Orphan Train

  My face colors. “No, ma’am, I don’t think so.”

  “They came from somewhere,” she says.

  “I think . . .” I start, but it’s hard to get the words out. “I think you might need to check the bed. And your hair.”

  “You brung it!” she says, flinging back the covers. “Come in here, acting all high and mighty, like you’re better than us . . .”

  Her nightgown is bunched up around her belly. I see a dark triangle of fur between her legs and turn away, embarrassed.

  “Don’t you dare leave!” she shrieks. She snatches baby Nettie, wailing, off the bed and tucks her under one arm, pointing at the bed with the other. “Sheets need to be boiled. Then you can start going through the kids’ hair with a comb. I told Gerald it was too much, bringing a vagrant in this house when Lord knows where she’s been.”

  The next five hours are even more miserable than I imagined—boiling pots of water and emptying it into a big tub without scalding any of the children, pulling every blanket and sheet and piece of clothing I can find into the water and scrubbing them with lye soap, then pushing the sheets through the hand wringer. I’m barely strong enough to load and turn the crank, and my arms ache with the effort.

  When Mr. Grote comes home he talks to his wife, who’s camped on the living room couch. Snatches of their conversation waft back to me—“trash,” “vermin,” “dirty Irish bog-trotter”—and in a few minutes he comes through the kitchen door to find me on my knees, trying to turn the wringer. “Lord Jesus,” he says, and gets to work helping me.

  Mr. Grote agrees that the mattresses are probably infested. He thinks if we drag them out to the porch and pour boiling water over them it will kill the bugs. “I have half a mind to do the same to the kids,” he says, and I know he’s only barely kidding. He makes quick work of shaving the heads of all four of them with a straight razor. Despite my attempts to hold their heads still, they twitch and fidget, and as a result have little bloody nicks and gashes all over their heads. They remind me of photos of soldiers returning from the Great War, hollow-eyed and bald. Mr. Grote rubs lye over each head, and the children scream and yell. Mrs. Grote sits on the couch, watching.

  “Wilma, it’s your turn,” he says, turning to her with the razor in his hand.

  “No.”

  “We have to check, at least.”

  “Check the girl. She brought them here.” Mrs. Grote turns her face to the back of the couch.

  Mr. Grote motions me over. I take my hair out of its tight braids and kneel in front of him while he gently picks through. It’s strange to feel this man’s breath on my neck, his fingers on my scalp. He pinches something between his fingers and sits back on his heels. “Yep. You got some eggs in there.”

  I am the only one of my siblings with red hair. When I asked my da where I got it, he joked that there must’ve been rust in the pipes. His own hair was dark—“cured,” he said, through years of toil—but when he was young it was more like auburn. Nothing like yours, he said. Your hair is as vivid as a Kinvara sunset, autumn leaves, the Koi goldfish in the window of that hotel in Galway.

  Mr. Grote doesn’t want to shave my head. He says it would be a crime. Instead he winds my hair around his fist and slices straight through it at the nape of my neck. A heap of coils slide to the floor, and he cuts the rest of the hair on my head about two inches long.

  I spend the next four days in that miserable house, burning logs and boiling water, the children cranky and underfoot as they always are, Mrs. Grote back on damp sheets on the mildewing mattress with her lice-infested hair, and there’s nothing I can do about any of it, nothing at all.

  “WE’VE MISSED YOU, DOROTHY!” MISS LARSEN SAYS WHEN I return to school. “And my—a brand-new hairstyle!”

  I touch the top of my head where my hair is sticking up. Miss Larsen knows why my hair is short—it’s in the note I had to give her when I got out of the truck—but she doesn’t give away a thing. “Actually,” she says, “you look like a flapper. Do you know what that is?”

  I shake my head.

  “Flappers are big-city girls who cut their hair short and go dancing and do what they please.” She gives me a friendly smile. “Who knows, Dorothy? Maybe that’s what you’ll become.”

