by Tess Hilmo
“Rattlesnakes are nicer than Kristina,” I say, leading the way into the coop.
Quinn follows me as I pluck out slimy pieces of chicken poop from the egg beds and pile the clean straw against one side of the small henhouse. “It’s not so bad,” he says. “It’s softer than Miss Franny’s floor.”
“But a lot colder out here.”
“At least we have each other.”
It is something Father often said when times were rough. Quinn is becoming more like him every day. Maybe it is the fiddle; I don’t know, but it’s nice to be around. I try to add to the optimism: “Can’t get any worse.”
“I guess you’re right,” Quinn says, but we both know those words are hollow. If there is one thing we’ve learned over the past eleven weeks it is that things can always get worse.
18
We awake at dawn the next morning nestled in straw and cuddled by chickens. It wasn’t as horrible a night as I thought it would be.
“Guess I should apologize to Miss Franny so we can get started on her chore list,” Quinn says.
“I don’t think you should. Mr. Olsen doesn’t expect us to be her slaves, he said so himself.”
“Mr. Olsen isn’t here and we can’t keep sleeping with the chickens.”
“Why not?” I ask. “Think about it, Quinn, we will be free of Miss Franny. We can spend more time trying to help Nettie or working to build our savings and then sneak in here after dark and have a soft bed in this straw. It’s not forever, it’s just for now.”
“That might be nice,” he says, pulling a piece of yellow straw from his hair.
“No more of her insults.”
“Unless we get caught,” he says. “In which case we’d really be in for it.”
“We won’t get caught,” I promise.
“Will we let Sam know?”
“I’m afraid he’d tell. Not on purpose, but he might slip and say something when he’s had one too many down at the pub. Which is every night.”
“So we just let him think we’ve disappeared?”
I know that won’t work. Sam cares for us and would worry. “Give me time to think about it. Right now we need to get out of here before Miss Franny finds us.” Quinn pushes a gray hen off his lap. She screeches and flaps her wings in my face. “Be careful,” I say, pushing her back toward the nesting box. “Her talons are sharp.”
“I guess there’ll be no oatmeal for us this morning,” Quinn says.
“No, but we’ve got fresh eggs.” I hold two up in my hands.
“How are we to cook them?”
I smack the end of one egg against the corner of the nesting box and then put the broken part to my lips, sucking out the thick, warm innards.
“That’s disgusting,” Quinn says.
“It’s breakfast and it’s all we have.” I hold the other egg out to Quinn.
“I’m not about to suck on a raw egg. Let’s go get something at Quixom’s.”
I put my empty shell in my pocket. “I don’t want to leave any evidence we were here and Mr. Frankel says eggshells are full of healthy minerals.”
“Said.”
“What?”
“Mr. Frankel said. He can’t talk anymore.”
“I know,” I say.
“And I don’t care how hungry I get. I’m not eating raw eggs or their shells. I’d rather play on the streets for an extra hour and earn money for food.”
I know there is no stopping him so we take a bucket from Miss Franny’s shed, walk a few blocks over to Quixom’s Market and buy three sandwiches for breakfast. Mine is egg and Cheddar cheese on rye bread with hot mustard. It is soft and spicy and scrumptious. Then we fill the bucket with water at the corner pump and go to the Monroe.
The same two guards are out front, but the guy who had been at the side of the building is gone.
“We have to come in from behind, on Madison,” I say. Quinn lets me take the lead. He is carrying his fiddle in one hand and the bucket in the other. “We wait here,” I whisper when we get to the outhouse. “I need a penny to bribe her out.”
Quinn gives me a penny.
After about twenty minutes or so, the boy I talked to before comes out.
“Psst,” I say.
He smiles and holds out his hand. I drop the penny onto his palm and say, “Go get her.”
“Anyone who would pay a penny to see someone would probably pay two.”
“That’s extortion.”
He shrugs. “I call it good business.”
