Coburn watched with his arms folded over his chest, enjoying the spectacle nearly as much as he had enjoyed the bidding.
Arthur let them watch.
That was the part that unsettled some of them later, when they thought back on it.
The boy did not hurry to escape their eyes.
He did not flush.
He did not curse.
He did not beg for a hand.
He worked the safe onto the cart.
He lashed it down with a length of rope.
And through all of it, he wore an expression with no shame in it anywhere.
Only a quiet, terrible patience.
As if he and the steel had an appointment none of them were invited to.
The whole county had decided he would fail.
Most of them had put that certainty into laughter and spent it freely.
They did not know about his ears.
They did not know whose ears they had been before they were his.
They only knew the price.
The way Dale Coburn only ever knew the price.
Arthur took up the cart handles, leaned into the weight, and started the long walk home with his father’s safe.
The walk home should have taken twenty minutes.
It took the better part of two hours.
Four hundred pounds does not roll.
It crawls.
And a handcart built for feed sacks complains under that kind of load with every turn of its wheels.
Arthur kept to the shoulder of the county road as the afternoon stretched long and gold.
He leaned his whole weight into the handles.
Every fifty yards, he stopped to let his arms quit shaking before starting again.
He was nearly to the edge of town, where the county road became Mercer Street and gravel gave way to cracked pavement, when he heard an engine slow behind him.
A pickup.
Arthur knew the three young men in it before the truck even pulled alongside.
They were the sons of Coburn’s foreman and the cousins of his hands.
The kind of boys who had grown up understanding their last names came with permission.
The driver, a heavyset boy named Cody Pruitt, leaned out the window with his elbow on the door.
He coasted beside Arthur at walking pace, slower than any truck wants to go, so the engine bucked and grumbled beneath him.
“There he is,” Cody called. “The richest fool in Harlan County.”
Arthur did not look at them.
He had heard already that afternoon what the town had decided to believe.
He heard it again in the way Cody said it.
A Callaway boy with ninety dollars.
Where does a boy like that get ninety dollars?
The question was not really a question.
It was an accusation dressed up in a shrug.
By supper, it would be settled fact in half the kitchens in town that Arthur must have stolen the money from somewhere, because the alternative — that he had swept floors for two years to save it — was not nearly as satisfying.
The truck nosed ahead and swung onto the shoulder, angling across his path.
Arthur had to stop.
The three of them got out slowly and stood in a loose half circle around the cart.
They did not lay a hand on him.
That was not quite the kind of thing they were.
But Cody put one boot on the lip of the cart and shoved the safe.
The whole thing rocked hard enough that Arthur had to throw his weight against the handles to keep it from tipping into the ditch.
“Careful,” Arthur said.
It was the only word he gave them.
“Careful,” Cody repeated, grinning.
He gave the safe another push, lighter this time, just to watch Arthur scramble.
“What you got in here anyway? Your daddy leave you something?”
One of the others snorted.
“Heard your daddy went into the Beaumont to clean the place out, and the Lord turned the lights off on him. That what you’re after? Finish the job he started?”
The words were meant to land somewhere soft.
They did.
Arthur felt them go in.
But he had a great deal of practice in not showing where he had been hit.
He simply held the cart steady and waited.
He looked past the three boys at the place where the road bent toward home.
After a while, standing in the road taunting a boy who would not taunt back stopped being fun.
Cody took his boot off the cart.
“Enjoy your garbage,” he said.
Then the three of them climbed back into the truck and roared off toward town, leaving Arthur in the settling dust.
Arthur stood for a moment, breathing.
Then he picked up the handles and went on.
By the time he got the safe up the outside stairs to his rented room above the hardware store, the light was nearly gone.
The room was small.
One window.
A bed.
A table he had built himself from crate wood.
When he finally rocked the safe off the cart and let it down, the thud shook dust from the boards.
It took up most of the floor.
Arthur stood over it in the dimness.
This thing he had given two years and every dollar he owned to hold.
For the first time since the auctioneer’s hammer fell, he let himself feel how tired he was.
Then he lit the oil lamp.
The room had electric light, but not light he could afford to run.
He knelt in front of his father’s safe and got to work.
The dial was the first problem.
And a bad one.
The fire had not just blackened the brass.
It had reached inside the mechanism the dial turned.
Arthur understood the moment he laid his fingers on it that the heat had done something cruel in there.
A safe’s combination works through a stack of small wheels.
Each wheel has a notch.
