Free Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary D. Schmidt Page B

Turner, then drew the eyes of his audience back. "This town is on the brink of economic collapse. Shipyards folding, one and then another. Families who have worked those yards for generations, who have used the hands that God saw fit to give them to build up a whole world, may see those hands empty. And what will this town be then? What opportunities will young Turner find then? I am a man of business, and I may not form the eloquent sentences of a preacher. But I say this: the day is coming when this town will perish, and young Buckminster will have nothing. Nothing at all."

    Turner thought it was rather hard to be used as an example. He decided he should head up the stairs.
    He did not make it.
    "Come in here, young Buckminster," Mr. Stonecrop called. "Come on in here and talk to your father." He held out his arm to him as though he were looking for a stage prop to be delivered.
    Turner went in, slowly, warily, feeling about as eager to go in as black molasses to flow on a wintry day.
    "Gentlemen," Mr. Stonecrop said, "this is the boy we've all heard about. Son, is it true, your running around naked in Mrs. Cobb's house?" He draped his arm around Turner's shoulders and drew him in, into his strength and power and presence. Turner felt as if he were moving in close to a mountain. But when he looked up into Mr. Stonecrop's face, he shuddered. Mr. Stonecrop was laughing, and his mouth was pulled into a grin, but his eyes were as dead as marbles, almost as if there were nothing behind them. He was like someone out of a ghost story, and Turner tried to draw away.
    Mr. Stonecrop held him.
    "Son, tell me, is that true?"
    Turner looked at his father. His face was pulled, too, but not into a grin.
    "Mr. Stonecrop, it's not true, what you heard."
    Deacon Hurd began to laugh. "The way I heard it, you were trying to wash blood off your shirt. You know, son, you'll learn that living in Maine is living more like a man than down in some easy city. But you have to be smart, too. You don't want to start throwing punches at someone a whole lot bigger than you—not if you don't want to get knocked around."

    Turner felt his hands start to ball into fists; he put them in his pockets. He felt the slight laughter of the men in the room wash over him like a foaming wave lapping over a crab. He did not look at his father; he did not want to know if he, too, was laughing. But he did look at Deacon Hurd. "How's Willis's nose?
    "Willis's nose? Fine."
    His voice tight.
    "Last time I saw it, it seemed pushed over to the side."
    More laughter in the room, but not from Deacon Hurd.
    "Willis's nose is fine."
    "Gentlemen," said Mr. Stonecrop. "Back to the issue. Reverend Buckminster, we came here to ask you to help us rescue the town. You've seen the squalor on Malaga. There isn't a soul on that island who isn't a drunk or a thief. We tried educating them. We built a school and hired a teacher, all at the town's expense. But that didn't do a single bit of good."
    "And besides," added Sheriff Elwell, "teaching those people is like teaching dogs to walk on their hind legs. All they know is living off others."
    "I'm not sure but that it wouldn't be the Lord's work to put them somewhere they can be safe," said Mr. Stonecrop. "A place where they can be cared for."
    "And since they haven't a one of them got a deed, there's no reason we can't." Sheriff Elwell smiled and held his lapels open so that Turner could see his pistol.
    Turner tried again to draw away, but Mr. Stonecrop would have none of it. Turner felt the man's arm lean more heavily upon him, as if the cue to use him hadn't come yet.
    "There will be those in town who insist that we should keep the school up, that we should spend even more money than we have from the town treasury on other schemes well-intentioned but foolish. You will hear talk of Christian charity and neighborliness and so on. We've tried it before, to no effect. But some people—say, the saintly Newtons—will come to you,