I look at Quinn, who hands me another penny. “Fine.” I give it to the boy, who closes his hand around the money.
“Wait here,” he says.
“And keep it quiet,” I whisper after him as he goes inside.
Nettie comes out within just a few minutes. Her brow is furrowed and her chin is tucked down. “I told you not to come back.”
“We brought you a sandwich,” I say.
“And fresh water,” Quinn adds, pulling the bucket from its hiding spot behind the outhouse.
She drops down to her knees and pushes her face into the bucket of water, drinking so deeply, she starts to cough.
“Slowly,” I say.
“It tastes good,” she says between gulps.
“When’s the last time you had fresh water?” Quinn asks.
“We’re not allowed to go to the main pump and the pipes are busted here,” she answers, still drinking. “The only water we get is down below.”
“Sewer water?”
“Some of it’s clean,” she says. “And you can get the helpers to bring you a cup of water if you give them pennies.”
“You mean the kidnappers,” Quinn clarifies.
I notice she is eyeing the sandwich on my lap. “Go ahead, it’s for you.” I fold back the brown paper and hand it to her.
She keeps her face down, shoving one bite after another into her cheeks like a squirrel going into the worst of winter. I take the opportunity of her distraction to say a few things. “Listen, Nettie,” I begin, “these people are lying to you and they have no power to hurt us if you leave.”
She flits her eyes up to me, but keeps eating. She is forcing the sandwich in faster than she can chew and bits of bread and cheese are dropping out of the corners of her mouth.
“You could come home with us right now and no one here would notice or care.”
“Tell that to Markie,” she says, mouth overflowing.
“Who’s Markie?”
She stops and swallows. “A boy who ran. They found him and beat him up real bad. Tied him to a post for three days and let all the kids here spit on him.” She swallows again and looks back down to the ground. “I didn’t spit on him.”
“Of course you didn’t,” I say.
“But most of the other kids did. Markie says he’s sorry he ran and told us all never, ever, ever to try anything like that. Now he works harder than anyone. Now he’s one of their best workers. But it sure was sad seeing him tied up like that.”
Quinn dips the corner of his shirt into the water and begins wiping the mud and traces of rat poison from her free hand. “We’d keep you hidden away,” he says, his voice certain. “They won’t find you.”
“They find whoever they want to find,” she says, finishing the last crust of her sandwich. “And I’m the only one small enough to fit into some parts of the sewer. They need me.”
“We need you!” I say.
Quinn puts his finger to his lips, reminding me about the thugs out front.
“We need you,” I say again, only quieter.
She lets Quinn finish washing her hands and then she plunges them into the bucket and scoops the cold, fresh water onto her eyes. She does that three times and then looks up at us. “I shouldn’t have eaten that whole sandwich. I should have shared it with the others. They’re hungry, too.”
“It’s okay,” Quinn says. “We’ll bring more tomorrow.”
“Really?” Her face lights up.
“Sure,” he says.
>
“What are you talking about?” I say. “There’s not going to be a tomorrow because she’s coming with us right now!” I can’t help raising my voice with each word and, by the end, the two thugs from the front are rounding the corner into the backyard. Nettie stands up and runs as fast as she can, disappearing into the hotel.
“Come on,” Quinn says, grabbing the bucket and his fiddle. “They look like they mean business, we’d better run.”
Leaving Nettie behind makes me feel like we are a couple of rats ourselves. And maybe we are. A couple of rats scurrying back into Chicago’s nameless crowds.
* * *
Once we are far enough away from the hotel, Quinn and I stop to catch our breath.
“I’m so glad we ran into you,” a woman says, coming up to us on the street. Then she turns to a well-dressed man at her side and says, “This is the musician I was telling you about.”
Quinn stops and leans forward into a grand bow. He is still carrying the bucket in one hand and his fiddle in the other. “Good morning,” he says, sounding amazingly mature and professional. “Do you have a request?”
