Granny cried, the toothless gap in her mouth wide. Her body cowering.
Effie stopped, grabbed the dishcloth and dropped her face into it. Never a moment of peace. Even at night while Rev. Jackdaw huffed and puffed on her in the attic, Granny called from below. The whole house listening to the length of the mating through Granny’s wails. When finally Rev. Jackdaw rolled off her and wanted quiet and the small mattress to himself, she rose to go to Granny. Who could blame her for wanting away from Homeplace? Even if it were the devil himself taking her.
Johnny sobbed. Granny’s face was blanched and the terror in her eyes sent a new rash of chills snaking up Effie’s back. She saw no dead children, but they’d all been killed right there, the blood, the crying. Painted savages stood in the very spot where her feet now trembled. Her heart raced. Even if no one else could see them, Granny saw actual ghosts. The spirits of her dead children lay scattered across the floor. Dying again.
“Let’s get out of here,” Effie said. Was Baby Sally’s ghost also there? “Bring your slate, Johnny.” She wrapped an arm around Granny’s waist, hefting her up. “We’ll sit on the porch. You can look out and see how all the trees are gone.”
Moving Granny along with the dragging quilt and a clutching Johnny was slow and felt nearly impossible. Behind them, Effie was certain that faces on the floor watched them leave.
The train pulling into the Minnesota station blew a loud, high whistle of warning. The sound and the slowing made Bridget stretch to look out the window. She was West now. West. The word sounded like wind and the warmth inside promises. Men in the West didn’t have to work in mines. They didn’t have to be carried home on stretchers. West was wonder. West was where she’d find her parents.
Craning her neck, she searched the line of women standing along the tracks. In their bonnets, she couldn’t see much of their hair and wasn’t sure of the colors. She squeezed the red wool tied around her waist and licked her lips.
She’d been licking since leaving Grandma Teegan, three days ago, and the skin around her lips was raw and stung when her tongue rubbed over the chafing. No matter. She licked again, searching for the taste of salt and the distant memory of Mum’s tears when they’d hugged good-bye in Ireland.
The train came to a complete stop. The matron in charge of the thirty-four children—some so small they still needed nappies and had just begun toddling—rose from her seat. Her eyes scanned the group but landed hard on Bridget, a warning as shrill as the train whistle. Because, Bridget thought, my hair is red, and she says that means I have “no soul”, and I’m a “half orphan”, “the worst kind.” And “a thief.”
Matron marched to Bridget’s seat with spectacles slipping down her long nose. “That disgusting habit of yours. I see your tongue again, I’ll cut it off.”
Other orphans watched; an older boy snickered.
Bridget squeezed harder at the band of wool and the thick coil of Grandma Teegan’s braid inside. She’d fight sadness and how much she missed Grandma Teegan. If you didn’t fight, one day you went to work, and three days later, a strange man stepped up to your bed and ran a dirty string from the top of your dead head to your dead toes. Measuring you for a burying box. Just like what happened to Rowan.
Matron clapped her hands over the group. “Silence. We are in New Ulm, Minnesota. You will behave exactly as I say.” She raised her palms and both sides of the aisle rose together. Bridget stepped in line, holding the hand of the two-year-old girl she’d been assigned.
Surrounded by a crowd of people eager to adopt, they followed Matron in pairs down a busy street filled with shops, horses, and buggies. The toddler under Bridget’s care, Penny, grew tired and wanted to be carried. Bridget managed the weight on her hip, walking crookedly to keep up. With each step, she fought a growing uneasiness. Why hadn’t Pappy and Mum pulled her out of the line—Mum crying tears of joy?
The adults hurrying alongside the procession talked too loud and began picking out the child they meant to have for themselves. A bright hat leaned close to Bridget. Mum? But Mum never owned such a large hat with colored feathers and a dead bird. The woman didn’t have hair that matched Mum’s, and she was only interested in Penny. “You’re a cute baby girl.”
