AFTER THE DUST SETTLED (Countdown to Armageddon Book 2) (27 page)

     
Clara immediately passed me to a young girl named Betsy, who held me up in wonder in the dusty sunlight breaking through the store's east window, and marveled at how I shone.

     
I remember the brilliance of the light, and the warmth of her little girl hands, sticky from the gumball she had been passing back and forth between her mouth and her fingers.

    
Thus began my journey of the hands.

     
I took my first train trip in a rickety old Pullman car, nestled into the pocket of a man named Gustafson Baker. He preferred Gus, although his wife used his full name when she was peeved at him, which she frequently was.

     
The train moved west over the Rockies, into Salt Lake City. I was rooted from my nest in Gustafson’s pocket and dropped into the hand of a young porter named Joe, who helped carry the Bakers' bags from the train into the station. Joe traded me for a piece of penny licorice a couple of days later.

     
I look back at my days in Salt Lake City with fond memories. I got to meet a lot of people and felt the warmth of hundreds of hands, as I was passed around, sometimes several times a day.

     
Sometimes the hands were soft, and smelled of sweet lilac or perfume. Sometimes the hands were grimy and gnarled, covered with dirt or coal dust, or heaven knows what else.

     
Sometimes I would ride around in a genteel lady's pocketbook for days or weeks at a time. The women tended to hang onto me longer than the men did. I suppose that's because in the bottom of a pocketbook I could be easily forgotten.

     
Once I got to go to a magnificent schoolhouse, in the small pocket of a girl of nine named Millicent. She traded me and an old buffalo nickel for a bowl of soup and a biscuit. Then she sat down and ate her lunch amidst a chorus of chatter and giggles, while I sat in a cold cash drawer, waiting to be passed to someone else.

    
By the time I was five years old I had given up on my goal of counting the number of hands I had touched. The quest was borne out of boredom, and I had no idea it would be so many.

    
After the first hundred hands or so I gave up on trying to remember all the names, or the details. After a thousand or so I gave up altogether. Suffice it to say it was a lot of hands in those early years.

    
When I was ten, I was on the move again.

    
This time was not so glorious a journey. I slipped through a hole in the pocket of a farmhand who was loading steers into a cattle car heading south.

    
For days I lay on the hard wooden floor of the car as it lurched along its tracks, occasionally being stepped on by a four-legged beast who had no more idea where we were heading than I did.

    
We wound up in southern California, where the cattle were turned into steaks and I was passed many times from one hand to another. I learned my worth was two tomatoes or one apple. I was in the land of itinerant farmers, most of whom were displaced by the dust bowl and the depression, and moved west in search of a better life.

    
I would go back and forth, from a set of scratched and cracked hands belonging to a picker, to the soft and lotioned hands of a grocer, in exchange for two tomatoes, or an apple, or a pat of wrapped bread. Then given in change back to another set of cracked dry hands.

    
Back and forth, day in and day out. It was monotonous. Sometimes I was passed back and forth in poker games, where I was apparently enough to ante my owner's hand of cards into the game.

    
In 1943 I belonged to a man named John.

    
John had picked me up on a sidewalk in Waco, Texas, where I had been carelessly dropped by a small child whose hands were too tiny to carry a handful of change.

    
John looked at the my date and proclaimed me his lucky penny, since we had been born the same year. I knew it was 1943 because the other pennies being jostled about in John's trouser pockets were marked with that date, and were shiny and new.

     T
hey never stayed around long, though. John carefully picked through his change whenever he paid for something. The shiny pennies would leave, never to be seen again.

    
I would stay with him to bring him luck, he'd say.

    
John worked in an armament factory outside of Waco, making gun barrels, until the day he changed careers and put on an ugly brown uniform. He stopped being John and began being Private Moseley, and he kept that name for the rest of the time I knew him.

    
Private Moseley always rubbed my face before going into battle. For luck, he said. In those chaotic days, scared men in faraway lands did whatever they could to calm their nerves and convince themselves that they would live to see another sunset.