The man sizes Quinn up and turns to the woman. “He’s a street urchin.”
“A gifted street urchin,” she says. “Let him play.”
“Do you know any Beethoven, boy?”
“No, sir.”
“Vivaldi?”
“What I know, I learned from my father,” Quinn says. “Irish jigs and a few English ditties. Nothing classical.”
The man gives the woman a look of exasperation. “What current musician of worth doesn’t know Beethoven or Vivaldi?”
“Stop being so stuffy, Robert,” the woman says. “Put aside your judgment and let the boy play.”
The man pulls out a gold pocket watch, flips it open, closes it with a snap, and says, “Fine. Play what you will.”
Quinn blows on his fingers to warm them, opens his case, and tunes his fiddle. Then he starts playing a heartbreak of a song with lingering notes that reach deep into your soul and tease out all the emotion. The man is clearly taken by my brother’s performance and, upon the last note, begins to raise his hands to clap but Quinn breaks into a lightning-fast jig that bounces out across the street and down the rooftops.
The woman leans in to the man and I hear her say, “Some play music and others play memories. This boy plays memories and it haunts me somehow.”
“Chicago is full of street musicians, as is New York and every other city in the world,” he says.
“There is more to this boy. There is heart and promise.”
The man inclines his chin ever so slightly. “Perhaps you are right.”
“I am always right,” the woman says as Quinn finishes his set of songs. “What is your name, boy?”
“Quinn Doyle.”
“Have you a home?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Is this your sister?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you know who this man at my side is? He is Robert Donlope, director of Chicago’s Grand School of Music. I am Gayle Shumway, his secretary. Give the boy your calling card, Robert.”
Mr. Donlope hands Quinn a card along with a five-dollar bill. “For your music and, if I may suggest, a bath.”
“Thank you kindly,” Quinn says.
Miss Shumway smiles. “You should know Mr. Donlope reserves his calling card for the most important of people. Do consider paying him a visit.”
Quinn just stands there, jaw hanging open, so I say, “Yes, ma’am, he certainly will.”
The pair walk on and I nudge Quinn. “Wow.”
“I know!” he says. “Five dollars for two songs!”
“Five dollars and a calling card. When will you go see him?”
Quinn tucks the cash into his pocket and tosses the calling card into the gutter. “We don’t have money for a school like that. I can hardly read.”
“You don’t need to be good at reading to learn music.”
“Count me out.”
But as he walks down the street, I take the card from the gutter.
“We can buy a dozen sandwiches with this money and still have some left over,” he says when I catch up with him. “Who is so rich they can drop five dollars for two songs?”
“And a bath,” I add.
Quinn stops on the sidewalk. “I played near a bathhouse a few days ago. The sign said it was ten cents for shared water and twenty cents for fresh. Let’s go there after work today.”
“If we had Nettie, she could come, too. She really needs a bath.”
“She was right when she said those thugs at the hotel would come looking for her,” Quinn says. “And that the punishment would be worse than anything she’s going through now.”
“So we just leave her there?”
“Of course not. But like Sam said, we have to be smart in how we go about it. Maybe we can save Nettie and help the other kids, too.”
“Shut the whole place down?” I ask.
“They’d all be free—and safe.”
“How?”
Quinn looks wearily down the street. “That’s the part we have to figure out. In the meantime, we can bring her food and water and try to talk to her. If she wants to run, we’ll be there.”
Every beat of my heart and pulse of my veins wants to lure Nettie out, grab her, and take off. I am sure she’d understand once we got her away from those people. We could try to keep her hidden. But maybe Quinn and Sam are right. As long as Mr. Blume’s lackeys were looking for her, she’d never be safe. As long as she wants to stay—even for the wrong reasons—I’ll be unable to force her into hiding.
“It’s going to take patience,” Quinn says. “In the meantime, we need to take care of ourselves. It’s like Mother said—if we don’t take care of ourselves, how can we care for others?”