Bridget held tight to her charge and walked faster as Matron ushered them into a school and then a classroom. The strange faces, not Mum’s or Pappy’s, crowded in, lining the four walls. They shouted over one another and pointed at the child they wanted. In the noise and confusion, Matron struggled to keep order. “Form a line, please. This will not do.” An old pen scratched down names as she filled out paperwork and tried to settle disputes.
The sinking feeling in Bridget’s stomach grew. Where were Pappy and Mum? She wanted to sock her stomach, but Grandma Teegan’s braid was there, and anyway, she had to hold Penny.
The woman in the hat with the colored feathers and a dead bird spied a small, blond boy. She grabbed his hand though he screamed and squirmed to get away.
“It’s okay,” Bridget whispered to Penny. “Someone else will want you.”
On the desktop in front of her, a large, lopsided heart had been carved into the wood with a penknife. She tried to distract Penny by having her trace the heart with a finger.
The littlest boys were fought over first. The room began to empty, with happy couples grasping small hands and couples unwilling to accept anything but a little boy leaving empty handed.
Then the little girls mattered: second choices. Penny was pulled away crying. Bridget concentrated on the carved heart, not letting her eyes meet and promise anything to Penny, who’d begun to scream and reach back for her. She clutched Grandma Teegan’s red scarf. Nera. Nera.
The older boys, able to work in fields, went next. Bridget sat with four other girls, all of them staring at their hands or straight ahead. Their eyes were open, but their faces were closed. A few minutes more and Bridget sat alone. Matron narrowed her eyes on the last remaining woman and repeated what Bridget had heard her say to another couple: “A thief that one.” And then, “Those worthy of placement are gone.” When the woman still hesitated, “She’ll be locked up. I’ll see to that.” The woman started for the door but glanced back, her eyes scolding Bridget. “I’ll not have a thief in my house.”
While Matron fussed over the ledger she’d filled out, Bridget pressed her finger deep into the heart, felt the skin push into the tiny hollowed-out shape. She wasn’t really a thief. Just, sometimes she couldn’t stop herself. Grandma Teegan had understood.
Bridget kept her fingertip pressed in the carving. “How long until the train leaves?” How much time did Mum and Pappy have to rescue her? They were hurrying. Any minute they’d run into the room crying, “Bridget! Bridget! We found you!”
Matron didn’t answer. She studied her ledger, her breath beginning to puff.
Minutes passed. Bridget twisted the fabric of the blue cotton dress she’d been given. “Why did they take my clothes? It wasn’t true, they weren’t full of bugs.”
Matron still didn’t answer.
Bridget couldn’t go back to New York. And not to prison. Grandma Teegan wasn’t even there. By now, she was on a steamer and would never know what happened.
Matron gasped, the color draining from her face. “Who took him?” She wiped her brow with a handkerchief yanked from her dress bosom. “Who took him? A runaway? Losing a child. My job. They won’t stand for this.”
Bridget hadn’t learned names on the trip, but she remembered faces. “Who did you lose?”
“Not a word to anyone!”
“You’re going to lose your job?”
For a long moment, cold eyes pinned Bridget, then Matron looked back to her book.
Out the window, horses pulled rumbling drays. Inside, a large horsefly tapped against the glass. Bridget wished she had a pocketknife. She’d carve a B. Then if Mum and Pappy arrived too late, they’d know she’d been there.
Rev. Jackdaw stood outside the New Ulm post office and clutched t
he letter he’d waited all summer to receive. He looked heavenward; it was time to be about his high commission. He crossed the street to the mercantile for the supplies he’d need for the trip to Omaha: beans, flour, sugar, coffee, a roll of bed ticking. Before leaving the establishment, he checked the letter again and added a long length of new hemp rope to his purchases.
He put what he could in the boot of his buggy and left the rest up front on the floor. At last, everything was coming to pass. In Omaha, he’d have a community of followers, prosperous men and women who’d hold their Rev. Jackdaw in high esteem. There, he’d build his church. More. An edifice. Like the great cathedral he’d seen in Miss Myra’s stereoscope. Putting the small apparatus to his eyes, sliding the picture up and back until it came into focus, he’d stared into what settled over him like heaven. Endless arches and domes vaulting great sweeps of space spoke of man’s power and indomitable will. Thinking about it made him breathe deep. He’d teach himself to read complex building plans and instruct men to build the tallest, grandest church in Omaha. He’d be remembered as an architect of God.
