His head kept bumping against something hard, and the smell that stung his nostrils was a mixture of the potting shed out back and the outhouse at his grandmother’s farm.  His hand snaked out to find his pillow, but felt instead the rough splinters of the boxcar floor.  Will blinked his eyes open and saw dots of light streaking across the sea of  sleeping brown rags and battered suitcases. The rhythmic motion shook him back and forth, while the clicks, squeaks, and metallic scrapes joined the snores all around him. 

When he felt the hand that was creeping into his left coat pocket, he pushed it aside and jumped to his feet, but, losing his balance, crashed forward into grimy faces, dirty hair, and sharp elbows.  He rose amidst the grumbled complaints and groans, shaking his tingling foot awake and yelled “I’ll take it off, man, I swear I will.  I’ll cut your hand off.  You don’t take my stuff!  You hear me?” into the face connected to the hand halfway into his pocket.  The whites of the man’s eyes glistened in the dark of the boxcar and there was a hush.  “I got a knife, old man.  So get your hand off me, and don’t put it on me again!”  The hand slid back out of his pocket, and Will pushed the man away, then turned to the wall and drew his jacket tightly around his stomach, crossing his arms in front of him. 

The rumble started up again just then; the one he’d just about learned to live with, the one in his gut.  He knew everyone had it; they were all as hungry as he was. He saw it in their eyes mostly, they way they looked at you, but not really, like they were looking past you, at a make-believe roast chicken Sunday dinner, or a good old summer picnic with all the fixings like his mother and grandmothers used to make, with ham, potato salad, watermelon, and those heavenly yeast rolls. He could just imagine the smell of those luscious rolls coming out of the oven, and how Ivy, his mother, would smack at his hands as he grabbed four, five, six, stuffed them into his pockets, and laughed as he headed out the door.  She’d say, “You’re a bad one!”  but her eyes always held a tiny twinkle as she said it, and he knew it was the only way she could show him any affection.  

Affection was something that was hard to come by in his home---that was for sure.  Mostly it had been a lot of fighting, with his mother’s sisters Ethel and Dorothy who had come to live with them, and the way his parents went days without speaking to one another. It was getting blamed for things he didn’t do, and not getting credit for the stuff  he did right.  It was the dragged-down feeling of never being good enough, and finally seeing no other way than to just leave and hop the boxcars out West.