  Hemingford County, Minnesota, 1930

  By summer’s end, Mr. Grote seems to be having more luck. Whatever he can kill he brings home in a sack and skins right away, then hangs in the shed out back. He built a smoker behind the shed and now he keeps it going all the time, filling it with squirrels and fish and even raccoons. The meat gives off a curdled-sweet smell that turns my stomach, but it’s better than going hungry.

  Mrs. Grote is pregnant again. She says the baby’s due in March. I’m worried I’ll be expected to help her when the time comes. When Mam had Maisie there were plenty of neighbors on Elizabeth Street who’d been through it before, and all I had to do was watch the younger kids. Mrs. Schatzman, down the hall, and the Krasnow sisters a floor below, with seven children between them, came into the apartment and took over, closing the bedroom door behind them. My da went out. Maybe he was sent out by them, I don’t know. I was in the living room, playing patty-cake and reciting the alphabet and singing all the songs he’d belt out when he came home from the pub late at night, waking the neighbors.

  By mid-September, round bales of golden straw dot the yellow fields on my walk to the county road, arranged in geometric formations and stacked in pyramids and scattered in haphazard clumps. In history we learn about the pilgrims in Plymouth Plantation in 1621 and the food they ate, wild turkeys and corn and five deer brought to the feast by the Indians. We talk about family traditions, but like the Byrnes, the Grotes don’t take any notice of the holiday. When I mention it to Mr. Grote, he says, “What’s the big deal about a turkey? I can bag one of those any old day.” But he never does.

  Mr. Grote has become even more distant, up at the crack of dawn to go hunting, then skinning and smoking the meat at night. When he’s home, he yells at the children or avoids them. Sometimes he shakes the baby until it whimpers and stops crying. I don’t even know if he sleeps in the back bedroom anymore. Oftentimes I find him asleep on the couch in the living room, his form under a quilt like the exposed root of an old tree.

  I WAKE ONE NOVEMBER MORNING COATED IN A FINE COLD DUST. There must have been a storm in the night; snow piles in small drifts on the mattresses, having blown in through the cracks and crevices in the walls and roof. I sit up and look around. Three of the kids are in the room with me, huddled like sheep. I get up, shaking snow from my hair. I slept in my clothes from yesterday, but I don’t want Miss Larsen and the girls at school, Lucy in particular, to see me in the same clothes two days in a row (though other kids, I’ve noticed, have no shame about this at all). I pull a dress and my other sweater from my suitcase, which I keep open in a corner, and change quickly, pulling them over my head. None of my clothes are ever particularly clean, but I cling to these rituals nevertheless.

  It’s the promise of the warm schoolhouse, Miss Larsen’s friendly smile, and the distraction of other lives, other worlds on the pages of the books we read in class, that get me out the door. The walk to the corner is getting harder; with each snowfall I have to forge a new path. Mr. Grote tells me that when the heavy storms hit in a few weeks I might as well forget it.

  At school Miss Larsen takes me aside. She holds my hand and looks into my eyes. “Are things all right at home, Dorothy?”

  I nod.

  “If there’s anything you want to tell me—”

  “No, ma’am,” I say. “Everything is fine.”

  “You haven’t been handing in your homework.”

  There’s no time or place to read or do homework at the Grotes’, and after the sun goes down at five there’s no light, either. There are only two candle stubs in the house, and Mrs. Grote keeps one with her in the back room. But I don’t want Miss Larsen to feel sorry for me. I want to be treated like everyone else.

&n
bsp; “I’ll try harder,” I say.

  “You . . .” Her fingers flutter at her neck, then drop. “Is it difficult to keep clean?”

  I shrug, feeling the heat of shame. My neck. I’ll have to be more thorough.

  “Do you have running water?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She bites her lip. “Well. Come and see me if you ever want to talk, you hear?”

  “I’m fine, Miss Larsen,” I tell her. “Everything is fine.”

