CHAPTER VI[ToC]
I BECOME A DAY LABORER
That night Ruth and I had a talk about the boy. We both came back from our walk, with him more on our minds than anything else. He had been interested in everything and had asked about a thousand questions and gone to bed eager to be out on the street again the next day. We knew we couldn't keep him cooped up in the flat all the time and of course both Ruth and I were going to be too busy to go out with him every time he went. As for letting him run loose around these streets with nothing to do, that would be sheer foolhardiness. It was too late in the season to enroll him in the public schools and even that would have left him idle during the long summer months.
We talked some at first of sending him off into the country to a farm. There were two or three families back where Ruth had lived who might be willing to take him for three or four dollars a week and we had the money left over from the sale of our household goods to cover that. But this would mean the sacrifice of our emergency fund which we wished to preserve more for the boy's sake than our own and it would mean leaving Ruth very much alone.
"I'll do it, Billy," she said bravely, "but can't we wait a day or two before deciding? And I think I can make time to get out with him. I'll get up earlier in the morning and I'll leave my work at night until after he's gone to bed."
So she would. She'd have worked all night to keep him at home and then gone out with him all day if it had been possible. I saw it would be dragging the heart out of her to send the boy away and made up my mind right then and there that some other solution must be found for the problem. Good Lord, after I'd led her down here the least I could do was to let her keep the one. And to tell the truth I found my own heart sink at the suggestion.
"What do the boys round here do in the summer?" she asked.