by Gina nahai
The main building was dark and quiet, inhabited by seventy young boys who went around in ragged uniforms—denim overalls and patched-up white shirts—barefoot in the summer, wearing only socks in the winter. They walked noiselessly and spoke in whispers, read with their heads lowered over the pages of books by the dimmest of lights, worked the fields surrounding the orphanage, and harvested sugarcane and corn, wheat and tobacco. Three hours a day they attended classes taught by the widowed ladies who belonged to the nearby Methodist church, and who had taken on the moral and ethical burden of saving the souls of children abandoned by their parents. The rest of the time, they lived under the tyranny of the home’s superintendent, a retired sheriff’s deputy named Mr. Harris.
Tall and thin and always dressed in military colors, Mr. Harris had made it his mission in life to “make honest citizens” of the offspring of “God’s lowliest subjects”—the mountaineers and coal miners who occupied, he was convinced, a rank not above that of animals on God’s good earth. To that end he ran the orphanage like a prison camp, imposing absolute discipline and exacting harsh punishment on those who did not obey his rule, or on those he simply did not happen to like. He disliked the weak and the ignorant, the arrogant and the ungodly. More than anything, he despised the ungrateful.
“The smartest thing your parents have done,” he routinely told the children in his care, “probably the only smart thing they will ever do, was to leave you here and spare you a life like their own. Recognize it and give thanks.”
He looked with equal disdain upon foreigners and city folk—people who believed themselves above God’s laws and who tried to rewrite his commandments to fit their own purposes—but he reserved his greatest scorn for the Holy Rollers who inhabited the lands immediately surrounding the home and who often traveled past it in convoys of trucks and cars heading to one church meeting or another.
He made no exception for Little Sam Jenkins, had even gone so far as to send some of the older boys in his care to break up Sam’s revivals in nearby counties, and so there was no reason to think he would feel pity for any offspring of Sam’s, but he did run a tight home, and he did feed the children without demanding that their parents contribute, and this alone managed to impress Sam enough that he insisted to his first and third wives, and later to Clare, that they leave their children in Harris’s care and free themselves, and Sam, of the burden of raising them.
Sam had had no luck with the wives, and at first, it looked like he would have no luck with Clare. The mountaineers were nothing if not doting parents, and Holiness people especially believed in the sanctity of family ties and kinship. But five years after she had given birth to Adam, Clare was exhausted and disheartened and feeling as if she had run out of options for keeping him, and so Little Sam’s urging—gentle and well-intentioned as it seemed—lodged itself in the corner of her mind and began to take on greater weight with every passing month until, in the end, it managed to convince her.
She would leave Adam in the home for only a short while, she thought—long enough for her to get some rest, gather her courage, and move to a real town with paved sidewalks and green trees, where people bought their coal instead of digging it out of the ground or off the sides of railroad tracks. She would live in a place where women bought their clothes instead of making them out of feed sacks, where a girl could wear pants without being denounced by the preacher for “imitating men and before you know it, she has become a lesbian.” Then she would come back for Adam—she was sure of this—and when she did, even her own mother would not recognize her in her big-city clothes and her fancy salon hairdo.
She said this to Adam, one day as they rode in the cab of a farmer’s truck, the driver too old to demand any favors in return. She sat Adam on her lap and smoked and cried and told him about the orphanage as if it were good news, as if she were taking him to a real home and real safety.
“They have clean beds and a sturdy roof that doesn’t leak,” she said. “No coal dust under your nails and no blood in the grown-ups’ cough and you can eat three meals a day and even learn to read and write.”
What she didn’t mention, Adam later remembered, was that he was going to have to stay there alone.
Mr. Harris had liked Adam at first, or rather, he had liked Clare—-the way her mouth was red and round and pouting like a spring apple, the way her face was young but drawn, pretty in a way that broke the heart. She had worn high heels right off the highway, dragging Adam by the hand as he clung to her a little too stubbornly, obviously suspicious of the new surroundings and of Clare’s purpose in bringing him here.