He climbed into the buggy and lifted the reins. His commission was clear this time and, as it had been for Moses, it could be written on two golden tablets. The first was building that church. The second was raising sons to carry on his work after he’d gone to his eternal reward. At sixty-three, he wasn’t too old to sire them. Abraham had been even older, and from his loins had come the twelve tribes of Israel. When Isaac was born, Sarah had already advanced far past a woman’s worthwhile years. Effie was only seventeen, ripe for bearing.
Just as he was ready to slap the reins over Nell’s back, the Lord stopped him. Two whores came screaming out of the saloon. They screeched and stomped on the other’s parasol, breaking the stays and ruining the paper. Cheap paper. Their sin-dazzled skirts flung, their lurid ankles and calves flashed in red stockings, and their groping hands threatened to rip open the other’s indecent bodice—bright, low-cut. Necks and heaving bosoms bare.
Dresses nothing like his own. The dress he kept hidden in the bottom of his valise was a scourge, assuring him he would never burn in hell. He’d struck a deal with God: when weakness threatened to overcome him and punishment was in order, the dress served as flagellation. Just as it had in childhood: punishment for his two grievous sins.
Watching the whores, he understood what the grinning male spectators didn’t. Thanks to the staged brawl, the “ladies” would be the talk in every saloon. By nightfall, men who’d lost interest in them would be standing in line again, eager for a two-dollar ticket to hell.
He sat, considering the magnitude of the Lord’s work waiting for him in Omaha, a city with the reputation of being the largest Gomorrah between Kansas City and Los Angeles. Over two hundred and fifty legal brothels. The newspapers claimed only ten times that many prostitutes, but he’d heard the real numbers were so high the city wouldn’t let them be reported.
The whores’ spectacle, unfolding in front of his eyes, the perfect timing of it, was divine orchestration. Had to be. He reached for his journal. Sitting in the buggy, his small inkbottle balanced on his knee, he began to write: I’m leaving this record lest God forget.
When he closed his journal, over an hour had passed. Writing the whole account of that long ago event was always necessary. The story was the roots of him. And like the tree stump in Effie’s yard, the roots plunged too deep and too wide to be removed.
He laid the book back on the seat, his name tooled on the front filling him with satisfaction. Rev. Jackdaw. He’d spent a long time considering the alias. It commanded authority and befit his mission.
As if nodding His head in wild approval, the Lord sent him the third gift of the day. The letter, the whores, and now a flyer nailed on the post, fluttering suddenly not four feet away: Free Orphans.
He hadn’t planned on bringing back an orphan, but females had poor constitutions, and Effie needed watching while he worked in Omaha. There were too many stories of wives out west jumping into swollen rivers or dressing in their Sunday best and sucking pistol barrels. Or running off when their husbands turned their backs.
A dark shadow filled the doorway of the schoolroom and made Bridget start. For a fleeting moment, hope surged again at the sight of a man. Just as quickly, her shoulders fell. This wasn’t Pappy. This man was too tall and thin and . . . something else she didn’t like.
“You’re not Pappy.”
She’d meant to whisper, but her disappointment sounded loud in the empty room. She peeked at Matron, who still dabbed at her sweaty temples. The woman flashed her a cold look of warning: Not a word from you.
The man stood framed. With his height and the black hat he didn’t remove, he nearly brushed the top of the doorway. “I’m looking for a free girl.”
A chill like stepping into cold seawater started at Bridget’s ankles and raced up the length of her body. The fish in her stomach said, “Yes. Yes.” But mostly they said, “No. No.”
Matron stabbed a crooked finger to her place in the ledger—the knuckle round as a marble—her eyes flashing. “You’re late,” she said to the man. “The adoptable orphans are gone.”
He spoke through lips buried in white beard. “What about that one? She free?”
