Far From Home

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  Uncle Aubrey brought out gifts and supplies, and the driver piled them into the coach box fastened to the komatik with leather cords. Missus Frances wrapped herself in a sealskin robe and the Eskimo driver snapped his walrus-hide whip. “Ohoosh! Ooisht!” rose in the frosty air. The dogs made a rush over crisp snow shining like glass under an ice-blue sky.

  Clarissa’s mind followed the komatik over the hills, black branches shaking away snow as they flicked against its sides. The driver’s voice would be sharp against the ears of the dogs. “Ouk!” turned the team right; “Urrah! Urrah!” turned it left, and “Ouk oo-ist, hoo-eet!” made the husky dogs go forward. She thought about the komatik going up over Fox Farm Hill, past Dr. Grenfell’s castle, past the Tea House and the strange box wrapped in snow like an unopened Christmas box.

  Only once had Clarissa gone past Tea House Hill and around the pond. “It is twelve miles to Devil’s Pond, and it is the dead of winter, so dress warmly,” had been Miss Elizabeth’s caution last year. Clarissa had pulled on extra clothes, including her double mittens, and had hurried out to sit on the sled drawn by a team of husky dogs, their fur parting like pompoms in the wind. Cold wind had come like a naked blade against her face as the dogs jolted her over high ground and low, and down into the valley where the silver skim of Devil’s Pond lay. The komatik came back down Fox Farm Hill and along the road. It pulled up by the orphanage, and the driver hauled out his walrus-hide whip and called “Aw” to stop the dogs. By then, frost was biting down on Clarissa’s fingers so hard she could barely get her hands on her crutches. When she did, she started up the steps, leaning heavily on her crutches and crying. Tears had frozen on her eyelashes by the time she reached the top step. Miss Elizabeth held the door open without speaking as Clarissa dragged herself inside. She stood there trying to fold her fingers inside her palms to stop the burning pain. I’m a crybaby, she thought. I won’t ever get to go on a sled again. And she hadn’t.

  Now Clarissa stared wistfully, visualizing Missus Frances and her driver going past deer standing silently, and snowbirds rustling in the trees. Like a ship in a headwind, the sled would ride over the hills and dip down into the rutted valleys on its way to settlements such as Flowers Cove. The mistress would be gone for two days. Anything could happen on such a trip. Clarissa hoped no harm would follow or meet Missus Frances. The brake stick could snap off the komatik going downhill . . . the dogs could get loose or tangled up in their traces . . . her driver could run off . . .

  As soon as the mistress and the dog team were out of sight, Clarissa turned to Cora. “We should go see Esther. I’d like to take her a hard knob candy and a book.”

  Cora shrugged. “Miss Elizabeth would skin us if she found out. You know she has warned us not to go marming around the harbour – mixing up with the likes of the harbour crowd.”

  Clarissa looked at her. “It will always be like this,” she said flatly, “one lot of people thinking they are finer than another lot, even though we are all from the same first skin.”

  “You mean Adam’s skin?” Cora looked at her sceptically.

  Clarissa rolled her eyes. “Well, I didn’t mean Santa’s skin.”

  Missus Frances, her face windburned, came back looking sad. She stood before the children at breakfast and told them that she and her driver had stopped at a small hut made of crude boards, just a hovel with a sod roof. They had found a mother with children scantily clad pressed against her, hiding their faces in the folds of her ragged dress. A baby lay in a wooden crate, diapered in moss and wrapped in sheep’s wool. Their Christmas tree stood as bare as the trees outdoors, even plainer. The trees outdoors were decorated with snow and ice crystals. During the night the children’s father, thinking he had heard the sad cry of a trapped rabbit, dressed and made for the woods, hoping to bring his family a Christmas dinner. The mother was waiting anxiously for him when Missus Frances and her driver showed up.

  The mistress looked around the dining room at her charges; there was a quaver in her voice as she finished her story. “The children lost their dreary look at the sight of Christmas coming by dog team. They were timid at first. Each reached shyly to take an orange, looking at it in their hand as if they were seeing the sun come up for the first time. One little boy tried to eat it, peel and all. He shivered as the zest of the orange touched his tongue. Those children would be happy for warm stockings to put their feet in, never mind having them to hang up on Christmas Eve.”

