Far From Home

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  24

  BARRED OUT

  Clarissa was playing cobby house alone by the snout of a yellow birch tree close to the beach. She missed Cora, who had a bout of summer sickness and was staying close to the orphanage toilets. When the first lunch bell rang, Clarissa dropped hers and Cora’s collection of seashells and chainies in a hollow at the base of the tree, and pulled a flat rock over it. She pulled herself to her feet and slipped the crutches under her armpits. She tried to hurry along the path, so she could wash up and get to the table before the second bell rang, but her braces held her back. There wasn’t a sign of anyone when she reached the orphanage. The second bell was already ringing. She got her breath; then she turned the handle on the basement door. It wouldn’t open.

  “I can’t be barred out!” she groaned just as a raindrop fell on her nose. She steadied herself and rattled the handle with her good hand. She knocked and waited, sorry now that she hadn’t gone around to the front door. She listened for noises coming from inside, but the only sound she heard came from a sudden torrent of rain beating down on her. It filled her eyes and dripped into her open mouth. She looked at the window beside the door, clenched her hand, and, pulling her sleeve down over her knuckles, she let her fist fly at the long, narrow windowpane. Shards of glass fell with a clatter onto the wooden floor inside. She stood quietly, rain and tears mingling.

  Through the broken window, Clarissa caught a glimpse of Imogene running down the stairs. She unlocked the door and opened it. Her eyebrows lifted at the sight of Clarissa shivering on the steps. Then, without saying a word, she let the door slam shut. Clarissa pushed the unlocked door open and stumbled inside, fuming at the sight of Imogene running up the stairs. The mistresses would soon know about the window from Tattle-tale Imogene.

  Clarissa hobbled upstairs to the hall and stood there streaming wet, her stomach growling like an angry husky. No one would care that she had not eaten since breakfast; no one would notice that her knuckles were bleeding. She dragged off her coat and was hanging it in the hallway to dry when she saw Miss Elizabeth hurrying towards her.

  “You are not in time for lunch, so you will not have supper either.” Miss Elizabeth snapped her mouth shut; it took on its familiar pursed shape.

  Missus Frances, coming out from the dining room, overheard the younger woman. “Clarissa missed her lunch. She will not go to bed without her supper, even if it is one slice of bread.”

  Clarissa warmed to Missus Frances for taking up for her. Mean feelings towards the mistresses made her teeth tighten and grind together like agitated ice pans. As soon as a mistress treated her well, her whole body settled.

  Miss Elizabeth’s voice softened as she lowered it. “If we don’t punish you, the other girls will pick on you.”

  They were interrupted by Dr. Curtis, coming into the orphanage from the basement. “Who broke the window?” he asked sternly.

  Miss Elizabeth answered: “Clarissa, your pet, did that. I’ve been told it was an accident.”

  The doctor lifted one dark eyebrow. He didn’t say a word as he went towards the library. The mistress looked at Clarissa. “You must be his pet. He didn’t deny it.”

  Clarissa didn’t know how she could be his pet. She hardly ever saw him. Sometimes he was with Dr. Grenfell when her legs were being examined, but he was never friendly. Still, he didn’t seem angry about the window and, if her luck held, she wouldn’t be punished for breaking it. Clarissa wondered if Imogene had explained the break as an accident, so she wouldn’t be blamed for locking the basement door.

  She started up the stairs, stopping when she heard whispering beside the staircase. She couldn’t see anyone, but when she got to the second floor, she heard girls’ voices raised in a chant. “Bay Girl, Bay Girl, come to supper: two cods’ heads and a lump of butter.”

  She was sure one of the girls was Imogene.

  25

  A FALL IN SUMMER

  The first weeks of summer were almost too wonderful to bear, especially those mornings when the dormitory room had pooled with sunshine by the time the breakfast bell rang.

  One morning after breakfast, Clarissa swung herself down the steps of the orphanage, and out towards the garden by the barns. She listened to cows lowing and horses whinnying. Leaves, wrapped in warm and gentle sunshine, soughed in the breeze.

