Rodzina (11 page)

Lacey looked up at me and smiled. Her tears flashed on her face like diamonds. What a face she had. No one would ever call her Big Nose Lacey or Potato Nose or some other ugly name.

I put my hand over my own nose, walked to the edge of the platform, and stared at the empty tracks pointing west toward the mountains. Behind me I could hear the moaning of the train whistle. I turned toward the sound. A little black dot grew bigger and bigger as the clanging and tooting got louder and louder until, with a burst of sound and steam like a hot Chicago summer, the train pulled in.

We boarded with everyone else and found seats in what Miss Doctor said was a third-class car. It seemed first-class to me—few orphans to tend, no jelly sandwiches, no Szprot.

Sammy and Joe sat together. I sat behind them with Lacey. And behind us Miss Doctor took a seat next to a lady in a red coat and a hat with cherries on it.

The seats were only hard wooden benches, but Miss Doctor got us each a straw cushion for sitting and sleeping on. They were two dollars each. Doctors, even lady doctors, must make a powerful lot of money, I thought.

The Indians did not enter the cars but stood on the landings between them. Maybe they liked the fresh air and didn't mind the almighty cold and wind. Whatever the reason, I was just as glad not to be too close. I didn't know what Indians were likely to do. I kept my stink face on awhile, just in case.

As the train started, Lacey jumped and ran up the aisle as if her feet were on fire. She scooped up a fat gray cat and carried it back to our seat, where they snuggled together like potatoes and gravy. The conductor, coming by to check our tickets, said with a wink that the cat was employed by the railroad. "To keep down the mice," he said.

"Does she have a name?" Lacey asked.

"Just cat, I reckon," the conductor answered her. "And she's a he."

"Well, he's got to have a name. Ro, what should his name be?"

"Let's see, he's so round and plump and soft," I said, "I think you should call him Dumpling."

"What's dumpling?"

"A dumpling is a fat ball of dough boiled and served with Mama's pork roast and sauerkraut," I said. "A dumpling is the best thing in the world."

"Then he is Dumpling," Lacey said.

I looked around the car at all the people going west. Or wester, since it seemed to me we were already in the west here in Wyoming Territory. What were they looking for? And why did they think it was way out here?

I turned around to ask Miss Doctor, but her eyes were closed. The lady sitting next to her was youngish and plumpish. Her face was as round and rosy as a china plate with flowers painted on it, and so jolly looking that I'd bet she smiled even while she slept. She was alone, but looked much too happy to be an orphan.

"Did you come all the way from Chicago like we did?" I asked her.

She shook her head no, and the cherries on her hat bobbled. "From Omaha. Going to be a mail-order bride." And she laughed a great, rumbly laugh.

"What is that? Can you order a bride from Mr. Montgomery Ward's catalogue like you do pianos and stew pots?"

She laughed again and said it was almost that easy. "I answered an advertisement in the Omaha
Herald
from a homesteader in this here Wasatch, Utah Territory, looking for a wife. We wrote a few letters back and forth, and here I am, going west." She smiled, and her eyes all but disappeared in the rosy folds of her face.

"I saw an ad like that in the Grand Island railroad station. A man in Montana wanted a wife. But aren't you worried about marrying a stranger?" I asked her. "Don't you mind leaving your home and family and all?"

"Got no family," she said. "And home was a room in a boarding house with mildew on the wallpaper and the stink of cabbage in the halls. Didn't aim to spend the rest of my life in that room or up to my elbows in scummy water washing linen for rich ladies who didn't want to wash their own. So when I saw that advertisement, it was like God said, 'Merlene, put down them buckets, dry your hands, and come out here to my country where the air is clean, the sky big and blue, and any dirty wash you do will be your own.'"

"What about him?"

"Who?"

"Him," I repeated. "You know. The man who placed the advertisement."

"Oh,
him.
Name of Enoch Thompson. He sounds kind and lonely. Not too young anymore, but neither am I. I foresee we'll get on well enough. I get on with most people."

"What if he doesn't want to marry you? What if he wants someone smaller or taller or older?" I was trying to understand this whole mail-order-bride business.

She snorted. "Men out there got to marry anything that gets off the train."

"What if
you
don't want to marry
him?
What if he's mean? Or ugly? Or a criminal hiding out from the law?"

