Mercy Train

by Rae Meadows

  She had never actually ironed, but she figured it couldn’t be that hard. She spit on the iron and it sizzled. She spread a man’s white shirt on the bed, and placed the iron on it, but when she moved it up the front panel it left a scorched yellow trail. The smell of hot cotton filled the room. She touched the spot and burned her finger. She tried to stand the iron up on the bed but it rolled off onto the floor, and then she gave up, shoving the shirt to the bottom of the pile.

  When Lilibeth appeared, she was pale and drawn.

  “I’m going for coal,” Violet said curtly. “And bread.”

  “Yes, yes,” Lilibeth exhaled, crawling onto the bed. “Get me some remedy? I don’t feel well. Money’s up in the tin.”

  “When do I get to meet your Mr. Lewis?” Violet asked.

  Her mother knit her brows. “Oh, soon, Vi. Real soon. You’re going to like him a whole lot.”

  “Okay,” Violet said, resolving not to ask about him again.

  “I brought you something.”

  Violet turned to her, easily warmed.

  Lilibeth reached into her drawstring pouch and pulled out a pink rose blossom, its petals bruised in transit.

  “I thought we could pin it in your hair.” She patted the bed for Violet to sit and reached for her hairbrush on the windowsill.

  Violet closed her eyes as her mother pulled the brush through her hair. Lilibeth pulled two pins from her own hair and fastened the flower behind Violet’s ear.

  “Look at you,” she said. “Stay still for a second. I’m going to remember you just like this. There.” She pulled a small mirror from her purse and held it up. “A real young lady.”

  Violet blushed when she saw herself; the frilliness of the flower in her chopped hair embarrassed her. But her mother looked pleased, momentarily relieved of the groove between her eyes, and Violet was happy for that.

  “You know he had a photograph taken of me at a portrait studio uptown?” Lilibeth said.

  “Really?”

  “I never had my photograph taken before. Bluford thought it was a waste of money whenever the traveling man brought his camera to Aberdeen. He didn’t even want a wedding picture.” She smiled. “I always wanted to have my photograph taken. To see what I really look like.”

  “You see yourself in mirrors,” Violet said.

  “Well, yes.” Lilibeth tucked her hands under the pillow. “But you know how you can catch a glimpse of yourself in a shiny window before you know it’s you?”

  “I suppose,” Violet said, not really understanding.

  “In a photograph you can see how other people see you,” she said, angling her face to look at the window.

  “You always look pretty, Mama.”

  Lilibeth held out her hand for Violet to hold. “You are dear to me. Go on, now. My head hurts something awful.”

  “Will you be here when I get back?”

  Lilibeth nodded. “We’ll eat our breakfast together.”

  Outside it smelled of acrid chemical smoke from a fire at the soap factory. Violet’s eyes burned. At the market, she bought bread, apples, and a slab of butter, and lifted a handful of caramels and a sack of dried apricots. She walked all over looking for Pardee’s for her mother, but everywhere was out. She took the long way, swinging by the Mission, to see if the Aid Society ladies were out again, looking for kids. Maybe someone she knew was going to get on a train. But no one was there except a drunk who looked already dead.

  On her way home, Violet found Nino hustling papers on Cherry Street.

  “News of the world, one penny only! Three hundred twenty-six people dead in New Jersey steamship fire! Read all about it!”

  Two men shoved coins in Nino’s hand and took papers. When they were gone, Violet skipped across the street.

  “Here,” she said, handing him the apricots.

  “You musta heard my belly grumbling. What’s the flower for?”

  She quickly pulled the rose from her hair and tossed it. “Nothing.”

  A large red-faced young man sauntered toward them, his blond hair buzzed close to the scalp, his hands in his pockets. Nino stood up straight, puffing out his chest.

  “Eastman,” he said under his breath, the name of a gang that controlled a section of the Fourth Ward.

  “Top of the morning to you, young friend,” the man said, in mocking cheer. “Why don’t you hand over your coin pouch and whatever’s in your pockets?”

  Nino stood stone-faced and crossed his arms. He reached only to the man’s chest.

