Moon Over Manifest

Even Miss Velma T. Harkrader generously devoted our last week of senior chemistry class to making relief parcels for our lads in arms. Despite a minor explosion while we mixed her dyspepsia elixir, the parcels turned out beautifully, each wrapped in red-white-and-blue gingham, and I am sure they will be received with great appreciation.

Now, it is time for me to hang up my crown as Manifest Huckleberry Queen of 1917 and trade it for the hardscrabble life of a journalist. And here is my pledge to you, faithful reader: you can count on me to be truthful and certifiable in giving the honest-to-goodness scoop each and every week.

So, for all the whos, whats, whys, whens, and wheres, look at the backside of “Hogs and Cattle” every Sunday.

HATTIE MAE HARPER

Reporter About Town BILLY BUMP’S HAIR TONIC

Listen up, fellas. Do you have a dry, itchy scalp? Wish you had more hair on your head? Is your hair turning the color of the old gray goat? Then Billy Bump’s Hair Tonic is for you. Just rub a little on your hair and scalp before bedtime, and when you wake up, you’ll already notice a clean, tingly feeling. This means your hair is growing back, and in the same color you remember from your high school days. That’s right, men. The ladies will notice the hair on your head and the spring in your step. Get your Billy Bump’s Hair Tonic today at your local barbershop. Tell them Billy sent you and get a free comb. Works on mustaches and sideburns too. But avoid contact with ears and noses.

Buy a Liberty Bond

and save American liberty!

Path to Perdition

MAY 27, 1936

First things first after jumping from a train: you needed to check and make sure you still had what you jumped with. That was always easy for me, because I never had much. Gideon said all you needed was your traveling pack and a good head on your shoulders. I had both, so I figured I was in good shape.

Heading for a grove of trees that looked half alive, I found a creek. It was only a trickle but it felt cool and clean on my face and hands. Now I could face the preacher I was to stay with for the summer. How my daddy ever got hooked up with a preacher, I can’t say, as he’s not a churchgoing man. Apparently the preacher had taken in a wandering soul now and again, and Gideon had been one of them. In any case, Pastor Howard was expecting me and no amount of dillydallying would change that fact.

I hunted up a good fence-running stick and rattled it along the first fence I came to. Gideon and I found that sounds filled up an empty quiet. When I was younger, we spent many a walking hour singing, making up rhymes, playing kick the can. Now the sound of stick on fence carried off into the trees, but it didn’t fill the emptiness. For the first time I could recall, I was alone. Maybe I’d try the rhyming. Gideon would start with a line and I’d come up with another that rhymed. The clatter of the stick provided a nice rhythm for the rhyme running in my head. I wish I had a penny and I wish I had a nickel. I’d trade ’em both in for a coffee and a pickle. I wish I had a quarter and I wish I had a dime. I’d buy a stick of gum before you could tell the time. I wish I had an apple and I wish I had an orange—

I realized I’d rhymed myself into a corner with orange when my stick came to a gate. A wide wrought iron gate that had every manner of doodads welded right into it. Forks, kettles, horseshoes, even the grate off an old potbelly stove. Looking closer, I ran my fingers over the black iron letters sitting along the top of the gate. The letters were kind of crooked and a little uneven but they looked to read PERDITION. Now, Gideon and I had been to enough church services, hoping to get a hot meal afterward, that I’d heard the word a time or ten. Preachers used it. They told people to give up their evil ways or follow the devil straight down the path to perdition.

Why somebody would want that word welded on their gate, I can’t say. But there it was. And weeds wrapped their way up through the ironwork, daring you to enter. And there was an actual path. Beyond the gate, leaves and dandelions lined a long grassless swatch of ground all the way to a dilapidated old house. The paint was worn off and the porch swing hung crooked, like it was plumb out of swing.

Surely no one lived there. A train car or a shantytown by the railroad tracks seemed a more welcoming place. But one of the front curtains fluttered. Was someone watching? My heart beat like a bat’s wings. For the time being, I was content to stay off that Path to Perdition. The town wasn’t far ahead, so I put my stick to the fence and continued walking.