Eddie appears at the front door of the church.

He has been leaving messages on my voice mail: the picture of him with his dog was blurry. He would like another. For several weeks he leaves voice mails, urging me to bring my camera to church. I bring it, week after week, and he never shows. This week I forget it and he shows. But Chico the dog is not with him. No picture today.

Instead of Chico he brings Steve.

Steve limps down the stairs to the food. He tells me that he hurt his leg jumping off a train.

A what?

Jumping out of the freight car as it rumbled through Springfield. Train didn’t slow. So he jumped at speed and bruised his heel. His triumphal entry was messy and manic.

Steve rides around the country in freight cars. He waits until the trains are moving slowly out of town and jumps aboard. He tells me that he travels for a living. He is an old-school hobo.

There is a rootedness that I thought was universal and necessary in people. Steve doesn’t have it. At evening on my land I know a sense of occupying my right place in things. Perhaps the stillness I find on my land at evening he finds only as the freight car, doors flung open, rumbles slowly out of town. He tried on yet another town and it didn’t fit. He says he has had enough of Ohio.

He rode into Springfield because his father is in the Odd Fellows home, and he will visit. But after that, maybe Arizona.

The Chestnut Street boys are wild tonight. We send them home early. Once outside, they attack. They remember my special move, the one where I put them over my shoulder and spin them. Each needs a turn, and another turn, and they argue and fight about turns. I try to spin them so fast that they will be temporarily disoriented and compliant, but they recover faster than I can.

One boy, the wildest, outright assaults me. His name is Chris and he wants to fight. Where his father is, and what his father is, and whether his father is, I know not. Maybe he is in a freight car, rumbling across Arizona.

There is a thing that fathers must do for their sons that has not been done for this boy, and he is left with an angry gnawing hunger. So he takes a swing at me.

If he were taller he could break my glasses or bend my nose. But in the cold, with coats and layers and all, he is mostly harmless, if you keep your wits about you. I give him my standard gentle smackdown, and a few punches around the shoulders, and finish off by whapping him across the back of his buzzcut.

Now Chris wants a piggyback ride wee wee wee all the way home.

Along the way some of the kids stop at a friend’s house and make plans to roller blade. They have one pair and split it. The game is: one boy ride on his right foot and push with the left, and the other do the mirror image. They rumble around us in the dark on the sidewalk. GK walks with me, his daughter high up on his shoulders. The boys negotiate with him for optimum candy next week.

We want three-foot strips of bubble gum. Yardstick bubble gum.

GK looked in the store and couldn’t find it.

OK then. We want three-foot Slim Jims.

I ask what kind of meat they use in a three-foot Slim Jim. A giraffe’s tail? Perhaps the thing is a snake, headless and spineless but otherwise whole?

No. Beef. Slim Jims are beef, I am told, with exasperation. Everyone knows that.

Maybe it’s Beefsnake. I bet it’s Beefsnake.

Beef STEAK. Not snake. More exasperation. Big grown up idiot.

They rumble away into the dark, one foot wheeled.

Up on GK’s shoulders, his little girl wonders and exclaims when a motion sensor on a house lights up at our passing, then goes black as we round the corner. Such a thing has never been seen. She wants to live in that house.

She has a real bike now. She is done with training wheels. She is bigger now, and so very exalted on her father’s shoulders, which she rides with no hands, and she is competent on a two-wheeler, and the world is utterly radiant with color and promise, up there on her father’s shoulders.

Chris gets a piggyback ride the last ten yards to his house. There. Done. Like a pushpin in a map, I put him in the right place.

He doesn’t stick. He won’t be rooted. Off he goes again in the dark, unrooted, following us for a while, and rumbling with his friends.