Rodzina (2 page)

I took off my coat and pressed my face against the window, snatching every last glimpse of Chicago that I could. I imagined Mama running after the train, the fringe on her shawl dancing in the wind. "Come back, Rodzina," she would call. "It was all a mistake. Come back. We are waiting for you at the house on Honore Street."

A small body came and shoved itself against me. "Kin I sit here with you?" said a girl with red hair pulled back into a braid as thick as my arm and a face like a holy angel. "I'm fearful scared."

Radishes! I sighed loudly to show I did not welcome company and stared at the sights out the window, which weren't much, being just more city and railroad tracks, then swamps and frozen prairie, for a long ways out of the station.

Finally the train picked up speed, and my whole world seemed to be jolting, swaying, bouncing, and jerking, and the constant noise of whistles and wheels and squealing brakes. We raced past scenes I had never seen before: houses surrounded by miles and miles of dark fields, cows and horses, rivers and creeks of clear icy water. Where were the grocers, the peddlers, the saloons, the churches and garbage dumps and apartment houses? Where did people buy their bread and block their hats? Where
were
the people? I might as well have been on the moon.

The intruder next to me interrupted with a gentle tap on my arm. "What's your name?" she asked.

I gave her the mean look I call the stink face, hoping it would discourage her questions.

She was maybe seven years old, pretty, tiny and delicate, with hair the color of spice cake and a smile so sweet, I knew everyone who saw her loved her. Me, I hated her. I was big, big for twelve and every day getting bigger, nearly tall as Papa, who was very tall, and round as Mama, who was very round.

I had not grown up wanting what I did not already have, except for one thing. I wanted to be pretty. When I told Mama, Mama said, "Pretty is as pretty does, Rodzina." Auntie Manya said, "What is this pretty? You got big hands, strong back, good teeth. What more you need?" Papa just smiled and said, "You are better than pretty. You look like me."

The girl nudged me again. "My name is Lacey. What's yours?"

"Rodzina Clara Jadwiga Anastazya Brodski," I said, not looking at her. I didn't want this girl to think we could be friends or anything. I just wanted to be left alone.

"I don't think I can remember all that. I'll call you Ro."

"Don't call me Ro. My name is Rodzina."

"Mine's only Lacey. That's all. Just Lacey. I'm a orphan."

So who in this car ain't?
I thought.

I could feel my lip tremble but was resolved not to cry. Crying solved nothing. I had cried the day Mama died. For a long time afterward I cried, sitting on the shabby wooden stoop of our shabby wooden house, tears freezing in my eyelashes and my ears so cold they ached. I cried for Mama, newly dead of the putrid fever. I cried for Papa, killed at the stockyards by a runaway horse and buried in the great Sacred Heart Cemetery at Twelfth and Madison; for my brothers, long dead in a fire; for Hulda and Auntie Manya, gone away who knows where. But most of all I cried for myself. I was alone, hungry, and miserable. I could not remember being all those things before, leastwise not all at the same time. Papa and Mama had always been there, familiar and safe, with hugs and bread and cabbage. But now I was an orphan, and alone, and crying would not change that.

I said nothing more to Lacey but turned to look out the window. When I looked down at her after a while, she was fast asleep, eyelids twitching and thumb in her sweet, silly mouth.

For a time I watched out the window some more, wondering at all the land and sky. It was so different from Chicago. I already missed Chicago. I missed the smokestacks and the factories, the wash drying on the lines behind a hundred little houses, the sound of horse trolleys, and the smell of roasting nuts. I missed Mrs. Bergman, who lived downstairs with her twelve children; the grease man who traded grease for soap; and the Polish butcher, whose shop smelled invitingly of fresh meat and sawdust.

If I had to be an orphan, I would have chosen to stay at the Little Wanderers' Refuge. I had been often cold there, always hungry, nagged and scolded and held captive, but at least I was still in Chicago and had a bed off the street. But they did not keep children permanently—just until new homes were found. I was there only a few nights, long enough for a cold bath and an argument.

"I'm not going to be shipped west on a train like some sack of potatoes," I told Miss Hoolihan, as she buttoned me into my new dress.

"Yes, indeed, you are, and you're lucky to have the opportunity. Do what you are told, smile engagingly, and you will have a new home before Easter," she said.

