The Edgar Award Book by Martin H. Greenberg

Author:Martin H. Greenberg [Greenberg, Martin H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 076070130X
Publisher: Barnes & Noble
Published: 1996-08-04T21:00:00+00:00

NINE SONS

Wendy Hornsby

I saw Janos Bonachek’s name in the paper this morning. There was a nice article about his twenty-five years on the federal bench, his plans for retirement. The Boy Wonder, they called him, but the accompanying photograph showed him to be nearly bald, a wispy white fringe over his ears the only remains of his once remarkable head of yellow hair.

For just a moment, I was tempted to write him, or call him, to put to rest forever questions I had about the death that was both a link and a wedge between us. In the end I didn’t. What was the point after all these years? Perhaps Janos’s long and fine career in the law was sufficient atonement, for us all, for events that happened so long ago.

It occurred on an otherwise ordinary day. It was April, but spring was still only a tease. If anything stood out among the endless acres of black mud and gray slush, it was two bright dabs of color: first the blue crocus pushing through a patch of dirty snow, then the bright yellow head of Janos Bonachek as he ran along the line of horizon toward his parents’ farm after school. Small marvels maybe, the spring crocus and young Janos, but in that frozen place, and during those hard times, surely they were miracles.

The year was 1934, the depths of the Great Depression.

Times were bad, but in the small farm town where I had been posted by the school board, hardship was an old acquaintance.

I had arrived the previous September, fresh from teachers’ college, with a new red scarf in my bag and the last piece of my birthday cake. At twenty, I wasn’t much older than my high-school-age pupils.

Janos was ten when the term began, and exactly the height of ripe wheat. His hair was so nearly the same gold as the bearded grain that he could run through the uncut fields and be no more noticeable than the ripples made by a prairie breeze. The wheat had to be mown before Janos could be seen at all.

On the northern plains, the season for growing is short, a quick breath of summer between the spring thaw and the first host of tall. Below the surface of the soil, and within the people who forced a living from it, there seemed to be a layer that never had time to warm all the way through. I believe to this day that if the winter hadn’t been so long, the chilling of the soul so complete, we would not have been forced to bury Janos Bonachek’s baby sister.

Janos came from a large family, nine sons. Only one of them, Janos, was released from chores to attend school. Even then, he brought work with him in the form of his younger brother, Boya. Little Boya was then four or five. He wasn’t as brilliant as Janos, but he tried hard. Tutored and cajoled by Janos, Boya managed to skip to the second-grade reader that year.

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