St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

by Karen Russell

  “Yes, Velina,” the Quigley sisters chorus. “Why, he’s just as good as any oxen!”

  “Our husbands are going to kill themselves out there,” my mother snaps. All of her wrinkles point downwards, like tiny pouting mouths. “It makes no difference if they are pulling or driving. We are going to forfeit every happiness we had, for a bunch of empty scrub.”

  “Don’t pay her any mind,” my dad laughed later. We were sitting on the outskirts of the campfire, watching the other men dance around its pale flames. Dad was working ancient, alluvial pebbles out of his hooves, and handing them to me for my collection. They are a translucent yellow, pocked by lacy erosion, like honeycomb. Children toddled towards our log, playing slow games of tag. The stars were impossibly bright.

  “Velina can’t see the West the way I can.”

  Dad claims that human women are congenitally nervous and shortsighted. “Like moles, son. If your mother is hungry for green corn, or if her bloomers get wet from the dew, she forgets all about the future. Believe me, when we crest those mountains and she sees the New Country…listen, everything will be different when we get there, Jacob. I promise.”

  That much, at least, I believe….

  We have lived a string of dull, thirsty weeks. Everybody is irritable, and looking for someone to blame. Our wagons bump along, a pod of wooden leviathans, eaten away from the inside by mold and wood-boring mites. Our road is full of tiny perils, holes and vipers, festering wounds. Today would have been indistinguishable from the twenty before it, except that Clem and I finally got a good ball play going.

  As soon as we got done striking camp and picketing the horses, we went exploring. Just north of the campsite, a quarter mile downstream, we found a clearing in a shallow stand of pines. In the center, a shrunken lake, an unlikely blue, was fringed with radish reeds. Behind us, you could see the white swell of the wagon sails, foaming over the trees. And the sky! The sky was the color that we’d been waiting for, our whole lives, it felt like. An otherworldly alloy of orange and violet, the one that meant a thunderstorm at sundown, and night rain for our stills.

  “Look!” I pointed to the rising storm, a spider tide of dust and light. Future rain, cocooned in red filaments of cloud. “Clem! See that? My dad says that in the old days—”

  “Jacob”—Clem rolled his eyes—“just play the ball, okay?”

  Ma had insisted that I take Maisy and Dotes so that they could get some fresh air, which I found infuriating, since they are girls and should be doing girl things, playing mumbly-beans or wearing yellow ribbons somewhere unobtrusive. Clem and I propped them up against some nearby boulders and used them as yard markers.

  “Ready, Jacob?”

  I swung wide, sending the ball to a delirious altitude, high above the blazing aspens. Maisy and Dotes clapped politely, while Clem ran off to retrieve the ball. A second later, we heard a terrible roar from behind the trees. The aspens started quaking, and I scurried to join him. We peered through the golden leaves.

  “Hey,” Clem said. “Isn’t that your dad?”

  My father was shedding his summer hide. His work shirt was hanging from a green sapling. Black fur caught like bits of cloud on the low branches. And there was my dad, rubbing his head right into a bifurcated stump, his horns sparking against the wood. “Uhhhh,” he groaned, scratching harder, his back spasming with pleasure.

  “No,” I lied.

  He snapped up when he heard my voice. “Boys!” He stamped. I felt traitorous, and embarrassed for everybody; Dad preferred to take care of his animal functions in private. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Hi, Jacob’s dad,” Clem squeaked. “We were just having a ball play with the twins.”

  We all turned. The girls had wandered down by the lake, to attend to their own functions. Maisy had unfolded the gingham curtain of modesty, and was holding it up for Dotes. When she looked over and saw us watching, she squealed and let go. The curtain of modesty went flapping off in the wind, revealing a horrified Dotes, bare-legged and squatting in the purple brush.

  “Eeee!”

  Dotes dove behind a rock.

  “Good Christ,” my father grumbled, looking away. “Get your bloomers on, Dotes.”

  On the Trail, propriety is a tough virtue to keep to, even if your curtain of modesty is made of the heaviest fabric—buffalo flannel, or boiled wool.