"I do not want a new home. I want my mama and my papa back."

"We cannot work miracles."

Didn't I know that. "If I cannot stay here, I will live on the street again. I am old enough to take care of myself."

"You can't do that. You're only twelve."

"I'm big for my age."

"And stubborn for your age as well, but still you're only twelve, and we are responsible for you. So you will go with other orphans and travel west to a new home."

Who out there would want scruffy orphans from the streets of Chicago anyway? Only someone who wanted to work us to death, I'd say, just like Melvin told me. And if nobody took me, would I have to ride back and forth on this train, east to west and west to east, like some Eternal Traveler, giving rise to the legend of Rodzina the Unwanted, and have my story told around fireplaces, kitchen stoves, and campfires to scare little children? Either way I was mighty unhappy.

I went to the toilet at the back of the car. Through the hole in the seat I could watch Illinois race by. Miles and miles of Illinois.

Back in my seat, I bounced and nodded until the rhythm of the train and the whirling of my thoughts had me asleep. When I woke, Mr. Szprot was passing around red jelly sandwiches and apples from the big baskets in the back of the car. Lacey was still sleeping so I took hers too. I ate the sandwiches slowly, letting the sticky sweetness tickle my tongue, but I left Lacey an apple.

"Miss Brodski," I heard someone call. I looked around and there at the back of the car sat the lady from the Orphan Asylum, nodding her head at me. I took myself over there.

"Yes, miss?" I asked.

She frowned, her gray eyes as cold as a February fog off the lake. "It's Doctor."

"Doctor?" I had never heard of a lady doctor. "Really?"

"Never mind. Sit down," she said, pointing to the seat next to her. I sat. She smelled faintly of soap and freshly ironed clothes. "There are more of you children on this train than we expected. Mr. Szprot is in charge of the older boys, but I am responsible for all the rest, and I cannot do it by myself. So I will take care of the babies," she said, nodding at a heap of children of maybe two or three sleeping all nestled together on the wooden benches in front of her, "and you will look after the other children: Horton, Gertie, Chester, Spud and Mickey Dooley, Sammy and Joe, and Lacey there, who is sitting by you. I will depend on you to see that they are clean, fed, quiet, and in the right place at the right time."

Psiakrew
—dog's blood—as Auntie Manya used to say. I just wanted to be left alone. "Why me?"

"Because you are the oldest."

Old enough to be in charge of orphans but not old enough to be on my own? Didn't make much sense to me. I wanted to say, "Depend on someone else and leave me alone," but I didn't. I didn't want her to hate me, just let me be. I said only, "Yes, miss."

"Doctor," she said, looking down at the book in her hands.

I turned to go back to my seat and ran smack into someone standing in the aisle. "I beg your pardon, as the convict said to the judge," said a skinny boy with a pale, freckled face. Both of his ears stuck out, his front teeth were missing, and one of his soft brown eyes gazed up to Heaven while the other looked up and down his nose.

"Who are you?" I asked, watching his eyes travel here and there, back and forth, never lighting for a moment on anything.

"Mickey Dooley, at your service," he said, sweeping off his brown wool cap to expose a crop of orange hair. Real orange. Carrot orange. "Orphan, purveyor of blarney, and a genuine bag of laughs. Nice to meet you." He pointed out the window. "And speaking of meat, holy moley, look at them sheep!"

A gang of boys standing behind him crowded around the window. "Them's not sheep; they's buffalo," said Joe.

"Moose!" said tubby Chester, smiling his crooked smile.

"Antelope!" Spud cried, his headful of yellow curls bouncing.

Having lived near the stockyards almost all my life, I knew cows when I saw them but did not choose to join the discussion. I might have to tend these kids, but the lady doctor didn't say anything about my setting them straight. I stumbled up the aisle and flopped into my seat.

At suppertime the train stopped. Some folks got off to eat. Us, we had more jelly sandwiches and apples. It wasn't pig's foot jelly or meat dumplings or sweet cake with raisins, but it was food. My stomach growled like an angry dog. You could hear it right out loud, it had gotten that quiet in the train car, except for the gurgling of Mickey Dooley's laughter and Gertie whining about how her elbow hurt or her toe or knee or someplace. The rest of us sat silently with our hunger, uncertainty, and jelly sandwiches.

