“But if I was working, I wouldn’t be begging.”

“I told you, no!” he said, just before a trucker pulled up with an offer of a ride.

Finally we were on our way west again, and I was sitting in another boxcar doorway, my leg braced to steady myself against the constant jolt and sway, jolt and sway of the car passing over rail joints.

I held the newspaper clipping, though I about had it memorized. It didn’t say much. Just that the CCC had openings for youths seventeen and older who wanted to do conservation work.

Pa had already told me to throw it away.

Just before, he’d pulled out a whisky bottle, which he’d somehow managed to find in the few moments we’d been in that last town.

Now he was out dead-cold drunk again, sleeping in a corner foul with other men’s vomit. Geez. Geez.

Maybe if he’d been a stranger, I might have felt something besides the loathing that was fast replacing every other emotion. But he wasn’t a stranger, who might have some excuse. He was my pa, who had brought this on himself.

No. That wasn’t the all of it.

He’d brought this on his family. On my ma, who, soon as she learned I’d been fired, wouldn’t know where to turn next.

Pa came to enough to grope around for the bottle and then dropped off again before his hand found it.

I couldn’t blame him for me losing my job, but I could sure blame him for this . . . this . . .

I wrapped my arms around my head. What in the world was I going to do? Could I really do like the JP said, and turn out like my pa? That couldn’t really happen, could it?

It was fear that it could, as much as anything, that made my decision for me.

I got off the train at the next good-sized town, without having got past Pa’s drunken sleep to tell him good-bye. I found the town’s name, Monroe, on a grain elevator.

Then I went looking for somebody to tell me where to sign up for the CCC.

Chapter 4

The postmistress directed me to the Monroe Hardware & Supply, which had a sign hanging from its locked door, BACK AT 4:00. Faded black lettering on a window announced OWEN SCHIELING, PROPRIETOR, and smaller, darker letters said CCC SELECTION AGENT.

I wiped away grime so I could read the small print of a taped-up leaflet, A Chance to Work in the Forest. It told how the Civilian Conservation Corps was carrying out conservation projects throughout the country—planting forests and restoring depleted farmland, building parks and wildlife refuges. That was as far as I’d got when a Model A pickup pulled up.