Mr. Harris made Clare wait half a day before allowing her into his office, and he noted that she remained standing the entire time she waited—though she was clearly exhausted and hungry and aching from the heels she stood on. Once inside the office she sat up straight and crossed her legs as if to impress Harris with her manners, and she did not lose her poise even after Adam had refused to follow her inside.
“Leave him.” Harris smiled indulgently. “We’ll teach him discipline in no time.”
He closed the door in Adam’s face and sat down to lecture Clare about the importance of what she was about to do.
He told her that having a child was a decision made by the Lord and carried out by his servants, that leaving a child to an orphanage was a commitment before the law and the Lord himself. It was not a step to be taken lightly, not reversible, not negotiable. That’s why, he said, he made mothers wait outside his office when they brought the children—so they could change their mind if they were so inclined, because once they had given the children to Mr. Harris, they were not welcome to take them back.
In the hallway directly outside the office, Adam had fallen asleep on the bare floor. Mr. Harris opened the door and stepped over the boy, then held out a gallant hand and helped Clare do the same. The dinner bell had just rung, bringing out the children who marched in single file through the house and into the mess hall in the next building.
“Leave him while he’s asleep,” Harris told Clare. “I’ll break the news to him when he wakes up.”
Years later, an adult already, Adam would still awake from restless sleep as if to discover for the first time that Clare was gone.
That FIRST EVENING he had cried until his throat shut down, and then he had cried some more, convinced, he later realized, that Clare would hear him and come back, that she would turn around, far away in the void she had stumbled into while Adam slept, understand his fear, his need to be with her, and come back and get him. Around him the other boys stood in ragged clothes and bare feet; one of them even tried to approach and soothe him, but that only made Adam cry harder and then Mr. Harris stepped in.
“You can sleep in a bed or in the boiler room,” he told Adam, “but you can’t stay in this hallway, and you can’t interrupt the order of things by crying.”
When Adam cried harder Harris sent one of the boys to fetch his whip, and he beat Adam—twelve strikes on the back of his pants while the other boys watched—then ordered him into the boiler room. It was a tight, dust-filled space lit by a lamp that hung from the ceiling, packed with pipes and machines that roared and hummed and looked like monsters.
Terrified, Adam struggled and tried to escape, but he was thin and small and weak from malnutrition, and maybe he didn’t quite understand the proportions of what he was up against because in one instant he had been picked up off the floor and thrown into the room, and then he heard the key turn in the lock.
All night long he screamed and kicked at the door. In the morning, when one of the church ladies let him out in time for prayers, he bolted past her and tried to run away.
He made it as far as the highway directly outside the home, and he even ran a few yards in the direction he had come from before he stopped and realized he had nowhere to go and no one to run to, and then the other boys and the church widows caught up and brought him back for twelve more strikes of Harris’s belt and three more nights in th
e boiler room.
He became Harris’s toughest charge, the one boy Harris could not quite break in, the exception that challenged his rules. For months in the winter of 1941 and the spring of 1942, Adam fought Harris as if to defend his life, as if the superintendent was all that stood before him and his lost mother. He was smart but stubborn, scared but unwilling to surrender. He waited until he was near starvation before he ate the food in the mess hall. He slept on the cold ground rather than lie in the bed assigned to him by Harris. He spent many nights in the boiler room, received more beatings than even the oldest, most rebellious boys. And he kept running away.
Mr. Harris decided that Adam was “a special case—one of those who need to be tamed or they will end up in jail or committing murder.” To that end he assigned Adam to field duty— carrying buckets of water to older boys who did the planting and the harvest—and he put Adam on a reduced diet of only one meal a day, two servings of potatoes fried in pig lard, and one glass of watered-down milk. For every infraction he beat Adam till he drew blood, or locked him outdoors on freezing nights till Adam had learned to appreciate the comfort of a bed.