  She turned to see Jakot and Owen lumbering up from the beach with seashells and sand for the coopy house. When the hens ate sand and pieces of seashell, their eggshells were hard and didn’t crack in the hands of children collecting them from nests of hay. One wily hen had managed to fly off the ground and land in the lettuce patch which it pecked full of holes. It was clucking against Peter’s chest as he clipped its wings. Clipping the wings was Uncle Aubrey’s way of dealing with flighty hens.

  Clarissa made her way down the beach path. Girls and boys were standing on the low rail of the mission wharf; their arms hung over the top rail as they looked down into the clear water. On the beach beside the wharf, children were blowing up sculpins by hitting them across the stomach with a stick. Young Ben went from breaking seaweed bubbles to teasing a starfish with a twig, getting it to crawl to a rotting caplin alive with flies. Its points closed over the caplin, and the starfish became a ball. It went limp, and then flat as it died under Ben’s foot.

  Clarissa watched children skipping flat stones across the water without making a splash, trying to finish a rhyme before the stones sank: “A duck and drake and a tatey, pork cake . . .”

  It was getting close to lunchtime; Clarissa felt tired and hungry. She went back to the orphanage and sat on the concrete wall outside the building. She watched children playing hopscotch and lallick, running, jumping, swinging – moving freely without sticks. Their feet had worn a path through the grass to a set of swings set up in the yard by Dr. Grenfell and Uncle Aubrey. Clarissa’s brown eyes almost turned green with envy at the sight of Cora and Imogene on the swings. She would sit on a swing if her left hand was strong enough to hold on, and her feet were able to push her. She wanted to be swinging high and higher, until her feet were hanging in the sky. There were days she wished she were a puffin on the wing.

  She closed her eyes, moving her body back and forth, imagining she was swinging through the air. Her eyes flew open as she lost her balance and fell back over the concrete wall to the flat alley below; her braces and crutches clattered like broken bones as she hit the hard ground. The brutal pain in her head was aggravated by the familiar ring of the lunch bell. The other children ran laughing towards the orphanage. Some of them looked her way, but they didn’t stop. She didn’t blame them. They wanted their lunch, and they needed ten minutes to get inside and wash up before the next bell.

  Clarissa lay feeling woolly headed, waiting for the pain to subside. After a while she put her fingers on her head. It was still together. She knew it would be, just as it had been the other times when she had fallen. Last summer she had hit her head on the leg of the table in the lunchroom. A week after that she bumped her head against the radiator in the dormitory. The cut had bled onto her navy sweater with the red trim.

  The pain lessened and Clarissa got her hands on her crutches and pulled herself up. She tried to ignore the heaviness of her body and the discomfort of the knobby handles of the crutches in her armpits as she dragged herself up the steps to the orphanage. The second bell was like a tongue banging her ears. When she was finally inside the lunchroom, the children looked at her with pity. Missus Frances didn’t ask how she was or tell her to wash up, but her voice was kind, “I think you had better go to bed; I’ll send you something to eat.”

  Despite the pain, Clarissa managed to haul her body up the stairs and into the dormitory. She undressed slowly, dropping her clothes across the bed. She pulled her nightgown over her head and got into bed, feeling stunned. Soon Missus Frances came with food: apple salad with savoury dressing. It was the first time Clarissa had seen staff food. She had always wondered what was on the covered trolley. She would
tell the other girls about the apple salad.

  Clarissa rested in bed the next day, not getting up except to go to the toilet. For the next two days she stayed in the dormitory, her head so heavy she didn’t even want to eat. Missus Frances brought her food for the next three days. Each time she cast a critical eye over her patient, exclaiming, “Clarissa, you must be more careful!”

  From the window, Clarissa watched the other children playing games. They ran into the wind lifting light, energetic arms. It was all so wonderful – the things they could do.

  I’ll do all that someday, she vowed.