    
The last time I saw Private Moseley we were on a landing craft in rough seas, heading toward something called Omaha Beach. He rubbed my face, said a short prayer, and placed me in his left breast pocket. Then he patted me through the pocket. I heard him tell a buddy that his lucky penny would keep him alive.

     
For two long weeks I sat in a box alongside a handful of other change, some love letters from Mary, three worn and tattered photographs of Private Moseley's mom, Mary and his young nephews with their ear-to-ear grins.

    
I was jostled about in this box, not knowing where I was, or where I was going, but knowing from the constant rocking that I was in the cargo hold of a ship.

     
Later I could feel the vibration of a truck that seemed to labor forever across the dusty and bumpy roads of west Texas. Finally I heard voices, then light, as the box was finally opened.

     
I saw Mary's face, red and puffy, polluted by too many tears rolling from her pretty blue eyes. I saw her clutch the love letters she had written to Private Moseley, to John, so many months before. I felt the warmth of her fingers as she picked me up, his lucky penny, and gazed hard at me.

     
Then in a rage she threw me from the porch swing where she was sitting, and into the soft green grass of her front yard.

     
For many years I sat in the dirt of that front yard, watching seasons come and go. In the spring and summer months, the grass would grow tall, and would block out the sun. Then someone would cut it and I'd see light for a few days or weeks, until it went away again.

    
My life became a series of cycles. I became very good at guessing the seasons. The grass growing and cutting cycles meant spring. When the growing slowed marked summer. When it stopped altogether it was fall. The cold marked winter, and I lost track of how many winters I laid there.

     
One year in the cycle I knew as spring, I could hear voices. A lawnmower had passed over me not too many days before, and sunlight was penetrating through the shortened grass and warming my face.

     
Suddenly I was up, away from the earth, feeling fresh air for the first time in way too many years. A smallish hand scraped the dirt from my sides, and I went into a dark pocket, where I joined two other pennies. One of them was rough cut, with freshly minted features. I could not see it well in the darkness, but I could tell from the feel of it and the smell of new copper that it was recently minted. It said 1963 on its face.

     
Suddenly I was alive again. I was being used again in the manner in which I enjoyed, being passed from hand to hand to hand. Children buying candy. Ladies buying produce. Men buying flowers for angry wives they had slighted in various ways.

     
I sat in a coin tray at a 7-11 convenience store, unwanted by one customer, then picked up and used by another.

    
One day I was dropped at a bakery and rolled under a display case. For several months I lay, smelling the glorious smells of fresh donuts each morning, and hearing the joyous laughter of children begging their mothers for cookies.

    
Eventually the smells drifted away, never to return, and the laughter went away as well. For a long time I was once again alone, day and night. At least I wasn't getting rained on as I had been in Mary's front yard.

     
Eventually the old bakery was reopened, only it wasn't a bakery any more. It was now an insurance office, and of course the old ovens and display cases had to be removed to make room for desks and chairs and typewriters and such. As the display case was lifted off of me, a worker picked me up, dusted me off, and thrust me into a khaki pants pocket. The pompous, overbearing quarter beside me said 1981.

     These days I don't go anywhere. I am confined to an airless, clear plastic pouch, which I assume is for display purposes.

    
On the white cardboard label attached to the pouch are the words "Lincoln Cent, 1925 P". I don't know what that means, but I do know that I am lonely. I miss being passed from hand to hand and traveling across the country and around the world. I miss being admired by children and hearing the joy in their voices as they traded me for the latest sweet thing.

      It’s funny, but I also miss
the grumbling of some adults who cast me into parking lots or sidewalks, as though carrying me was not worth their effort. I knew that invariably, someone would pick me back up, recognize my worth, and pass me along.

     
I even miss feeling the ants run across my face in Mary's yard, and shuddering each time the lawnmower passed over, ten to twelve time a year, in the season I knew as spring. I would love to break out of my plastic prison and feel the warmth of the hands. I really miss them...