Hardships (a 99% Heyes narrative)

0-0-0-0-0-0

When we were boys growing up on Kansas farms, I really envied Kid. He had everything I wanted; charm, good looks, a gaggle of brothers, and even a little tag-along sister. And such an easy going manner. Nothing ever bothered him. The only thing in the future he worried about was how the weather might affect our Saturday fishing. Laughter came easy to him, even if he was laughing at himself, and he was never without a smile. Almost three years younger than me, by the time Kid was six years old he could out run me, out shoot me, out track me, and by the time he was seven, I never again beat him at Indian wrestling. But he was never one to gloat. He knew my talents lay in planning, calculating, conniving, and out-smarting. He knew that together, we were a formidable team.

At the time, we were both misplaced farm boys. Schooling and book learning came easy to me and sowing and reaping a crop, plowing a field, those things were all just a nuisance, an unwelcome distraction from the intellectual avenues I wanted to pursue. But Kid just took that work in stride. I think he somehow knew his life was destined for other adventures and he was just biding his time till he was old enough to walk away like his brothers had all done.

Now don't get me wrong, we both worked hard on those farms. We understood them crops was revenue, the means of getting our families through them cold, harsh winters. But farming was our parent's calling, and we both had dreams...

But dreams are precarious things, fragile things, easily shattered things. Now I won't bore you with the destruction and mayhem of Bloody Kansas. You've likely heard all about that, or you can look it up in history books. But the day Bloody Kansas came knocking on our doors was the day the boy in both of us just up and called it quits; vanished from the face of the earth. I was eleven and Kid was eight, and neither one of us was old enough or big enough to slip into a man's boots. But we did it, all the same.

We had no say in what was to come, no say in where we went. The bank repossessed the farms, so we had no money. The only clothes we had were the clothes on our backs. For Kid, that casual, easy nature of his went the same road as his childhood. The laughter was gone. The smile seldom made an appearance. His dreams of the future were overshadowed by the nightmares of the past.

I remember the day we landed on the steps of the Valparaiso School for Waywards. Father Murphy had driven us in a buckboard and as he stood knocking on the door, Kid, (well he was Jed then), and me stood on the top step, neither one of us brave enough to take that last step onto the porch. We each held a burlap bag clutched tight in our hands. The day before we left, Father Murphy had driven us out to our farms and Kid and me scoured the ruins for anything we could salvage, which weren't much as both farms had been burnt to the ground. But what little we found, we held clutched in them burlap bags.

I remember looking over at Kid as we stood on the step. He was looking straight ahead at that door. Eight years old and there wasn't a hint of fear on his face. But his eyes had changed. They had a look I'd never seen before. Over the years I've come to recognize it as the look he gets when he's been called out. It's a focused look that blocks out everything around him except what it is he needs to focus on. I've gotten use to that look now, I even depend on it sometimes, but that day, it scared me, cause right then I knew that in the course of the past five days, something in Kid had turned cold.

Father Murphy stay about an hour getting us registered. But when the Matron offered to show us the dormitory, Father took the opportunity to make his exit. We stood on the porch watching him drive away. He didn't even turn to wave goodbye, and we knew right clearly that no one was ever gonna watch out for us again, except the two of us. We weren't just cousins after that day. We was partners.

The first night there, Kid kept that burlap bag of his with him in his bed. He didn't open it and he didn't offer to tell me what was in it. But by the next night it was gone. It wasn't stolen. Kid had just found a secret place to store it. It wasn't until a few weeks before I was to graduate that I laid eyes on that bag again.

We spent the better part of three years at that school. I suspect it weren't any worse than any other school for orphans. We got schooling, three meals a day, a bed to sleep in, all in exchange for what the school like to refer to as 'assigned chores.' Kid and me did what was expected of us, and I don't think either one of us got into any more trouble than any other boy.

But that last year we was there, Kid turned eleven and he shot up and filled out to the point he was almost as tall as me and definitely stockier, and more muscled. But there was another change in Kid, a maturity well beyond his years. Maybe it was knowing that I'd be leaving in just a few weeks and thinking he'd be on his own, all alone. But somewhere in that darkness inside him, a match was struck, and a light began to flicker in him again, and I knew that at the tender age of eleven, Kid wasn't the least bit afraid to face life on his own. That scared me as much as that look I'd seen in his eyes. He seemed to walk in his own light, independent and fearless of everyone and everything.

For them reasons, it didn't surprise me in the least when three weeks before graduation, I woke up in the middle of the night to find Kid's bed empty. What did surprise me, and caused me a lot of alarm, was that laying on the blanket on Kid's bed was that burlap bag, and whatever had been in it, was missing. I sat up and swung my feet off the bed and my right foot landed in a hole in the floor. I lit an oil lamp and turned it down low and held it down close to the floor.

One of the floorboards had been pried and pulled up. That must have been where Kid had kept that bag for three years. Whatever he had in there must have been awful important to him. As I set the lamp back up on the nightstand, I saw a note on Kid's pillow. The message was short and to the point. If we was going to be separated, then he was going somewhere of his own choosing, and the orphanage was not on his list of choices.

I got dressed, then turned the lamp up brighter and woke the other boys and asked them if Kid had mentioned anyplace he'd like to live, any place he might have run off to. One boy said when he worked with Kid in the stables, Kid would often talk about wanting a chestnut horse some day. He didn't tell the boy why, but I knew his pa use to ride a chestnut. I stuffed my spare clothes in that burlap bag and headed down the stairs and out the door.

I checked the barn first, all the while praying that Kid hadn't stolen a horse, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw all the stalls were still full. Next, I headed for the livery in town. It was maybe two in the morning, a good three hours before the livery would open, but Kid weren't there, either. I was about to go back to the school and notify the headmaster when I saw a shadowy figure sitting on the board walk in front of the gun shop. As I got closer I could see from the gaslight that it was Kid.

I could see him watching me as I grew closer and I could see that determined look in his eyes. I knew there'd be no changing his mind. Then I saw what was in his hands, what he had so carefully hidden under the floorboard, protected by that burlap bag.

It was his pa's Colt .45 gun. It couldn't have been in good shape when he'd found it in the ashes and rubble, but now it was clean and shiny, and looked brand new. He told me he was waiting for the store to open because he was planning to sell it for money to tide him over till he could find a job. He said he wanted to go west, and he'd walk if he had to. I spent a long time talking him out of selling his pa's gun. I told him he'd regret that for the rest of his life. Then I told him we could hop a freight train that would take us west for free.

Then, for the first time since that Bloody Kansas day, Kid looked at me and smiled with the smile I hadn't seen in over three years...

"Heyes, does that mean you're coming with me?"