CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
FOR MORE THAN FORTY YEARS,. . .
PART ONE THE CITY
ROAD KID
COTTON PICKER
TOMMY
A BOWL OF RICE
ANNIE OF THE NORTH STAR
PARIS OF THE PACIFIC
A HUNDRED POUNDS
ONE CHANCE
SOMETHING UNEXPECTED & UNSEEN
PART TWO DOOMED
AFTERSHOCKS
FORGOTTEN
THE LAST WAGON
EVERYONE OUT
UNION SQUARE
MARCH OF THE FLAMES
CHASED BY FIRE
ACROSS VAN NESS
PART THREE INTO THE FIRESTORM
THURSDAY NIGHT
INTO THE FIRESTORM
A GOOD DOG
PART FOUR SAN FRANCISCO SPIRIT
WHAT MATTERS
SHAKESPEARE’S NAMESAKES
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
OTHER YEARLING BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY
COPYRIGHT
To Maya, Stewart, and Ruby
(who, like Shake, is a very good dog),
and special thanks to the real Nick
For more than forty years, Yearling has been the leading name in classic and award-winning literature for young readers.
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ROAD KID
“Hey, kid. Get back here and empty your pockets.”
Nicholas Dray whirled to see a burly policeman pointing a black club right at him. He froze in astonishment. This should not be happening. Not to Nick the Invisible.
Nick could count only three things he was good at. First, he could pick cotton. Working cotton—planting, thinning, chopping the weeds away with a hoe, and picking—was about all he’d done for most of his eleven years.
Nick wasn’t bad at writing, either. Oh, not putting words together to tell a story or anything, just making letters and words look nice. Back in Texas, he would often come home after working in the fields and sink down with his back against their wooden shack. Before long he’d be scratching in the dust with a stick until Pa yelled at him to finish his chores or Gran called him in to eat some steaming-hot corn bread.
Being invisible was Nick’s third and newest skill. He’d only gotten good at it since becoming a road kid, since that morning a few weeks ago when he’d finally taken off from the Lincoln Poor Farm for Indigents and Orphans.
Nick had worried a lot about whether he’d be able to make it to California from Texas. But between begging rides from farmers and even hopping a few freight trains, things had gone pretty well. Not one policeman or official-looking person had paid him any mind. In fact, Nick had gotten so confident, he’d begun to think of himself as Nick the Invisible.
So how could he have let this policeman sneak up on him? How could it be that now, when he’d finally arrived in San Francisco, just where he wanted to be, he wasn’t invisible at all?
“Hey, kid, didn’t you hear me the first time? Get back here and empty your pockets.” The policeman’s yell drowned out the clanking of a cable car. The big man lumbered closer, looking like a giant bear, with bushy red eyebrows sprouting every which way. “I saw you stick your grimy hand into that vegetable cart.”
“You can’t send me back. I didn’t take anything, Bushy Brows,” Nick mumbled out loud, pushing off into a run.
And that was true enough. Nick hadn’t stolen a thing—at least not yet. He’d only stopped to feast his eyes on the bright lettuces and cabbages and breathe in the fresh, sweet scent of oranges piled in neat rows. He couldn’t help it. He was that hungry.
Nick pulled his old brown cap over his curly hair and lunged into the crowd. His wild hair could be a problem. It made him easy to spot—and made it easy for policemen like Bushy Brows to remember him.
Nick never used to mind his hair. For one thing, Gran kept it cut close during cotton season so as to keep his head cooler. She’d always told Nick his hair was a gift from his mother. Since his mother had died when he was born, Nick didn’t carry any real memories of her, not the kind that make you sad, anyway. There was just that faded wedding photograph in a cracked frame that Gran kept free of dust as best she could.
“My, how Janet would’ve laughed to see such a shock of wild curls wasted on a boy,” Gran would say in her soft drawl as Nick sat on an upturned bucket while she trimmed away. She always made sure to scatter the cut locks to the wind so the birds would have something for their nests.