  I AM ASLEEP ON A PILE OF BLANKETS, HAVING BEEN NUDGED OFF THE mattresses by a fitful child, when I feel a hand on my face. I open my eyes. Mr. Grote, bending over me, puts a finger to his lips, then motions for to me to come. Groggily I get up, wrapping a quilt around myself, and follow him to the living room. In the weak moonlight, filtered through clouds and the dirty windows, I see him sit on the gold sofa and pat the cushion beside him.

  I pull the quilt tighter. He pats the cushion again. I go over to him, but I don’t sit.

  “It’s cold tonight,” he says in a low voice. “I could use some company.”

  “You should go back there with her,” I say.

  “Don’t want to do that.”

  “I’m tired,” I tell him. “I’m going to bed.”

  He shakes his head. “You’re gonna stay here with me.”

  I feel a flutter in my stomach and turn to leave.

  He reaches out and grabs my arm. “I want you to stay, I said.”

  I look at him in the gloom. Mr. Grote has never frightened me before, but something in his voice is different, and I know I need to be careful. His mouth is curled up at the edges into a funny smile.

  He tugs the quilt. “We can warm each other up.”

  I yank it tighter around my shoulders and turn away again, and then I am falling. I hit my elbow on the hard floor and feel a sharp pain as I land heavily on it, my nose to the floor. Twisting in the quilt, I look up to see what happened. I feel a rough hand on my head. I want to move, but am trapped in a cocoon.

  “You do what I say.” I feel his stubbled face on my cheek, smell his gamy breath. I squirm again and he puts his foot on my back. “Be quiet.”

  His big rough hand is inside the quilt, and then it’s under my sweater, under my dress. I try to pull away but I can’t. His hand roams up and down and I feel a jolt of shock as he probes the place between my legs, pushes at it with his fingers. His sandpaper face is still against mine, rubbing against my cheek, and his breathing is jagged.

  “Yesss,” he gulps into my ear. He is hunched above me like a dog, one hand rubbing hard at my skin and the other unbuttoning his trousers. Hearing the rough snap of each button, I bend and squirm but am trapped in the quilt like a fly in a web. I see his pants open and low on his hips, the engorged penis between his legs, his hard white belly. I’ve seen enough animals in the yard to know what he’s trying to do. Though my arms are trapped, I rock my body to try to seal the quilt around me. He yanks at it roughly and I feel it giving way, and as it does he whispers in my ear, “Easy, now, you like this, don’t you,” and I start to whimper. When he sticks two fingers inside me, his jagged nails tear at my skin and I cry out. He slaps his other hand over my mouth and rams his fingers deeper, grinding against me, and I make noises like a horse, frantic guttural sounds from deep in my throat.

  And then he lifts his hips and takes his hand off my mouth. I scream and feel the blinding shock of a slap across my face.

  From the direction of the hallway comes a voice—“Gerald?”—and he freezes, just for a second, before slithering off me like a lizard, fumbling with his buttons, pulling himself off the floor.

  “What in the name of Christ—” Mrs. Grote is leaning against the door frame, cupping her rounded stomach with one hand.

  I yank my underpants up and my dress and sweater down, sit up and stumble to my feet, clutching the quilt around me.

  “Not her!” she wails.

  “Now, Wilma, it isn’t what it looks like—”

  “You animal!” Her voice is deep and savage. She turns to me. “And you—you—I knew—” She points at the door. “Get out. Get out!”

  It takes me a moment to understand what she means—that she wants me to leave, now, in the cold, in the middle of the night.

  “Easy, Wilma, calm down,” Gerald—Mr. Grote—says.

  “I want that girl—that filth—out of my house.”

  “Let’s talk about this.”

  “I want her out!”

  “All right, all right.” He looks at me with dull eyes, and I can see that as bad as this situation is, it’s about to get worse. I don’t want to stay here, but how can I survive out there?

  Mrs. Grote disappears down the hall. I hear a child crying in the back. She returns a moment later with my suitcase and heaves it across the room. It crashes against the wall, spilling its contents across the floor.