Bridget tried to make her lips smile, but they wouldn’t do it. He wore black clothes. His black coat hung to his knees, then black trousers and black boots. Not coal black, not the way she remembered Uncle Rowan’s clothes after a day in the mine. Nor was this man’s hair covered in dust. Long and white, it hung beneath the black hat he still hadn’t removed. Where his hair stopped beneath his ears, his beard had already begun, covering his cheeks and ending long and skinny at the second button on his coat. In the center of the bush was the crack she’d seen: the twisted twig of his mouth.
She knew the man! The realization made her breath suck in. That’s why she’d felt such cold the moment before. She’d dreamed him. Remembering made her clutch again at the red wool. She’d dreamed him her last night with Grandma Teegan. She’d cried out and Grandma Teegan, beside her on the cot, pulled her even closer.
“Only a dream,” Grandma Teegan said. Pretending she hadn’t also been dreaming the same dream, and that her own throat hadn’t also cried out. Pretending the awake world and the dream world were separate. Which Bridget knew wasn’t true. Too many dreams followed her out of the night, banged on the door of her daytime world, and stepped in.
“Not all children deserve homes.” Matron’s brows were two angry moths struggling to reach one another. “Some need to pay for what they’ve done.”
The man didn’t hear or didn’t care. His hard boots with thick heels came knocking into the room. Knocking, knocking across the wooden floor. He leveled his eyes on Bridget. “This one left for me?” Me echoed in the nearly empty room. “I need a free girl.”
Matron’s bosom lifted with frustration. “Those fit for homes are gone. It’s the jailhouse for this one. Now, I have pressing matters.”
Bridget traced the heart, losing count of the number of times her finger had gone around the shape. Losing a boy scared the woman, but losing her silver writing pen made her mean. She’d turned out Bridget’s pockets, emptied the paper suitcase holding Bridget’s two pair of bloomers, and even untied the wool around Bridget’s waist. The pen wasn’t there, only the long length of Grandma Teegan’s hair. “Evil.” She crossed herself.
The man tipped his chin in Bridget’s direction. “That one? She free?”
Across the top of the slate board, the alphabet stretched out on green cards. A, upper and lowercase, and then B, for Bridget, upper and lowercase. She skipped ahead to K, upper and lowercase for Kathleen. Mum.
“I have a use for her,” the man said.
“It’s a thief you’re wanting?” Matron let the question hang in the air.
“The name is Rev. Jackdaw. I’ve been about the Lord’s work.” He grabbed his chin hair and slid his hand down the length of his beard. “The Lord’
s work needs no apology.”
Bridget fought an urge to run out the door. If a boy could get away, she could. But even so scared she might be sick, she’d stay. Nera hadn’t run. Nera—who was always Bridget’s exact age—faced the skeleton no matter how it rattled. Even knowing the bones would clamber down from the tree and chase her and never quit.
“The Children’s Aid Society,” Matron faced Rev. Jackdaw squarely, though Bridget saw how the woman’s round finger never lifted from the ledger, “promises to place out only healthy, honest children. This one is a criminal.” She threw Bridget a hard look. “She should have been locked up, the key thrown away. Some fool thought she deserved another chance.” She sniffed her dry nose. “It was my father’s silver pen.”
“It’s your business to place them out.” Finger by finger, Rev. Jackdaw pulled a black glove off one hand. Then the other hand. “She’s got no family likely to come after her?”
“She lost one of the orphans . . . a boy,” Bridget said. “She lost a boy.”
Matron’s face blanched. She glared at Bridget. “That one’s a half orphan. She had a grandmother,” the words hot and bitten off the tip of her tongue “but the woman sent her away. Signed Surrender Papers. It isn’t a wonder she did. Half orphans are the worst—”
“What’s that mean, half orphan? I’m looking for a free girl.”
“Families don’t want them. They push the burden onto good Christians. Lazy folks, not willing to work, they are.”
“No.” Bridget licked her lips, then wider. “Grandma Teegan didn’t just give me away.”
Rev. Jackdaw scoffed. He stepped up too close and pinched Bridget’s lower jaw so hard her mouth opened. He bent down and looked in at her teeth, his beard falling forward and touching her chest. “You ain’t the first to be put out. No use mourning that.”
River People Page 4