'The boys' arrived in late summer, to give them time to get settled, and for family life to reach a kind of normal state, and for everyone to get ready for school in the fall. 'The boys', as they were referred to, always meant Greggy, Nelson and Elliot. Sometimes Warren seemed to be included, and sometimes not -- it mostly depended, practically from the start, on who had done something wrong.
During the remaining weeks of summer, Warren took his brothers around the neighborhood, showing them the places he liked best for playing, or for being alone. He introduced them to the kids across the street, and a couple other boys who lived up the hill. The other kids seemed kind of polite, but ill at ease. Warren supposed it was because, in most families, kids didn't just show up, three at a time, from someplace else.
In the house, Warren shared the front blue bedroom with Elliot, and Greggy and Nelson shared the middle room, the pale green one, that you had to walk through, to get to their parents' room. This middle room always seemed darker than the others, and more crowded, because it only had one small window, and the two twin beds had to be arranged to leave a pathway. In Warren's room, there was room for a dresser and an extra chair, and the clothes closet was pretty big. Warren thought things were arranged this way because he was the oldest, but he couldn't be sure.
At the very first, things seemed all right. During the days, Warren and his brothers played outdoors, or in the big unfinished basement, if it was raining out. They would have a quick lunch, which Jane seemed to like fixing for them, and bringing to the brothers sitting at the formica dining room table. Warren liked to trace the soft triangle shapes in the dark grey and pink surface as he ate. The table had an extra section, in case they had guests, and needed more room. It mostly stayed in the hall closet, though, beside the vacuum cleaner.
On Sundays, Warren would lead his brothers on the two-mile walk to the nearest Presbyterian church (in bad weather, their Dad would drive them, but they knew he didn't like to), where they would go to their separate Sunday school rooms, and when that was over, they would all walk back home. Sometimes Elliot would stay at home; he was the shortest, and it was hard for him to keep up. In the early afternoon, the whole family would drive down to Myrna and Sam's restaurant, about five miles away, on the outskirts of downtown McKeesport. Across the street from the restaurant, there was a great dark steel mill, and busy railroad tracks. You would never know there was a river less than half a mile away. There were a lot of trucks driving everywhere too, and Myrna rented rooms on the restaurant's second floor, for drivers who needed someplace to sleep at night.
This Sunday meal was eaten in two of the booths by the restaurant's front windows. The grown-ups would sit at one table -- Warren's father and Jane, Myrna and Saul, and Jane's younger brother Tim. 'The boys' sat together in the next booth. The red upholstery could be sticky in damp hot weather, and Elliott had to strain to reach his food, until Myrna got a phone book for him to sit on. She didn't seem to like the boys as much as Jane did, although Warren couldn't figure out why -- after all, she only saw them once a week, for this big dinner.
Saul did most of the cooking, and there was always plenty to eat, even if what was served seemed strange to Warren and his brothers. The stuffed cabbages were particularly difficult to understand -- having grown up, thus far anyway, on mostly meat loaf and variations of pot roast, the boys all found these translucent, pale green objects, organic-looking in their reddish sauce with sauerkraut mixed in, unappealing. The fact that there was a little knot of meat and rice, tucked away inside the rolled up leaves, seemed to mean something, like a riddle in a fairy tale, but Warren wasn't sure what that meaning was. He was pretty sure it wasn't good, though.
Sometimes, after dinner, the boys were sent out to play in the vacant lot between the restaurant and another business that sold tanks of oxygen and other industrial things. The open flat area was usually full of parked trucks, and there was a sharp kind of gravel underfoot. In the rest of the lot, there were tall weeds, hiding broken cinder blocks and trash. There was an old, neglected apple tree at the end of the lot where the gas tanks were kept, and the boys preferred to play there. It wasn't difficult to turn that twisted tree into almost anything, and the rest of the world around them seemed to vanish. And after they were called inside, when it was getting late, sometimes they stayed overnight at the restaurant, one each in the upstairs rooms, if there weren't truckers asleep. At night, the sky never got dark -- it stayed a moody orange, flaring up sometimes, and then subsiding to that same dull fiery glow. Trains ran all night too, a steady rumbling with the occasional whistle.
And so it went. In September, school began, and Warren and his brothers joined the other kids along their narrow street, climbing the steep hill to the bus stop right at the top. The school was maybe two miles from their house -- though the trip seemed longer, because there were other stops on the way to the school yard -- and Warren had that usual sense of wariness, from having already moved so many times, and having had to meet so many new kids. At this school -- a one-story brick building, newly built -- Warren was going into the 7th grade. Greggy would be in 5th, Nelson in 4th, and Elliot in 2nd. Now things would be normal.
And for a while, they were, almost. Elliot would sometimes pee his bed, and Jane was becoming more and more impatient with this. Because Warren did so well in school. his brothers were scolded for not measuring up to their older brother's achievements. Sometimes the younger boys would fight, or break something, or spill their milk at the dinner table -- things that seemed to be normal on TV, but in this house, the reactions were much more shrill. Because Warren's dad was now working at strange times of the day and night, Jane was left alone with the boys most of the time, and she gradually looked more and more impatient. When something went wrong -- which seemed to happen almost daily as the school year progressed -- she began to behave like a radio with only two volumes: normal, and screaming. This only made Warren and his brothers flinch -- screaming like this, in the orphanage, was always followed by a beating.
