Read Online Cy in Chains by David L. Dudley - Free Book Online Page A

What’s it to you?”
    â€œDo yo’ thinkin’ somewhere else. They’s a long line waitin’ to get in.”
    Outside, boys were washing up by the pump. The boys from the other bunkhouse appeared, following Jack, their leader. They joined the line for the outhouse. Jess and Oscar poured water into a tub and stood by Billy while he stripped off his pants and started rinsing them, trying not to let anyone see his parts.
    â€œCy, see if you can get some clean britches for Billy, okay?”
    It annoyed Cy when Jess asked him to do anything. Just because Jess was the head boy in their bunkhouse didn’t give him the right to give orders. Whenever Cy was asked to do something, he told the next fellow to do it. He, in turn, would push the job off onto the next smaller boy. Everyone knew the order: Jess, Cy, Ring, Oscar, West, Davy, and so on all the way down to Mouse. Billy would quickly discover that his place was even below Mouse because he was the new kid. That’s where he would stay, unless he could fight his way up the ladder and bully or bribe younger or weaker boys to do his bidding.
    Cy cornered West, who had already found his place in the morning roll-call line and was standing, looking straight ahead at nothing in particular.
    Cy poked his shoulder. “Jess say for you to go get the new kid some britches.”
    â€œYou mean he told
you
to do it, and now you passin’ it on to me.”
    â€œCould be. Don’t matter, though. I’s tellin’ you to go. See if Rosalee got any.”
    West shrugged Cy’s hand away and trudged toward the cookhouse, muttering to himself.
    â€œYou best watch yo’ mouth,” Cy called after him.
    West knocked at the cookhouse door, and Rosalee answered. She looked annoyed—she didn’t like to be disturbed when she was cooking, if that’s what you’d call it. Like Ring, Rosalee was much more white than colored, but she too was doomed to live her life as a black person. She wasn’t pretty, and she wasn’t young. Sometimes she seemed in a fog, and certain mornings her speech was slurred and she was only half awake. “A drunk” was Oscar’s verdict.
    She might have been a drunk, but Rosalee wasn’t a prisoner, even though she lived at the camp. She and her little boy, Pook, had a room behind the kitchen, but she clearly spent some of her nights with Cain, because Pook looked just like him: the same thin, wavy hair, gray eyes, small ears, and stocky build. Even so, Cain never let on the boy was his.
    Sometimes Rosalee sneaked West some extra food when she thought no one was looking. Cy sometimes wondered why she would do that, but she had her favorites. No one minded West’s luck, because he shared whatever he got. That made him popular, that plus his sassy mouth, which could make anyone laugh.
    Rosalee disappeared and came back with a pair of uniform pants. They were dirt-stained and too big for Billy, but he wouldn’t have to wear wet pants all day or go half naked.
    As the boys finished in the outhouse, they lined up in their two gangs, Jess’s boys facing Jack’s across the small patch of red clay in the middle of the camp.
    Jack strutted down the line of “his” boys, poking and threatening, trying to act like a big man. Prescott and Stryker didn’t mind letting Jack do some of their dirty work, but Cy had seen him get cuffed when the white men thought he was being too big for his britches. That just made him meaner.
    Prescott and Stryker stood by the cookhouse door, sipping coffee from tin cups. The aroma made Cy’s mouth water. Of all the many things he missed about Aunt Dorcas’s kitchen, her strong coffee was first. Inside the cookhouse, Rosalee was finishing getting breakfast. The smell of baking cornpone was in the air, and that made Cy think of Aunt Dorcas, too. Of home. But he blotted out those thoughts. If you let them get hold of you, you’d go