“Your mother is not coming back for you and your father won’t even acknowledge you as his own, and you’d better realize this is all you’ve got and this is where you’re going to live or die—it’s up to you but don’t even think about defying my rules,” he screamed at Adam, but in vain. He found himself staying up nights trying to contain his own rage at the boy and worrying about Adam’s disruptive influence on the other children. Then one of the church ladies put her nose where it didn’t belong, and made a suggestion that saved everyone: she proposed that Adam be allowed to attend school.
In class Adam sat still and paid attention as if mesmerized by the signs and numbers drawn before him on the board. He was soothed by the voices of the widowed ladies, comforted by the distraction of new thoughts, the mental challenges that forced him to look outside of himself and the home, to see beyond his pain, focus on a place that was neither hostile nor frightening— the North of Clare’s imagination, the cities and states she had talked about incessantly but which Adam had never been able to visualize. True to Harris’s standards the widows were strict disciplinarians and harsh judges, showing neither love nor indulgence, or even pity, for the boys. They did not accept failure and did not praise achievement, but even they were impressed with Adam’s quickness and concentration, the hardheadedness with which he came to class straight from a beating by Mr. Harris—his skin often cut, the welts from the whip still swollen and angry on his face and hands.
He advanced two years in one. Reading reminded him of his mother, made him feel as if she weren’t so far away, as if the two of them could engage in the same act at once: look at the letters on the sides of the trucks that passed on the highway, read the hand-painted signs on the fronts of churches, together again. His grandmother Rose, he remembered, had said that reading had ruined Clare, that any woman who went to school became a whore or a lunatic. But the widows of the church were neither whores nor lunatics, Adam observed, and neither was his mother, and he thought she would be proud to learn that he could read just like she could.
Slowly he settled into the home. He received fewer beatings the second year he was there, and he almost never got locked in the boiler room, but he did not allow himself to make a friend, to confide in another boy, or feel as if he were there to stay—as if Clare would forget to come back for him, lose her way in the city with the paved sidewalks, and let Adam stay in the home forever.
CLARE HAD GONE to Akron, Ohio, found a job in a rubber factory, moved in with a Ukrainian worker who had lost three fingers in a plant accident. She lived with him in a single room on 7th Avenue in East Akron. Rubber ruled the city at that time, and jobs at the Goodyear and Firestone factories had drawn tens of thousands of immigrants from Europe. The city was divided into four sections: Italians in North Hill; educated whites in West Hill; Firestone workers in South Akron; Slovaks, Ukrainians, Russians, and blacks in East Akron.
The Polish women in the building where Clare lived sold bootleg whiskey out of their apartments and breast-fed one another’s children when one of them was too dry to nurse. The Russians celebrated Christmas on January 7 and drank more than anyone Clare had ever known. Her Ukrainian lover hardly spoke a word of English and did not seem to notice her except when the lights were off. The rest of the time, he spoke in his own language to the other men, and he took his meals alone, following a tradition whereby the woman of the house ate the leftovers after the main bread winner had had his fill. Both with him and the others, Clare felt uneasy and awkward and forever the outsider, talked about without being spoken to, looked down upon as a mountain person, which she would always be, regardless of how much she wanted to transcend her past.
So she left the Ukrainian and moved in with a man she had met in the outskirts of North Hill—an Italian with a gold tooth and a first model year Dodge. He gave her money to have her hair done at the beauty shop and bought her clothes she never could have made for herself, but he beat her every time he drank, and so she ran away, on December 8, 1941, as he sat in his
Dodge listening to the radio broadcast the voice of President Roosevelt announcing news of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
She hitchhiked from Akron all the way into Richmond, Kentucky, found a job in a sewing factory, promised herself she would not return to Adam until she had saved enough money to support them both. She worked through ’42 and early ’43, but everything she made was spent on rent and food and the little caprices that were essential for a girl who was trying to keep from merging into the sea of other women, all of them poor and exhausted-looking, walking the downtown streets of every city she had crossed. Two boyfriends and three jobs later, she left Richmond with a suitcase full of pretty clothes and went back to the orphanage to see her son.
