Preacher's Boy by Katherine Paterson

Author:Katherine Paterson [Paterson, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

That night I couldn't get to sleep. As hot and stuffy as my third-floor room was, it was probably cold up at the cabin and dark as pitch. We wouldn't have a moon, even a sliver of one, till tomorrow night. Those raggedy quilts were all they had for cover. I ought to have told them to get some pine boughs or leaves to lay between themselves and the earth floor.

Where had they come from? Had they ever been respectable townsfolk who sat in a pew at the Congregational church or stood up to speak in a town meeting? It was hard to imagine. Still, they hadn't always hid out in abandoned cabins—just the two of them. Vile looked to be about my age, ten, or at the most eleven. She was born somewhere. Once she'd had a mother. I tried to picture a dirty, ragged woman and set her amongst them. It made me shiver despite the leftover heat the day had stored up in my room. I reached down and pulled up my summer quilt and snuggled under it.

Vile was for Violet. How did she go from flower to dirt? I'd never seen anyone so poor. The poorest child in Leonardstown had a roof over his head and a school to go to. Even the children whose fathers had died young from working in granite and whose mothers had too many children and no wages coming in could count on the town. The town still made sure you had a roof and food. It might be on the town poor farm where nobody really wanted to go, but still that was better than what Vile and Zeb had, wasn't it?

I might be a conscienceless apeist who didn't have to obey the commandments, but that didn't mean I had lost all human feeling. I decided to persuade Vile and Zeb to come to town. Pa would help them. What kind of work would Zeb be able to do? He didn't look smart enough to work in the quarry or in the stone sheds. It might have to be the poor farm, at least for a while. How could they be too proud to go to the poor farm? They were squatting in an abandoned cabin, stealing what food they had. Wasn't the town farm better than jail? Which was sure where Zeb was headed if he snatched one chicken too many. He wasn't oversmart. The law was sure to catch up with him soon.

I didn't sleep all that well. When I did fall asleep, it was to dream. In the dream I didn't have Ma and Pa anymore. I was living with Zeb and Vile. They made me do the stealing for them because I was smarter than Zeb, and Vile was a girl.

The night was hot and seemed to press in on me as I crept down to Mr. Webster's chicken house. It was so still, I could hear my own loud breathing. But then, just as I

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