Suddenly and quickly, things began to fall apart. Just after that first Christmas together as an entire family, Jane realized that she was going to have a baby. Myrna and Saul were overjoyed -- Jane was their oldest, and their only daughter, and her new child would be their first 'real' grandchild. But at home, there was more tension than usual, and Jane seemed to use the loud volume setting more often. School, for Warren, continued to be a shelter, and he longed for weekends to be over, so he could return to the safest place available.
And then, as Jane was gaining weight from the new baby, Warren's father came home from his job in Pittsburgh, much earlier than usual, and took Jane into their bedroom. Warren could hear crying, and his father's high, sharp voice, almost as loud as Jane's now. That night, dinner was silent, with bitterness in the dark dining room. Greggy asked for another piece of bread, and Jane yelled at him -- at all of them, really -- that they were just going to have to learn to do without from now on, because their father had just lost his job. Her voice was like knives now, and Warren's dad sat silent, looking at his plate.
Warren clung to school now, more than ever. Being at home was fearful. Mealtimes were especially terrible. Warren's father barely ate anything at all, and Jane watched Warren and his brothers as though she was counting every bite they took, of the meals that shrank from day to day. Four boys to feed. Four boys who were, really, someone else's. Four boys who, every day it seemed, were more of a burden. Warren started having trouble with his school work.
One spring evening, Warren's parents went out, leaving him in charge of his brothers, with instructions to get everyone into bed by nine. Having long since learned how vitally important it was to be obedient, Warren followed his instructions to the letter. Greggy and Nelson went to bed in their pale green room. Warren and Elliot went to bed in the room painted blue. Warren worried that his youngest brother might wet the bed again.
Later that night, Warren woke up. His parents had come home, and they were yelling in another room, and he thought he heard Greggy's voice, and someone else crying. The crying got louder, and Warren figured out that his brothers had gotten out of bed, and they had been doing something bad, and now there was going to be more trouble. The next day, on their way up the hill to the bus stop, Warren asked Greggy what had happened. 'We were hungry,' Greggy said. So he and Nelson had gotten out of bed, gone to the kitchen, and found a box of saltine crackers. They were so busy eating, that they didn't hear our parents come in, and... well, Warren knew the rest.
When school was over for the day, Warren didn't want to get on the bus to go back home. But what else could he and his brothers do? Their stop was the last on the route. They walked together down the steep hill to their home.
Jane was in the master bedroom. Warren's dad was in the basement, doing something at his workbench. The boys changed out of their school clothes, and then sat together at the dining room table, doing their homework. Sometimes Greggy would ask Warren a question, in a hoarse whisper, and Warren tried to answer without making any noise at all. When their homework was all done, they continued to sit quietly in the dining room. Warren drew pictures of swans and horses on a piece of tablet paper.
Jane came out of her bedroom to get dinner ready, and screamed at the boys for sitting in the dining room, when it was going to be time to eat in a few minutes. They gathered their books and papers, and went to their bedrooms. In a few minutes, it was time to go back to the table, for another silent, meager meal.
With the meal finished and when Warren and Greggy had finished washing and drying the dishes, their father told the boys to get ready for bed, even though it was barely 7 pm. When they'd put on their pajamas, he called them into the living room. He had a big paper bag in his hands. Jane was sitting on the couch, looking out the front window. The sun was just beginning to set.
'Since we can't trust you boys to behave yourselves,' Warren's dad said, 'we're going to have to start a new regime around here. Come with me.' He led his sons into the pale green bedroom, and told Greggy and Nelson to get into bed -- but not under the covers yet. Then he reached into the paper bag, and pulled out two lengths of metal chain -- the kind you'd use for walking a dog, maybe, if you didn't have a nice leash. He pulled out four small padlocks, the kind that need a key. While Greggy and Nelson lay in bed, and Warren and Elliot stood watching, their father looped one end of a length of chain around a leg of Greggy's bed, and padlocked it into place. Then he took the other end, and looped it, tight, around Greggy's ankle, and clipped another lock into place. Then he went through the same operation with Nelson.
'Come here,' he said, and Warren and Elliot went with their father into the pale blue room. 'Lie down.' Elliot got onto his bed, and his father repeated the shackling. Warren felt dizzy and sick to his stomach.
But the paper bag was empty now. And instead of securing Warren to his narrow bed, Warren's father handed his oldest son three small keys. 'I'm putting you in charge,' he said. 'Every weekday, as soon as your brothers are done with their homework, they are to get into bed, and you will chain them there, just like I showed you. And you will not unlock them until it's time to get up for school in the morning.'
And this is how it was. Warren kept the keys in the drawer of the nightstand between his bed and Elliot's. The second night, as Warren was locking the chain around his youngest brother's pale ankle, Elliot begged him to make the loop big enough to get his foot free. 'I don't want to pee the bed, Whizzy. I'll be quiet in the bathroom, I promise.' Quietly, Warren refitted the chain, to make sure there was enough room for an easy escape. Then he put the keys back into the drawer, and went to sleep.
These are things that happened, just at the very beginning of the bad time.
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