1930, Part 2

The first thing LeeAnn and I had to do was find somewhere to live. The rail yard was completely deserted once the Sheriff and his searchers left it alone. They figured that I had hopped a train and gone somewhere safer. I let them think that. Together with The Girl (I always thought of her as The Girl at that time), I found a forsaken railcar house. There were no cars in it now, which was unfortunate, but there was plenty of lumber around and what had at one time been a loft of sorts. I made sure it was sound and began work. Over time, that loft would become home for her and I. Most of my sweetest memories are there.
With her help, I strengthened the rafters so they would hold our weight and the weight of our things. She would hold up the end of the beam while I secured it. Then we did the other end. I remember doing this about five times. After that, she would hand the planks up to me so I could build the floor. In all, the loft covered the back of the building, twenty feet wide, thirty feet long, and room enough to stand up in. There were stairs against the wall so we could get up there easily. I was never more thankful for my father’s lessons and tools as I was when we looked at the loft complete.
I had a lot of time to think about my father. The work was long and hard. The Girl was too tired at night to talk much, so I let her sleep and brooded on my fate. Pop was dead. It hurt every time that thought crossed my mind. I had been used to him being around for so many years. He was always there. He was always stronger than I was. He always knew what to do and things were done right with him around. I had depended on that more than I had known. Now it was too late to truly appreciate it. So, what was I going to do now that I was alone? Well, not completely alone. There was LeeAnn who, despite the fact that she was young and scrawny, was good help with the work. She did not complain, she did not slow me down. She had proven herself clever with some things, like food. I don’t know where she got it. All I knew was she would disappear for about an hour and return with carrots and bread and sometimes even potatoes. Sometimes I wished she would stay gone, yet she always came back. I had learned the hard way to appreciate what I had, so I was thankful for her, but I increasingly found myself wondering what had possessed me to take her in in the first place. Maybe I had just been afraid to be alone. The thought terrified me even now. Perhaps it had been what my father had taught me about being kind to the less fortunate. He had always told me to “Do Unto Others.” Had I, in a moment of distress, simply adhered to the lessons I had learned as a child? Did Pop have that much control over me even now that he was gone? I took a good long look at LeeAnn one night as she was sleeping, thinking that same thought. It had been Pop. He had taught me good things and good things would happen because of that. If I kept living my life like how Pop had wanted me to, I was sure that everything would be all right. And the right thing was to stick with LeeAnn.
And I needed her. I needed her more than I would ever have admitted to myself back then. I was stubborn because of her. I would keep working every day and breathing every day because I worked and breathed for her. Her needing me made me keep on living. I lived for her. But at first I did not know that.
When the loft was finished, we moved our few things up there where they would be safe. LeeAnn grinned real wide at the top of the stairs as I brought my tools up. She looked so proud of it all. I could not help grinning myself. We celebrated that night. LeeAnn found some beer and we drank it all till we were laughing idiots. That was our first good memory.
I learned everything there was to know about LeeAnn that night. It was a short history. She was one of a lot of children. She could not count then, but she knew it was a lot. She was not the oldest either, so she was ignored quite a bit. She did not know her last name because a lot of men could have been her father. The kids were leaving one by one until it was just the babies left. LeeAnn had left herself, crawling into the boxcar at one point for some sleep. That was how she ended up in Hacktown. Bums in the car had told her about being beaten, which is why she hid herself when the train stopped. Then she had met me.
I remember she looked at me like I was some sort of angel that night. She kept saying how I had rescued her from certain death. It was all very silly since we were so drunk, but it was not too far from the truth. LeeAnn always maintained that she would not have survived very long except for me. Maybe it was true. She seemed adept enough at finding food. The truth was we needed each other. That was how it would be. That was how it was.
There was a lot of work to be done, now that we had a place to live. I had no idea where to begin. I simply started rummaging through the building, trying to find anything useful. There were odds and ends all over the place. Nails, bolts, the odd hammer or wrench, and one time I found an oil lamp with extra oil next to it. That lamp would become our most prized possession. There was wood everywhere and I gathered it up. Soon I had too much for it to remain in a disorganized pile. I made a shed for it in one corner by the large door they had used to bring the cars into the building. I was proud of that shed. Pop would have liked it, I thought. He had always liked things to be organized.
After that, the work fell into place. I cleaned out the building in stages, making each cleared place into a new space. Near the large door I set up a workshop where I would build anything we might need. I had my bench, my drawers, and my tools lined the wall behind it. I once unearthed a stove under a pile of old oil rags. It was in working order after I cleared the soot out of the stovepipe and we set up the kitchen right there. That was LeeAnn’s domain. I could not cook to save my life. She always said that I could burn water and I do believe she was not too far off the mark with that statement. She would work in the kitchen on one side of the building while I worked in the workshop on the other side. If I stepped even a toe over the middle, she shooed me away with whatever instrument she happened to have in her hand. I soon learned my place.
One day I was clearing away and exceptionally large pile of timber and I found a handcar sitting on the tracks. The tracks came straight through the middle of the large door and had their buffer stop at just about the same place where I had put the end of the loft. I had never thought to find a railcar left abandoned. They were valuable pieces of machinery. But this had been left and with a little oil, then a lot more oil, it seemed in perfect working condition. What a find it was. Before it could be put to any use, however, I had to make sure it was safe to use it.
