Jim asked in a disappointed voice,
and Little Tom swallowed hard like there was a tear in his throat and
said, "Daddy's not home again. He--he's--not home," Tom finished, and
I knew what he meant, but he was ashamed to say it, and it probably
was that his pop had got drunk again and was maybe right that very
minute in the Sugar Creek jail.

"Where's Bob?" Little Jim wanted to know, and Tom stood there in the
half-open kitchen door and said, "He got up early and went over to
Shorty Long's; they're going to hunt pigeons."

I knew what that meant, 'cause sometimes some of the farmers in our
neighborhood had too many pigeons, and the Sugar Creek Gang would go
to their different barns and shut all the doors and windows quick and
help catch the pigeons for them, and you could get sometimes fifteen
cents apiece for them if you sold them.

If Shorty Long and Bob had gone hunting pigeons together, it meant
that Shorty Long wouldn't want to go to Sunday School with us when we
stopped at their house after awhile to get his mother to take her to
church with us. It also meant that Shorty and Bob had maybe decided to
like each other, since neither one of them liked the Sugar Creek Gang.

Little Tom didn't know what I'd been thinking, so he piped up and said
to Little Jim, "I'm sorry I can't go, but I can't. You tell Teacher
I'll try to come next week, and tell her I studied my Sunday School
lesson, and--wait a minute!" Tom turned and, leaving the door open,
hurried back inside the house, opened the door to their living-room
and went in, like he had gone after something. He shut the door after
him real quick, like he was trying to keep the cold air in the kitchen
from getting into that other room.

In that split minute while the door was open, though, I saw that they
had a big double bed in their living-room and that Tom's mother was in
it, all covered up, and that there was a small table beside her bed
with a glass half full of water, but that the room looked kinda
topsyturvy like the housekeeping was being done by a boy instead of a
mother.

A second later Tom was out again, shutting the door behind him, and
coming right straight to Little Jim and me, and holding out his hand
and saying, "Here--here's my offering." He handed me a small offering
envelope like the ones we used in our church, and without trying to, I
noticed it had two very small coins in it, and I guessed they were
dimes, which maybe Tom himself had saved from