Mercy Train (13 page)

“Hi,” Jack said. “I know you're working. I just wanted to say thanks. For doing the thing for Franklin. And don't be too hard on yourself. It doesn't have to be perfect. See you tonight.”

She didn't want to go back in the house. The one place that came to mind was illogical, even worrisome, but she wanted another look. She restarted the car. And headed back to the Sunrise Inn.

 

VIOLET

Nino coughed and spat and stuck his head under the pump for a drink. The late afternoon was warm and damp as spring slid toward summer. Slaughter Alley had a rotting ripeness.

“Charlie says I could work at the boiler,” Nino said. “When I'm too old for the papers.”

“You could come with me,” Violet said. “Work on a farm. It's got to be better than smelling like Charlie.”

He smiled. “You know that kid Bobo? He's got those bruises all the time from some kind of sickness?”

She nodded. She'd seen the boy around Nino's building, his skinny legs blotched yellow and purple.

“He tried,” Nino said. “No Italians they said. No Chineses, Negroes, Jews, Spanish, Turks. No Russians, neither.”

“So? You could hop the train anyway.”

“I never even seen a alive cow,” he said. “What would I do on a farm?”

“I don't know. Same as me. Eat good. Run around. It can't be that hard to pick corn.”

He shook his head in dismissal.

With Nino she could leave her mother. How could she leave them both? She kicked a bag of ash, which spewed coal dust in the courtyard, eliciting a string of Italian screams from the women pounding on their washboards. Violet and Nino ran out to the street, leaping over the sewer channel into the last of the afternoon sunshine.

“How much they give your mama?” Nino asked.

“Nothing.”

“She's giving you for nothing?” His face crinkled in contrition for what he'd said.

Violet shrugged. “She was putting me in the Home anyways.”

A hunched and mangy woman used a stick to rifle through a heap of garbage outside of the mercantile. She didn't bother wiping the flies from her face.

“Your grandma'am die yet?” Violet asked.

“Yesterday I thought for sure she was cold as a wagon tire, her mouth all hanging open. But she's still breathing up there,” he said, nodding his head at their apartment. “It's a wonder he hasn't tossed her out the window.”

“Come to the station tomorrow,” she said. He rubbed the back of his neck. They didn't usually talk like this, direct and serious, and she knew he didn't like it. “We'll leave together.”

The older Dugan boy ran by, a flash of copper hair.

“I'll tell them you're my brother,” she said.

Nino looked at her straight on, and Violet saw him weigh the possibility of escape. She pictured them next to each other on the train, watching the city get small behind them. It would be their greatest adventure.

“You'll come then?” She bit her lip to clamp down her smile.

“Can't,” he said.

Violet felt cold and prickly. She didn't speak for fear of what her voice would reveal. She wanted to punch Nino square in the face, and she wanted to cry about the unfairness of it all, and she wanted him to know things she could never tell him.

“I'm going to find Jimmy,” Nino said. “Want to come?”

“Can't,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, looking at the space above her head.

She already felt the sickening lightness of his loss, air in her bones where the marrow used to be.

“Bye, I guess,” he said, hitching up his pants.

“Yeah,” she said.

She saluted him, and he was gone.

*   *   *

“This is just for a short time, Vi. It's not like I'm giving you up, you know that. I'm your mother.”

Lilibeth placed her shawl, along with a small hairbrush and comb, on top of Violet's meager clothes in her beloved carpetbag. From a small pouch she pulled the silk sachet bedizened with an owl, the pre-wedding gift from Bluford. The embroidery around the owl's eyes was frayed, the silk water-stained and mildewed. Lilibeth ran her finger over the owl with a wistful reverence.

“It was lovely once,” she said. “Here.”

Violet took it and ran the silk against her cheek.

“Heavens,” Lilibeth said suddenly, her hands fluttering up around her. “I almost forgot.”