  My boots and the mustard coat, with Fanny’s precious lined gloves in the pocket, are on a nail by the front door, and I’m wearing my only pair of threadbare socks. I make my way to the suitcase and grab what I can, open the door to a sharp blast of cold air and toss a few scattered pieces of clothing onto the porch, my breath a puff of smoke in front of me. As I put on my boots, fumbling with the laces, I hear Mr. Grote say, “What if something happens to her?” and Mrs. Grote’s reply: “If that stupid girl gets it in her head to run away, there’s nothing we can do, is there?”

  And run I do, leaving almost everything I possess in the world behind me—my brown suitcase, the three dresses I made at the Byrnes’, the fingerless gloves and change of underwear and the navy sweater, my school-books and pencil, the composition book Miss Larsen gave me to write in. The sewing packet Fanny made for me, at least, is in the inner pocket of my coat. I leave four children I could not help and did not love. I leave a place of degradation and squalor, the likes of which I will never experience again. And I leave any last shred of my childhood on the rough planks of that living room floor.

  Hemingford County, Minnesota, 1930

  Trudging forward like a sleepwalker in the bitter cold, I make my way down the driveway, then turn left and plod up the rutted dirt road to the falling-down bridge. In places I have to crunch through the top layer of snow, thick as piecrust. The sharp edges lacerate my ankles. As I gaze up at the crystal stars glittering overhead, cold steals the breath from my mouth.

  Once I’m out of the woods and on the main road, a full moon bathes the fields around me in a shimmering, pearly light. Gravel crunches loudly under my boots; I can feel its pebbly roughness through my thin soles. I stroke the soft wool inside my gloves, so warm that not even my fingertips are cold. I’m not afraid—it was more frightening in that shack than it is on the road, with moonlight all around. My coat is thin, but I’m wearing what clothing I could salvage underneath, and as I hurry along I begin to warm up. I make a plan: I will walk to school. It’s only four miles.

  The dark line of the horizon is far in the distance, the sky above it lighter, like layers of sediment in rock. The schoolhouse is fixed in my mind. I just have to get there. Walking at a steady pace, my boots scuffing the gravel, I count a hundred steps and start again. My da used to say it’s good to test your limits now and then, learn what the body is capable of, what you can endure. He said this when we were in the throes of sickness on the Agnes Pauline, and again in the bitter first winter in New York, when four of us, including Mam, came down with pneumonia.

  Test your limits. Learn what you can endure. I am doing that.

  As I walk along I feel as weightless and insubstantial as a slip of paper, lifted by the wind and gliding down the road. I think about the many ways I ignored what was in front of me—how blind I was, how foolish not to be on my guard. I think of Dutchy, who knew enough to fear the worst.

  Ahead on the horizon, the first pink light of dawn begins to show. And just before it, the white clapboard building becomes visible halfway up a small ridge. Now that the schoolhouse is within sight my energy drains, and al
l I want to do is sink down by the side of the road. My feet are leaden and aching. My face is numb; my nose feels frozen. I don’t know how I make it to the school, but somehow I do. When I get to the front door, I find that the building is locked. I go around to the back, to the porch where they keep wood for the stove, and I open the door and fall onto the floor. An old horse blanket is folded by the woodpile, and I wrap myself in it and fall into a fitful sleep.

  I AM RUNNING IN A YELLOW FIELD, THROUGH A MAZE OF HAY BALES, unable to find my way . . .

  “DOROTHY?” I FEEL A HAND ON MY SHOULDER, AND SPRING AWAKE. It’s Mr. Post. “What in God’s name . . . ?”

  For a moment I’m not sure myself. I look up at Mr. Post, at his round red cheeks and puzzled expression. I look around at the pile of rough-cut wood, the wide whitewashed planks of the porch walls. The door to the schoolroom is ajar, and it’s clear that Mr. Post has come to get wood to start the fire, as he must do every morning before heading out to pick us up.

  “Are you all right?”