  “Fuck off,” Violet said.

  The man laughed and nodded. “I like this one,” he said, and then threw a punch that landed in Nino’s gut.

  Nino doubled over onto the street, a wagon swinging out wide to avoid him. Violet jumped on the man, punching and scratching, until he swatted her off. She landed hard on her knees, the pain shooting up her legs. The man kicked the stack of papers into the gutter and pointed a meaty finger at Nino before walking away.

  “Figlio di puttana!” Nino shouted, a vein on his temple bulging blue. He got up to his knees, his thick fists clenched.

  She stood gingerly and limped over to Nino to help save some of the papers blowing about. They sat together on the curb and ate apricots.

  “E chi se ne frega, my father says,” he said. “Pfft. Who gives a damn.”

  She knew it was best not to say anything about it. “You seen them rounding up snipes for the train?” she asked.

  He worked his jaws on the sticky fruit and squinted up at the soap-factory smoke hovering above the neighborhood.

  “Think they really get families?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Those kids that go on the train.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, impatient with her questions and annoyed that she was letting her neediness show.

  “Maybe I could go on one,” Violet said.

  “They’ll make you do chores and go to church. It’ll be like the shitcan Home all over again.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Besides, you’re no orphan,” Nino said.

  “So? Mikey wasn’t either.”

  He spat out a bad apricot onto the sidewalk. She knew he would want to get on the train, too, if his family would ever let him go.

  “Vamoose. I got to sell at full chisel,” he said. “Rent’s late. They’s banging on the door all the time.”

  “See you around,” she said, punching him in the arm, wishing she could smooth the way for Nino, knowing what they all knew, that he had a year or two at most before he would have to pick a gang to fight for.

  She held her parcel of food to her chest so no one could snatch it and set off toward home. Her knees ached. Above her in the tenements, women pulled in laundry because of the smoke.

  When she returned to the room, coughing from the rotten air and six flights of damp-walled stairs, her mother was gone and so was the money, the open tin lying empty on the bed.

  * * *

  There had been a time in Kentucky, before the baby came, that Violet remembered as almost happy. Lilibeth, her belly a hard mound, had been vibrant and girlish, her hair thicker, curlier, blonder, her face full and flush, as she walked to town or gathered blackberries or accompanied Bluford to church.

  “Feel it, Vi, can you feel it move?” she said, as they sat together on the banks of the stream, the cool, silty water twirling around their ankles.

  Violet put her hand on her mother’s stomach and felt the whoosh of the baby shifting positions, an elbow here, a foot there. It was funny to her, strange but exciting. A brother or a sister. Even her father seemed less angry at her, less likely to cuff her for burned lima beans or broken eggs or needing a pencil for school.

  “He’s sure it will be a boy,” Lilibeth said, pulling apart a cattail and letting the fuzz blow away. “We’ll call him William.”

  Maybe with a boy, Violet thought, he will be nicer to me.

  The house was less suffocating then—her sour tobacco-chewi
ng grandmother had not yet moved in—and Bluford had even stopped bothering Lilibeth at night, which meant no grunts, creaks, or sighs for Violet to wish away from her pallet on the floor in the living room.

  During the warming humid days of spring, the air thick with the weedy smells of goat grass and foxtail, Lilibeth would sit on the broken-slatted chair on the porch, her dirty-soled bare feet resting up on the railing, and watch the birds, the ants, her belly, the sky.

  “Get your mama some water?”

  Violet, annoyed at being pulled away from catching frogs, dragged herself from the ditch, went to the water barrel, and ladled out a cool sip for herself before filling a jar for her mother.

  “You looking at something?” Violet asked, handing her mother the glass.

  “I’m watching it all grow,” she said, smiling, setting her feet down on the floor. “Come sit on your mama’s lap for a bit.”

  Violet, too old and too big, tried to balance in the small space not taken up by the baby, and nestled her face against her mother’s neck.

  “This is nice,” Lilibeth said.

  “It’s too hot,” Violet said, sitting up and jumping down to the porch.

  “Always your own little pirate. Go on, now.”

