True to form, Joe plodded down the hill to the schoolhouse the next morning and stepped inside the open door just as the last toll from the bell faded. Just because he’d been blackmailed into being here didn’t mean he was going to arrive in time for any before school harassment. Miss West glanced up at him as he slid into his desk next to Andy Kale, a skinny boy with red hair and more freckles on his face than warts on a toad. Andy didn’t look up, and Joe’s heart sank. He glanced around. The smaller boys were avoiding looking at him and some of the bigger ones were grinning. He was in for it.

Joe spent most of that morning’s arithmetic lesson trying to figure out why. Usually there was some reason, no matter much sense it didn’t make. Maybe his pa had made it to town yesterday. If that was so he was sure to have done something socially incorrect and it was sure to have become the subject of everyone’s supper table discussion. Maybe he had tried to buy a beer with his shirt buttons again. Joe glanced at Ernie Miller, the son of the saloon owner. He was bent over his slate copying down numbers with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as he tried to make sense of his own scribbling. He didn’t look over at Joe. Maybe not.

“Joseph? Do you know the answer?” Miss West’s voice made Joe’s head whip around to face the front. For a moment he froze. Mr. Herron never called on him. He never knew the answer. Everyone knew that.

“Four.” He ignored the giggles coming from the girl’s side of the room and the snorts from behind him.

Miss West paused. “Joseph, where is your slate?”

Joe clenched his jaw and didn’t answer. More giggles, and the boys behind him were starting to sound like a herd of pigs. He felt his ears turn red.

“Did you leave it at home?”

Why wouldn’t she drop it? Joe was saved from answering by a particularly loud snigger.

“As if you can call that falling down shed a home!” Jack Davis’ comment was met by laughter.

“That’s enough.” Miss West seemed to finally realize her error. “Joseph, I’ll talk to you at lunch. Jack, maybe you know the answer since you seem so eager to talk?”

Joe kept his eyes glued to the wooden top of his desk the rest of the morning.

He didn’t move when Miss West dismissed them for lunch. As the rest of his classmates filtered past, Joe felt their varying looks, pity, embarrassment, scorn. He lifted his eyes and met them all with a glare that quickly made them look away.

“Joseph.”

He stood and walked forward. He had a hunch as to what this was about. Well she could keep her pity. He set his jaw as Miss West looked up at him from her desk.

“The general store usually lets the school borrow a slate if there’s a child who needs one. I can speak to…”

“That’s alright.” Joe interrupted. Miss West raised her eyebrows, and Joe shifted uncomfortably. She might as well learn now though.

“They won’t lend you a slate for me.” He said.

“Oh?”

Joe didn’t answer. The silence seemed to stretch for miles then Miss West finally cleared her throat.

“I’ll see what else I can do then.”

He wanted to tell her not to bother, but he got the feeling she wouldn’t listen. What did it matter anyway? She’d find out sooner or later that no one in this town was friends with any Greyer.

“Is there anything else you need? Books maybe?”

“No, ma’am.” Joe looked down at his shoes. Maybe if he stared at the floor long enough, it would open up and swallow him. He could take the looks of anyone staring down at him, but Miss West’s warm, careful gaze made him wish he was invisible.

“Alright.” She said at last. “You can go.”

He turned without a word and let out a large breath as the door shut behind him. The last half came out as a groan when he saw the group of boys waiting at the bottom of the steps.

“Got in trouble, Joe?” Jack smirked.

Joe considered his options. He could try to push past them and be knocked down or he could stay on top of the steps until lunch was over. Or he could make the first hit.

“Boys! Boys!” Miss West’s angry yells cut through the air several moments later. Joe rolled out from under Jack and Henry’s grip, swiping at his bloody lip. Henry’s mirrored it, and another boy, Will, had a black eye. But there was no doubt in Joe’s mind that he’d gotten the worst of it. He hobbled inside and slid gingerly into his seat, his hand pressed against his side. Someone had kicked it hard. Several times.

“You’ll all sit here for the rest of lunch period.” Miss West’s skirts swished as she sat back at her desk. Her eyes glanced up at the group darkly before she went back to her papers. Joe settled back into his seat. As he’d thought earlier: she might as well learn now.

He slipped out the door the moment school was over and hightailed it through the woods until he reached the road that wound into Durham. Right in town, nestled next to the blacksmith’s and a slightly dilapidated mercantile was a small yellow house. Joe always paused to look at it before walking up the spotless steps to the door. It stood between the two much larger buildings like an old yellow cat sitting primly between two shaggy dogs, not caring at all. Kind of like the woman inside, actually.

Ellie Goodwin had lived in Durham as long as anyone could remember. Her father had built the house for her mother, and the town had grown up around it alongside his rather large family. They had all either died or moved away, all except for one. No one was getting rid of Ellie Goodwin despite the fact that the blacksmith wanted the land to build a small stable and the mercantile owner wanted the house for himself so that he didn’t have to walk across three streets every morning. But Ellie Goodwin and her house weren’t going anywhere.

Joe had first met her one Saturday after having been sent by his ma to look for his pa, who hadn’t come home the night before. He’d trudged reluctantly into town, not at all looking forward to the prospect of having to drag his hung over father the whole four and three quarter miles home. She had hollered at him from her porch as he’d past, and he’d nearly jumped out of his skin. He hadn’t even seen her.