  26

  A SAVAGE ATTACK

  Clarissa was lying across her bed reading Little Women when she heard screaming in the distance. She shrugged it off, thinking that some rascal – Peter most likely – had put a spider in someone’s ear, the same as he had done to her last year. The screaming became more intense, and then stopped. She grabbed her crutches and hopped to the window: children and adults were running in the direction of the beach. Probably just a fight, she thought, and went back to lie on her bed. She picked up her book and was deep into reading when Cora burst into the room panting, strangling the words she was trying to get out. “Peter . . . dogs!”

  “Peter,” said Clarissa in a dismissive tone, “should go where the dogs don’t bark.”

  Cora’s eyes widened in horror; Clarissa dropped her book, and its pages swished shut. Something was wrong. Cora never put a face on her like this; her eyes looked ready to fall out of their sockets.

  Cora wrung out her words, her hands clasped: “He’s lying on the ground, bitten into and streaked with blood. Dead!”

  The last word came like a hammer. Clarissa’s head seemed to crack with the blow. Her face and eyes grew heavy; her heart felt like a rock.

  Cora fell across her bed, whimpering, “I wished him dead.”

  Clarissa looked at her best friend. “But it wasn’t that kind of dead,” she said slowly. “I wanted to bat him so many times with my crutches, and I would have if I could have stood without them.” Now she wished she could have saved him from the wild teeth of the dogs. He must have felt the same kind of pain that bit into her hip and foot long after Dr. Grenfell had split her tendons and sewn up her skin.

  “Besides,” she added hopefully, “you don’t know if he’s really dead.”

  “Yes I do. Uncle Aubrey threw whale meat in the kennel to get the dogs off him; then he dragged him out and put his finger against his neck. He looked up and said, in a strange voice, ‘This boy ain’t needin’ salve and bandages. His breath’s gone.’”

  Cora’s eyes were downcast. “No one seemed to know what Peter was doin’ in the kennel.”

  “Maybe he was hanging off the kennel fence and the dogs dragged him in.” Clarissa thought of all the times she’d seen Peter locking his heels on fences and dropping his head, his arms dangling, while the younger orphans watched him with open mouths.

  The sound of gunshots drew the girls’ attention to the window. They looked at each other. Now the huskies were dead, too.

  Missus Frances warned the children at suppertime, as she had done many times before, not to go near husky dogs. “They have a savage nature like the wolves that are part of their ancestry. From the wolves they get their howl and whine. Remember,” the mistress cautioned, “dogs will lick your hand today and eat you tomorrow. They are as deceitful as wolves who, trappers will tell you, are not dead until their teeth show. As long as their lips are together, they have enough life to bite. There has been trouble with dogs in St. Anthony before this. Arms and legs – and faces – have been bitten into and torn. The dogs have to be destroyed after an attack. Once they taste human blood, they don’t stop until they get flesh.”

  The mistress lifted her chin, her voice grave. “After today we will not speak of Peter’s mishap. Someone else will soon take his place at the table.” Her eyelashes flittered as if flicking away tears.

  That night, the silence from the kennel was more lonely than the dogs’ howls had been. The girls in Clarissa’s dormitory slipped quietly into their beds and fell asleep without a word. Clarissa awoke to the lonely sound of galing winds. She stirred, relieved that although the wind howled like huskies, it couldn’t get inside. The wind used to whip around the old orphanage, looking for open seams in the green wood. Sometimes the wind had a tongue of rain; Clarissa would wake to cold, damp air breathing in her face.

  She fell back asleep and dreamed about Peter. He and other children are outside the dog kennel hussing the animals. Some boys dare Peter to climb over the galvanized mess wire and jump into the kennel with the four husky dogs. Jakot is grinning. “If you can do that without showing you’re afraid, the huskies won’t attack yer.” Peter is acting cocky, but fear surfaces in his eyes as he drops into the kennel. They widen at the bared, white teeth of the dogs. The animals turn on him, fur straight up on their backs, their tails bristling and their jowls foaming. Peter’s heavy pants are ripped from him and blood drips from torn, white skin into the sawdust-covered ground. Clarissa balances herself on one crutch and pushes the other through a hole in the wire kennel and hits one, two, three, four dogs on their heads. They lift their snouts into the air and howl as if they are wolves baying at the moon. Then they run to cower in the corner. Peter crawls away whimpering; the dogs come back after him. Clarissa hears him screaming; she’s afraid the dogs will leave Peter, leap the fence and turn on her. The screaming stops; she’s too scared to look back. The other children go shrieking towards the orphanage. Clarissa tries to follow them, but huskies catch a whiff of her blood from the monthly eggs broken inside her. They leap the fence and attack her. She falls down knowing she will never get away until the huskies have eaten her legs. She awoke from her dream, her heart pounding. Peter was really dead!