Nick risked a glance back at the policeman. Another mistake. He wheeled forward again to find a well-dressed man with a thick brown mustache barreling down on him.
At that moment, Bushy Brows let loose an earsplitting cry. “Stop. Thief!”
“A thief, eh? I’ll teach you, young ruffian,” growled the man, thrusting out a long black umbrella.
Crack!
“Ow!” Nick cried out as the umbrella hit his shins. The man made a grab for him, but Nick twisted away, his heart pounding. His head felt light from not eating.
Nick did his best, though. He skipped around businessmen in suits and hats, ladies in long dark skirts and crisp white shirtwaist blouses, deliverymen toting crates and boxes. Veering onto the cobblestone street to avoid bumping a tottering elderly lady, he found himself face to face with a snorting horse pulling a cart.
“Easy, Betsy,” the driver crooned to his mare. “You watch it, boy. Lucky for you I ain’t driving one of those fast new automobiles.”
By now Nick was panting. He could feel drops of sweat trickle down the back of his neck. This should have been easy, but everything was going wrong. And then, just when he felt sure he’d left the police officer behind, he tripped.
Nick threw out his hands, scraping his palms hard on the sidewalk. He groaned and closed his eyes, feeling a wave of sickness wash over him. It all sounded far away: laughter and voices, the ironclad wheels of wagons clattering along on cobbled streets, cable cars screeching and clanging.
“I got you.” Nick felt something hard jab into his back.
The large, round officer loomed above him, panting slightly. Nick looked up and tried to bring the man into focus. His eyebrows were enormous, with hairs sticking out in all directions like a thicket of blackberry branches.
The officer poked. “Get up, boy.”
Nick got to his feet slowly. He staggered a little, feeling dizzy with hunger. “I didn’t take anything, sir. Honest.”
“You talk funny. You’re not from here, are you? We got enough problems with the Chinese without snotty runaways roaming the city,” the policeman grumbled. “Now turn out your pockets and tell me where you live.”
Nick’s heart sank. He stuck his hands into his pockets, closing his right hand tightly around the two coins he’d kept safe for so long.
What was it Mr. Hank had said that last day? “Once a picker, always a picker.”
A cotton picker. Maybe, after all, the boss man had been right. Maybe that’s all he’d ever be.
COTTON PICKER
Before. Before the Lincoln Poor Farm for Indigents and Orphans, there’d been Mr. Hank’s farm. Nick and Gran had landed there in late summer, after they’d been driven off their sharecrop.
“I ain’t happy about taking in an old lady and a kid,” Mr. Hank had grumbled. “But I’m short of hands right about now. If you can keep up and put in a full day’s work, you can stay.”
“My grandson picks cotton faster than a grown man, Mr. Hank,” Gra
n assured him. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he picks a hundred pounds a day when the cotton is at its peak.”
Mr. Hank scoffed, “He looks too skinny. Probably lazy, too.” And from that moment, Nick made up his mind to try.
For the next two weeks, Nick picked from daybreak to dusk. He came close to bringing in a hundred pounds in a single day, but he never could quite make it.
“Grandson, I’ll give you two bits tonight if you can do it,” Gran said on that last morning. He bent to give her a sip of tepid water from the dipper.
“We don’t have a dime to spare, Gran, never mind a quarter.” Nick’s heart turned over, but he had to grin. “Not yet, anyhow. But before long, I’ll make enough to get us out of here.”
“It would sure be nice to have our own house again,” she murmured, shaking her head. “I never thought I’d miss that shack on Mr. Greene’s place. But where do we go now? No farmer wants to give an old lady and a skinny kid a sharecrop.”
“I’ve got that all worked out, Gran. We’re gonna leave Texas and head to California,” Nick said all in a rush. He’d been thinking about this plan for so long but had never put it into words before. “I got the idea even before Pa left and we lost the sharecrop. You remember Miss Reedy, my teacher? She told us all about the city of San Francisco. That’s where we’ll go.”