“Boy! Where are you going?” she’d asked, hands on her hips while wearing an apron.

Where indeed? In a moment Joe decided that if she didn’t recognize that he was Cal Greyer’s son and couldn’t put two and two together, he wasn’t going to enlighten her.

“Nowhere.” He had said.

“Good. Come help me then.”

“With what?”

She’d turned back around to face him, and this time her lips pursed angrily. “With what? As if! When I was a girl I was taught respect for my elders. Now get up here and I’ll explain it to you.”

Curiosity piqued, Joe had climbed up onto the porch. After all, it wasn’t like he was in any hurry to search the alley behind the saloon.

“I need someone tall to reach those cobwebs with this broom.” She had said.

Joe had looked at her for one incredulous moment. Tall? He’d been called many things in his life, but tall had never been one of them. He had always been the small, shrimpy one. But he had to look down a couple of inches to meet her eyes, so he supposed in this instance he was tall, relatively speaking. But that still didn’t mean he had to spend all morning knocking cobwebs into his eyes.

She must have sensed his hesitation because she rambled on, “Then you can chop my wood, paint my steps, and test to make sure the batch of cookies I’ll be baking came out alright.”

It was the last chore that had really caught his attention.

“You’ve got a deal.” He said.

Now Joe came out a few times a week to do some manual labor and testing of her cooking. But it was more than that that brought him there, and it was why he always paused before pushing through her bright blue door. When he stepped inside the yellow house, he always felt like he was stepping out of himself and into someone else. And for some reason he always liked to stop and savor the moment.

“Is that you, Joe?” she called when he entered.

“Yes, Miss Ellie.” He called her by the same name everyone else did, from the oldest senior to the youngest toddler.

“I was wondering if you would come today. The weeds out back have been growing like… good heavens! What on earth did you do now?” she’d come around the corner and had caught sight of Joe’s torn clothes and swollen lip.

Joe shrugged self consciously and tried to straighten his shirt, albeit a bit tardily.

“It’s nothing.” He said.

“Oh really? Who have you been trying to beat up this time?”

“No one. It was…”

“You young folk. Always rolling around in the dirt like young savages. It’s as if you forgot that God have you a brain inside your head as well as two ears to listen with.”

“And two fists.” Joe muttered. But despite Miss Ellie’s sharp words, she’d somehow managed to pull Joe into the kitchen and sit him down at the table. He pulled back as she dabbed at his face with a damp cloth. “I’m fine.” He said.

She snorted. “Well I daresay you deserved what you got anyhow. Fooling around like a bunch of ruffians.” She let the rag fall into the water with a flat slap. Then her voice softened. “I hear you have a new teacher.”

Joe shrugged.

“I suppose she’s the one that gave you the split lip. You don’t take long to drive people crazy.” This time she managed to get a small grin out of him.

“I’ll get to those weeds.” He said.

She nodded and let him go. He was a tough one, too firmly withdrawn into himself to recognize when it was safe to come out. But he had a good heart. Ellie watched him out the window for a moment before turning to the stove to make him a platter of biscuits.

The sun was painting the horizon with streaks of red and pink when Joe left Ellie’s. Instead of going down the road toward home, he turned and went farther into town, and a few minutes later he was in front of The California Hotel. It was a lofty name for a slightly crooked building, but the food there was good. That’s not what Joe was here for though. He waited outside, watching the last of the sunset’s vivid colors fade away until his Ma came out. She glanced at him, and then, without speaking, they fell into step with each other. Joe didn’t mind the silence. Once upon a time, when he’d been young, he’d tried to fill the silence with empty chatter, but slowly he’d learned that what his ma really wanted after a day of endless bustle and talking was quiet. The only reason he came to walk her home was because she’d been stopped several times by men who either didn’t want to pay or thought that because they had paid her once they were entitled to her forever.

She hadn’t told him the first time it had happened. Instead he’d found out from a schoolmate; Benny Jenkins had hollered an insult about her to him before school. Joe had brimmed in rage and had broken his nose. If they hadn’t pulled him off of Benny who knew how much damage he would have done? It hadn’t been rage at Benny; he was used to slurs against his mother’s ‘second job’ and smacks about his legitimacy (which he personally didn’t think was an insult anyway). No, what he’d really been mad at was something he couldn’t hit, a shadow, the thing that always hovered at the back of his mind, whether it was thrown up in his face at school or not. It was the fact that he was nothing, worth less than the dirt that had clung to his shirt and elbows as he’d been shoved to the ground and held there by the hollering of his teacher. But he couldn’t fight that, so he’d fought Benny instead.

Mr. Herron had told Joe and Benny to shake hands, and Joe had been able to see Benny’s resistance. He hadn’t wanted to touch the son of Elena and possibly Cal Greyer. But he had, and when they’d locked eyes, he could see just as easily as Joe that nothing had ended; the shadow was still there. If anything it had grown.

They reached the shack, and Joe held open the door. Elena stepped inside and then put a finger over her lips. A low snore was coming from the chair in the corner, and Cal’s head was tipped back, mouth slightly open, oblivious to the world. Joe shut the door softly behind him. Despite the shadow, for the moment he was content. He’d eaten at Ellie’s, and Elena was pulling some bread out of the cupboard. It didn’t do to look for a large miracle, he decided. Better to be grateful for the small things. And at the moment, he was extremely grateful for the sound of snoring accompanied by the sweet echoes of silence.