No Promises in the Wind by Irene Hunt Page B

given an old sweater; another time a warm cap. People found it hard, I think, to turn Joey from their doors.
    Begging was, indeed, much more effective with Joey doing the job, but I finally realized that I was hiding like a scared rabbit and allowing a ten-year-old boy to face the humility because I didn’t like it. After that I did my share. It was terrible, and I never became accustomed to it. However, night after night Joey and I started out, sometimes taking alternate houses, sometimes trying our luck on separate blocks.
    One night a girl came to the kitchen door when I knocked. I had a fleeting impression that she was very pretty. I don’t really know what she was like, for after that first glance I couldn’t look at her again. I looked past her and muttered, “I hate to say this—but I’m hungry.”
    Her voice was nice. I heard her say, “It’s a boy who’s hungry, Daddy. May I give him something?”
    A tall man came to the door and looked at me. “Yes, Betsy, by all means. Give him some of our roast,” he said, and then he walked away.
    In a few minutes she came back to the door with a little cardboard box containing food that smelled wonderful. I wanted to look into her eyes and thank her, but I couldn’t. I took the box and just stood there for a few seconds, hurting because I was forced to beg, to stand before her deprived of confidence.
    The girl spoke to me then in a very low voice. She said, “I hope things will be better for you soon. I feel so ashamed that I have food when the times force boys like you to go hungry.”
    I’ll never know her name, and I’ll never know if she was really as pretty as that first glance told me she was. I know only one thing about her, and that was the fact that she fed my hungry stomach and laid a kind of healing balm on a part of my spirit that was raw with the beating it was taking.
    There were many times when I was ready to give up during the cold weeks of November, times when I really believed that Joey and I would have to wander out into some open field and let the cold finish us off. But always at such times something turned up, something happened which seemed to say “Not yet, not yet,” and we would find food and rest and the spirit to go on.
    It was like that the night we stopped at a tiny farmhouse somewhere in Nebraska, and a very old lady asked us to come inside. She gave us supper at a little table in the kitchen where a good fire burned and a kettle poured out steam from its copper spout.
    She watched us thoughtfully while we ate. “Do you smoke?” she asked me after a while.
    If there had been any laughter in me, I would have considered that a joke. “Ma’am, if I had the money to buy cigarettes, I’d have bought something for us to eat instead of asking you,” I said.
    She nodded. “All right then. You boys can stay the night here. I had to ask about smoking because I’m fearful of fire. But you can stay.” She paused a minute. “I think you’ll have to take a bath, though, and after you’re in bed, I’ll wash your clothes.”
    A bath. I wondered if she knew what that meant to us. Joey and I washed with soap and hot water for the first time since we had left home. Our bodies were clean and refreshed and respectable in the suits of long underwear which the woman told us had once belonged to her husband. We lay in a soft bed that night under a feather comforter; we moaned a little before we slept, half in weariness, half in the wonder of being comfortable, and we refused to think of another day.
    The lady let us sleep until almost noon the next day. Then she came in softly and laid our clothes, freshly washed and ironed, on the foot of the bed. She stood there looking down at us.
    â€œPoor little fellows, you were dead tired, weren’t you?” she said. She raised the shades at the windows and then walked to the door. “Better