Power in the Blood (2 page)

Mrs. Smalley had been expecting fewer children under broader adult supervision. She introduced herself and her charges to the custodians, who in turn gave their name as Canby, Mr. and Mrs. Then it was time for stilted good-byes.

“These nice people will take care of you till you find a home. You be sure and heed them, and be good always, promise me now.”

“Yes,” said Zoe.

The boys simply nodded, their attention on the newcomers flocking around. Clay was already testing with his eyes the resolution of anyone who cared to match his gaze. He liked the idea of being top dog of this so-called orphan train, even though it was obvious from all the grown-up passengers milling around that orphans would constitute only a small portion of the payload.

Tall for his age, Clay was disappointed to note at least a half dozen boys older and bigger than himself; he hadn’t thought there might be such things as orphans over the age of thirteen, and felt a fool for it. The trip was not shaping up as he’d anticipated, so he scowled and said as little as possible to Mrs. Smalley, wishing he could blame her somehow for his displeasure. While she lectured on good behavior and obedience, he stared at the soot-encrusted walls round about, allowing her voice to be drowned by the station’s din.

Clay had heard that in the west there was no soot, at least not enough to accumulate on streets and buildings. A clean place, he told himself; new and clean. He had heard that less than two weeks ago the nation was linked by a continuous set of rails built simultaneously from east and west; they had met and been joined by a golden spike somewhere in Utah Territory. What was to prevent the Dugans from riding all the way to the Pacific? he asked himself. All they had to do was refuse the entreaties of anyone wishing to adopt them along the way. It would be easy.

The orphans had a car entirely to themselves, the oldest and least comfortable available, the seats little more than narrow wooden benches set close together. “The most seats for the littlest money,” Drew heard the man with one arm say, but the man didn’t sound pleased that they had the most seats.

Leading the first wave of boarders, Clay shoved Zoe and Drew against a window and sat beside them. “That boy!” Mrs. Canby cried, pointing at him. “There will be no pushing and shoving, do you hear!” Clay loathed her instantly. “There is room for all!” she called over her shoulder. “Once seated, remain there, all of you! We will not hold up departure of this train through rowdiness!”

Several boys who had sneaked away to admire the snorting locomotive were rounded up by railroad staff and brought to the car for inclusion among the swarm already aboard.

“Settle down!” roared Mr. Canby, and the effect was immediate; all unnecessary movement among the seats was stilled. Clay admired the man’s ability to control so many with just his voice.

Despite relative calm inside the car and a full complement of orphans, the train did not leave for a further twenty minutes. Zoe, crammed against a window, could see Mrs. Smalley on the platform, clearly unwilling to call a halt to duty until the train was gone. Zoe remained invisible behind the grimy pane. She pointed out Mrs. Smalley to Drew, but he was more interested in a knee-bumping contest with the boy seated opposite him.

Clay refused to look out the window; Schenectady already belonged to the past. He stared at the back of Mrs. Canby’s tightly bunned and bonneted head further down the cramped aisle and willed the train to begin moving. When finally the whistle blew and the cars lurched forward in a rattle of couplings, he found he’d been holding his breath.

Within a very few minutes, the station and Mrs. Smalley, the edge of the town itself, all were gone, left behind. Clay resolved to remember his life up until this moment only in the broadest terms. There had been too much unhappiness in that place receding behind the red caboose, too much hunger and desperation, too little laughter. When he recalled their lives in Schenectady without sentiment, he saw there had been no real hope for them at all.

2

During the day and night it took to leave New York State and enter Pennsylvania, Zoe learned that Mrs. Canby was without humor or warmth, and seemed in fact not to like children. She had made sure the newcomers knew her rules soon after the train left Albany. “Remain seated at all times. Hold up your hand if you require attention. Do not leave the car without permission. Do not make unnecessary noise or create disturbances among your fellow travelers.”

Her husband, the one-armed man, was more approachable. He would tell anyone who asked him how his arm was lost at Shiloh. Zoe had heard the story several times already. Mr. Canby didn’t change so much as a word of it each time, so it must be true. The part about the rebel ball that shattered the bone was interesting, but best of all was his description of the hospital tent, with arms and legs stacked outside.