"Now, child, sometimes you got to trust and hope, not be saying 'what if' all the time. Besides, if we don't suit each other, I won't stay. I got my assets—hands and feet and a strong back. And at least I'll be out of that boarding house in Omaha."

Miss Merlene closed her eyes. While I watched her, I thought about this mail-order husband of hers. Would he be tall and handsome with a handlebar mustache and a horse and buggy, like the hero of a story? Could someone find all this out in advance so she would not be stuck with a Mr. Clench? Or did she have to hope and trust and not say "what if" all the time, just like Miss Merlene said?

Her eyes were still closed, but I asked her anyway, "Don't you mind that it's all so strange and unfamiliar here? People carry guns and live in dugouts and there are Indians on the landings."

"I like strange and unfamiliar," she said, opening her eyes just a slit. "It ain't the same old thing. And as for the Indians, poor souls, they ain't allowed to come inside, but they can ride for free out there. It's in the treaty. We get their land and they get the landings between railroad cars." She shook her head. "We white folk straight out robbed them, I reckon."

Miss Merlene went back to her nap then, and I turned to watch Wyoming Territory go by outside the window.

Lacey and the cat snuggled next to me. "Dumpling and I need a last name," she said. "You got a last name, and Mickey Dooley does. I reckon Sammy and Spud and Joe got last names, too. Everybody but us got two names. What could our last name be, Ro?"

"Well, pick a name. Any name. Like off that sign there," I said, as we passed a barn with a sign painted on.

"I can't read."

Sighing, I read it aloud: "Connery Grain and Manure."

"Manure," said Lacey. "It's pretty."

I sighed again. "Sure is, but I think Connery would go better with Lacey." So then she was Lacey Connery, and the cat was Dumpling Connery, and they both sat there and purred.

Snowflakes began to fall as the train climbed and turned. In some places we went so slow, it felt like they were laying track right in front of the train, so slow that what had been only blurs became bushes, scrub grass, and stunted pine trees poking up through the snow.

After a while we halted at Sherman and got off to stretch our legs. The sun was bright overhead, but still the air was bitter and sharp with the smell of cold earth. The conductor pointed out the sights, which weren't much. Sherman was a bleak and wild place, just a settlement of maybe a dozen houses, a little brick hotel, and a saloon set among low hills and snow-covered red rocks. A mighty wind stung my face as I read aloud the wooden sign posted there: "You are standing 8235 feet above sea level."

"Highest point on the route," said the conductor, pointing to the sign. "From here we'll go downhill fast as lightning through a gooseberry bush."

Lacey kicked at the ground a few times and buried her face in Dumpling's dusty fur. "What's wrong?" I asked her.

"This here highest peak. It's just more land. Why, I thought it would poke right through the clouds to Heaven."

"Ain't quite that high, Lacey," I said. I myself wished it was. Papa was in Heaven. "Welcome to Heaven," he'd say to me. "It is a wondrous beautiful place. Reminds me of Poland. Mama is here too, cooking roast goose and dumplings for you and God."

We walked around Sherman a bit, breathing the frigid air that burned my nose and chest and made my eyes water. There was a cliff with people's names carved in it. If Hermy the Knife was still here, I could borrow his knife and add my name:
Rodzina Clara Jadwiga Anastazya Brodski, an orphan going west, April 1881.
And it would be there forever and ever. I stood there at the highest point on the railroad line and looked east and west—saying goodbye and hello. The west sure was different from Chicago, and I didn't know if it would suit me.

I was already back in my seat when Miss Doctor boarded the train, followed by Lacey, Joe, Sammy, and the other passengers. She looked out of place in her black suit amidst all the horse-blanket coats and gingham dresses. And the black suit wasn't crisp and sharp anymore, marked as it was with red jelly and gray fuzz and what looked mighty like tobacco juice. I was surprised she hadn't changed into clean clothes.

Her face was so pale and unhappy that I found myself with a funny feeling. Pity. I pitied Miss Doctor. You got to be in a real bad fix to admire a rat
and
pity Miss Doctor.

She sat in the seat behind me. I turned. "Miss Doctor?"

She looked away from the window, her gray eyes more sad than sharp. "Miss Brodski?"

"Joe said Mr. Szprot said you're going to California. That true?"

"That's true."

