Crows & Cards by Joseph Helgerson

have a ma standing beside him?
    The boy's coal must have tumbled off one of the full-sized wagons hauling it up and down the street. And the drivers of those bigger outfits certainly had a la-di-da way of cracking their whips. Then too, there were gents and ladies riding in fancy rigs and riffraff just woke up from their beds of straw. Most every block had one or more grog shops or beer houses or saloons or coffeehouses that appeared to sell drinks strong enough to rattle your teeth, if you had any.
    Pretty soon the pavement piddled out and dirt took over. There were holes and ruts that must have seemed as deep as small canyons to the coach's horses, easy as they spooked. The streets narrowed up and went all crooked as everything got older, and storefronts gave way to houses that appeared thrown together out of wood and spit. Old ladies on caved front steps sang out, " Bonjour. " Chilly told me that was French for "Mind your own business." I figured maybe he was funning me, friendly as those ladies seemed.
    Finally the coach creaked to a halt and the driver called out, "End of the line," which meant we had to hoof it from there, with me lugging Chilly's carpetbag along with my poke and boots. There wasn't even any discussion about my being a pack mule. Chilly just dropped his bag on my toes and headed off without checking to see how I was keeping up. Not that I minded. Eager as I was to see where we were headed, I'd have tried to carry Chilly too, if he'd asked me. We kept moving away from the river till we nearly ran out of town, picking our way from one patch of shade to the next as if hiding from something, though surprising us would have been a task, what with the way Chilly kept a weather eye on everything, including the sky. The only man I ever saw watch the heavens any closer was my pa, who foretold rain, sleet, and hail regular as clockwork.
    At last we pulled up to a rambling, old two-story house that was knocked out of dark timbers. There was a sign hanging over its front door that had a red, spouting whale painted on it. I wished I could have shown off that sign to my littlest brother, Lester, who was all the time wild about whales. Being but three, he couldn't hold chalk proper yet so was forever pestering me to copy the whale picture from Ma's dictionary for him. Thinking of that gave me a pang. Anyway, somebody had peppered the whale on that sign pretty lively with shot, but it kept right on swimming along, which I figured I better do too.
    To one side of the house was a tipsy balcony where a man sat on a split-bottom chair playing something weepy and mournful on a violin. He didn't hold it like some country fiddler but had it tucked under his clean-shaven chin. Dignified as he sat there, you didn't hardly notice the pair of Shanghai chickens pecking around his boots. More what caught your eye was the way he pursed his lips, as if tasting the music, and how what few wisps of hair he had left fell across his smudged eyeglasses whenever he leaned forward to tease out a high note.

    "That fool's the Professor," Chilly informed me. "Don't get any notions about those hens of his. They follow him everywhere, worse than family."
    Without any further to-do, Chilly pushed on up the front steps and into the house, which had itself quite a stock of glass in its windows and real fetching calico stretched over the panes that had gone missing. There were several dogs howling out back who seemed to be objecting to the piano playing going on inside the place. I couldn't see how the Professor's violin would have set 'em off, but that piano playing was another breed of music entirely. Whoever was pounding on those keys knew no mercy.
    "This here's Goose Nedeau's place," Chilly said, "or at least half of it is. The other half come into my hands a while back over a matter of some deuces. It's where we'll be holing up. There's only but two things you got to remember if you're going to get along with Goose."
    "What's those, sir?" I