the father and the mother must have done wrong to have been made to live in public, the children had not but had to serve time there anyway
next to the post office and the town pump, main drag, in a twenty-by-twenty hut of cement block, weakening red stucco, flat roof, door on the sidewalk
that had been the fire hall, next a café, remained an establishment that one might drive up to, go into
as though to do a transaction but now would have to frown or grin at what one saw there living on display, establishment, not a home
how they had been caught none knew, but the father and the mother seemed half happy in the hut that had no interior walls, redoing it with paint and curtain
retaining the name fire hall to explain or excuse the truth of what and where they were, no new home or things for them, only a sentence to continued emergency
the father more half-happy than his mate put in a huge vegetable garden, flowers in the yard, made an outhouse of wood and corrugated tin with a morning-glory trellis to protect it from the town’s eye
into the light of which the kid would have to go, bucket in hand, to fetch water, making a way among the audience to the pump
farmers would be in to shop and get the mail and maybe have coffee or a drink, chat with the old men of the town who on a July afternoon would have taken to benches in the shade, oh the kid is out at the pump again
someone would be thinking in the window of a home across the main drag, he knew and knew that fear was behind that house or between it and the one next to it
fear too great to be contained within him, anyone, that lived on its own and did not move, made him move
next time he might slip out the north door of the hut and go around the post office to get water, it would not see him emerge from the hut
the mother was allowed to teach at the school, the father to work as a hired man, but otherwise they had to sit at the hut in stocks that did not have to be apparent
school was meant to reform the kid before he needed it so that he would not add to the inherited wrongdoing, and in time the little sister got a sentence too
they had lived in Seattle and on the river out of Fargo, then moved in with the children’s grandpa and grandma, who had already served their time
Grandpa and Grandma rented a farmstead near Christine, but the father and the mother and the children did not stay, it was only a place in which to wait to be caught
one day the kid ran away to the farmstead in the heat, and the mother, not teaching in August, drove out and used the father’s belt to whip him
one day the little sister disappeared, the mother and the kid and many in town went searching, did not find, she had hidden somewhere and came back with a smile
the kid had a Sunday paper route that had to be walked, heavy snow or not, the heavy lessons at church that followed did not begin to say why
he tried to mount a children’s carnival, found a boxing club, lay out a ball diamond, he did well with Halloween costumes, but the town shook its head
he threw stones and broke a window in a vacant house, hurt a younger kid with an ice ball, mocked the gait of someone’s odd aunt, another headshake, the town knew what it knew
the father needed a car to drive to work at farms in the neighborhood, and they let him have an old one that the mother could use as well, but sometimes they drove in to Fargo, which liberty the kid did not apprehend
the town was a grove on the cultivated prairie, only a steeple and an elevator surmounting the tree mass
and not a half mile away was the MacLeod farmstead, m’cloud to the kid, where lived an old man and woman
she with a harelip, who would serve him milk and cookies when he ran in, they had raised a crippled boy who was a scientist in Maryland now
also giving him a book on Theodore Roosevelt, and he apprehended what it might mean to read, to move away
where the town ended were fields, and beyond and edging them were groves that had no one in them and ditches, no one human, just a rabbit, a badger, a deer, a fox, a gopher, birds and bugs and plants
to the west the Wild Rice River, to the east the Red, which did and did not have people along them and no one owned, but most of the groves were human
what does just-own mean, a younger kid wanted to know whose dad had threatened to do it to him
I think he said disown, the kid told him, he’s not going to leave anything to you when he dies
who did not want to be left anything or be left, who wanted to leave
to ski and learnt on what had been made in Sweden and a late granduncle had used here, both wood and toestraps coming apart, because in winter he could go over a field to the woods
did not have poles, he went skating too, March meltwater frozen in a ditch, someone having given him a too-tight pair of which he was unworthy even so
he had to go to the minister’s wife every week to learn piano, finger O Holy Night, hated it and the little girls around it so much that they let him quit
but he found a tinted drawing of a man named Schubert at the piano, looking out the window into light that reminded him of the ray of winter sunlight at the hut’s south window now
there was yelling in the hut, the father and the mother, which must have led to the trip to Seattle and Oregon that they took, the kid and the little sister in back and more yelling in the front seat
how they had been allowed this trip he did not apprehend, and the sister went to sleep whenever the yelling started
he had known and liked the rain city, been to Oregon as a tot, the family welcomed them to both, were almost too nice to them
we ought to try it out here again, the mother said, ya we should, but there was more yelling in the hut
nor could they just leave, who were here to finish doing what had to be done, no the
town could not just let them go, who were disappointing and hurting it in a way that they would not have sunk to had they done right and not wound up as they were to begin with
could not just leave town, if they meant to go they would have to leave North Dakota entirely, Christine was giving them longer looks than they had ever merited
the kid did not apprehend the release or think that it would come true until it did, evacuation of hut, loading of trailer, nor why the father and the mother went on yelling the sister to sleep
at night on a highway in Idaho, the mother tried to jump out of the moving old car
I don’t know if we should even go on or turn back, I hate all of this, she yelled
the father, worried angry, took them to a motel where they put the sister to bed and waited in shock, the yelling done
you are a grown-up little boy, the mother said to him, what do you think we should do, go on or turn around
we should go on with our plan, words came right away, the fear and humiliation of the moment not so strong as the fear behind that house or between it and the one next to it, of getting caught again
the kid was eleven, would remember the father’s cold look at him
and the town in which he had not spent another night
