Ruby holds out the jar.
Keep ’em if you want. They’ll be frogs before long. Drops shine in her
eyelashes. Rain glues her shirt to her clavicles. Well, that’s something, says
Mr. Weems. He nudges Tom in the back. Isn’t it, Tom?
Tom is opening his mouth. He’s saying, Maybe I could— when Mother comes
down the stairs in her big, black shoes. Trouble, hisses Mr. Weems.
Mother dumps the tadpoles in a ditch. Her face says she’s composing herself
but her eyes say she’s going to wipe all this away. Mr. Weems leans over the
dominoes and whispers, Mother’s as hard as a cobblestone but we’ll crack her,
Tom, you wait.
Tom whispers, Ruby Hornaday, into the space above his cot. Ruby Hornaday.
Ruby Hornaday. A strange and uncontainable joy inflates dangerously in his
chest.
***
Mr. Weems initiates long conversations with Mother in the kitchen. Tom
overhears scraps: Boy needs to move his legs. Boy should get some air.
Mother’s voice is a whip. He’s sick.
He’s alive! What’re you saving him for?
The boy tells himself he is a treasure hunter, a hero from one of Mr Weems’s
adventure stories
Mother consents to let Tom retrieve coal from the depot and tinned goods from
the commissary. Tuesdays he’ll be allowed to walk to the butcher’s in Dearborn.
Careful, Tomcat, don’t hurry.
Tom moves through the colony that first Tuesday with something close to
rapture in his veins. Down the long gravel lanes, past pit cottages and surface
mountains of blue and white salt, the warehouses like dark cathedrals, the
hauling machines like demonic armatures. All around him the monumental
industry of Detroit pounds and clangs. The boy tells himself he is a treasure
hunter, a hero from one of Mr. Weems’s adventure stories, a knight on important
errands, a spy behind enemy lines.
He keeps his hands in his pockets and his head down and his gait slow, but his
soul charges ahead, weightless, jubilant, sparking through the gloom.
In May of that year, 1929, fourteen-year-old Tom is walking along the lane
thinking spring happens whether you’re paying attention or not; it happens
beneath the snow, beyond the walls—spring happens in the dark while you
dream—when Ruby Hornaday steps out of the weeds.
She has a shrivelled rubber hose coiled over her shoulder and a swim mask in
one hand and a tire pump in the other. Need your help. Tom’s pulse soars.
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