Orphan Train (17 page)

Feeling around in the bag, he said, “Aw, shit. I meant to get you a chain to clip these on.” He patted her knee. “Don’t worry about it. That’ll be part two.”

Two weeks later, coming home late one night, he lost control of his car, and that was that. Within six months, Molly was living somewhere else. It was years before she bought herself that chain.

Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011

“Portage.” Vivian wrinkles her nose. “It sounds like—oh, I don’t know—a
pie made of sausage.”

A pie made of sausage? Okay, maybe this isn’t going to work.

“Carrying my boat between bodies of water? I’m not so good with metaphors, dear,” Vivian says. “What’s it supposed to mean?”

“Well,” Molly says, “I think the boat represents what you take with you—the essential things—from place to place. And the water—well, I think it’s the place you’re always trying to get to. Does that make sense?”

“Not really. I’m afraid I’m more confused than I was before.”

Molly pulls out a list of questions. “Let’s just get started and see what happens.”

They are sitting in the red wingback chairs in the living room in the waning light of late afternoon. Their work for the day is finished, and Terry has gone home. It was pouring earlier, great sheets of rain, and now the clouds outside the window are crystal tipped, like mountain peaks in the sky, rays emanating downward like an illustration in a children’s bible.

Molly pushes the button on the tiny digital tape recorder she signed out from the school library and checks to see that it’s working. Then she takes a deep breath and runs a finger under the chain around her neck. “My dad gave me these charms, and each one represents something different. The raven protects against black magic. The bear inspires courage. The fish signifies a refusal to recognize other people’s magic.”

“I never knew those charms had meaning.” Absently, Vivian reaches up and touches her own necklace.

Looking closely at the pewter pendant for the first time, Molly asks, “Is your necklace—significant?”

“Well, it is to me. But it doesn’t have any magical qualities.” She smiles.

“Maybe it does,” Molly says. “I think of these qualities as metaphorical, you know? So black magic is whatever leads people to the dark side—their own greed or insecurity that makes them do destructive things. And the warrior spirit of the bear protects us not only from others who might hurt us but our own internal demons. And I think other people’s magic is what we’re vulnerable to—how we’re led astray. So . . . my first question for you is kind of a weird one. I guess you could think of it as metaphorical, too.” She glances at the tape recorder once more and takes a deep breath. “Okay, here goes. Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts?”

“My, that is quite a question.” Clasping her frail, veined hands in her lap, Vivian gazes out the window. For a moment Molly thinks she isn’t going to answer. And then, so quietly that she has to lean forward in her chair to hear, Vivian says, “Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts.”

“Do you think they’re . . . present in our lives?”

Vivian fixes her hazel eyes on Molly and nods. “They’re the ones who haunt us,” she says. “The ones who have left us behind.”

Hemingford County, Minnesota, 1930

There’s hardly any food in the house. Mr. Grote has returned from the
woods empty-handed for the past three days, and we’re subsisting on eggs and potatoes. It gets so desperate he decides to kill one of the chickens and starts eyeing the goat. He is quiet these days when he comes in. Doesn’t speak to the kids, who clamor for him, holding on to his legs. He bats them off like they’re flies on honey.

On the evening of the third day, I can feel him looking at me. He has a funny expression on his face, like he’s doing math in his head. Finally he says, “So what’s that thing you got around your neck?” and it’s clear what he’s up to.

“There’s no value in it,” I say.

“Looks like silver,” he says, peering at it. “Tarnished.”

My heart thumps in my ears. “It’s tin.”

“Lemme see.”

Mr. Grote comes closer, then touches the raised heart, the clasped hands, with his dirty finger. “What is that, some kind of pagan symbol?”

I don’t know what pagan is, but it sounds wicked. “Probably.”

“Who gave it to you?”

“My gram.” It’s the first time I’ve mentioned my family to him, and I don’t like the feeling. I wish I could take it back. “It was worthless to her. She was throwing it away.”

He frowns. “Sure is strange looking. Doubt I could sell it if I tried.”

Mr. Grote talks to me all the time—when I’m pulling feathers off the chicken, frying potatoes on the woodstove, sitting by the fire in the living room with a child in my lap. He tells me about his family—how there was some kind of dispute, and his brother killed his father when Mr. Grote was sixteen and he ran away from home and never went back. He met Mrs. Grote around that time, and Harold was born when they were eighteen. They never actually tied the knot until they had a houseful of kids. All he wants to do is hunt and fish, he says, but he has to feed and clothe all these babies. God’s honest truth, he didn’t want a single one of ’em. God’s honest truth, he’s afraid he could get mad enough to hurt them.

As the weeks pass and the weather gets warmer, he takes to whittling on the front porch until late in the evening, a bottle of whiskey by his side, and he’s always asking me to join him. In the darkness he tells me more than I want to know. He and Mrs. Grote barely say a word to each other anymore, he says. She hates to talk, but loves sex. But he can’t stand to touch her—she doesn’t bother to clean herself, and there’s always a kid hanging off her. He says, “I should’ve married someone like you, Dorothy. You wouldn’t’ve trapped me like this, would ya?” He likes my red hair. “You know what they say,” he tells me. “If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead.” The first girl he kissed had red hair, but that was a long time ago, he says, back when he was young and good-looking.

“Surprised I was good-looking? I was a boy once, you know. I’m only twenty-four now.”

He has never been in love with his wife, he says.

Call me Gerald, he says.

I know that Mr. Grote shouldn’t be saying all this. I am only ten years old.