  Clarissa wished she could give the children her porridge – wished, too, she could go home and let one of the children take her place.

  12

  NEWS OF CLARISSA’S FAMILY

  New Year’s Day came and went with the burning of the Clavie. The boys split up old blubber casks and set them alight, smoking the sky to open the new year.

  Six days passed and then it was Old Christmas Day. It came with a golden shine on trees, their dark limbs lifted like fingers in crystal gloves. Conkerbells hung off the orphanage and fence like silver carrots with a golden shine. The older girls got busy taking down Christmas decorations that trimmed the dining room windows and walls. Clarissa helped undress the tree until it was as bare as when it left the forest near Fox Farm Hill.

  “Bad luck it will be indeed if we keep any sign of Christmas after its twelve days are spent,” Ilish tutted, shooing the older boys to the task of taking away the tree. They laughed and poked at one another, and pulled sprigs off the tree, tossing them into the faces of anyone near. Miss Elizabeth heard them and put a stop to their bantering with a flash of her eyes in their direction. Owen and Peter picked up the battered tree with mournful faces, as if they were lifting a dead body. They dragged it outdoors and through the snow to the shed where it would be limbed for firewood. Other boys went off to the woods to cut a turn of wood for the furnace and fireplaces. They were always watchful for the footin’s of bears and foxes as they hauled the wood home by sled.

  Clarissa stared out her dormitory window, feeling that the spirit of Christmas had closed its wings forever. She hadn’t minded that December carried more night than day when she had Christmas to anticipate. Now that January was here, she hated to wake to night staining daylight, and not fading until after breakfast.

  She brightened at the thought that she would have another special day to look forward to. It would carry her through this cold month, and the vexation of being dragged to school by boys who wanted to be running on their own. Her twelfth birthday was coming. She rolled her eyes at the sight of Peter turning heel over hand in the snow. It was bad luck that they had been born on the same day, if not in the same year. In a few days she would have to share a birthday with him. She and Peter would blow out the candles together, his head leaning in towards the cake as if it was all his.

  She had been almost ten before she learned the real month and day of her birthday. She was about to celebrate her birthday with Jakot and Ettie in August when Nurse Smith came back from a trip away. She told Clarissa and Miss Elizabeth that she had dropped in on Mrs. Dicks in Humbermouth, and found out that Clarissa had turned nine on the twenty-seventh of January.

  “Well, my child,” she had announced, “your father is a train engineer, and your mother looks after a kitchen full of children.”

  “Boys or girls?” Clarissa had asked in awe, wanting to touch the nurse for having been in the same place as her family. There were so many questions racing after each other that they piled up, clogging her mind, even while the nurse was answering her first question.

  “Likely a half-dozen of one and half a dozen of the other, I should think,” the nurse said, smiling. “You will celebrate a real birthday now, with your true date, instead of getting lumped in with the other children who have birthdays in August.”

  “Yes, we’ll wait for January,” said Miss Elizabeth, ignoring Clarissa’s disappointed look at being cheated out of her birthday for that year.

  On the Saturday following Old Christmas Day, Jakot and Owen shovelled a path from the orphanage t
o the road; school began again on Monday. Clarissa stood on the steps watching them. Then she made her way down the icy steps to the ground where she looked longingly at boys and girls tossing snowballs at one other, laughing and slobbering into their mitts. She wanted to pelt all of them with snowballs. Instead, she sat making tunnels in the snow with her crutches, and building pyramids with her hands. Cora and Treffie joined her, digging big holes in the snowdrifts.

  The boys soon finished their shovelling, and began to build a fort. They called to the girls to build their own fort, so they could have a battle. Clarissa sat on the ground, helping to dig the hole that would be the girls’ fort. She could hear the boys yelling: “Ours ’ll be bigger than yours.” The boys were using the shovels they had been given to dig snow away from around the orphanage.

  Clarissa swung herself inside the girls’ fort.

  “You can’t be in the fort,” Peter called. “We’re going to war.”

  “I’ll come,” she said, lifting a resolute chin.

  “You can’t come. If there’s anything wrong with your legs, you can’t be conscripted.”

