Breath and Bones (17 page)

Famke made an angry exclamation and set off walking again. The river breeze nearly ripped the page from her hand, and she folded it up again—awkwardly,
with the bundle slipped over her wrist—and put it back in its pocket.

A crowd of Scandinavian immigrants was waiting outside Castle Garden now, unaware that nearby the splendid Americans were pointing and laughing at them. She recognized several cabinmates, still somewhat green around the lips; she thought Heber would surely be finished soon, and then they would all go to the hotel. If she were going to strike out on her own, now was the time.

She stopped, let the little man catch up to her. She had to be certain of one thing: “
Do
you know Albert Castle?”

At last he gave her an answer. “I have never heard of him. But let me tell you how to find
me
, should you be so inclined—”

“
Fanden!
” Famke saw Heber, his face grave in its ring of hair as he helped elderly Sister Carstensen to sit on the very bench where he had left Famke. He saw Famke, too, and his face lit up in a smile as he lifted his hand to wave. Then his expression darkened, and she realized he'd seen the man at her side.

The correspondent kept on, blissfully oblivious. “My name—”

“Oh, leave me!” Famke bent over in a sudden fit of coughing.

“The devil, you say!” He stepped back, hesitated, then politely offered her his handkerchief. Famke took it blindly, stoppered her mouth, and fled toward her husband.

No, she decided, it was far better to stay with Heber; alone in this new world, she might lose herself, just when she so badly needed to find Albert. This cough—she bent over again—surely this cough would improve in the clean air of the West, in the arms of her love.

Viggo bade farewell to his homeland in the way Famke had wanted to, standing on deck and watching first the fairytale copper church spires and then the prosaic wharves, masts, and warehouses recede. He took with him four hundred
Kroner
in a bag tied around his neck; the prospect of menial work on a steamship bound from Liverpool to Boston; three pounds of arsenic, in case there should be an odd job of embalming to be had; and a fat
packet of letters that included a lengthy epistle from Mother Birgit to Famke, wrapped around the note from the boardinghouse landlord, and at the heart of the bundle, the letter from Famke's Albert. Viggo had never seen so much money before, or so many words written to one person. Neither had he a sense of what the work would be like, but at the moment he was feeling a mixture of excitement and trepidation. No one he knew—except Famke—had ever crossed the ocean.

A knot of sailors worked behind him now, their forked caps swaying as they coiled ropes, trimmed sails, and told each other tales of fancy in a mix of tongues:

“As tall as a house she was, with eyes the size of dinner plates and nipples like—”

Here the sailor must have stopped to illustrate his tale manually, for Viggo heard a chorus of whistles and hoots.

“. . . nothing but a nightdress to save her from the cold, and that itself made of ice,” another voice finished.

Here Viggo stopped even half-listening; he had seen enough women in their shifts, farm wives withered and frail, dead in their sleep.

As he watched, Copenhagen became a smoky scribble against the sky, then vanished entirely. Viggo was overwhelmed with a sense of loss. The
Gunnlod
chugged up the Belt between Denmark and Sweden, keeping in sight of land; but Viggo felt with a rising panic that he was never to see his homeland again, had nothing left of it . . . except the letters written to Famke.

It was no more right for him to read Famke's mail than it had been for Mother Birgit to do so; if anything, it was a graver sin on his part, as he could in no way be considered Famke's confessor. Still, he pulled the fat packet from his rucksack and tore it open. The letter in English he could not read, and the one from the landlord was brief and dull; but he unfolded the outermost letter, the one from Birgit, and began.

“My dear child,” he read, “A great deal of sad news has arrived at Immaculate Heart in recent weeks, not the least of which has been word of your departure for Amerika. That you did not write or call upon us to deliver these tidings personally has caused some pain; and yet I do not mean to reproach you here, but rather to pass on this letter from one who now seeks to correct the wrongs he has done you . . .”

The railways are so poorly constructed that the cars shake tremendously, and the trains don't go any faster than back home. One English mile costs five cents, which certainly is not cheap
.

L
ETTER FROM
D
ANISH IMMIGRANT
,
IN
B
ORNHOLMS
T
IDENDE

In her new world, Famke was far from alone. There was Heber and the flock of new immigrants; there was also an American girl called Myrtice Black, who would be in charge of the women for the rail journey and whose speech was hard for Famke to understand because she came from a place called Georgia, where people spoke differently. She wore a hoopskirt and a small bustle. At Heber's suggestion, she and Famke shared a room and a bed at the hotel, but Myrtice was clearly in no mood for chatting; she unbraided her straw-colored hair, brushed it as if disciplining an unruly animal, and braided it up tight again. She slid her somewhat thick body all the way to the far end of the bed.

Famke gathered that Myrtice was some widowed relative of Heber's first wife, Sariah, and therefore might be resentful on that woman's account. In any event, she was glad that, after the tumult of finding the hotel and dining with her former cabinmates, she and Myrtice had a room to themselves—and, just down the hallway, access to a real flush toilet, in a clean-smelling water closet where Famke was able once again to lay Albert's sketch upon her knees and remind herself why she was here, in America, the new world, a marvelous land where even an ordinary woman was entitled to modern plumbing.