  The blood arrived a few days later. Some spots in the bed became a rivulet down Lilibeth’s leg, which became a gush of pink water as she tried to make it to the outhouse.

  There wasn’t a doctor in Aberdeen, not that it would have mattered. The baby, a boy, was dead before he was born, blue and slick. Bluford, the only time Violet had seen tenderness from him, wiped the blood from the baby’s face with a towel and wrapped him, still attached to the placenta, in a blanket. Violet watched from the doorway as her father kissed the baby’s forehead and placed the bundle in Lilibeth’s arms. Bluford pushed by Violet and was gone.

  A neighbor’s wife arrived with cabbage leaves to relieve Lilibeth’s milk-swollen breasts. The minister came by to bless the baby’s soul.

  “He was warm,” her mother would say for weeks afterward, her face confused and broken. “He was warm for a little while.”

  After two days, Bluford finally had taken the swaddled baby from Lilibeth and buried it in the backyard under the branches of the mulberry tree, whose ripe and rotting berries had quickly stained the earth a sticky, inky purple. Within a few weeks, the patch had been lost under a shroud of weeds.

  * * *

  Violet waited for her mother for another day before setting off again for Madam Tang’s. This time she went alone, and she was not scared. Fancy-suited men ducked in and sneaked out of the customer entrance, and she hated them. Chinese vendors pulled carts past, laden with chicken feet and roots and fish. The neighborhood men wore short pants and collarless shirts. She saw only two women, one barely taller than herself, hurrying along with a sack bulging with vegetables, a baby on her back. The other was young, her hair pulled high and tight, her lips painted pink. She eyed Violet with a competitive glance before moving on.

  Lilibeth emerged, her hand a visor against the sun, disheveled, in a dress Violet didn’t recognize, brown velvet with puffed sleeves.

  “Mama,” Violet called, running over.

  Lilibeth winced and then covered it with a smile.

  “Well, hi, baby,” she said, her drawl opium-slow. “I was on my way to get you. Have you been okay by yourself?”

  “Mrs. Baker’s come by a bunch for the laundry.”

  Her mother nodded, her face vacant. “I thought you might busy yourself with some of that ironing,” she said. “I imagine your little hands would be good at that.”

  Violet gnawed her dirty thumbnail. “That’s a new dress,” she said.

  “You like it?” her mother said, running her palms dreamily down the velvet. “I went to a restaurant uptown with Mr. Lewis, and I couldn’t very well wear one of my old dresses. You should have seen it, Vi. White tablecloths, crystal glasses. The most delicious roast with these darling little carrots. Maybe we’ll go there sometime. You and me.”

  They were out of Chinatown, and men now felt free to turn their heads to keep their eyes on Lilibeth, to tip their hats with leering eyes.

  “There’s no more coal,” Violet said.

  “Hmm,” her mother said.

  “And no food.”

  Lilibeth stopped, and leaned over with her hands on Violet’s shoulders. Her breath was stale with smoke.

  “Violet,” she said. “I’ve been thinking. You know how hard I’m trying. I am to see Reginald in a day or two. You remember Reginald? He will give me a little something, I’m sure. But until then, I don’t know. I don’t know what else to do. Give your mama a hug now. I love you so.”

  Violet felt a stone in her stomach. She knew what was coming, as she felt the bird-wing arms of her mother enfold her.

  “It will just be for a few days this time. I promise,” Lilibeth said. “Be a good girl, Vi, for your mama. Listen to the ward mistress.” She smoothed her hand across Violet’s forehead. “At least they won’t have to cut your hair again.”

  Violet held her tears and bit the soft, smooth flesh of her inner cheek until blood, warm and salty, slid over her tongue. “No,” she said softly.

  Her mother pretended not to hear her. She held her hand on her chest and squinted against the sun.

  “I’m not going back there,” Violet said, stopping.

  “Violet, please. Please don’t make this harder for me. I’m doing the best I can.” Her eyes, still dilated and heavy lidded, sparkled with tears. “I could have left you with him, and I didn’t. I wanted better for us.”

