8. Evening: December 15, 1933

The house was two rooms deep:
Sitting room, the kitchen,
Two bedrooms at the side.
They’d pulled up their chairs,
Tom and Riah. On the table,
Pencils whittled sharp,
Paper scraps
Thomas ciphered on;
Also, printed white sheets
James knew to be “the papers”
For the farm.
Crosslegged on the floor,
James stole lamplight,
Doodling on his pad.

“Trim that wick!
They don’t come free!
No use wasting.”
Dad’s mad, James thought, but–
I’m good today. James
Pricked his eraser with his thumb,
Crescent dents:
Surely, he was not at fault,
To blame.
Riah trimmed the wick,
And dimmed the light.
No one asked if he could see.

They were figuring–
What could it be?
James eyed Tom.
Tom wrote columns, numbers,
Growing stacks–
Plus signs, two dark strokes–
Bearing down hard
For the decimal marks.
Calculating once, twice,
Once again,
Pencil stub inched
Down the margin line.
Doublechecking totals–
Suddenly, Tom’s bony fingers
Scooped, crumpled up the page,
And made a wad.

Three more times James
Watched him wrestling numbers,
Scratching sums out,
Setting them aside.
In the end, a litter of tight balls.
All the space in front of Tom
Was blank.
Thomas held his pencil
In the air,
Looking vaguely off
Toward something far.
Then he said:
“We’re going to lose it.”