Jim the Boy Read Online Free

Glass.”
    Jim looked up at the hotel window. He smiled slightly before remembering how unhappy he was.
    “Hey,” Jim called back. “Hey, Whitey Whiteside.”
    “Where you going?” Whitey asked.
    “Nowhere,” said Jim.
    “Hang on a minute, then,” said Whitey. “I ain’t going nowhere, either.”
    Jim waited while Whitey Whiteside clomped down the stairs of the hotel and came out into the street. He was tall and skinny like the uncles. His brown hair was going gray, which he said was a good thing, even though he was young. Gray hair on a young man, he said, coupled with the name Whitey, would make people remember him even better.
    “What happened to you?” Whitey asked. “You’ve got dirt all over your face.”
    “I’ve been hoeing corn with the uncles,” said Jim.
    “That’s good, Jim,” Whitey said. “Hard work’s good for a man. Hard work will grow hair on your chest.” He studied Jim closely. “But you know,” he said, “you ought to carry a bandanna in your pocket, and wipe your face off with that, instead of your hand. That way, if you run into a pretty girl on your way home, you won’t have dirt all over your face.”
    Jim shrugged. He liked Whitey Whiteside, but didn’t always know what to say to him. Whitey Whiteside talked to Jim like Jim was grown. He had even asked Jim to call him “Whitey,” and not “Mr. Whiteside.”
    “Well,” Whitey said, “I don’t guess it matters.”
    Jim shrugged again and looked at his hands. He wiped them on the legs of his overalls and then stuck them in his pockets.
    Whitey Whiteside always wore a suit and a starched white shirt. He wore big fedoras with stiff brims, felt in the winter, and blazing white straw in the summer. Jim thought Whitey Whiteside must be rich.
    “I mean,” said Whitey, “it’s probably more important to a pretty girl that a man has a good job and works hard and looks after things, than whether or not he has a little dirt on his face. Don’t you guess?”
    “I don’t know,” Jim said.
    Jim and Whitey stood in the street for a long moment without talking.
    “The uncles let me off a little early today,” Jim said. “It was almost dinnertime, anyway.”
    “I see,” said Whitey.
    Jim studied one of his footprints in the dirt. He could see the nail marks around the outside of the sole. Jim could feel some of the nails sticking through on the inside of his shoe. The nails didn’t bother him unless he thought about them. He wiggled his toes.
    Whitey took his watch out of his pocket and looked at the face as if it were unfamiliar.
    “Let’s see here,” he said. “It’s still a little bit until my train pulls in, so why don’t we walk up the hill and have a look at that new school?”
    Whitey covered his routes by riding trains all over North Carolina. He had even ridden the Carolina Moon, which was the newest, fastest passenger train on the Great Southeastern Railway. The Moon did not stop in Aliceville.
    “Okay,” Jim said. “I guess we can go look.”
    The new school was the biggest building in Aliceville. It was two stories high and made from red brick. The hotel was the only other brick building in town, but it was narrow and dirty and sad-looking. The new school sat on top of the hill like a fortress. You could see it from all over Aliceville. It had been under construction for as long as Jim could remember. It was supposed to open in the fall. Jim and Whitey walked up the dirt street toward the school.
    “That’s some building, huh, Jim?” Whitey said.
    Jim didn’t say anything. He was nervous about going to the new school. The old school he had attended since first grade had only two rooms. Jim knew everybody who went to school there, even the older kids. But when the new school opened, all the country schools around Aliceville would close down, and the kids who went to those schools would come to school in Aliceville. They would ride to town on buses. Even hillbilly kids from Lynn’s Mountain would