She arrived on a Sunday morning in late autumn, two years and nine months after she had left Adam asleep on Harris’s office doorstep. She looked thin and drawn but determined, her clothes more faded than she would have liked, her hair cut in jagged lines that fell around her face without a trace of a salon do. Mr. Harris saw her walk in from the gravel yard and went out to greet her immediately. He was glad to see her, he said, took her into the darkened office where he had received her the first time. He sat behind his desk and picked up a sharp letter opener, watched the light reflect off the tip of the blade as he turned it in his hands.
He was glad to see her, he said again, but he did not approve of parents coming back for their children once he had taken the time to teach them the ways of civilized living, and he would not allow Clare to violate the laws she had agreed to honor only two years earlier.
Across from him Clare stood with her arms crossed and her eyes avoiding his, and Harris could tell, by the way she did not answer him or even sit down, that she was as stubborn and defiant as her son. He got up from behind his desk and went closer, took her hand that was chapped and rough, turned it over and examined the nails that were dirty with factory grease.
“I can let you see the boy if you want,” he whispered.
He placed two fingers under her chin and raised her head slightly so their eyes met.
“You can watch him from a window, without letting him know you’re here.”
Her eyes avoided his. She shifted her weight, pulled her hand out of his. He put his other hand, the one under her chin, around her neck and began rubbing the back of her head, his fingers dipping into her hair and over her scalp. He felt her relax for a moment, thought she was about to give in.
“I can let you rest here awhile, bring you something to eat.”
His thumb reached across the side of her face. She opened her mouth just a bit, let his thumb move onto the fleshy part of her lower lip, smudging her lipstick, reaching in. He put his other hand around her waist and pulled her closer. Just as he was about to kiss her, she stiffened, broke free, and ran for the door.
She ran
through the hallway calling Adam’s name, Mr. Harris and a herd of boys behind her. Adam was outside on the lawn picking up trash and raking leaves, and he heard the commotion without realizing at first what had caused it. Then he saw the other boys looking at him as if he had caused trouble, and suddenly he heard his own name, a voice that was distant but familiar. He was too afraid to respond, or even move, so he stood with the rake in hand, trembling as the noises got louder and then he felt his own tears sting his eyes and face, and he thought he would never be able to move again but already, Clare had burst through the door and was sweeping him up into her arms.
SHE TOOK HIM on a train to Virginia, then begged a ride with a family to Norton and spent three nights in an abandoned gas station directly outside of town. With America at war in Europe and gasoline rationed in the eastern states since May 1942, travel by car had become more difficult than before. In December gas was rationed nationally, and two months later, in February 1943, shoes and canned food had also become rationed, and it was understood that any wise person without a pressing need to travel would stay at home and aid the war effort by holding down a factory job instead of running aimlessly through the country looking for luck—but Clare was homeless and out of work and determined once again to break out of the life she had been born to, and so she stayed on the road with Adam, begged for food or a place to sleep, worked odd jobs and all the while, kept looking for a man who would save her. Two months into the adventure, she gave up and took Adam home to her mother.
Rose’s hair was long and silver and rough as corn leaves, and her back was stooped from too many years of leaning over a tub to wash miners’ clothes, but she recognized Adam immediately and greeted him with open arms and a blessing. He stood against her and breathed in the smell of lye and starch on her skin, felt the roughness of her fingers poking at him through his shirt. Then he looked up and saw that Rose’s eyes were misty and tear filled, and this made him want to cry as well—put his face on her belly and tell her about the nights in the boiler room and the beatings with the whip. Instead, he felt anger rise in his chest and into his throat, and he had to pull away to gasp for air.