  “But it’s just a toy war. We’re using snowballs, not cannonballs.”

  “In with you then,” he said, shrugging.

  The girls squealed and shouted, firing snowball after snowball until Peter screamed in triumph, “We’ve made the most hits. You girls come out with your arms up.”

  “But my crutches will fall down,” Clarissa called back.

  “That’s the fun,” he said grinning. “Surrender with your face and eyes in a snowbank.”

  Clarissa pressed her armpits down on her crutches and tried to balance herself on the lumpy snow. She would meet the enemy eye to eye. I’m not going to fall on my face, she told herself, just before she slipped and went down.

  Cora looked at Clarissa sympathetically. “We’ll go indoors and play Snakes and Ladders.”

  “We could build a snow woman,” said Treffie, coming up beside Clarissa.

  “There’s no such thing,” said Cora, going up the steps.

  “There will be,” Treffie called, “when I’m finished.”

  Miss Elizabeth was just opening the door to come outside when the wind veered up like a demon, grabbing at her coat and swirling her shawl around her head. Her muskrat hat sailed into the air. The fierce wind pushed back the door and then slammed it in her face. “Newfoundland, this wild plantation,” she muttered. “What an adventure this has turned out to be!”

  The wind settled as suddenly as it had come. Cora and Clarissa looked at each other and burst out laughing. “Too bad she didn’t say a naughty word and have to wash out her own mouth,” Cora said with a wicked grin.

  13

  A CLOSE CALL

  “I dare you to walk across the ice on Bottom Brook, fraidy-cat,” Imogene taunted Clarissa. “You’ve got crutches. That’s the same as two gaffs.”

  “You can’t walk; see if you can swim,” Peter ragged her.

  “Fraidy-cat, fraidy-cat!” The voices of Imogene and Peter yanked on her ears like hooks.

  Cora’s voice was anxious. “Don’t go. They’re playing a fool’s game.”

  Clarissa ignored her, moving cautiously until she was standing on the frozen surface of the brook. She pulled back as a tinkling sound rose in the sharp air, the same noise she heard whenever she stepped on a shiny rind of ice over a puddle on the road. She tried to keep her balance as a grey line snaked through the freshwater ice. The ice broke and Clarissa toppled into black water. It widened around her and a piece of ice scraped her cheek and nose like the edge of a dull knife.

  This is no way to go to Heaven, Clarissa thought wildly, my birthday coming and all. “Dr. Grenfell,” she called foolishly. She didn’t know why she called him. He wasn’t there, and if he had been he would think she had done a terrible thing: risking the gift of life God had given her. Never mind that he had done it so many times, travelling on the ice with his komatik and dog team, even when he was warned that the ice wasn’t safe. But he risked his life trying to save others. He hadn’t done it on a silly dare.

  Owen and Peter dragged Clarissa from the water. They and two other boys carried her barrow-style towards the orphanage. Shivers took over her body and her knees were icy knobs inside her cold braces. Her sodden woollen stockings and drawers dragged. No wonder sheep run from rain; their wet wool must be a barrel of heaviness, she thought ruefully.

  Uncle Aubrey met the children at the door of the orphanage. He got Owen’s explanation as he lifted Clarissa into his arms. He tut-tutted. “There you go – off on ice when you can’t walk on land. What possessed you?”

  Her teeth chattering, Clarissa answered, “The ice went smooth out over the brook from the land. I thought it was fastened, but then it cracked.”

  The caretaker’s boots thumped down over the basement stairs. With Clarissa still in his arms, he went past the laundry room with its humongous tubs, its scrub boards and ironing boards, past racks and bins for sorting clothes, past a black potbellied, cast-iron stove laid with flatirons.

  In a back room there was an enormous wood-burning iron stove. The waft from a dozen loaves of bread baking in the large oven filled Clarissa’s nose. Cora’s mother, a slight, worried-looking woman, was at the end of a long work table, kneading bread. A hairnet covered her dark hair, pulled straight back from her face into a fat roll. She shook her head at the sight of Clarissa, and ran to get a blanket that hung on a line by a little coal stove. Clarissa thought, It’s too bad she never has time to be a mother to Cora and Suzy and Owen. Once when Cora had tried to talk to her mother, Clarissa heard her answer tiredly, “Sure, you’ll have to stop your chatter. You’re moidering my brain.” Clarissa imagined her thoughts getting so mixed up her words wouldn’t come out right.