“And then the surgeon picked up the saw,” said Mr. Canby, “and he started in on me with just a stick between my teeth and not even a shot of good whiskey inside me for the pain of it, and he didn’t quit sawing till that arm was off and the flapping piece of flesh they left all nicely tucked and stitched over it. Then came the hot pitch—slapped on the stump like a mud pie it was—and didn’t I howl, you bet I did, howled like a pup. But you know what the strange part was?” Everyone did by then, but his audience leaned forward anyway. “I still felt the arm,” Mr. Canby said in hushed tones, “felt it joined to my shoulder, just like the other one, with the fingers wriggling all alive still, even if the whole thing was gone. A phantom arm …” It never failed to produce an intake of breath.

Drew was fascinated by the openness of the countryside. During the hours of daylight he stared through the window at an endless series of neat farms and tiny hill towns. Sometimes the train would stop to let passengers off from the other cars, and new passengers would step aboard to be drawn westward through the long afternoon and evening.

He talked occasionally with the boy seated opposite him, Kerwin (who pronounced it Care-win), but found conversation difficult because of Kerwin’s peculiar big-city accent. “Eeeehh, fuck yez,” Kerwin eventually said, when it became clear he was not understood, so Drew returned to watching the world roll effortlessly by.

He’d been unprepared for so many trees, so great an expanse of sky, and they’d only just started. Clay said everyone would be on the train for days, getting west. It was a shame Mama couldn’t be there to enjoy the newness of it all with them. Mama would have sat with the bonnet lady and talked with her like she’d always sat and talked with Mrs. Smalley back home, back in that place none of them would ever see again; even Mama, who’d stayed there, would never see it again. Drew wept silently, then fell asleep, and woke up to find still more countryside sliding by, late afternoon sunlight lengthening the shadows of the trees. He was terribly hungry.

At sundown the orphan car was detached from the train for transfer to a string of boxcars behind another locomotive, which would continue hauling westward through the night. While the car was switched onto a siding, the children were ordered to stand in an orderly fashion along the station platform to receive their first food since breakfast. Mr. Canby opened the wicker basket he’d wrestled with literal single-handedness from the car, and his wife dispensed a meal of bread generously spread with lard. This was followed by two dried apricots for each child. It became clear the basket was not intended to feed so many for very long.

“What’s needed here,” said Mr. Canby with a grin, “is a miracle of the loaves and fishes, maybe.” Mrs. Canby frowned darkly, and he stopped grinning.

The new train having been shunted onto the main line, the orphans’ journey resumed. Reinvigorated by food, they could not fall asleep as ordered by Mrs. Canby. The distraction of a passing landscape no longer available to them, the children found renewed interest in one another, and the car soon was filled with a continuous babble of young voices raised to their highest pitch to overcome the grumble and clatter of rolling wheels and the more immediate din of their neighbors.

“Cease!” cried Mrs. Canby. “You must be quiet!”

Zoe wished it were possible to change seats temporarily, just so she could talk to some of the other girls, or even some of the boys. It was wearisome to be forever in the same place, looking at the same faces arranged opposite her, not one of which she liked. It had been interesting at first to listen as Kerwin held whispered swearing contests with the boy beside him, an Irish youth named McIlwray, who could not, despite coaching from Kerwin, learn how to pronounce “fuck” correctly. It became a laughing matter in the immediate vicinity of the swearers, and McIlwray grew irritated. “Fock yew,” he said with genuine feeling, and Kerwin responded in kind.

But that sport had become boring through repetition, and Zoe chafed at her immobility. Occasional rearrangements of seating were made by Mrs. Canby, usually to terminate cases of harassment, verbal or otherwise, conducted by boys against girls. Mrs. Canby even threatened to separate the sexes, girls on one side of the aisle, boys on the other, if such despicable behavior did not cease upon the instant. The threat was not carried out, to Zoe’s relief. For all that she wanted to sample friendship throughout the car, she would have felt lost without her brothers on either side. Mr. Canby slept throughout the worst of this crisis, his snores the object of much stifled giggling.