“California? That sounds as far away as the moon.” Gran’s voice was hoarse, but there was still a twinkle in her warm brown eyes.
“We can get there, Gran, I know it.” Nick held her hand in his. He could feel how work had weathered and hardened her skin. “Miss Reedy said San Francisco was the Paris of the Pacific. You know, like Paris, France. It’s a great, golden place on a bay of blue water. Tall buildings reach as high as the clouds, and cable cars run up and down hills as steep as cliffs.”
Gran shook her head a little. “Now what would we do in a grand place like that?”
“I’ll get a job,” Nick went on, talking fast, half afraid she’d start laughing and call it a foolish dream. And maybe it was, but now that he’d started, he couldn’t stop. “We’ll find us a little room. Miss Reedy says there’s sometimes a cool fog in San Francisco, so it won’t be hot and dusty like here. And we’ll never pick cotton again.”
“Never pick cotton again…,” Gran repeated in a whisper. She looked into Nick’s eyes. “Why, I believe I can just see you on the streets of that bright city.”
Gran’s breath seemed ragged and uneven, as though it hurt to talk. She pressed his hand, then let go. “Now you get on, or Mr. Hank will be mad. And don’t fret about me—Elsie Turner promised she’ll look in later.”
The fields that day had been thick with pickers. Men and women, some as old as Gran. And children, too. Others were so small they could only toddle behind their mamas. Nick knew most everyone by name. Elsie Turner’s daughter, Rebecca, had taken to tagging after him.
“Daddy says I can’t stop till I fill my bag or I’ll get a whipping,” she’d whined just the day before. “You pick sooo fast, Nick. Can’t you pleeease give me some of yours?”
Rebecca asked him this just about every day. As usual, Nick growled in return. “Go away, Rebecca. You can’t pick if you’re jabbering the whole time.”
But that hadn’t stopped her questions. “You ever been to school, Nick?”
“Not much,” he admitted. “We used to live on a sharecrop before we came here. I’d go to school sometimes, when my pa didn’t need me in the fields. I liked parts of it just fine.”
“I’m five, too little for school,” announced Rebecca. “Did you pick cotton when you were five?”
Nick grunted. “I’ve picked cotton since I could walk.”
On that last morning, Rebecca hadn’t bothered him at all. Nick found himself looking around for her. He spotted her in the next row over, her shoulders slumped. Rebecca moved slowly, her small bag trailing behind her. Nick thought a breeze might knock her over.
There had been dew in the early dawn. Nick didn’t like picking on dewy mornings. For one thing, it made his clothes damp and cool just when the morning was chill. Worse was what the dampness did to skin.
Nick’s fingers were so callused and rough from picking, he didn’t suffer much. But he figured the morning dew had made little Rebecca’s skin soft. So soft the hard points of the cotton bolls had dug into her fingers, drawing tiny pricks of blood each time she reached inside to pluck out the white fiber.
“Rebecca,” called Nick in a loud hiss. “Scurry up to me and hold open your bag.”
In a flash, Nick pulled out an armful of cotton and stuffed it into her sack. Rebecca went back to her row, her bag dragging behind her, too miserable to smile her thanks.
By mid-afternoon, an enormous sun filled a glaring white sky. Nick’s sack could have been packed with river rocks, it was that heavy. He wanted to rest, to stretch out between the rows of cotton and fall asleep on the warm earth. Nick felt everything was against him—the sun, the heat, the prickly cotton bolls, the stubborn cotton itself.
I can’t give up, Nick told himself. Even if the bag got so heavy it made him weave like a drunken man. Even if the muscles in his shoulders burned into his bones. Sweat stung his eyes, but Nick didn’t stop to wipe it away. He made himself keep picking, steady and quick.
Now grab the cotton at its very roots. Now pick it out clean. Right hand, left hand, both together.
