In the early morning dark they stole eggs from under the sleeping hens. Charlotte gently laid the warm things in the basket. At five she could do this; it was expected of her. She'd learned to boil water for the eggs that, once cooked, they set out in a metal bowl with a tall saltshaker next to it there on the breezeway stoop. She and her mother would come back into the house and lock the door behind them like Daddy had instructed. Always his words beat in their ears, warnings of vagrants, how if you gave what you could afford on a farm, what you had more than enough of -- food for poor rumbling bellies -- then you could expect decency in return, but don't you bank on it.

Charlotte stood with her mother in the breezeway between the house and garage, an open air porch that a particular sort of weather transformed into a wind tunnel. She never looked the hobos in the eye. Her mother scooted her into the house when the vagrants began making their way over the hill from the open mouth of the barn where they took shelter overnight. This her father also allowed.

To Charlotte the hobos looked sleepy. Her mother said they needed baths.

Charlotte said, "If we put towels by the pump they can wash."

Off to the chores upstairs -- making beds, swinging the dust mop across the wood floors, sending the laundry down the chute to the cellar. Meanwhile the hobos who'd come in on the rail cars the night before tramped up to the breezeway and sat peeling their morning eggs, shaking salt over the rubbery whites. Charlotte could hear their voices, a slow rumble, a sound she imagined for boxcars. She couldn't make out one word they said. They spoke a different language, one that included harmonicas.

When Charlotte and her mother came back down to start lunch for Daddy and his men, the hobos were gone. The eggshells had been crunched and worked into the topsoil around the yew bushes. They must have used sticks or their fingers because all the tools were either locked in the garage or Daddy had them out in the field.

The stack of towels sat as before, touched only by morning dew.

When her mother dumped them down the laundry chute she said, "It's a kindness they're not used to." She said it in a forgiving manner, said she didn't mind the extra washing that day. It was just once.

The tramps had cleaned up after their breakfast, except for the salt on the cement. Charlotte could feel it under her bare feet, a grit that made her hungry for a meal of her own.

Mother put a broom in Charlotte's hand and told her, "Sweep that clean out there."

But before Charlotte set to work, she bent down, licked her fingers, and put some of the salt into her mouth. She'd had her own eggs, scrambled, with toast and juice and fresh milk Daddy'd brought from the barn before sunup -- none of it as satisfying as the hobos' leftover salt on her tongue. In it she tasted miles and towns and the chill of boxcars. It all tasted good.

***

Her mother threw an extra tablespoon of salt into the noodles she cooked for dinner, using her cupped palm for measure. The boiling surged up for a second and she smiled at Charlotte. "Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble."

By simply gazing out the window Charlotte's mother could gauge the temperature of wind and soil. She had a knack for sizing up the seasons. "Cool nights and warm days are good for their settling in," she said, referring to her tomatoes.

Charlotte snatched up everything her mother said and saved it.

You get out what you put in. Sleep on feathers for sweet dreams. Hot soup to sweat out a fever. Work lingers as the day is long.

Love was in her mother's hands, in her every household task, in the comfort she made for them out of the raw elements the farm gave her.

Charlotte's father pointed a fork at her mother at the dinner table, his way of telling Charlotte to take note. "Your mother knows how to cook up a chicken," he said. That was his kind of thanks. A good meal could set him rapturing, and her no-nonsense mother blushed where she sat across the table from him. In clearing the dishes, before she set the pie in front of him, Charlotte's mother kissed her father on the sunburnt back of his neck. Charlotte's eyes skated over the sight of them petting each other. Instead she thought herself right out of the kitchen, ahead to the trail the hobos were hiking, a meandering nighttime trudge that would end on the straw-scattered floor of the barn out back. She squirmed in her chair.

"Got ants in your pants?" her father joked. And then, "You can be excused."

Charlotte flew out of there, her pulse rapid, breathing raggedy gusts, her feet flying out sideways behind her she ran so fast to the barn, but no hobos. They'd skedaddled, and so she turned her back on them, too. To prove she didn't care a whit if they'd come or gone, she swiped at jacks. She skipped rope. She couldn't yet read, but on the kitchen stoop she paged through the Golden Book Encyclopedia volume with Egypt's pyramids, straining her eyes in the near dark to make out the thing half man and half lion. Charlotte had her mother's patience, and that patience was rewarded because after dark the hobos seemed to come right up from the ground with the fireflies, collecting round the mouth of the barn. The lit ends of their cigarettes glowed and faded, a code that meant they were breathing.

How was it Charlotte had managed to slip outside after dark? In this house they bedded down early, her mother and father behind their closed door, Charlotte behind hers. Her mother might be dreaming of a little girl, a wee-willie-winkie with the hem of her summer nightgown dragging in the dirt around the feet of stinky wrinkled men -- men with no clock, no map, no good reason to go to sleep because there was nothing they absolutely had to do once they woke.

Charlotte had never been a sleepwalker but she stood under a moon that practically turned the outside into day. Mosquitoes dug into the sweat at her armpit. She scratched and heard her mother's voice inside her head say, "Smoke will keep the biters back," so she drew nearer to the hobos' fire.

Charlotte counted. She counted the morning's collection of eggs, so she could surely count hobos. Four of them, four brother hobos in the salty smoke the burning gave off. Each looked the same as the next, except for one who played a harmonica with his eyes screwed shut and pleats all up and down his face.

