Chapter Text
“Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten ,” The gruff Mr. Yang counted out the last of Cole’s payment for that day and handed the coins over to the young boy. “Now scram .”
Cole grabbed the coins and ran out of the lumber mill, jogging up the muddy slope of a nearby hill. He glanced back at his workplace for a moment, trying to keep from slipping on the wet grass.
The Mill looked the same as it always did. A massive gray building rose from the banks of the Columbia River. Inside were housed the eighteen massive water-powered saws that cut timber so it could be shipped. Words were printed on the side of the buildings, which read; Cascade Rains West Lumber Co. Cascade Rains was the town where Cole and his brothers lived.
Nestled in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains on the Columbia River, the town was the perfect place for a logging business, which provided most of the income for families living there. Cole turned back towards the town and headed down the streets towards the general store.
A light mist dusted the air, and night was falling. Cole worked from six in the morning to six in the evening to support his family, and the brightness of October was just beginning to yield to the brown of November. Cole was only thirteen years old.
Congress Discussing Changes to Child Labor Laws. Read one of the newspapers tacked up on the side of the store. Cole paused to look at the date on the paper; October 30th, 1930 . It was a Friday, not that that had anything to do for Cole, who worked Saturdays as well.
Entering the general store, Cole looked around for a while. He glanced down at his hands, where he was holding his ten quarters firmly clenched in his fist. Ten quarters. Two dollars and fifty cents.
He was lucky. Other companies, like the Hamilton Timber Co., paid their child workers even less. Though Cole was a child, Mr. Yang was a fair boss to him. He paid Cole half of what other sawmill owners did.
Cole glanced at the salt pork and the beans, then back at his money. Too expensive. He sighed. He’d have to go with bread again, and hopefully this time there’d be enough to go around.
One year ago, in February, lumber was not in as high demand, causing wages to drop. Cole had barely made enough money in a week to buy one loaf of bread. Those nights had been agony, but seeing his family, especially his youngest ‘brother’ Jay crying himself to sleep over hunger was torture.
Cole paused and then thought back to the day he had first met Jay.
Lou Brookstone was a famous dancer. He was a famous singer, too. He was good at dancing and singing. And then, he was dead.
Which was why Cole ran away from Master Chen’s Home For Troubled Orphans. Lous Brookstone was Cole’s father, but when he died in a freak stage accident (a water pipe had burst and the ceiling had collapsed) his son Cole was left on his own. Master Chen’s Home had seemed like an ideal orphanage at the time, but Cole knew that under Chen’s smiling face was a Textiles Factory, where the orphans slaved day and night producing cloth for Chen’s business.
Cole ran away at the ripe age of ten with another orphan named Zane. Both had fled to the railroads and headed west to find work. Unfortunately, farms in the midwest were not hiring little ten-year-olds, which was how, after a year of doing odd jobs to pay for food and railroad fare, Cole and Zane had ended up in Spokane Falls, Washington.
It was there they met Jay.
Cole had bought a sandwich, but when an interesting coin had caught his eye, he had left the paper-wrapped sandwich under a stone on the riverbed, before going off to explore. When he returned, however, his sandwich had been stolen!
Fortunately, the culprit had left a pair of footprints in the mud on the riverbank, allowing Cole to easily track down the sandwich-thief.
Following the footprints, he eventually cornered a little boy in a back alley, who was clutching his sandwich in one hand, terrified. He was wearing a tattered blue shirt and shorts and whimpered when Cole approached him.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” He cried, holding out the sandwich. “You can have it back! I didn’t eat it!”
Cole approached him and looked down at the trembling younger boy. “Why’d you take my sandwich?”
The younger boy’s shaking slowed and he looked up at Cole, a bit confused as if no one had ever asked him that before. “I… was hungry.”
Cole stared down at the other child for a moment, before he took the sandwich and divided it into three pieces. One he wrapped up in the paper, to save for Zane. The other piece he handed to the other little boy.
“Thank you?” The boy took the sandwich from Cole and stared at it for a long time before taking a bite.
Cole smiled at him. “What’s your name?”
“Jay,” Answered the other child, scarfing down the sandwich. “And before you ask, I don’t got no parents.”