  The next morning, Clarissa overheard the older boys talking outside the orphanage about Peter and the blood on the ground in the kennel. She wanted to dream Peter alive so she could say she was sorry for thinking he was mean – even though he was – and for not believing him when he said his people came from Norse warriors – even if they didn’t.

  She remembered Peter telling Miss Ellis, in a proud voice, about his father and Norsemen. Clarissa had expected the school ma’am to give him a poke with her ruler, and call him fanciful, but she hadn’t. She looked at him as if anything was possible. She said she had heard of a Newfoundland historian – a man named W. A. Munn – who was writing a book suggesting that Vikings had once lived near St. Anthony. “No one knows the many bloodlines in this country,” the school ma’am had answered, as if upholding Peter’s belief that he came from Viking blood. Peter had looked around at the rest of the children with a bold and lofty look on his face.

  ***

  “It is important to feel you belong to someone,” Clarissa murmured to Cora as they sat together at the funeral service.

  Cora looked at Clarissa. “Peter was good on times,” she admitted reluctantly. She turned her head towards the pulpit, where Reverend Penny was about to start his sermon.

  Reverend Penny assured everyone that the dogs had only hurt Peter’s body, which was just a box holding his life. They had freed him to go up to God. The Reverend’s voice rose solemnly. “We must not think of a person as being dead. Peter is gone away from a torn body into the garden of God. In Heaven he has a new life. He will be there with his mother and father. We all have to pay the debt of nature someday.”

  Debt! Clarissa never thought of herself as owing her breath to anyone. She thought it was a gift. It had not occurred to her until now that her body would go into a pitty hole someday. Jakot, Owen, Hipper and Simon looked as mournful as the black bands on their left arms, as they each reached for a handle of the barrow under the white box holding Peter. They carried it out of the church.

  Clarissa and Cora walked together down the road to the graveyard. An old fisherman, standing there, watching and puffing on his TD pipe, said, as if to himself, “These are dog days: July a
nd August. The Dog Star, the brightest star in the night sky, rises and sets with the sun, and no one knows what effect this could have on wild dogs.” He went down the road shaking his head.

  Thinking of Peter barred inside a box reminded Clarissa of the other box up on Tea House Hill. She wondered if she and Cora would ever have the nerve to pry up the cover. Closed boxes seemed to hold dead things. Her face brightened. Or treasures.

  A cloud crossed her face. She shouldn’t be thinking about treasures with Peter just dead. Guilt settled inside her.

  27

  NEWS ABOUT GOING HOME

  Clarissa had been twelve for six months when Missus Frances called her into the office. She stood, leaning on her crutches, wondering what awful thing she had done now.

  “Your mother has written to us,” the woman said quickly. “She has sent for you to come home.”

  Clarissa’s eyes widened. Her voice came out in a hoarse whisper. “My mother wants me to come home.” Her body swayed as if an earthquake had started beneath her feet.

  Going home had been her daydream and her night dream through the long years, sustaining her through every hard blow. But now, sitting in the office looking across the desk at Missus Frances, her concept of home fled as swiftly as if it were a dream she had awakened from. An icy feeling swept through her.

  “Your mother feels it is time for you to be instructed in the Roman Catholic faith.”

  “Did she say . . . uh . . .?” Clarissa couldn’t finish her sentence under the probing eyes of the mistress.

  “Yes?” The woman’s lips pulled tight as she waited for Clarissa to finish.

  Clarissa drew in a deep breath. “Did she say she missed me?”

  “Now, Child, why would she tell me that? You’ve been gone for most of your life. You may not have been missed, but you are wanted home.”