  Violet wanted to pummel her mother, kick her in the shins, tear her luxurious dress. More than that, she wanted her mother to tuck her in and sing the song she used to sing when Violet had been fevered and was sweating it out in the old iron bed, looking up at the branches of the crooked pine tree smashed against the window.

  A gypsy rover came over the hill,

  down through the valley so shady.

  He whistled and he sang till the green woods rang,

  and he won the heart of a lady.

  When she sang, Lilibeth’s voice was a whispery slip of smoke that curled up and floated away. Violet wanted what her mother could never give her. She wanted something different from this.

  “There’s a train,” Violet said, looking down at the sidewalk. “You can put me on the train.”

  IRIS

  The roses had still been in bloom along the east split-rail fence of the yard. Armistice Day, 1940. School had been closed for the holiday, so Iris was home. She’d even been allowed to go to the movies the night before, a rare indulgence for a girl who spent innumerable hours daydreaming Hollywood scenarios with herself as the romantic lead. They’d gone all the way to Caledonia to see His Girl Friday, the drive a small sacrifice, as far as Iris was concerned, to see Cary Grant. Rosalind Russell was not as glamorous as Iris would have hoped, but she had still loved getting lost in the story on that huge screen and had slid the ticket stub into the mirror above her dresser. She twirled her ponytail for a moment, and then hopped up to wash out her oatmeal bowl.

  Her mother had gone to town to deliver one of her famous Jenny Lind cakes to the Veterans’ Home, and her father was out in the fields somewhere beyond the ridge surveying the new wheat grass shoots. Iris pulled on a cardigan and went out back to the garden, where there was still, strangely, plenty of spinach and broccoli to pick. Here it was November and it was in the mid-sixties—it had been unseasonably warm for weeks—and even if her father was concerned that there would be too much crop growth before the land froze, she was happy about it, giddy with the reprieve from the withering cold that would last until April.

  There was no warning, no weather service radio announcement, no siren. The wind started first and Iris spun around in her skirt. But all of a sudden it was very cold, and the sleet poured from the sky in freezing sheets, and wind almost knocked her over, and Iris knew something was terribly wrong. She ran to the house. Wi
thin an hour the temperature had dropped forty degrees, and it was a raging blizzard, the winds driving snow in every direction. She could see nothing but white from the windows. She didn’t even see the car’s headlights as it drove right up to the edge of the porch. Her mother pushed through the front door, gasping, her sweater, hair, even her eyelashes covered in snow.

  Iris ran to her, relieved to see her but a little thrilled, too, by the scariness and excitement of the storm. It was like the time they’d had to huddle in the cellar during a tornado, like she was Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, the winds moaning above them. They’d sung songs and eaten pickles she’d helped her mother can the previous fall.

  “Where’s your father?” her mother said. Her normally impassive face was tense in fear and wet with melting snow.

  Iris’s stomach dropped. She had not given him a thought.

  “Iris, look at me,” her mother said, grabbing her shoulders with her strong, cold fingers. “Didn’t he come in?”

  “He must have gone to the machine shed. He must have.”

  Her mother ran to the kitchen window, but she couldn’t even see to the chicken coop. She dashed to the catchall closet in the hall where tools mingled with cleaning supplies and winter boots. Iris knew her mother was going out to find him.

  “Mother, no.” She started to cry, panicking. “You can’t go out there.” She wanted to say, You can’t leave me, but she knew it sounded selfish.

  “Get my coat, Iris, and gloves and a hat. A wool blanket from the cedar chest.”

  Iris collected these things with her heart rattling in her chest.

  Her mother tied one end of a large coil of rope around the outside of her coat and tied the blanket around her head.

  “Hold on to this end,” her mother said. The rope must have been a hundred feet. She gave her daughter a rare kiss. “It’ll be fine, Iris.” And she was gone, the door whipping open and cracking against the side of the house.

  Iris gripped the rope, wrapping it around her rigid hand, shivering, as snow blew into the kitchen. She watched the loops of the rope slowly uncoil. And when the rope went taught, she held fast, offering God everything for her parents’ return. A snowdrift grew on the landing as she watched, a powdery tower.