Wanderville (2 page)

B
reakfast, as always, was barley gruel with broth.

Frances Sweeney had a feeling she couldn't talk her way out of this
place. It was the Howland Mission and Children's Home on Fifth Street, which took in “little wanderers” like herself and Harold. But, Frances thought, when you didn't have a place to stay and the weather was five below,
wandering
was just about the last thing you'd be doing. You'd get yourself somewhere fast.

Which is what Frances and her kid brother did back in February. It had been so bitterly cold out that she'd run out of nerve one night and headed to the mission and delivered to the preachers the story of her and Harold's plight. The full story, even, the one she didn't like to tell at all.

From the outside, the home looked a lot better than other places they'd stayed. When Frances and Harold had first found themselves on their own, they'd slept on pallets on the floors of one miserable apartment after another.

First they'd stayed with a neighboring family, then a gin-swigging uncle they scarcely knew, then the uncle's landlady, and then the landlady's cleaning woman, whom they hardly saw but who let the children sleep in her windowless rear tenement in exchange for chores. The stairs had been soggy, and Harold would wake up coughing his tiny lungs into a fit. They remained there until that night in February when the stove ran out of coal and even the cleaning woman seemed to have abandoned the tenement for a warmer place.

But here inside the home was a gloom of another kind. The dormitory had tall windows, but the neighboring buildings were even taller, so that the sun came in for only an hour or two at midday, making scant patches of light on the floors. The smallest kids sought out those sunny spots to play in, and even though he was seven now, sometimes Harold did, too, looking strangely angelic whenever the sunlight shone behind that red hair of his. Or so Frances thought. Otherwise, though, you never felt warm enough in the home, not even in spring.

It was April now, and Frances was itching to get out of here. She didn't want to get used to this place. She especially didn't want Harold to get used to it, either. Even if he sometimes still asked if they were ever going back to Auntie Mare's.

“I can't believe you remember that place,” she said whenever he brought it up, her stomach lurching each time. “You were so young when we left.” That was always her answer. Better than saying no, they weren't going back.

They didn't talk about what they were, but sometimes, when Frances read aloud to Harold from her old
Third Eclectic Reader
with the cracked spine, they would come to a poem on page eighty-eight called “The Dead Mother” and, above it, a definition:
Orphan, one whose parents are dead.
Harold never let Frances turn the page until he had read it silently to himself.

Now, before the midday meal, the children of the home lined up for Hygiene to show that they had scrubbed up. Frances didn't see the point in checking, since the soap they had to use smelled so strong it made your eyes sting. Plus, anyone with eyeballs could see how red and chapped all the kids' knuckles were from the scalding water that ran from the taps.

There appeared to be a new matron on duty today, and she was making her way down the line. She stopped in front of Frances and considered her for a moment. Frances, in turn, pondered the way the puffy mutton sleeves on the matron's dress made her look taller than she actually was. None of the other matrons were clothed as finely as this woman.

“How old are you?” she asked Frances.

Truthfully Frances had turned eleven back in March and had gone past the home's age limit. She knew she was getting old enough to work as a hired girl somewhere, but she couldn't leave Harold behind.

“Ten years old, ma'am,” she replied.

The woman with the big sleeves leaned closer, as if to study her.

Frances could feel one of her braids coming loose. The older she got, the thicker and woollier her hair had become, until all she could do was plait it and pin it to her crown. Aunt Mare had sometimes called her “Saint Frances with the auburn halo” to tease her.

The woman stepped back at last. “Well,” she muttered, “
this
one's a slattern.”

“Pardon?” Frances said. She was used to getting scolded for her hair, but something about this matron was different. Colder.

“I wasn't
talking
to you,” the woman said. And then she continued down the line.

Dinner today was stewed tripe with potatoes.

“It's beef,” Frances told her brother. “Sort of.” One day she'd tell him what it really was.

Sometimes after dinner, one of the mission women would stand at the head of the long tables and read aloud something from the
Youth's Companion
, which Frances wouldn't have minded just reading to herself instead of hearing some busybody drone it to death. But today one of the elderly matrons was walking up and down the benches with a basket on her arm, handing out something to every child.

“Candy?” Harold asked hopefully.

“I don't think so,” said Frances. “Whatever it is, it's something silly.” She got a better look and could see that each child was being given a little ribbon—blue or red. They weren't being handed out any which way, but sometimes the matron would stop and look to someone across the room, cocking her head to solicit approval. Frances turned to see who she was checking with and discovered that it was the woman with the puffy mutton sleeves on her dress—not one of the matrons, she suddenly realized, but a lady.

Frances felt a tap on her shoulder. The old matron was standing right over her now with the basket. She pressed the ribbon into Frances's palm. “Now don't you dare lose this,” she said.

The ribbon was blue. Frances turned it over. There was nothing printed on it. Nothing remarkable about it at all.

“Harold,” she asked, “what color did you get?” She turned to her brother, who, only moments after being given his ribbon, had scooted off the end of the bench.

“I just dropped mine,” Harold whispered from under the table.

“You
dropped
it?”

“It's down here somewhere,” Harold muttered. Frances could hear his shoes scuffling around.

“Pick it up,” she whispered back. “Let me see what color.”

Just then, the big bell at the front of the room was rung to call them to attention.

“Dear children!” the head matron called. “If you received a red ribbon, please come by the windows. Blue ribbons, you may stand at the front. Gather quickly!” All the children scrambled off the benches toward their places, but Frances hung back, waiting for her little brother, who was still scurrying around under the table.

She felt a hand at the back of her neck. “Let's not dawdle,” said the old matron, steering her toward the front of the room. Frances couldn't help but notice that most of the blue ribbon holders were closer to her age than Harold's.

