hobo signs

These old ghosts won't come out in sunshine like this. They hide in the closets and behind taped off doors with old, hard locks and long gone skeleton keys; easy enough to get open, but damn near impossible to pick. It'd take a spear of hard steel and years, which we don't have. The garages smell of old magazines and bygone summer days. The old golf clubs and shovels hang on the walls, and the sun can't stream through these windows. Dust won't live here. How can anything else? The Packard with the white top and chrome side rails still chugs its way along the sand roads. They haven't paved anything within forty miles. Nothing worth seeing anyway. The jail's way over that way, and the doctor's house is on the way. So's his misses. Kindly women with educated husbands will always make an extra space at the table. Especially kindly women who can't bear children of their own. With travel-weary eyes those two shovels that've been painted over on the front fence post a dozen times become stunningly clear. Why, there's only so much day left after the late afternoon train has gone through, so when you say, "Ma'am, I can dig a garden all the day long" you're damn well more likely to succeed when the sun's this far gone. Drifts of fried chicken with gravy and snap peas and smashed apples with cinnamon will almost double you over in that soil. Shouldn't even be called soil. Not like up north where the dirt under your fingernails almost smells as good as anything you're gonna get for puttin' it there. Here, it stains your nails and heats the skin. Only thing it's good for, people tell me, is rich folks layin' on it what need some rest and relaxation from their taxing vocations. In the study are the tin types of their parents up on the mantle. Their parents knew war, and their boys know it, but these kind souls don't know how to fight. They'll hum the songs, but they know none of the words. They found their trade and they worked it. A plow? That's for the negroes what carry their bags, or maybe their grandfolks. You work the folks around you and what doesn't drop off prospers, and these men prospered. Hotels and crystal glasses. They'll never put wood on their own fire. Never feel those splinters trying to get under their skin. Oh, we'll eat, boys. Tonight, we'll eat.