Harold Wiseman didn’t consider himself a bad man, though he wasn’t a good man either, that couldn’t be denied. He did bad things, but only as a consequence of his circumstance.

 

He saw the whole thing happen. He’d been hiding in the woods on the south side of the barn, waiting for his chance to steal a chicken, or perhaps one of the piglets nursing at the sow’s teat if he could get alone enough, or if he could hold its mouth shut quick enough. He was crouched down, obscured by a line of thick blackberries lining the fence in front of him, taking comfort in the shade of the alders and cottonwoods behind him, when he saw the boy come running, lickety split, right for him, his daddy giving a half-hearted effort at chasing him. They both wore faded overalls with no undershirt, they both had dirty blond hair, (cut round, no doubt by a mama using a bowl as a reference point), that matched their dirty arms and dirty necks, the boy’s dirty feet, and the daddy’s dirty boots. It was the boy’s bare feet that gave him the advantage and made his daddy give up the chase.

 

“I’m gonna whip you good when I get hold of you, boy,” the daddy yelled after him.

 

The boy turned and said, “You ain’t never gettin’ hold a me. I ain’t never coming back.” Then he took off running again, bounded over the fence not twenty feet from where Harold crouched, and padded through the undergrowth a few feet, then slowed to a walk.

 

Harold followed the boy. Though he was bigger, he’d learned the art of stealth, and the boy never knew he was being followed. The boy headed to the creek, skipped a couple of rocks, sat down on the bank, munched on a chicken leg and a buttered biscuit he pulled from his pocket, then occupied himself with boy things until sundown. He hopped across the creek on rocks, he rolled up his pants and waded back, he caught tadpoles, he whittled a branch with his pocket knife, leaning against a tree, one dirty foot crossed over a dirty knee. He mumbled to himself about matters of recrimination and how so what if he took a piece of pie before dinner and it didn’t deserve no whipping, and about how sorry his daddy would be him running off and leaving him to shovel out the hogpen and collect the eggs and push the mower, and he’d be sorry, all right.

 

Harold just watched and waited.

 

As night fell, the boy’s mumbling took on a sorrowful aspect. He’d missed supper, and his tummy rumbled, and a wind kicked up, and it smelled like rain, but his rebellion hadn’t full broken yet. That’s when Harold moved in. He came at him slow and stealth because he didn’t want to have to chase after the boy.

 

“Boy, what’s your name?” he said standing square in front of the boy, looking down on him from his great height of five feet, eleven inches.

 

The boy startled, Harold appearing like a specter out of nowhere like that.

 

“I said, ‘Boy, what’s your name?’” Harold repeated, and the boy said, “Tommy.” He said it in a quivery sort of way because he was scared. Well, here standing before him was the wrong sort. Tommy was old enough to know the wrong sort, and Harold was defined enough to be recognized as such, what with his sloppy stubble and his long greasy hair and his tattered clothes; a chambray shirt spotted and greasy and jeans torn at the thighs and held up by a length of rope, and his worn boots–the left one gaping open at the front and the right one with his big toe sticking through a hole on top. And Harold imagined he smelled bad, too. He didn’t notice his own stink so much, but he noticed that Tommy noticed it. He’d had to pull his teeth one by one, and only had five left. Had three of his eye teeth, and two next to that on the left side, one on top and one on bottom, so he could still chew meat pretty good.

 

“Well, come on, boy, get up,” Harold said, pulling at the boy’s arm.

 

Tommy obeyed as Harold expected, but Harold kept a good hold on the boy, given that he didn’t feel like giving chase. He walked the child five long miles through the night, the night dark from clouds, the wind blustering through branches and making all manner of strange sounds to help frighten the boy half to death. The boy stayed quiet mostly, but once he tried for a little bravado. “Are you kidnapping me, mister?”

 

“What do you think kidnapping means?” Harold asked.

 

“When you take somebody somewheres they don’t want to go.”

 

“Are you a wantin’ to be going where I’m a takin’ you?” Harold asked.

 

“No, sir,” Tommy said.

 

“Then I reckon I done kidnapped you.” Harold tightened his grip when he said that.

 

Time passed and the boy said, “Where you takin’ me?”

 

“Place called Stranger’s Home,” Harold said.

 

“The graveyard?” Tommy said, and then he began to cry.

 

Tommy tried to quit walking, but Harold pulled him along.

 

It was midnight by the time they got there. Harold drug him to the middle of the mishmash of head stones, up to a weathered stone pillar with a name that couldn’t be read anymore, even in good light, unless you already knew what it said. “Mabel Wiseman Wife, Mother, Friend,” it said, along with the number of her days: 40 y, 3 m, 22 days.

 

“You set right there,” Harold told the boy, swinging him around so he sat on the base of the pillar. “I’m fixin to tell you a story.”

 

Lightning struck and in the flash, Harold saw the white trails Tommy’s tears had made down his dirty cheeks, and the wet smears where he’d wiped his nose with his dirty arm. Thunder slapped then rolled across the heavens.

 

“One time was a boy. A put upon boy. He’d been given chores beyond what might be expected from a boy his age. And one day, he just got plumb fed up. He went to town, and took him a stick of horehound candy from the Mercantile, and straight way got caught, and his daddy whipped him to kingdom come. The boy was already twelve and he thought he’d just set off and make his way in the world, and he never saw his mama come out to the back porch that night, her hand grasping the front of her dress, her voice calling for him, ‘Harold. Haaaaroooold. Where are you boy?’ He never thought about her depending on him and her loving him and tending after him and fixin’ him his nice dinner and darnin his socks and warshin his overhalls and such. No, the boy just walked away, and make his way, he did, but not altogether pleasantly. He didn’t never come back, neither, not for many months, when his belly was sucked in and his hands blistered from tryin to work here and there, and when he got back, what do you reckon he found?”

 

Harold imagined the boy shrugged, but he couldn’t be certain, seeing as how lightning hadn’t struck to light him up enough to see.

 

“He found his mama gone of a broke heart and his daddy so wounded and sorrowful he wouldn’t take the boy back. So the boy had to leave, and this time, he walked away hangdog, not proud, and he walked away grieving and sorrowful on account of it was him gave his mama the broke heart that done her in. And what do you reckon come of boy?”

 

The boy sniffled, and lightning streaked the sky to the east and to the west and overhead, and thunder crackled and rolled and rain poured down upon them in big, thick drops.

 

“No good, is what come of him,” Harold said loudly, over the din. “He took to beggin’ and ridin’ the rails and soon enough he took to drink and stealin’ and he carried the sorrow of his mama in his heart until he was an old, old man. And do you reckon if that boy had it to do over again, he’d a done his chores and not stole that horehound and learned to be thankful for all his mama and daddy done for him?”

 

“You reckon?” Harold repeated, to let the boy know he expected an answer.

 

“I reckon,” the boy said, his voice soaked with tears and his overalls soaked with rain.

 

“I reckon, too,” said Harold, softer now. “Now I want you to just set there and think that over.”

 

Then Harold walked off, leaving the boy alone in the graveyard, with the rain and the thunder his only companions. It didn’t take long for the boy to light out of there, and Harold followed him back, to see that he got home safe, and when the boy went up on the porch and on into the back door, Harold helped himself to one of the piglets. What with the rain, and the thunder, and the commotion inside the little house, nobody heard the poor thing squealing for its mama.