By the end of the year, Mr. Pickery moved on to his final reward. The way my parents said that, I got the impression it was a trip he neither wanted nor deserved to take.
Then a new fella showed up to run the bank. His face was gaunt and his accent corvine. According to my mama, that means “like a crow,” and she went all the way to eighth grade, so you can believe it. It likewise tells you everything you need to know about Mr. Shepherd. On our front step (he refused to come inside), he cawed about interest and payments and wouldn’t take any of Mama’s good food home.
That was a bad sign, Mama said. She wasn’t wrong.
Mr. Shepherd called in all the loans in Swan’s Holler. All at once. The Cunninghams lost their house first. That didn’t sit right with anybody, because Jesse Cunningham built that house with his two hands and owned it outright. I guess they’d used it against a loan for a new tractor, though. Least that’s what I gathered from hushed conversations my parents had when they thought I was sleeping upstairs.
The Cunninghams had six boys, and they worked a piece of land right outside town. Always had. We thought they always would too. But we were wrong. The next thing we all knew, the Cunningham pew was empty at First Calvary, and the bank auctioned off the tractor and the house both.
After them come the Stricklands, who were sharecropping. They didn’t own the land they farmed; they rented it. The problem was, the landowner got stripped to the skin in the stock market crash. He stopped paying his receipts, and Mr. Shepherd turned up with two police officers to run the Stricklands off their plot. They had beans and corn in, and the bank let those rot.
Plenty of us kids snuck over in the middle of the night and filled our shirts with what we could carry. There was only so much we could haul off in the dark, though. It made Daddy so mad he went hard silent every time we walked past that field full of ruined crops.
Pretty soon, Swan’s Holler was more ruined than not. The couple stores we had closed up. The families I grew up with faded out one by one. Boys joined the army; girls run off to get married — everybody hoped there was something better somewhere else.
It was the same all over — our town in Indiana, yours wherever you are, all them ones out in dusty, dusty Kansas. The money dried up. The work did too.
Finally, so did the people. They turned into husks, blown away by bad fortune. It was hard times, and we all knew who to blame.
The bankers. The fancy money men up in New York who gambled when the rest of us knew gambling was a sin. Herbert damned Hoover too — at least him we run out of office. Roosevelt promised us a New Deal when he got elected, but so far all we had was a raw deal.
And Mr. Shepherd on our doorstep.
I stood behind Mama, one hand in the middle of her back. I was propping her up, because I could feel her shaking. It made me nervous too, but I was trying to be grown. So I glared over her shoulder while Mr. Shepherd handed over legal papers. I listened while he explained that what we had due was due, and we had two weeks to come up with it. Valiantly, I thought, I did not punch him in the face when Mama started to cry.
That’s when I knew I had to do something. I had to fix this for my family. And since I knew who was to blame, I knew what I’d do. I wound a bandage around my new breasts, put on my daddy’s pants and suspenders, and whittled a gun out of scrap wood. Then I hitched a ride to Boswell and robbed their bank at lunchtime. It wasn’t fair, those bankers calling everything due and hoarding all our money.
By God, I was gonna set it right.
Now, here’s a puzzle.
Is it better to jump a hundred feet into a river and hope you don’t hit the rocks? Or is it wiser to turn yourself in when you’re about caught?
Well, I don’t know from wise, but I knew the banks of the Wabash were hungry. Sharp limestone jutted all around it, gnashing for a bite of somebody foolish enough to get close. Or damned fool enough to jump in blind.
Of the many things I cared to be, a fool wasn’t one of them. Therefore, I did the next best thing and got as low as I could. Down in the weeds, covered in poison ivy, my nose pressed to the ground, I didn’t dare breathe deep.
No matter what lying arithmetic I figured, I had no idea how many bullets Caleb had left. Since he was determined to chase me all over creation, I figured I’d better use the one advantage I had over him: I was a little bit smarter than a sack of hair.
Flattening out on the ground, I grabbed an exposed root. Then I dragged myself slowly forward.
Caleb crested the hill I’d slid down, then stopped. Gun raised, he looked all up and down, searching for me. I could tell from the way his eyes darted back and forth that he hadn’t spotted me. Otherwise, I might have believed his bluff.
“Come on, Baby Boy,” he called, tromping a few feet closer. “Nobody has to get hurt. Just come on out.”