A hundred pounds, a hundred pounds, he chanted silently. A hundred pounds for Gran.
TOMMY
“You’re one of those road kids, ain’t you?” The thick-browed policeman kept hold of one of Nick’s sleeves and poked at him with his club as if he were checking the tenderness of a piece of meat.
Nick opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He was caught. And then Gran’s words came back to him. I believe I can just see you on the streets of that bright city.
Nick bent to snatch his cap off the ground. Then he squirmed—hard—wrenching his sleeve out of the policeman’s grip.
“Why, you…”
Nick willed himself to move, feet flying, dodging and ducking through the crowd. He could hear Bushy Brows pounding behind him, panting and wheezing. He sounded madder than a wasp, and he sure didn’t seem ready to give up.
“Stop that boy!”
Up ahead, Nick saw two men unloading a large crate from a wagon. They were blocking the sidewalk and seemed to be having trouble getting the crate through a doorway. Nick could hear the men arguing. A small circle had gathered to watch and give advice.
“Turn the crate the other way.”
“Put it down first and measure the opening.”
The workers backed away from the doorway, calculating their next move. Nick grabbed his chance. Slipping into the circle, he darted between the men and the doorway. He crawled through the legs of the bystanders. And he came out the other side.
Bushy Brows wouldn’t catch him now.
Nick slowed to a trot, his breath coming in short gasps. He should duck in somewhere and hide. He couldn’t be sure Bushy Brows would give up the chase.
Nick hurried along, head down, not meeting people’s eyes. And so at first he didn’t notice he’d entered a different neighborhood. It was full of small, busy shops, with bright wooden signs and barrels of food crowding the sidewalks. Even the air had changed, and his nose caught the scent of smoke, fish, and spices.
The streets now were filled mostly with men in simple blue cotton clothes. He walked behind a man who wore a small round hat. His hair was pulled into a long dark braid that hung down his back.
Chinatown. He was in Chinatown. Since he’d arrived in San Francisco a few days ago, Nick had heard people on the street talk about Chinatown, but this was the first time he’d come here.
Nick ducked into a doorway. Next to him, bins displayed fruits and vegetables. Above his head was a large sign with flowing, inky black symbols on it. That, he figured, must be Chinese writing. Nick felt a thrill of excitement. He’d come to the city from Texas. But thes
e people had traveled from the other side of the world.
The world really is big, just like Miss Reedy was always telling us, Nick thought.
The writing reminded Nick of Miss Reedy’s penmanship lessons—his favorite part of school. Mostly Nick and everyone else in the run-down one-room schoolhouse did lessons in chalk or pencil. Once a week, though, Miss Reedy brought in several real Waterman pens for them to try, along with her prize possession, an old-fashioned glass inkwell decorated with flowing silver leaves. She placed it on the center of her desk, almost like a vase of flowers on a table.
If he closed his eyes, Nick could still see the glass sparkle as that inkwell caught the rays of the morning sun streaming in the window. He’d sure never seen anything like it at home—or anywhere else, for that matter. It was just an ordinary object, a container for ink. But he couldn’t help wondering where it had come from. Someone, far away, must have worked hard to make it so beautiful.
All at once the door behind him opened. A Chinese man emerged and nodded. Without thinking, Nick slipped inside. Bushy Brows wouldn’t think of looking for him here.
Nick took a few steps and stopped uncertainly. It seemed safe—no one was in sight. He tiptoed behind a shelf toward the back of the store. Maybe he could hide here a little while and then slip out the back into the alley.
Suddenly Nick heard a noise. Sprinting quickly across the wooden floor, he entered a small storeroom in the back. He crouched behind some barrels full of peanuts and held his breath. He didn’t think he’d been spotted.
Nick heard voices—a customer must have come in. But Nick couldn’t understand a word of the language that was spoken.
Maybe I should run for it, Nick thought. On the other hand, what was the chance of Bushy Brows finding him? Better to stay put.
Into the Firestorm Page 1