From her coat pocket she pulled a small silver case and held it out to Violet. Lilibeth tried to smile, but it forced a tear to spill over onto her cheek. Opposite a red velvet cushion was the photograph Mr. Lewis had commissioned, sepia-toned and striking in its clarity. In it, Lilibeth looked serious, her eyes almost sleepy, her hair pulled back in a softly piled bun with a spit curl on each side of her forehead. She wore a dark taffeta dress with a high-necked collar of white lace, her body angled away, her face turned to the camera. Her eyes looked dark, unlike their usual blue, and her gaze was straight on, impermeable, almost challenging.

“They have dresses there for you to wear,” Lilibeth said, breathlessly. “I felt like I was trying on one of my mother's when I was a girl. I wanted to smile. I thought it would be nicer to smile. But the man told me not to. He said people don't do that.”

Violet was mesmerized by the image of her mother. The woman in the photograph looked substantial and knowing, even strong. She did not look like the woman who'd cried when a May storm washed out a robin's nest in the crabapple tree—“Three perfect blue eggs, Violet, can you imagine”—or the one who'd stared out the window as Bluford thwacked Violet's legs with a broom handle for leaving the chicken coop door open. Or the same one who'd slept with the body of her dead baby boy for two days.

I don't want to go, Violet thought.

“I got to choose between three of them,” Lilibeth said. “I hope I picked the best one. I don't know about my hair. I look old. Do you think I look pretty?”

Violet nodded, feeling like the floor had begun to tilt beneath her. I will do as I'm told, I won't eat much, I'll be better, she wanted to say. Don't let me go.

“You'll remember me, won't you, Vi?”

Violet felt like her mouth had been filled with dirt.

*   *   *

Nino did not see Violet off, nor did any of the other boys. She knew she would fade quickly into a story, like Sammy who drowned in the river or George who left to find gold in California, and then be forgotten altogether.

She was to be at the Children's Aid Society by four o'clock. Lilibeth powdered her face and tied a green ribbon around Violet's hair. They did not talk about where they were going, where Violet would be going. They took a streetcar—Violet's first paid trip—up to East 22nd Street. She felt a seed of fear. This neighborhood might as well have been in a different city, the buildings tall, the streets wide and clean. Lilibeth clutched the card she was given at the Mission and checked the address again. They walked west, to the last building before Park Avenue, a tall brownstone with arched windows, two gas lamps ablaze on either side of the entrance.

“Oh, I don't know, Vi. Maybe we should come back tomorrow,” Lillibeth said, fanning her face. “I'm not sure about this.” She grabbed Violet's hand. “What do you think? You really want to go?”

I want to stay with you
, Violet thought. But she knew this wasn't what was being offered.

“Come on, Mama,” she said.

They were greeted by a smiling, plump-faced woman with volelike eyes in head-to-toe black. Lilibeth handed her the card, her hand quivering.

“God bless you,” the woman said. “What is the child's name?”

“Violet,” Lilibeth said softly. She cleared her throat. “Violet Elaine White.”

Violet looked around at the dark wood trim of the foyer, a vase of cream-colored roses on a side table. She tried to pick somewhere to look, something to focus on, to maintain her tough veneer. She found a divot in the marble floor.

The woman pulled out a piece of paper from a folder.

“Sign here, please, Mrs. White. It's just a formality. No need to worry yourself over the particulars.”

This is to certify that I am the mother and only legal guardian of Violet White. I hereby freely and of my own will agree for the Children's Aid Society to provide a home until she is of age. I hereby promise not to interfere in any arrangements they may make.

Lilibeth struggled over the words, her eyes jumping all around the sheet of paper, before she picked up the pen in what looked like defeat.

“If things were different,” Lilibeth said, her voice faltering. “I wish things were different.”

Take me home
, Violet thought.

Lilibeth signed the paper and at once covered her mouth with her hand.

“Here, my baby,” she said. She handed Violet the bag. “Be good. Don't let them take you back to Kentucky.” She forced a small laugh that quickly died and hung in the air.

“Mama,” Violet said. This couldn't be all there was. This quick cut. She clung to the idea of the train and how it would take her to the wide-open Middle West, someplace on the map she couldn't remember. “I'll write you a letter,” she said, even though she'd never written a letter and wouldn't know where to send it.

