The Sword and the Scythe

Chapter 18: Mama

1899

Leroy woke up before the sun rose to leave for work. He got dressed in the dark, not wanting to bother with fumbling around for a match to light the single dwindling candle they had left. His mother wasn't yet home from working the streets; she never came home before the sunrise. Wrapping his thin coat around him as tight as he could, he took a deep breath and headed out into the snowy streets of New York. He hurried out of Harlem to the printing presses in the center of Manhattan. Business was always slow before the sun came up, but it picked up in the few hours after sunrise as more people flooded the streets on their way to work.

Sometime around noon he ran out of papers. He tucked his satchel into the pocket of his coat and grabbed his cap and pulled it down to hide most of his face. He hurried through the snow to the Upper East Side. Hovering in doorways and between buildings, shivering from the cold, he watched for distracted people in fine clothes. Then he'd scurry up behind them and rob them of just enough to be worth his time, but not so much that they'd notice right away. In just a few hours he'd have enough cash and trinkets to make double what he had earned in the morning selling papers.

If it was up to him, he'd quit selling papers and pickpocket full time. He'd make more money that way. But his mother needed to think he was out doing something better than that, and he didn't enjoy lying to her. At least this way he wasn't lying—just withholding part of the truth.

It might kill his mother if she found out how he made most of his money. She was protective of him—more so than he thought she should be. There were lots of other kids he knew that had jobs working in factories. Leroy would be fine with taking a job like that where he could take on more hours, but his mother refused. She didn't even like for him to sell papers—and forbade him from setting foot off Manhattan. His mother had told him that she couldn't bear the thought of him roaming around the entire city, despite the fact that they needed every cent they could get.

He wasn't a boy with delusions of grandeur by any means; all he wanted was a comfortable life. Their current situation was anything but. Leroy might have only been ten, but he felt a hell of a lot older. It broke his heart that his mother sold herself in order to provide what little they had. That was why he needed to get a real job and help her out. Unless he could find a way to provide for the both of them, he would have to make a choice between having the kind of life he'd always dreamed of and his mother being a part of his life.

Luckily for him, that hadn't yet been necessary.

A few hours before sunset, he headed home with a pocketful of money. His mother was sitting on the bed eating a bowl of soup. When she saw him come in, her world-weary eyes lit up. Her beautiful face looked much older than she was due to all the heartache and misfortune. She pushed back her dark hair and gestured for Leroy to grab a bowl of soup and sit next to her. "How's my beautiful boy today?"

"I did alright today, mother." Looking down into his bowl, he could tell that the soup wasn't much more than water with the few small scraps of meat that had fallen off the bare bones she always got at a discount from the butcher on the corner.

"No but how are you, my little prince?" He sat down with his soup and she wrapped her arm tight around his shoulders.

He suppressed an eye roll, knowing that no royalty lived as they did. She always asked him that question, and he always hated it because he didn't want to lie to her. Was he supposed to tell her how much he despised their poverty? How ashamed he was of it? Or that, even at so young an age, he couldn't stand to see the people with their fine things go on with their lives, being able to replace anything he stole from them with the blink of an eye—things he would never in his life be able to afford to have in the first place.