No Promises in the Wind by Irene Hunt Read Free Book Online

turnips in it. Nothing but weeds and crabgrass. Whoever lived there had made a clean sweep of everything edible. Everything, it suddenly occured to me, except the white rooster.
    He was curious, that old fellow. He had come back to the yard and was studying me, cautiously, though, as if he sensed danger in the air. And truly there was danger for him at that minute, for I had a sudden vivid and ravenous vision of a boiled chicken dinner.
    I made a dash for him, and he ran for his life. Neither of us was feeling too well that morning, but we were both desperate. We circled the house a couple of times with all the speed we could muster; finally he came to grief when he got tangled up in a mass of wire that had been thrown over the fence. I caught him there, and I felt a glow of elation that Joey and I would have food for the next several meals.
    It took a long time to get our rooster ready for cooking. We found an old bucket in which we heated water to help remove the feathers. The same bucket had to be washed out and serve as a cooking kettle when I had at last done a pretty good job of getting the feathers removed. While I worked, Joey explored the heap of debris outside, finding a cracked china cup and a real treasure in the form of an old salt shaker with a packed and soggy mass of salt in the bottom. We dissolved the salt in hot water and saved the liquid to flavor our meat when it was done.
    That rooster was, without doubt, one of the toughest fowls that had ever been hatched. We boiled it the rest of the day, testing it with our knife from time to time and finding the flesh just as tough and unyielding at twilight as it had been at noon.
    The broth was pretty good, though; we took turns drinking it from the cracked cup, and though it wasn’t the best soup I’d ever tasted, it wasn’t too bad. The liver at least became tender after a few hours of cooking, and our rooster had a remarkably fine liver; I made Joey eat it while we waited hopefully for the rest of the meat to get done.
    We enjoyed our meal, poor as it was, and that night as a cold rain pelted against the windows, we knew the wonderful security of a roof and a fire. It wasn’t our roof, of course, and I half expected that at any minute someone would appear and order us to be off. But such a time would have to be met when it came. For that hour of gathering darkness with the silence of the prairies all about us, I gave myself up to the warmth of the stove and the comfort of a pallet made of our blanket with our jackets rolled up for pillows.
    Joey was soon asleep. I lay for a long time watching the trembling shadows which the light from the stove threw upon the ceiling. It occurred to me that in a nation of hungry people, I was almost as small and helpless as Joey. I knew that both he and I could be wiped out as quickly as Howie had been, and that very few people would ever know or care. I knew just as well, though, that Joey and I were going to tackle the days ahead of us together. We had lost Howie and the shock was still inside us; the knowledge that we were crippled without him was frightening. Still, we were not going home to eat food that Mom had bought with a day of ironing; I was not going to eat food that Dad would resent my swallowing.
    I sat up for a while and looked down at my brother, wondering at the callous indifference I had so often felt toward him. That night I knew that the small boy stretched out on our makeshift bed was all I had in the world to make me feel a part of the human race. I leaned over as I had that last morning at home and tucked the blanket more carefully around his shoulders; he stirred a little in his sleep, moving closer to me, and when I finally slept, I was comforted by Joey’s presence.
    We heated up more chicken broth the next morning for breakfast, and as we were taking turns at drinking from the cracked cup, I saw a man and woman coming toward the house. I braced myself for trouble and went to the