Lacey was asleep again, so I finished my sandwich and half of hers and put the apples away in case I was hungry later. I knew I would be. I was always hungry. I loved food. Papa used to say, "Poles are the only people who write love poems about food." Were I a poet like my papa, I would write about cabbage rolls in tomato sauce, pickled herring, and the jelly doughnuts we ate each year on Paczki Day.

After supper the train got under way again. I washed hands and faces and helped Horton and Gertie blow their drippy noses. Because of my brothers I had plenty of experience with drippy noses and other details of child minding, but that didn't mean I had to like it. I must say, I didn't exactly hate it either. I was good with little kids.

The lady doctor and I got blankets down from the luggage racks and passed them out, for the car had grown colder. The other orphans huddled together for warmth, curling around kids they would have ignored in the light of day. Some cried out in nightmares, others whined or grumbled. I sat silent, wrapped in an itchy green blanket.

The gas lamps flickered in the darkness, making shadows dance on the walls and windows of the car. Once Papa's pants froze on the clothesline back of our house and he made them dance like a puppet. Back in the early years, this was, when he used to laugh and make jokes, before he found there was no place in Chicago for a Polish poet.

"Americans," he said, heading out one morning to his job at the stockyards, "are not a book-reading people." I sighed at the remembering and fell asleep, rocked by the jiggling and swaying of the train.

T
HE STILLNESS WOKE ME
shortly after dawn. The train had stopped. I could see some faded wooden buildings and a water tank and hoped this pathetic place wasn't the west.

It wasn't. Just a little town where the train had stopped for water. Some women in checked aprons and muddy boots got on, selling milk and small cakes, which Mr. Szprot bought for our breakfast, but not enough if you ask me.

I gathered the little girls for a trip to the water bucket to rid them of the breakfast still smeared on their hands and faces. As we passed the lady doctor's seat, the train started with a lurch and Gertie stumbled, grabbing at the lady to keep from falling down. "Don't touch!" she shouted, shoving Gertie's hand away. Radishes! Such a fuss over a little milk and cake on her skirt.

I helped Gertie stand back up, straightened her hair and the bow on her pinafore, and started to shepherd her back to the water bucket.

Then she, old Miss Don't Touch, said, "Rodzina—"

I stopped, letting Gertie go on without me. I was used to people saying my name the wrong way, but I wanted to give Miss Don't Touch as hard a time as she'd given Gertie. "That's pronounced
Rodzina,
" I interrupted, making that sound between a D and a G and a Z that it seemed only Polish mouths could make, sort of like the G-sound in
bridge
or
cage
or
huge,
but not quite. The lady doctor sounded like a bumblebee with her Rod-zzzzzz-ina.

"Isn't that what I said,
Rodzina

"No, you said
Rodzina.
It should be
Rodzina.
Like this:
Rodzina.
"

She looked at me like I was a hair in her soup. "I shall just call you Miss Brodski."

She pronounced that just fine. I thought to tell her, "That's
Brodski
," and pronounce it exactly as she had, just to discombobberate her, but I didn't want to push my luck, so I nodded.

"Miss Brodski, you must do a better job of keeping these children neat, quiet, and away from me." She took a starched handkerchief from her pocket and began to scrub at the stain on her skirt. "I have enough to do with the babies. Now go."

I washed milk and crumbs off little faces with the water in the bucket, scrubbing a bit roughly, I must admit, but it was not my choice to be doing this. After the children were settled in their seats again, I sat down to suffer another day of swaying and rocking. I could see nothing out the window but more Illinois or Iowa or wherever we were.

Lacey visited the toilet and, after a while, came skipping back to her seat, with Spud, Sammy, and Joe trailing behind her. "Oh, Ro," she called.

"Rodzina," I said.

"We was looking out the window at horses," she said. "I saw all different kinds. Black ones. And black-and-white ones. And a brown one. And a baby one." She bounced in her seat a few times. "I hope we see a mo."

"A what?"

"A mo. You know, what you get mohair from. Like for ladies' coats."

"Who told you that?"

"Spud. He said you get horsehair from horses and mohair from mos."