Migration among seats being forbidden, the one place anyone could visit, after raising a hand, was the crude privy built onto the car’s rear platform. In daylight it had been exciting to watch the crossties flashing past under the hole in the plank; it caused a delicious shiver to imagine oneself falling through, to be cut in half by the wheels. After nightfall some of the girls preferred using the privy in twos, comforting each other beneath the inadequate light of a swaying oil lamp while they relieved themselves onto a roadbed made invisible by darkness.

Sleep was difficult on the unyielding benches. The children sat as they had throughout the day, the next shoulder along providing a bony pillow as the night lengthened. Girls used each other’s soft laps, but the boys were denied this comfort, with the instinctive rejection of physical closeness among their kind. Drew was just young enough to avail himself of Zoe’s thighs without embarrassment. Zoe in turn leaned against sturdy Clay, upright as ever despite his closed eyes, behind which he slipped in and out of dreams that showed him Mama beckoning him further west, further west, until he came to a place where the sun lay like a molten ball of gold, a brilliant puddle on a desolate plain, and Mama was nowhere to be seen. Waking, he allowed himself a brief moment awash with tears that went unobserved in the dim car, now quiet as it swayed along rails into the Pennsylvanian night.

Breakfast came from the same wicker basket: bread and chicken fat, plus two dried apricots apiece. Mr. Canby, a large man despite his incompleteness, was seen to stare at his portion for some time before eating it, his expression doleful. Lunch saw no change other than the Canbys’ having to reach deeper into the basket. Mealtimes had already become less rowdy, almost sullen occasions.

In the evening, when the train reached Pittsburgh, there was a treat for all—dinner in the station restaurant. The menu was lengthy, but everyone had soup, Mrs. Canby having protested at the exorbitant price of every meat dish. Mr. Canby spooned soup under his mustache, his face darkened by unknown forces within. Glaring at his emptied bowl, he insisted there be a dessert. Over his wife’s objections, he ordered pie, and then pie again, not one belly having truly been filled. Mrs. Canby refused to look in his direction as they herded their charges back to the car, now hitched onto yet another train. The benches seemed less uncomfortable, an advantage of repletion, which Mr. Canby referred to as “intestinal fulfillment, like a live human’s supposed to feel at least once every twenty-four hours for good health.”

The morning of the third day revealed Ohio, and now there was real excitement in the car. This was the first state in which it was possible to be selected for adoption. Orphans wondered, silently or aloud, at their chances. Clay was scornful; he told Zoe and Drew they had to hold out for more westerly regions. “Ohio’s just not far enough,” he said.

In the afternoon it happened. The car was detached from the train and shunted onto a siding at the edge of a sizable town. A council representative approached smilingly to speak with the Canbys and suggested bringing all orphans to the town hall, where a crowd had already gathered in anticipation.

The Children’s Aid Society was in its fifteenth year of good work, having begun in 1854, and a larger than usual turnout of prospective foster parents had assembled to survey the spring crop of adoptees. A diphtheria epidemic of unprecedented virulence the previous winter had sharpened interest in the children.

“Plenty of families lost their little ones just recent,” the councilman whispered, keeping his voice from the straggling line of painfully hushed orphans following behind. “These here’ll be snapped up in double-quick time, I guarantee. Folks have come in from a hundred miles around, farmers mostly. They’ll be eager for the younguns, all right.”

Inside the town hall, arranged on a long bench covered by cloth, without a single chair to impede access, a feast was waiting—a communal celebration of the orphans’ arrival. Anxious adult faces were everywhere, yet these were thrust into the background by the endless table of food, real food, present in variety and abundance. There were cold meats and cakes; fresh bread and pies; an assortment of dried fruit, notably apricots (these would be ignored); jars of preserves with their melted paraffin seals dug out; butter molded into rough blocks of tantalizing yellow; crocks of milk still smelling of the udder. Not a feast—a banquet.

“Fall to and take your share,” commanded the councilman, and not an orphan hesitated. Surrounded by questing eyes and subtly pointing fingers, they attacked the fruits of central Ohio and set about gorging themselves. The councilman, a student of human nature, gently pushed the Canbys toward the food. “Have at it, one and all,” he urged.