I had seen neither hide nor tail of anyone in the rail yard since the Sheriff and his gang of searchers had left a few weeks before. But I was not about to be careless, especially since if I was taken in, they would probably hang me without trial. Where would that leave LeeAnn? No, I was going to be very careful. Armed with a hammer and a knife I had found and cleaned, I scouted out every inch of the yard. Every building was deserted except for the colonies of rats. We were far enough from the rail line that we did not have to worry about being found out that way. This only left the edge of town to make sure of. I crept about slowly and as quietly as I could, praying harder than I had ever prayed before that I would not be seen. I was not. From what I could see of Hacktown it was only getting emptier as time went on. I did not see one child playing in the street and only a few women with shawls wrapped around their shoulders walking quickly to their destinations. The way they glanced about, I could tell they were frightened. A few seconds after one woman passed, I saw why. A gang of six men walked straight down the middle of the street, armed to the teeth. The laughed boisterously, hefting their clubs and axes to make sure everyone knew what they were about. I recognized one of them as being one of the boys I had fought off the day Pop had died. From the looks of his face, he was the one whose nose I had broke. But no one spared a look for the abandoned rail yard, so I deemed it was safe to start moving around more. Besides, all the tracks were far enough back that I could use the railcar safely.
When I got back to the loft, a look of obvious worry disappeared from LeeAnn’s face. She was standing at the side of the door when I walked up and a smile immediately broke over her face. She wanted to know everything I had seen and where I had gone. I told her about everything over dinner.
“Lee,” I always called her Lee, “where do you go to get the food? Do you go into Hacktown at all?”
“Of course,” she answered guilelessly. “There’s nowhere else to get it.”
“When you do, I want you to keep an eye and an ear out for anything about a gang. I saw a gang of men going around like they owned the place. They seemed to have everybody pretty buffaloed. I want to know everything you know.”
“Okay, William.” She always called me by my full name. “I’ll be careful.”
“I don’t want you to be careful,” I snapped. “I want you to be as invisible to them as possible. Do you understand me?” She nodded her head, not even looking abashed by my gruffness. She was a trooper, always. LeeAnn was very strong in every way.
After I had found the railcar, I started going around to the other buildings. LeeAnn went along with me sometimes, since she needed things I often did not think of. She found the bed. She could always find things that turned out to be worth their weight in gold. She was lucky. Shithouse lucky.
We were at one of the buildings farthest away from our loft. I was inside, seeing what there was that could be useful. I found a box of odds and ends that seemed to hold promise. LeeAnn was scouting around back when I heard her call to me. Not too loud, so as not to alert anyone to where we were, but loud enough to get my attention. I came round to where she was and stared. There she was, standing triumphantly next to a metal bed frame, one hand resting on a bed post. She smiled so brightly at me that I was almost more taken aback by the look on her face. Not thirty feet behind her lay the mattress. Who had tossed them there or why, I could never guess. But we, actually I hauled them home. It took an act of God to get them both up in the loft, but we got it eventually. We both stood next to each other, just staring, still disbelieving of our own good fortune. Let me assure you that we slept very well from then on.
One of our most practical finds was an old water barrel. It was perfect for catching rainwater, which was the only thing we could not beg, borrow or steal. Luckily, We had survived the summer and autumn was setting in. It made its first appearance in a seven-day stint that kept us indoors most of the time. That was a rough time. Unable to venture outside like we were used to, both of us became a bit stir crazy. Of course, then the roof began to leak and I had to slither my way up through a hole to fix another hole, which led to another hole, which kept LeeAnn in spasms of worry down below. It was very slippery up there, but I managed to make the roof waterproof without killing myself. Thankfully, we discovered the leak towards the start of the rain, which left plenty of time for other chores to get done inside.
I have always had a streak for homesteading in me. I like my home to be proper and ordered and compact. I had always lived that way with Pop and despite the rough conditions, I was determined to remain that way. While other people were sinking lower into incivility, I was struggling to maintain a semi-civilized way of life. LeeAnn, who had rarely experienced such a mode of living, followed me as though I were a religious leader. She learned to keep a house to my specifications and eventually surpassed me in most tasks. She was pickier than I was in many ways. We found some cans of whitewash that had been used on the boxcars at some point. She took those cans and a brush and whitewashed much of the inside of our building, especially around the kitchen and the loft. It made the place look clean and bright. Once she got over her fear of the rats, she began killing every one that came into her sight. Eventually, the rats began avoiding us as much as possible, which greatly improved the cleanliness of our habitation.
I meanwhile, was working in my workshop most of the time. There had been some excellent lumber lying around the rail yard and I had salvaged most of it. Using my father’s tools, I began to furnish our dwelling. The first thing LeeAnn asked for was a table we could eat at. So, I made her a table. It was large enough for six people, though there was only the two of us to use it. I then made chairs for us. They were rough chairs, but I intended to make better ones at some point. I never did. As long as we lived there, we used the two original chairs that wobbled and were uncomfortable. I suppose we just became set in our ways. LeeAnn wanted bins so she could store food. I protested this, saying that there was not enough food to go around, let alone store. But she insisted. Later on, I was glad she did. I made her three bins - two feet long, one foot wide, and one foot deep. They were made to stack on top of each other with enough room at the front to reach a hand in and grab what was needed. I shook my head when she set them together in their place. I was sure we would never have enough food to fill even one of them. After that it was a wood box for the stove. Just as I thought we had everything we needed, the rain stopped and we went back to our regular routine.

This is sort of a long one, but I really like where it is heading. Let me know what you think. Not bad for a dream, eh?