  I nod, willing myself to be.

  “Does your family know you’re here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How’d you get to the school?”

  “I walked.”

  He stares at me for a moment, then says, “Let’s get you out of the cold.”

  Mr. Post guides me to a chair in the schoolroom and puts my feet on another chair, then takes the dirty blanket from my shoulders and replaces it with a clean plaid one he finds in a cupboard. He unlaces each of my boots and sets them beside the chair, tsking over the holes in my socks. Then I watch him make a fire. The room is already getting warm when Miss Larsen arrives a few minutes later.

  “What’s this?” she says. “Dorothy?” She unwraps her violet scarf and takes off her hat and gloves. In the window behind her I see a car pulling away. Miss Larsen’s long hair is coiled in a bun at the nape of her neck, and her brown eyes are clear and bright. The pink wool skirt she’s wearing brings out the color in her cheeks.

  Kneeling by my chair, she says, “Goodness, child. Have you been here long?”

  Mr. Post, having completed his duties, is putting on his hat and coat to make the rounds in the truck. “She was asleep out there on the porch when I arrived.” He laughs. “Scared the bejeezus out of me.”

  “I’m sure it did,” she says.

  “Says she walked here. Four miles.” He shakes his head. “Lucky she didn’t freeze to death.”

  “You seem to have warmed her up nicely.”

  “She’s thawing out. Well, I’m off to get the others.” He pats the front of his coat. “See you in a jiff.”

  As soon as he leaves, Miss Larsen says, “Now then. Tell me what happened.”

  And I do. I wasn’t planning to, but she looks at me with such genuine concern that everything spills out. I tell her about Mrs. Grote lying in bed all day and Mr. Grote in the woods and the snow dust on my face in the morning and the stained mattresses. I tell her about the cold squirrel stew and the squalling children. And I tell her about Mr. Grote on the sofa, his hands on me, and pregnant Mrs. Grote in the hallway, yelling at me to get out. I tell her that I was afraid to stop walking, afraid that I would fall asleep. I tell her about the gloves Fanny knitted for me.

  Miss Larsen puts her hand over mine and leaves it there, squeezing it every now and then. “Oh, Dorothy,” she says.

  And then, “Thank goodness for the gloves. Fanny sounds like a good friend.”

  “She was.”

  She holds her chin, tapping it with two fingers. “Who brought you to the Grotes’?”

  “Mr. Sorenson from the Children’s Aid Society.”

  “All right. When Mr. Post gets back, I’ll send him out to find this Mr. Sorenson.” Opening her lunch pail, she pulls out a biscuit. “You must be hungry.”

  Normally I would refuse—I know this is part of her lunch. But I am so ravenous that at the sight of the biscuit my mouth fills with water. I accept it shamefully and wolf it down. While I’m eating the biscuit Miss Larsen heats water on the stove for tea and cuts an apple into slices, arranging them on a chipped china plate from the shelf. I watch as she spoons loose tea into a strainer and pours the boiling water over it into two cups. I’ve never seen her offer tea to a child before, and certainly not to me.

  “Miss Larsen,” I start. “Could you ever—would you ever—”

  She seems to know what I’m asking. “Take you home to live with me?” She smiles, but her expression is pained. “I care about you, Dorothy. I think you know that. But I can’t—I’m in no position to take care of a girl. I live in a boardinghouse.”

  I nod, a knob in my throat.

  “I will help you find a home,” she says gently. “A place that is safe and clean, where you’ll be treated like a ten-year-old girl. I promise you that.”

  When the other kids file in from the truck, they look at me curiously.

  “What’s she doing here?” one boy, Robert, says.

  “Dorothy came in a little early this morning.” Miss Larsen smooths the front of her pretty pink skirt. “Take your seats and pull out your workbooks, children.”

  After Mr. Post has come in from the back with more wood and arranged the logs in the bin by the stove, Miss Larsen signals to him, and he follows her back to the entry vestibule. A few minutes later he heads outside again, still in his