The next morning, after a flurry of eating, food shopping, and prayer, Heber and his flock crammed into a series of horse-drawn omnibuses and let themselves be borne through the packed streets to New York's South
Station. This, no less than the streets outside, was a vast, bustling, echoing place, full of the deafening shriek of engines and wheels, with more cinders than breathable air making their way to the immigrants' lungs. Famke found herself shrinking closer to Heber and Myrtice, even as the latter eyed her with obvious disapproval. Famke had not expected this chaos. How could she ever find Albert, if just one American city had so many people in it?

Famke still wasn't prepared, either, for the interest that a flock of Mormons would excite in the American citizens. Like the yard of Castle Garden, the station was crowded with fashionably attired men, and even some women, all gaping and pointing at the Saints. Despite the heat, Famke pulled her shawl over her head—and then pulled it down again, as she'd already realized that it marked her clearly an immigrant. She followed her husband down the platform.

“This way!” Heber called in the voice he usually used for preaching. A long line of Mormons trailed after him, lugging their bundles and boxes.

Their train was obviously an old one—not at all the sort that Famke had imagined in her visions of America—and its cargo was largely human, groups of assorted immigrants bound for points west. They spoke a variety of tongues whose harsh sounds grated on Famke's ears.

“Come along!” boomed Heber, at the same time as another man, right by their side, yelled it.

Confused, Famke turned to see a large number of grubby children, mostly boys, being herded into a nearby boxcar. The man in charge of them wore the sort of sober clothes that Heber did.

“Are all those children Mormon too?” she asked.

Myrtice answered, in her peculiar voice, “No, those there are orphans being sent west for adoption by Gentile families. The papers call it a mercy train. Charities don't send children to
us
. Now try not to get lost. It is my duty to lead the women to car forty-seven.” She hefted her own two satchels and poised to stride away.

“Yes, dear, please keep up with Myrtice,” Heber said. “I must see to the men now.”

Famke stuck to the Mormon girl's heels as Myrtice wove through the crowds and guided the other women into the car reserved for them; she even pushed her way to the wooden bench that Myrtice claimed inside. To
ingratiate herself, she helped Myrtice unpack boxes of silk eggs—Heber's new livestock—from the special trunk that the egg broker claimed to have imported from China.

“They need to breathe,” the Mormon girl said, and although Famke was finding it hard to fill her own lungs in here, she saw no advantage in disagreeing. Myrtice had been in charge of those eggs for several days already; her purpose for coming to New York was as much to collect them from the broker as to help Heber with the converts. That morning, Famke had heard her explaining to some of the other women that she was recently widowed, having gone to Georgia for normal school two years earlier and met and married her husband there. Now that he was dead, she was rejoining her aunt and family in Prophet City, to help with the new silk venture and to teach the local children; indeed, her very manner of speaking identified her as a schoolmarm. When she took off her glove to dab her eyes with a black-bordered handkerchief, her gold wedding ring gleamed.

As she and Famke settled onto the hard seat, surrounded by the slim wooden boxes, Myrtice scowled and handed over the handkerchief. Famke realized she'd been coughing. She used the cambric square—she was amassing quite a collection—to expel a lungful of dust and smoke and the stench of half a million people crowded into a city in August.

“There are remedies you can take for that, you know.” Myrtice looked pointedly at the wadded cloth. “And a heap of cures without alcohol that are true to our faith. Nobody has to cough anymore.”

Before Famke had thought of anything to say—and what could she say? she
did
need to cough, and rather often—Myrtice propped her feet on the silkworms' trunk and pulled out a leatherbound book embossed with a golden beehive and elaborate lettering: The Book of Mormon. She held it up as if offering it to Famke, who declined as politely as she could. She had found no real stories in her old copy of the Mormons' sacred text, only a series of sermons and some men moving tablets around with considerably less efficiency than Heber and Myrtice were moving the immigrants. She would leave that sort of thing to Myrtice.

Instead, Famke opened Heber's copy of the
New York Times
and scanned the headlines. There was no news of Albert, but then she hadn't really expected any; Albert was in the West, and that was where she would pick up his trail. She was pleased, however, to find a description of the scene she'd
participated in yesterday. According to the correspondent, who went by the peculiar name of Hermes, the newly arrived Mormon women were “not without a share of youth and beauty, although the beauty was high in the cheekbones and rather more rugged than that of our New-York belles.”

Famke laughed out loud. Though the correspondent did not describe her specifically, Famke had little doubt that he was the one who had followed her by the water. The article had to be about her. She read it several times, glad that in this one small way she might feel at home in the new land.

After pulling out of the tangled city, the train's iron wheels ate up miles of green countryside over that long afternoon. Famke saw her first mountains—hills, really, Myrtice said, but to a Dane they looked titanic. She imagined a glittering ice cave deep inside every one.

“Mæka,” she murmured. It was as if she'd stepped into the picture on that old puzzle, a season or two after it had been painted. And Albert was just around the next curve, or perhaps the next after that. It was still hard to believe that America was much, much bigger than that puzzle mountain.