That was the day when Cole gained a second little brother. Jay was a little brother in the ways that Zane wasn’t. Jay was small and thin, with darling blue eyes that people fawned over. He had good ideas and was smart, but it did come with a price. Jay was only seven years old. He couldn’t work.
Cole snapped out of his memories to buy a loaf of bread. Sure, a factory owner might hire a child that young, but there was no way Cole was going to let little Jay work in one of those dangerous, dirty factories. He knew what the jobs of young children were. Being so small, they could climb up inside a machine to replace a broken belt or mend a cog, but that wasn’t anywhere near safe.
Back at Master Chen’s, Cole had seen a boy named Jacob torn apart by one of the machines there, and thinking of Jay in the same place made Cole want to cover his head and scream for hours.
No. Cole did all he could so Jay would have a semi-normal childhood. As normal as a homeless orphan in a tiny logging town in southwestern Washington State could have.
Purchasing the bread, Cole headed through the town to an abandoned farmhouse on the edges of Cascade Rains.
He approached the farmhouse and lifted a broken board at the base, before lying down on his stomach and squirming through the hole. Then he crossed the empty cellar of the abandoned building before coming up to a ladder that leads through the ceiling. He climbed up towards where feeble candlelight was shining down the cracks in the floorboards.
It was Zane who had discovered the farmhouse. Jay and Cole had followed him through the hole in the cellar and climbed up the old ladder to the first floor of the building.
“I don’t know,” Cole had told Zane. “It seems kind of unstable.”
“Check out this view!” Jay had injected before Zane could respond, pulling the mothball-ridden curtains open to reveal a gorgeous view down to the town, with the river and majestic mountains in the background.
Jay had fallen in love with the farmhouse, it was close enough to Cole’s workplace, and Zane was happy as long as his brothers were happy.
Cole smiled at his memory then climbed up the last few rungs of the ladder to the first floor. He looked around. Zane was sitting and looking out the window, and Jay and Kai were sprawled out over what passed as the bed; a pile of blankets in the middle of the floor.
No one knew Kai’s whole story, not because he never told anyone, but just because he kept changing it every time someone asked him. The first story was that he was a runaway from Canada and was raised by bears, and the whole thing went downhill from there.
The only thing Cole knew for sure about Kai was that Kai had just… shown up… one day and everyone had accepted him. It was what they did. No one had questioned it.
“What do you like best to eat?” Jay asked Kai, stretching out across the bed.
“Apple pie,” Kai answered, squirming a bit. “And roast beef and green beans. You?”
“Crumb cake,” Jay nodded to himself. “And pumpkin pie and acorn squash and-” He spotted Cole across the room and interrupted himself. “COLE!”
Cole smiled at Jay. “Hi, Jay.”
Kai sat up, looking disgruntled and Zane turned away from the window. All three of them approached Cole happily, who sat down at the table.
‘What’d you get this time?” Jay asked, bouncing on his knees since he was too short to sit up to the table.
“Some bread,” Cole answered, opening the package and dividing the bread into four pieces, which he passed out.
Kai and Zane struck up a conversation that had something to do with bears and lightning bugs, and Jay munched on his bread happily. He was a talkative kid when he wanted to be, but right now it appeared he was content with his bread.
Cole stared down at the chunk of bread in his hands, then looked up at his brothers. Crying rang in his ears, the same way it had done last February when they had almost starved to death in the cold. With a sigh, Cole realized that Jay needed the bread more than he did, and when Jay wasn’t looking, Cole slipped it onto his plate.
Later, a sharp pang of hunger pierced Cole’s midsection, but he ignored it. All four of them were in bed. Kai was pressed back-to-back with Zane, and Jay was curled up against Kai. When Cole had come to lay down in bed, Jay had let out a soft, satisfied sigh and squirmed a little until he was pressed against both Cole and Kai, and was now happily asleep.
Cole smiled softly, but hunger panged through his midsection again. He swallowed, then looked down at his brothers, knowing that they didn’t have to suffer the same torment. Not now, not this winter, and hopefully not ever.
Jay made a noise in his sleep and moved against Cole, who smiled a little wider. Jay wasn’t hungry. Kai wasn’t hungry. Zane wasn’t hungry.
Cole was hungry, but he would suffer for his brothers like this any day. As long as they were safe, he had no problem going hungry.