got the damn thing raised up. It’s leaning some off to the left and Esther’s saying it smells like a diaper that nobody bothered to wash, but after a night sleeping in the open, I don’t think none of us care two bits.

Once we get all the pots and blankets and whatnot we brung from Second Street stacked inside the tent, my ma hands the twins a couple gallon buckets and shoos them out into the woods to gather up acorns. She tells Lottie and me we’re gonna have to be eating black acorn mush for a bit. She says we oughtta make out that we like it in front of the twins and Johnny, no matter what it tastes like. Lottie just groans she didn’t sleep worth a damn last night out in the damp air and she’s going in the tent to get some proper rest.

I don’t know nothing ’bout making no black acorn mush and I ain’t too keen on learning, so I wander over to the cook fire. It’s still a little cold from last night and more than a couple folks are setting round warming theirselfs off the flames licking up out of the fire pit.

I says “hey” to everybody and set my ass down on one of the logs put round the fire. Some folks is roasting up corn ears at the edge of the fire in the bed of red glowing coals. Cooking through them husks, that corn smells like pretty good breakfast to me and I ask them folks setting around where they got it.

One of them Slovak girls, what used to run with Buzzy, clues me in they been picking for the farmers out in Ashtola. She says they been dragging theirselves out there every morning and them kraut farmers put ’em to work in the fields bringing in the potato crop. The farmers mostly let ’em take a half bushel of potatoes for a day of picking. Sometimes they even get a few corn ears or maybe a bit of milk or eggs to boot.

She turns them corn cobs over in the fire and I tell her that sounds all right to me. I says to her about how we got our stuff set out by the Pinkertons and ain’t got much of nothing left to eat.

I say that even with what happened to Buzzy, I still got two brothers and a older sister.

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