  Myra, one of the helpers and a former orphanage inmate, was at a metal sink washing dishes. “Dear me,” she said. “You’m a sight.”

  Soon Missus Frances was bearing down on her. “Clarissa, you wretch, you’ve lost your crutches and broken your braces. You’ll have new crutches in a few days, but you will sit until then. That will be punishment enough. You will likely sneeze your way through your birthday this year and maybe find yourself over in the hospital with inflamed lungs.”

  In the hospital! In bed! Clarissa thought wildly. Never again!

  But as she lay in bed that night heat crept across her face and lay on her cheeks like hot pokers. Her body felt peeled . . . raw . . . tired. Someone washed her and then packed her in softness. The edge of something cold was pressed to her lips until they opened. A cool flow poured down her throat. She floated above her pain, and then she was falling down through time. The hands of a grandfather clock revolved backwards; the pages of a calendar flipped back. Clarissa was getting smaller and smaller, shrinking into the little girl she used to be, a long time ago.

  She surfaced through her delirium crying, “Nurse Smith!” Her eyes opened to the walls of the orphanage infirmary. She was wrapped in cold blankets and wearing an ice cap. An ice-filled water bottle lay on her feet. Cora was wetting her lips as Imogene looked on.

  Clarissa had missed her birthday, but Missus Frances had saved her a mixture of Gibraltar sweets, peppermint knobs, butter rocks and a card of beads to ring into a bracelet. Her best birthday gift was from her mother. She would no longer have to hobble to the library to read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland over and over to keep her courage up.

  She lay in bed sucking on a sweet and reading her book: a gift – if not a letter – from home.

  14

  QUARANTINED AND A

  SWEET LESSON

  Carissa’s eyes opened in bewilderment. Daylight was coming through the window. She sat up thinking she had slept in and another morning would begin without breakfast. She looked around and saw that the other girls were still asleep. They had all slept in. There was the sound of footsteps in the hall, and then a knock came on the door. “Up, Girls! Just because there’s no school is no reason to li
e abed all day,” Ilish called.

  No school! Clarissa smiled to herself. She stayed very quiet, stretching her legs as much as she could, despite the aching in her limbs. She could spend time reading after she had finished her mending, darning and dusting chores.

  The other children awoke as if pulled from sleep into a wonderful daydream. “No school?” Celetta asked, her heavy eyelids opening only a slit.

  “Nooo schooool.” Imogene dragged on the words, clearly disappointed. An arithmetic test had been slated for today, and she always got a hundred percent.

  “Dusting and polishing, that’s what we’ll be doing,” moaned Becky.

  At breakfast Missus Frances explained, “The orphanage has been quarantined for six weeks because influenza is in the harbour. We don’t want thirty little mortals dying of flu.”

  “’Tis a blind lookout, that’s what it is. So many children in St. Anthony wandering around with their lips at each other’s tin cups,” Cora’s mother said later. She poked a strand of Cora’s hair behind her ear. “Sure, we’re to guard this place with diligence. Thank God, ’tis not Spanish influenza: the sickness that took so many poor mortals a few years back.”

  Clarissa nodded at Cora’s mother and then moved as fast as she could to get to the study room, before she was waylaid to do chores. She stayed there reading all morning, expecting to be hauled off at any moment to mend or dust. It wasn’t until after lunch that Ilish called her into the mistresses’ lounge. She laid a cloth and a bottle of lemon wash on a chair. “Dust-and-shine time,” she said with a flicker of a smile as she went out the door. Clarissa leaned on one crutch and, with her good hand, dusted a wooden table, leaving a fresh, tangy smell in the air. Her mouth felt dry, and the dish of candy the mistresses kept in their quarters drew her, tantalized her. Usually she resisted. This time she reached out her hand to take one sweet. Her crutch slipped and she almost fell to the floor. She got a firmer grip, and her hand tightened over a striped hard knob. She lifted the big candy to her mouth and closed her lips around it. Her eyes shut with the pleasure of having a sweet to suck when it wasn’t a special occasion.