T
HE CHILDREN WHIMPER LIKE WOUNDED DOGS AND CLUSTER TOGETHER
for comfort. They don’t play like normal kids, running and jumping. Their noses are always filled with green mucus, and their eyes are runny. I move through the house like an armored beetle, impervious to Mrs. Grote’s sharp tongue, Harold’s whining, the cries of Gerald Jr., who will never in his life satisfy his aching need to be held. I see Mabel turning into a sullen girl, all too aware of the ways she has been burdened, ill-treated, abandoned to this sorry lot. I know how it happened to the children, living this way, but it’s hard for me to love them. Their misery only makes me more aware of my own. It takes all my energy to keep myself clean, to get up and out the door in the morning to school.

Lying on a mattress at night during a rainstorm, metal ribs poking at me from under the thin ticking, water dripping on my face, my stomach hollow and empty, I remember a time on the
Agnes Pauline
when it was raining and everyone was seasick and my da tried to distract us kids from our misery by getting us to close our eyes and visualize a perfect day. That was three years ago, when I was seven, but the day I imagined is still vivid in my mind. It’s a Sunday afternoon and I am going to visit Gram in her snug home on the outskirts of town. Walking to her house—climbing over stone walls and across fields of wild grass that move in the wind like waves on the sea—I smell the sweet smoke from turf fires and listen to the thrushes and blackbirds practice their wild songs. In the distance I see the thatched-roof house with its whitewashed walls, pots of red geraniums blooming on the window-sill, Gram’s sturdy black bike propped inside the gate, near the hedge where blackberries and sloe fruit hang in dense blue clusters.

Inside, a goose roasts in the oven and the black-and-white dog, Monty, waits under the table for scraps. Granddad’s out fishing for trout in the river with a homemade rod or hunting grouse or partridge across the fields. So it’s just Gram and me, alone for a few hours.

Gram is rolling dough for a rhubarb tart, back and forth with the big rolling pin, dusting the yellow dough with handfuls of flour, stretching it to cover the brimming pie dish. Now and then she takes a puff of her Sweet Afton, wisps of smoke rising above her head. She offers me a bull’s-eye sweet, which she’s stashed in her apron pocket with a half-dozen half-smoked Afton butts—a mix of flavors I’ll never forget. On the front of the yellow cigarette box is a poem by Robert Burns that Gram likes to sing to an old Irish tune:

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes.

Flow gently, I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise.

I sit on a three-legged stool listening to the crackle and spit of goose skin in the oven while she trims a ribbon of dough from around the rim of the pie dish, making a cross with a remnant for the center and brushing it all with a beaten egg, finishing with a flourish of fork pricks and a sprinkle of sugar. When the tart’s safely in the oven we move to the front room, the “good room,” she calls it, just the two of us, for afternoon tea, strong and black with plenty of sugar, and currant bread, sliced and warm. Gram chooses two teacups from her collection of rose-patterned china in the glass-front, along with matching saucers and small plates, and sets each piece carefully on a starched linen placemat. Irish lace, hanging in the windows, filters the afternoon light, softening the lines on her face.

From my perch on the cushioned chair I see the wooden footrest with its floral needlepoint cover in front of her rocker, the small shelf of books—prayer books and poetry, mainly—by the stairs. I see Gram singing and humming as she pours the tea. Her strong hands and kind smile. Her love for me.

Now, tossing and turning on this damp, sour-smelling mattress, I try to focus on my perfect day, but these memories lead to other, darker thoughts. Mrs. Grote, back there moaning in her bedroom, isn’t so different from my own mam. Both of them overburdened and ill-equipped, weak by nature or circumstance, married to strong-willed, selfish men, addicted to the opiate of sleep. Mam expected me to cook and clean and take care of Maisie and the boys, relied on me to hear her troubles, called me naive when I insisted things would get better, that we would be all right. “You don’t know,” she’d say. “You don’t know the half of it.” One time, not long before the fire, she was curled on her bed in the dark and I heard her crying and went in to comfort her. When I put my arms around her, she sprang up, flinging me away. “You don’t care about me,” she snapped. “Don’t pretend you do. You only want your supper.”

I shrank back, my face flaming as if I’d been struck. And in that moment something changed. I didn’t trust her anymore. When she cried, I felt numb. After that, she called me heartless, unfeeling. And maybe I was.

A
T THE BEGINNING OF
J
UNE
,
WE ALL COME DOWN WITH LICE
,
EVERY
last one of us, even Nettie, who has barely four hairs on her head. I remember lice from the boat—Mam was terrified of us kids getting it, and she checked our heads every day, quarantining us when we heard about outbreaks in other cabins. “Worst thing in the world to get rid of,” she said, and told us about the epidemic at the girls’ school in Kinvara when she was a boarder. They shaved every head. Mam was vain about her thick, dark hair and refused to cut it ever again. We got it on the boat, just the same.

Gerald won’t stop scratching, and when I inspect his scalp I find it’s teeming. I check the other two and find bugs on them as well. Every surface in the house probably has lice on it, the couch and chairs and Mrs. Grote. I know what an ordeal this will be: no more school, my hair gone, hours of labor, washing the bedsheets . . .

I feel an overwhelming urge to flee.

Mrs. Grote is lying in bed with the baby. Propped on two soiled pillows, the blanket pulled up to her chin, she just stares at me when I come in. Her eyes are sunk in their sockets.

“The children have lice.”

She purses her lips. “Do you?”

“Probably, since they do.”

She seems to think about this for a moment. Then she says, “You brung the parasite into this house.”

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.