"Well, what I want to know is why? You don't seem like the kind of person to want to go west. Aren't you a good enough doctor for Chicago?"

Her eyes sharpened right up at that. "I am a fine doctor, with excellent skills and training."

"Then why?"

"Because people in Chicago don't seem to take to a lady doctor, and I can't eat plans and dreams." She turned and looked again out the window. "I hoped it would be different in a new state like California."

"Miss Doctor?"

She made a little impatient motion with her hand, and I let her be.

After Sherman we raced back down onto flat plains and then, after the chimneys and fences of Laramie, started to climb again into hills of wind and desert. The earth was red and the land was lifeless, littered with dead trees, ox bones, and abandoned wagons. A shabby, hand-lettered sign read "New York City: a million miles away." I knew just how that fellow felt.

Here and there were lonely settlers' huts, which reminded me of the Clenches and my narrow escape. We stopped at stations with sad names like Bitter Creek and Point of Rocks. People got on and off, although I could not see where they were going to or coming from. The Indians at the front of our car left, and I breathed a breath of relief.

At the supper stop we ate in one of the eating stations I had so long admired from the outside. For three dollars all five of us ate meat soup, pie, sweet potatoes, pickles, raisins, bread, and coffee. The coffee reminded me of Papa's Sunday smell—a little bit coffee, some hair tonic, and the clean fragrance of a starched shirt, so different from his sour, sweaty everyday odor.

The land changed as we climbed again. There were rocks as big as buildings, and evergreen trees looking almost human as they waved their branches at us in the wind. Snow fell, the wind roared, and the train rattled and swayed west.

W
ASATCH STATION WAS
our first stop in Utah Territory. Miss Merlene was the only passenger to get off the train. A man who had been leaning against the What Cheer Eating House walked over to her and tipped his hat. I wiped the steam from the window and pressed my nose against it, the better to see this mail-order husband of hers.

He was not what I had imagined, no fairy-tale hero at all, being a spindly fellow and a mite shorter than she, with a lot of grizzled gray in his beard. His coat sleeves didn't reach his wrists, his pants were so short I could see his stockings bagging around his skinny ankles, and he carried a fistful of weeds or sagebrush or maybe just the ugliest flowers I ever saw. But the moony way he looked at his bride and took her arm made my heart twirl around. It was as if she was a treasure made of glass or spun sugar, and he the lucky man who won her at the fair. If you asked me, they would hit it off just fine. Lucky Miss Merlene. I waved to her, but she never took her eyes off him long enough to see me. As they walked off, the cherries on her hat bobbled cheerfully.

"Echo Canyon," the conductor called, walking through the cars a while later, "now entering Echo Canyon." Enormous cliffs, red as the Polish flag, rose on both sides of the tracks. If I squinted my eyes, they looked almost like the brick mansions of the rich on Prairie Avenue.

"What is this word 'canyon'?" I asked him, for I had never heard it before.

"It's a Spanish word, missy. Means a deep ravine or narrow valley, like this here one we're riding in."

Spanish. How far away from Chicago I was, here where they said things in Spanish. I took to watching out the window behind us at the scenery we had already passed so I could remember where I came from. That girl was me, that girl back in the room on Honore Street. Here, who was I? Was I anybody? And what was to become of whoever I was?

I was still moody and broody when we stopped at the Thousand Mile Tree, marking that we had come a thousand miles from Omaha. A thousand miles. A thousand seemed like an awful lot of anything—a thousand potatoes, a thousand sausages, a thousand oranges or oilcans or orphans.

We all got out and looked at this big old pine tree on the bank of a stream. Although it was midday, it was cold, with a wind that nipped and bit at my face. I pulled my too-small coat tighter around me. At least I had a coat. Joe and Sammy wore only shirts and sweaters and knickers, and they stomped and pounded their arms trying to keep warm.

People were picking up twigs and stones—to remember the place by, I guessed—and some had newfangled box cameras that were supposed to make pictures, but I didn't think there was much worth remembering, just that old tree and red cliffs and silence. I stood there for a moment thinking about loneliness.
How quiet and deserted it must be here
, I thought,
when the train is gone and the only sounds are wind and water.
I wondered how that big old tree felt when the trains pulled out. Would it be happy to be left alone? Or would it droop with loneliness, remembering the folks who used to visit and daydreaming about those to come?