  My father snatched his own thick shirt from the tree, and started buttoning up. He plucked at the pink, scabby spots around his ears and neck—they startled me, these hairless patches, they looked so much like my own raw skin. He avoided our eyes.

  “Who told you to take the girls out here, Jacob?” he bellowed. “Who gave you permission to leave the company?”

  “Ma did.”

  “Oh. I see. Well.” He glanced at Clem, scowling through a nimbus of bull fluff. “I say they go back.” Then Dad trotted down to the creek, to where Maisy was wringing out the sodden curtain, and swept the girls up in his arms. He took long, regal strides back towards the camp, poised and paranoid, the way he walks when he suspects that he is being watched.

  Afterwards, we couldn’t find our ball. We both sat on a log, sulking, staring into the coming storm, and waiting to be called for dinner. Our bellies grumbled at the same time. A cloud of pollen floated past.

  “Hey,” Clem demanded, “how come you don’t look like your dad?” It was spoken as a challenge, sudden and accusatory, as if we had been fighting all this while.

  “What? But I do!” I pulled at my nostrils and blew, a nasally mimicry of my father’s anger. “I do! How come you don’t look like your dad?” I tried another wild snort, but it came out sounding like a sneeze.

  Clem just smiled at me, aping his own parents’ expression, a doughy swell of pity and smug piety. He patted my back. “Poor Jacob. Bless you.”

  That did it. I charged him with my invisible horns, and suddenly we were fighting in the dirt like animals, dunced into a feral incomprehension. Kicking and scratching and biting, full of a screaming joy, hot and ugly. We kept at it until the dinner bell returned us to our selves; and suddenly, as if by magic, we were back at the camp, gorging on buttered oats and quail cakes, full-bellied, and friends again.

  That night, I found my father at the edge of the campfire. The company was having a barbecue, and this always makes my dad uncomfortable. The teamsters tore into the antelope meat like savages. The men wore linen work shirts during the day, but at night they stripped to their bare chests. Then they rushed at each other, half in jest, tipping their bottles back with a taut fatigue. In the center of the corral, Olive had hiked her skirts up, drunk and merry. She was sitting on Gus’s lap, slapping a tambourine against her bare knees. The wives sucked air through their teeth, flushed with scandal, and clapping along all the while.

  “Dad? Will you cut my hair?”

  “Sure, son.” This was our favorite ritual. He put on his reading spectacles, and removed a tiny pair of scissors from his belt. Then he started cutting at my curly mop of hair. He cut with a tender precision, squinting furiously, his thick tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth.

  When he finished, he held the cold, flat edge of the scissors against my scalp. “Can you feel your horns, son? There?” And I smiled happily, because I could feel them, throbbing at my temples, my skulled, secret horns. Ingrown, but every bit as sharp. And I knew that no matter what Ma or Clem or anybody said, I was my father’s son.

  We had our first true storm last night. Acres of lightning! A smokeless heat, and the choking smell of ash and sage. The wide, roiling prairie announced itself in liquid glimpses, apocalyptic and familiar. We had been sleeping in tents outside, and now we all ran for cover. Blue discs of hail blew into our wagons. The soaked canvas shuddered; and this became indistinguishable from the tremors within our own divided bodies, the hollow vibrato in our spines and human skulls and bellies, during the thunder.

  “Mother,” I said, to say something.

  I had been eagerly awaiti
ng just such a disaster. Storms, wolves, snakebite, floods—these are the occasions to find out how your father sees you, how strong and necessary he thinks you are. As it turns out, I am still just a buff-colored calf to Dad. I watched the older sons and brothers leaping off of the wagon tongues all around me, a shoeless stampede. There went Clem, in a peppery cloud of dust. There went Obadiah, eager to assist.

  But none of the fathers called me out of the wagon, least of all my own. I huddled with my mother, nuzzling into her neck, while the men shouted commands to one another, weighting the wagon boxes so that they wouldn’t leak or capsize. Our family was in good shape. Months before we set out on the Trail, Mr. Gustafson had come over and treated our cover with linseed oil, until the canvas shone like opal. Now we could actually see the accumulation of each raindrop, held in an oily suspension above our heads. It was freezing inside our wagon. I peered through the cloth portal, searching for my father, lost in a haze of swung lanterns and the wind. The wagon train blurred and shifted around us, like a serpent uncoiling.

