The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell Page A

the Cold War would be a great burden, but the name became mine and I’ve never wished for another.) His wife was Masha, small and light, and from the first she seemed pleased to tend John Paul and renewed by his presence.
    Mr. Cherenko said that night, “This garden for me and the woman to eat, yes? Yes? But we don’t wish hunger on none, boy. Hunger not mischief, we feed. Hunger you got, boy. Not mischief. We wish hunger on none.”
    John Paul was fed heavy dark bread and a soured sort of soup that was then exotic and challenging to him but would become a favorite, and carried to a back room, laid in a small brass bed with the shape of another relaxed into the mattress. Cherenko stood over the wounded boy and opened his arms to indicate the space. “Our son lived. War came, he goes, there’s cross stuck in dirt over somewhere don’t mean to us nothing. Settle here, boy, to sleep. Go goodnight.”
    And from that moment John Paul, with no real discussion of the matter or concern about legalities, did stay with the Cherenkos as a replacement son, lived with them for years until his own war arrived and called him abroad, staying on there even after Alma was in 1938 deemed well enough to be hired away from the Work Farm by July Teague, and came back into the neighborhood of his life.

M ae Poltz and her children were run from town within weeks of the blast when Freddy’s true name and past became known. A city boy called Plug who’d served Egan’s Rats and rented the building had to be somehow involved, that’s the sort of senseless devilment men like him were wont to amuse themselves with when uncaged, but his wife kept her lip buttoned and couldn’t be coaxed to repeat the rhyme nor reason of the horror and make a clean breast of it. She claimed ignorance, and never wavered from her claim, but that much ignorance of the man she’d married and shared her midnights with had to be willful, just had to be, nothing else rang true, and she and her toddler brood were escorted to the train depot on a day of bleating weather and given tickets to a whistle-stop in central Kansas.
    “If ever you think about coming back—think on it some more and don’t.”
    When the Second Citizens’ Commission Inquiry was called (after months of agitation from motivated pests named Dr. and Mrs. Mark Shelton, Haven McCandless, Bud and Frieda Johnston, Ted Steinkuhler, July Powell Teague, and Alma DeGeer Dunahew) and scheduled for December ninth of 1941 (never held, never rescheduled) in order to deal with long-dormant but revived anger concerning still-unanswered questions and haunting rumors of provable guilt that were again reaching critical mass, Mae (now Mae Claar) was found in Fort Collins, Colorado, and asked to return. Her response suggested the commission members were out of their cotton-picking minds if they thought she’d willingly return, but she added, “We all know who it was got seen running the wrong way that night. When she blew up, everybody in town who could run did run to the fire and help except this one tall man in a white shirt and necktie, who when the sky got bright was seen by two housewives at the least and one maid and one old doctor jumping over fences and running real desperate through backyards going the exact opposite way from all the rest. Why is it we never have heard from him?”
    The second summer after the blast, in the flat meadow across Howl Creek where the Skateboard Park is now, a Saturday baseball game was in progress in midafternoon, and one of the Heaton brothers hit a homer that rolled between distant saplings and down the bank into the creek bed. Two barefoot squirts on hand watching were sent to retrieve the ball and came back fast, without it.
    “Where’s the ball?”
    “Somebody’s down there.”
    “So what?”
    “His head is not on him right and he’s got his face stuck in the water.”
    Both teams and all three spectators made quick time to the bluff above the creek for a look.