She heard her brother's voice behind her. “Frannie!” She turned and saw that he was holding up his ribbon. His blue ribbon. He caught up with her, and she let out a breath that she hadn't even realized she'd been holding in.

The room fell silent as the head matron stepped up to the small stage at the front of the room. Behind her was the lady with the puffed-sleeve dress, the one who'd given Frances the once-over at lunch.

“Tomorrow,” announced the head matron, “those of you who hold red ribbons will be going on a very special outing to visit the aquarium at Castle Garden.”

A cheer went up from the children by the windows. Frances noticed Harold shifting his feet and looking down at the blue ribbon in his hand.

The lady with the fancy dress stepped forward. “As for those of you with a
blue
ribbon,” she announced, “you are receiving a very
special
opportunity from the Society for Children's Aid and Relief. Tomorrow, you will begin your journey to your new
placements . . .”

The woman spoke so differently on the stage from the way she had to Frances. Her voice sounded like Christmas bells practically. She was talking about placements. . . . Did that mean homes? Frances wondered. She could tell Harold had caught that word, too, from the way he'd straightened up.

“. . . where you will find a
most satisfactory
situation with these kind and upstanding families,” the woman continued, “in a most
wholesome
and
healthful
environment. . . .”

This lady was talking some big mouthfuls to be sure, Frances thought. All the same, Frances felt like she was floating, like the ground she stood on hardly mattered, and like she would drift up far above the tar rooftops of all the buildings whose shadows darkened the Howland Mission and Children's Home. Then Harold's hand reached for hers, and they clasped tightly.

The matron spoke up. “Miss DeHaven,” she asked the woman, “won't you tell them where they're going?”

“To a better place,” the woman answered.
“Kansas.”

K
ansas
, Jack thought.
Not dead, and going to Kansas.
Three weeks after he'd escaped the fate that had claimed his brother, this was his life now. It was like he was being punished for surviving.

On any other day the train shed at Grand Central Depot, a huge, arching expanse of steel and glass and soot and noise, would have been enthralling to Jack. Instead, the hugeness of it all was grim, and the platform he walked along seemed to go on forever.

In front of him was the man from the Society for Children's Aid and Relief who was leading him to the train. But Jack kept his eyes fixed on the distance ahead of them, where the tracks vanished into the tunnels at the end of the train shed.
Soon he'd be disappearing into that unknown.

In the days after the fire that killed Daniel, his mother hadn't wanted Jack to leave the apartment, not even to fetch coal for the stove.

“I don't want to lose him, too,” he'd heard her say to his father one night when she thought Jack was sleeping.

His father, on the other hand, ate with his coat on in the mornings and pushed himself from the table as soon as he was finished, stalking out without a word. At first it seemed he was finally looking for work again, but when he crashed through the door late at night, bringing the stale scent of beer with him, Jack knew better.

But then one morning Father stayed at the table and didn't say a word while Mother brought out Daniel's good jacket and told Jack to put it on. He pulled it over his shoulders dutifully, though it seemed his mother couldn't even look at him.

“Am I to go back to work?” he asked.

His father spoke up at last. “Not to work,” he'd said. “We're having you placed out. It's for the best.” It was the first thing he had said to Jack in days.

That had been a week ago. Now Jack had a new set of clothes—a black wool suit coat, trousers, and a starched shirt with a collar that felt rough as rope—and a cardboard valise. And now he knew that to be
“placed out” meant you were put on a train to live with strangers out west. It was called the Children's Emigration Program, the man from the Society for Children's Aid and Relief Office had explained.

“The newspapers call them orphan trains,” he'd told Jack. “But a great many of our placements are not truly orphans, just children in need of a better situation.”

They might as well be orphans
, Jack had thought.

Now, here in the depot, he could sense his parents walking right behind him.

Jack wiped his eyes on his sleeve. The depot felt too bright, the sun bearing down on the glass roof. He could see a dozen or more of the Emigration kids boarding a nearby train car. There was a girl whose hair was being brushed by a woman who spoke to her in Swedish or maybe Norwegian, and a boy in a knit cap who shook his head and cried as his father knelt beside him. Some of the children formed tight groups together and shuffled their steps as the Relief Society workers steered them toward the train. Others stood alone. Jack could see that a few of them were pulling at the collars of the outfits they'd been given or else were limping in their hard, new shoes.

There was a girl about Jack's age with brown hair pinned up into a crown of frizzled plaits. Her hand was clasped tightly around the hand of a little redheaded kid next to her.
Daniel would do that
,
Jack thought, his breath catching in his chest.

The girl, Jack noticed, appeared to be giving Grand Central one last, hard look. After a moment, their eyes met. Maybe she was thinking the same thing he was—that the world was moving underneath their feet whether they stood still or not.

As Jack approached the train, he knew at some point he was going to have to turn back to see his parents, but he couldn't bring himself to do it just yet. They had come to see him off, and it was supposed to mean that they cared. But putting him on an orphan train when he wasn't even an orphan was somehow also
supposed to mean that they cared. Daniel was dead. Jack was going to Kansas so he wouldn't wind up dead, either. Jack tried to work it all out, but it wouldn't come out even in his mind.

He would have kept on walking to the end of the platform, to the end of the earth, but the man from the Relief Society suddenly stopped at one of the last cars and motioned for Jack to board.

Jack climbed one of the iron steps leading up into the coach, and then another. He braced himself to enter the train when suddenly a sharp cry rang out over the din of the station. His mother.

“Jack!” she shrieked. He turned around to see her, and she grasped his hand. She looked much older suddenly, with her eyes red and her brow crumpled. “I can't do this,” she said, her voice hoarse. Then she clamped one hand over her mouth to keep from crying out again.

His father turned his head away. “We mustn't stay,” he said.

Jack couldn't speak. He could only nod, his throat burning and tight. Then he boarded the train.