  The twins kept on crying in fright, and all around us the treasures we had sewn into the pockets of our wagon cover were shaking loose, pewter spoons and wooden toys, a grainy mess of stone meal, my father’s musket. It’s a wonder it didn’t go off and kill someone. My mother, cold and comfortless, was cursing “our luck,” by which she meant the gods, my father, all fathers. I thought about my hard bed, and the many things I used to hate about our old life—keeping the Sabbath, harvesting the roses, all the honking, stupefying demands of our geese—and wished and wished that we had never left.

  We think the wolves got Olive. When the rain cleared, she had disappeared. The grown-ups all screwed their faces into identical grimaces. They tried to make their sorrow sound as genuine as their surprise. “Poor Olive!”

  Jebediah Hatfield found her mule in a ravine eight miles to the west of us, grazing on an abstemious circle of brush, its grizzled snout stained red from the berries. Torn yellow ribbon hung from the low branches. There were bits of a woman’s skirt clinging to the currant bushes. My dad volunteered to lead the search party.

  “Are you mad?” Mr. Gustafson shook his bushy head. “We could lose a whole day if we send a search party. At this rate, we’ll never make it to the New Country.”

  My dad looked from face to face, incredulous. “What is wrong with you people?” His horns were shaking involuntarily, no longer a mere tic, but an obvious compulsion. His voice sounded small and human. “What about the contract?”

  Before we left, we had Reverend Hidalgo officiate our wagon union. Every family had to sign the contract: many wheels, a single destination, all for one until the Trail’s end.

  Somebody snickered, a thin, hysterical sound. “The contract, Mr. Minotaur?” And I flushed, seeing my father the way the other men did, his puzzled, hairy face, his dumb cow eyes.

  Our company took a group conscience, and most everybody agreed it to be hopeless. My father and half-blind Clyde were the only ones who voted in favor of sending a search party, and Clyde later insisted that he had just been stretching.

  “Think about it, Mr. Minotaur,” Mr. Grouse said with a dark twinkle in his eye, fingering the ribbon. His cheeks were flushed, as if he were telling a naughty joke. “What solution could there be to this mystery? Who wants to waste half a day, burying the answers?”

  “Velina!” We all turned. Mrs. Grouse was squatting a few yards away, waving frantically at my mother. She reached into a rain-soaked satchel, and held up one of Olive’s lacy, begrimed shirts. “Velina, do you want this? I think it’s your size.”

  Yesterday, my father was the last wagon but one to cross the Great Snake River. We rafted across in the boxes, jowl to elbow, crammed in with albino cats and babies and buckets of bear grease. The men swam alongside their oxen. Clem and I banked first, and sat watching our fathers from the opposite shore. I didn’t want to tell Clem, but I was very scared. The cows had churned up a crimson froth of silt and mud, water rising to their necks, and I lost sight of my father in the lowing melee, his ruby eyes, his chipped left horn. For a horrifying instant, I couldn’t tell him apart from the regular cattle. I worried that the other men, preoccupied with their own stock, wouldn’t know to help him if he started to go under.

  “Do you ever worry that your pa won’t make it?” Clem asked carefully. His own father was struggling below us, his gum boot caught in the rapids. “I mean, to the end of the Trail?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. Of course he’ll make it. My father is a legend.”

  All my life, I have believed only the best parts of my father’s myth. But as it turned out, this belief makes little practical difference on the Trail. Dad still got the chills, and had to stop and catch his breath on a small rock island. I got a fire going, and my mother knelt in the sand, wringing the water out of the furry knots of hair around his neck. She murmured something into his wet, mud-rubbed ears. I don’t think it was a soothing something. Even now, they are fighting inside our wagon:

  “Who do you think you’re fooling out there, acting like you’re immortal? I should have listened to my mother! I should never have married a Minotaur!”

  Ma likes to talk as if she could have done better than my father. All of my aunts married postmasters, and prim, mustachioed mayors.

