He never asserted himself.  That was one thing that helped him escape.  In an odd way he stood in the shadow of the wall of life, was meant to stand in the shadow.  He saw the men and women in the houses of lust, sensed their casual and horrible love affairs, saw boys fighting and listened to their tales of thieving and drunkenness, unmoved and strangely unaffected.

Once Tom did steal.  That was while he still lived in the city.  The grandmother was ill at the time and he himself was out of work.  There was nothing to eat in the house, and so he went into a harness shop on a side street and stole a dollar and seventy-five cents out of the cash drawer.

The harness shop was run by an old man with a long mustache.  He saw the boy lurking about and thought nothing of it.  When he went out into the street to talk to a teamster Tom opened the cash drawer and taking the money walked away.  Later he was caught and his grandmother settled the matter by offering to come twice a week for a month and scrub the shop.  The boy was ashamed, but he was rather glad, too.  “It is all right to be ashamed and makes me understand new things,” he said to the grandmother, who didn’t know what the boy was talking about but loved him so much that it didn’t matter whether she understood or not.

For a year Tom Foster lived in the banker’s stable and then lost his place there.  He didn’t take very good care of the horses and he was a constant source of irritation to the banker’s wife.  She told him to mow the lawn and he forgot.  Then she sent him to the store or to the post office and he did not come back but joined a group of men and boys and spent the whole afternoon with them, standing about, listening and occasionally, when addressed, saying a few words.  As in the city in the houses of prostitution and with the rowdy boys running through the streets at night, so in Winesburg among its citizens he had always the power to be a part of and yet distinctly apart from the life about him.

After Tom lost his place at Banker White’s he did not live with his grandmother, although often in the evening she came to visit him.  He rented a room at the rear of a little frame building belonging to old Rufus Whiting.  The building was on Duane Street, just off Main Street, and had been used for years as a law office by the old man, who had become too feeble and forgetful for the practice of his profession but did not realize his inefficiency.  He liked Tom and let him have the room for a dollar a month.  In the late afternoon when the lawyer had gone home the boy had the place to himself and spent hours lying on the floor by the stove and thinking of things.  In the evening the grandmother came and sat in the lawyer’s chair to smoke a pipe while Tom remained silent, as he always, did in the presence of everyone.

Often the old woman talked with great vigor.  Sometimes she was angry about some happening at the banker’s house and scolded away for hours.  Out of her own earnings she bought a mop and regularly scrubbed the lawyer’s office.  Then when the place was spotlessly clean and smelled clean she lighted her clay pipe and she and Tom had a smoke together.  “When you get ready to die then I will die also,” she said to the boy lying on the floor beside her chair.