“I will come get you,” Lilibeth said, looking trapped, her eyes wide and frightened. “I will come when I can.”

“We'll take her from here,” the woman said. “It's for the best.” She separated Violet from her mother with an ushering arm around her shoulders.

“How will I know where she is?” Lilibeth said, her voice rising. “How will I find her?”

“She will get a good home,” the woman said, quietly but firmly, her authority now firmly in place. “It is better for the child. Say your goodbyes now.”

Lilibeth wavered for the briefest of moments, but then she pulled her daughter into her fragile chest.

“Forgive me,” she whispered, into Violet's hair.

Violet watched the silhouette of her mother's willowy figure floating out the door, lost in the evening's descent. She knew she would see Lilibeth again, because she couldn't conceive of the alternative.

I can go now
, she thought.
I'm on my way
.

*   *   *

“Through this door,” the woman said. “I'll take your bag.”

Their feet tap-tapped along a shiny black-and-white-squared floor.

“I'll keep it with me,” Violet said, sensing a shift in the woman's tone now that Lilibeth was gone. “It's no trouble.”

“You won't be needing anything in there anymore,” the woman said, pulling it from Violet's hand. “You are going to a new Christian life. To start clean.”

Violet's mind flashed, and she thought,
run
, but then she thought about the train and how it made her pulse quicken to imagine it delivering her somewhere new.

“Can I have the photograph that's in there?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even and polite. “My mother's photograph. That's all I want.”

“Shhh, now,” the woman said. “It will all be fine. God is looking after you.”

Violet swallowed, disoriented by it all, her heart skittering as her resolve gave way. She followed.

The woman led her up a staircase, through another door, down a hall, and into a large room where children of different ages—girls and boys, some in orphanage-issued uniforms, others in tattered, street-worn clothes—stood in various lines. None of them talked. There was only the scuffing of boots, the shuffling of papers, and the murmurs of Aid Society women.

“Here is Mrs. Pettigrew. She'll get you freshened up and fit you with a brand-new dress for the trip. Supper will be at five. You have a big day tomorrow.”

Violet looked down at her mother's bag in the woman's hand, a relic to which she no longer had claim.

“You'll be reunited. When things are better,” the woman said. “You can pick up your things then.”

“This way,” Mrs. Pettigrew said, her old fingers curled like claws. “You are a lovely girl. You should have no trouble getting chosen.”

Violet scanned the crowd for anyone she might recognize. Some of the younger children cried, others merely stared. Two twin boys around the age of five, their hair cut in a line high on their foreheads, held hands and squatted in the corner. Across the room she saw Buck, the newsboy from her neighborhood, biting his bottom lip.

“Buck,” she called.

Everyone turned to look. He scowled back at her and turned away.

“Hush, child,” Mrs. Pettigrew said. “Let's let Dr. Smith have a look at you. To make sure you're fit for the country.”

*   *   *

They told the children very little about where they were going. Each was pinned with a square of paper with a number on it. Each was given a Bible. Each was given a new birth date because, they were told, that's what their new families wanted. The girls wore white ruffled dresses and black bows in their hair. The boys wore dark blue suits and ties.

Violet did not know much about geography, about which state was where, other than what she remembered from sporadic school attendance. She knew that Indiana and Ohio were above Kentucky. She knew that President Lincoln—the teacher barely masking her contempt—had been born in Illinois. West was a bright, gauzy place that was never loud or crowded or dirty. The farms there were not like the dusty, broken-down farms of Barren County, where chickens scratched at dried-mud yards, cornstalks sagged, worms chewed through cabbages, and squirrels took out whole strawberry patches in one night. The farms out west were huge and green and abundant.

At dawn the children were gathered and grouped into “little companies” of thirty or so, for trains heading out in a fan across the country. Buck—his number was on yellow paper—was headed to Texas, or so he boasted to Violet during the wagon ride to the station. She had snorted when she'd first seen him in a suit, his hair cut high over his ears so his teeth were more noticeable than ever.