  “Your mother,” my father snorted, between a laugh and a sneer. “You women, you’re all alike….”

  “It’s not too late, you know. It’s never too late to turn the wagon around—”

  “Listen, Velina,” my father is saying. “I’m telling you, it’s too late. We can only go forward. Our geese have been eaten. There are strangers living in our house….”

  There is some wooden clattering that sounds angry and deliberate, and an iron shudder. Then silence on my mother’s end.

  For the first time, I feel just as sorry for my ma as for my dad. Everybody wants to go home, and no one can agree on where that is anymore.

  Today, we nooned in a purple grove, along the dry riverbed of Snail Creek. It was cool and pleasant. After biscuits, I found a dead snake, and skinned it, and made a toy out of its rattler to give to my sisters. They are both quarantined in the wagon, sick with ague. Their heads are swollen and bluish, like tin balloons. Maisy coughs less than Dotes, but Dotes is better at keeping boiled peas down. My parents haven’t spoken to each other for three days.

  “Hey, Clem?” I asked him. “What does your father talk about with your mother? You know, in your wagon?”

  “Huh.” Clem frowned. “Your folks talk to each other?” He shrugged. “My mother mostly bangs pans around, or folds the blankets real loudly. Sometimes they pray together.”

  Without anybody taking verbal notice, in imperceptible increments, we have slipped to the back of the company. After the third time Dad fainted, Mom quietly stepped down from the high seat and slid into the canopied box. Now Ma refuses to drive our wagon. She curls up with the girls on a feather ticking, and sleeps during the day. It has fallen to me, now, to drive my father.

  Every morning, I wake up at dawn. The sky is still prickled with stars, and it will be a full hour before the first blue ribbon of smoke gasps up from the first campfire. I shake my father awake, and help him into the traces. It’s a special, single yoke, made to order. My father drinks a tiny glass of flame-colored liquid, his breakfast, while I clasp the collar slip around his neck, and secure the nails in his crescent shoes. Then I take the reins. I’m okay once we get rolling, but I’m still uncertain, a herky-jerky greenhorn, when it comes to the commands for stopping and starting:

  “Gee? Oh! I mean…Haw! Sorry, Dad!”

  Even when I close my eyes, now, I see the outline of my father’s back, swaying in front of me: the bent, pebbled steppe of his vertebrae, bruise-purple from sun and toil, the shock of his bull’s mane tumbling out of his hat, bleached to the color of old milk.

  Gus traded his mouth organ for a sock and a sack of millet, so now we travel in silence. I miss the camaraderie of that
first prairie, everybody traveling with a single aim, to the same place, and music even on the worst days. The lighter our wagons get, the quieter our daily sojourn becomes, and the more determined we are to get there and be rid of one another. The lumberwomen are mute and sour, except for the hollow growl of their hunger-barrels. At night, after we make camp, they break long bouts of wordlessness to ask for whiskey and matches and soda crackers, and various other Trail alms.

  “Don’t you give them anything, Jacob,” my mother hisses. “Remember, if you give those women so much as a single cracker, you are taking it from your sisters’ mouths.”

  Lately, my parents can’t seem to agree on the value of things. Last night, well after eleven o’clock, my father trotted back to our wagon, bashful and out of breath, fresh from a barter with the local Indians.

  “Velina! Open your mouth, close your eyes, I have for you a great surprise….”

  Then he put a raw kernel of corn on her tongue, and waited, beaming, for her reaction.

  My mother smiled beautifully, rolling the kernel in her mouth. “Oh, Asterion! Where did you get this?”

  “I sold our whiffletree,” Dad said proudly. He pulled an ear of green corn out of his back pocket and, with a magician’s flourish, stroked her cheek with the silky husk.

  “You what?” My mother’s eyes flew open. She spit corn in his face. “You did what?” Then she took hold of his horns and drew him towards her, slowly, half laughing and half crying, pressing her face against the white diamond at the bridge of his nose. “You did what?”

  Dad’s nostrils flared; he lowered his head and pawed at the caked dirt. I dove into the wagon and slid beneath the blankets with my sisters. The candles had guttered out, but moonlight seeped through the rips in our wagon bonnet.