Free Sarny by Gary Paulsen Page B

couldn’t help smiling. “And ours. We’ve got a bath. Inside.” Was hard not to take on with it. I never in all my days thought anything like this was real and for me to be living in it—was hard to not take on with it. Inside bath. My Lord.
    Miss Laura she went to one of the doors and opened it. “Here, see?”
    Stuff in there didn’t seem real. Big copper tub with handles at one end, some kind of seat with a hole in the top—I knew what it was for but didn’t see how it worked, where it all went—and sink with a looking glass over it.
    “What are the handles for?” Lucy asked. I wanted to but thought I’d already asked enough.
    “Handles … oh, you mean the faucets. Those are for water. One for hot and one for cold. There’s a large tank on the roof, and water is pumped up there for the apartments. In the basement there’s a boiler that keeps it hot for the hot-water faucets.”
    “You mean you just turn that handle and you’ve got hot water?” I couldn’t help myself. “That’s all you do?”
    “Try it. The one on the left.”
    I turned it. Wrong way of course, then the right way. Took a minute but then it was sohot it hurt my hand. Turned it off. “I never thought there could be such a thing. In the quarters we had to heat water in the big cook-pot over the fire.”
    Miss Laura she held up her hand. “There are no more quarters. Ever. From now on you won’t speak of them, and tonight you will both have a hot bath with French perfumed bubble soap.”
    She left the room and opened another door. “This will be where you three sleep—the two of you and Tyler Two, until we can find him a home.”
    We looked in the door. There was a bed and a table with a chair and another kind of half bed with a back on it—she called it a couch—and an oil lamp on the table with a milk-white chimney and there was a pointed thing in a stand on the table with some dark fluid in a little jar.
    “What’s that?” I asked. “With the sharp end.”
    “Why, it’s a pen. There is paper in the drawer of the table. You can write letters if you wish, and Bartlett will send them for you.”
    I went to the table and pulled the drawer. Clean white sheets of paper. Pure clean. I pulled one out and put it on the middle part of the table. Took the pen and tried to make a mark but nothing came.
    “You have to dip the point of the pen in the ink,” Miss Laura said. “Just a bit on the end.”
    I dipped it. Black ink, black as me, and I wrote on the paper. Wrote BAG. In all big letters. Couldn’t help it. Wrote BAG.
    “What is that?” Miss Laura asked.
    “It’s the first word I ever wrote,” I said. “First word I knew. BAG. Learned to read in a pit school.”
    Little sound and I turned and she was smiling at me, her eyes misting. She touched my arm and then she took me and hugged me and pretty soon Lucy she was there and the three of us were hugging and were my children there and Delie and Nightjohn and Martin I wouldn’t ever have been happier.
    Want to talk more on that bath. That whole first night in New Orleans.
    We unpacked and Miss Laura she sent out for food—I never heard of such a thing. They brought shrimp and chicken and red beans and rice in metal buckets and we ate at the table off plates you could see light through and drank something Miss Laura called a cordial in crystal glasses that caught light from everywhere some way. Tyler Two he went to sleep on the bed in our room. I got to giggling after drinking the cordial—Lucy she got plain silly—and when we’d cleaned up the dishes inthe kitchen where there was a sink and more hot water for washing, Miss Laura she said, “All right, who’s first for the bath?”
    I didn’t want to be a hog for it so I held back but Lucy she didn’t want to appear hoggish either and finally Miss Laura she took a straw from the broom and broke it in two pieces and held them out partly hidden in her hand.
    “Short straw goes first.”
    I got the short straw and