“That wasn’t Mother. That was Nettie quoting one of the nuns from her orphanage.”
Quinn’s expression falls. “It hasn’t even been three months and I’m already forgetting them.”
I take the bucket from his left hand. “Mixing up something they said is not forgetting them. I’ll never let you forget and you’ll never let me forget. Maybe that’s why we both survived.”
Quinn pinches his eyebrows together and says, “Maybe.”
I look up at the sky. “Ida’s expecting me. Where will you play?”
“By the cobbler’s shop,” he says. “In the bazaar, where it’s warm.”
“Down from Ketchum’s Butcher Shop?”
“Yes.” I can tell he’s still thinking about mixing up Mother’s memory.
I force a smile. “Play to remember them today and I’ll meet you there at three o’clock.”
He nods and disappears into the crowd.
* * *
After work, I follow Quinn across the city to a hotel with an adjacent bathhouse. It is surprisingly clean. Some bathhouses have bad reputations, but this place seems respectable.
“I want fresh water,” I say.
“Me too.” Quinn hands me two dimes and waves me ahead of him in line. “I’ll see you when you get out.”
I follow an attendant into the back room. It is small but nice and the dividing walls between the baths go from the floor all the way up to the ceiling, which makes me feel more comfortable. The attendant, a young girl with a blond braid and white apron, hands me a towel. “Soap is along the ledge.”
“Thank you.”
She leaves me alone to slip out of my dress and into the bath. The water is steamy and warm. Even when we bathed on the farm, the water was always cold. I slide down into the tub and let the water ease up around my shoulders and neck, closing my eyes. The sorrow I have been carrying for so long begins melting from my skin, along with the dirt. I imagine it lifting off and dissolving into the warm water and I stay in the bath until the last trace of warmth fades away. When I finally get out, I feel so light. Like I could be the Ailis I once was.
Oh, how I want to be that Ailis.<
br />
I get dressed, twist my hair into a fresh braid, and go out into the alley to meet Quinn.
“You look like a new person,” he says.
“I feel like a new person.”
He nods. “Yeah, I do, too. It’s good.”
“I’m tired of being sad,” I say. “But it doesn’t feel right being happy when I remember all we’ve lost and the trouble Nettie is in.”
“I know what you mean. I’ve been feeling bad about going to the bonfire with Sam and dancing around like a fool. I just couldn’t stop myself.”
“Mother and Father wouldn’t want us to be sad forever.”
“How long is long enough?” he asks. It is a good question and I don’t know the answer so I shrug. Quinn picks up his fiddle and I pick up the bucket.
“Maybe it’s when you can’t stand to carry the weight of it anymore,” I say when we are down the road a ways. “When you feel like the sorrow is changing who you are meant to be.”
“Is that how you’re feeling?” he asks.
I think about it. “Yes.”
“Then you shouldn’t. We’ll figure out a way to help Nettie. Instead of thinking of her in a sad way, try to think of a way to get her out.”
“I wish I could.”
“Maybe it’s something you do one minute at a time. And let’s make a pact,” he says, reaching out a hand. “From now on, we only talk about the good times back home, okay?”
I slide my hand into his and shake it. “Like how Gertrude used to chase the chickens around the yard?”
“Flapping her arms and clucking at them?”
I laugh. “She was the cutest thing.” The memory makes us smile, but murky sadness lingers, waiting to crawl back in and choke our hearts with gloom. We both know our sorrow won’t disappear by recalling one funny memory. But for the first time since the fires, I feel peace in knowing Quinn and I can at least talk about our family.
19
Ida told me she was meeting a carpenter to design a new hat block and would be opening the shop an hour later than usual today, which works out nicely with our plan to take Nettie and the other children some sandwiches. Another night in Miss Franny’s chicken coop with our light coats makes Quinn suggest we stop by the church on our way and ask if there have been any coat donations.