In March of 1927, nineteen-year-old Tony Halas leaves the coal town of Kelloway, Pennsylvania, on a B&O train with a grip, a priest's half-sheet of an address, and a town behind him that has already started talking.
He is easy to like and hard to leave. In Cleveland he learns a trade and has his coat mended by a woman who will not forget him. He works a river landing, a mill town, a railroad junction. He is given coffee, a bed, a skillet, a place at the end of a counter. People take to him on sight, the way people take to a lamp in a window. And in town after town, when he moves on, someone is left behind to wonder what they did wrong, and some of them do not wonder long.
Tony never asks why it follows him. He only walks, and takes whatever road is open, and does not know that every road he has taken has been bending the same way.
Part One of The Halas Boy, a novel of The Devil's Favorite.