He played while one of the triplet hobos sang, "Hear that lonesome whippoorwill, he sounds too blue to fly2" The singer hobo's voice, deep and rumbling like her father's, was a throb in Charlotte's own throat.

When they'd finished the song they wet their whistles from some bottle in a bag they passed around and then the harmonica-playing hobo pointed a crooked, dirty finger skyward. "That moon's as big as an old egg." He said it to whoever would listen.

Charlotte was an egg authority, she knew them intimately. She wiped chicken shit off them with an old piece of flannel mornings before sunup, when she was bent gathering them. Not round like the moon, eggs were an oblong shape that fit into your palm; you could cradle them warm there. They didn't belong in the sky. Not even the thought of them belonged there. Charlotte knew more than this hobo but she kept her mouth shut and instead watched the gaps between his few teeth, how his tongue, like the wet arm of an octopus, squirmed in those spaces when he talked, just about ready to jump out and flatten her.

The hobo made his tongue and teeth gaps work for him when he sucked air through his harmonica. In playing his music, all the facts of his mouth that repulsed Charlotte made her instead revere him. How he could pull sound out of squares in the wood by flipping and squishing and looping his octopus tongue, that was his God-given talent.

"The one of two things I'm good for," he said, winking at Charlotte, letting her know he'd seen her edging their hobo circle.

She wondered what the second thing was.

With his scarecrow of an arm he scooped the air in her direction. "Pull up a stone," he said.

Charlotte inched closer and the murmur of the hobos broke into words she could understand, like hungry and lonesome and adventure. She thought of something silly -- of wrapping up her jacks and a nightie in an old cloth and tying it around the end of a stick, such as the stick she was using to poke at the embers of the hobos' fire. She could already hear her daddy judging, his kindness to hobos swallowed up by his anger at her foolishness.

The hobo nodded like he could read her mind. "Daughters will make you do dangerous things." When he spit into the fire, his spit sizzled.

She wanted to say something back to him but didn't know how or what. The man smelled of orange peels and tobacco and milk that had just begun turning. He was whiskery. He had a pocketknife he stripped a green branch with when he wasn't sucking air through his harmonica. Charlotte watched him work the knife, smelled the wood's raw center, which made her think of snuggling a baby, which was silly because she never had, because she'd been the one baby held close and her mother doing the holding.

"Lester, give us a song," one of the hobo friends said.

Lester, with the octopus tongue, the hobo that had invited Charlotte to step near, said, "Can't you see I'm busy?" but he was only whittling, a nothing pastime Charlotte thought could be dropped and picked up again at will.

He had the breath of sweet things, of blossoms on fire, when he spoke in her face. "Ever play the harmonica?"

"No," she said, though taking that music maker was her prime wish.

A wonder then when the fine-edged instrument filled her two hands. The hobo told her, "Go on and bring it to your mouth," and she did so without thinking.

It was like eating splinters, the taste of that wood, and drinking well water, too, when she tongued the metal part, hobo spit and tobacco breath inside. All the tiny openings lined up like that reminded Charlotte of the world's biggest grin, a harmonica that had teeth. She blew out wind and she sucked it back in, making unconnected music, while the hobo smacked her on the back as if they were pals. The others clapped and laughed. When the paper bag they passed around reached her, she put her nose to what smelled like the doctor's office.

The hobo took the bag and the harmonica from her, his octopus tongue lolling about in his open, laughing mouth. "Careful, honey. Mixing music with moonshine ain't easy. Takes knowing."

Charlotte thought he was talking again about that egg of a moon, and she almost corrected him, regarding the shape of things, but didn't. She was only five, but wise enough to know everyone's understanding was greater than hers. Sitting around the hobos' fire ring warmed Charlotte. Their humming, whether words or song, made her sleepy. She didn't know how she'd found her way back up the trail to the house in the dark, only that she woke later, chilled by the concrete of the breezeway against her skin where her nightie didn't reach.

***

Charlotte's father had a gun and more than once she'd heard him tell her mother, "I'm not afraid to use it."

The hobos scattered like coyotes.

"They won't be back come morning," Daddy said. "They'll move on if they know what's good for them."

Her mother scrubbed the soot from Charlotte's bare feet and dabbed a soapy washcloth at the tiny scratches that had left blood on her ankles. Standing there naked in the tub, Charlotte kept her balance by grasping her mother's shoulders and staring at the laundry chute in the hallway. She imagined tumbling with the hobos' untouched towels down to the cellar, two flights worth of falling, and the force of the air flying up as she fell would whoosh her nightie right off her body, as in the way her mother had stripped it in one motion over Charlotte's head to administer a frantic, pinching inspection. At the same time she was enduring her mother's rough, nearly famished touch, Charlotte had a greater sense of being coddled in her mother's palm.

***

The next day Charlotte tested the cold fire ring with her stick, stirred the ashes and spread them out.

The hobos' absence was a touchable thing to her, more real than chores, more actual than eggs. They continued to live in her imagination and she called them to mind when she was lonely, which was often, her being the only child on a far-flung farm. Remembering the hobos, their music and their welcome fire, warmed her. One had put his arm around her, a sleeve long in its winding and gathering her close to him, the way a sweet uncle might.

She'd done nothing wrong in stealing a little bit of their adventure. What if hobos did stretch their arms to see what they could, in their meandering, touch? Skimming the surface of the whole wide world without care, that's what riding the rails offered. Charlotte's daddy knew this. It's why he pumped four shotgun shells, one for each hobo, into the sky above the barn, it's why he called them "damned bums."