St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

by Karen Russell

  “Girls?”

  Maisy opened one brown eye and held a finger to her lips. Dotes had her fist in her mouth, stifling a cough. I felt proud and sad that my sisters knew enough to pretend to be asleep. Outside, our parents were still arguing:

  “Is that what we’re worth to you,” my mother was yelling, “five dollars and an ear of green corn?”

  “…besides, you were the one who said you wanted corn….”

  “Do you even have any idea how to repair a whiffletree, Asterion?…Well, I hope that is some consolation to you, when the wolves are gnawing on your daughters’ bones….”

  “C’mon,” I said, loosening the cinched portal and sneaking my sisters out the back. I carried them over to the Grouses’, two wagons down.

  “Hey, Clem,” I said. “Can we sleep in your wagon tonight?”

  “No,” Clem said sadly. “No, my ma says that we’re only allowed to be friends in church now. They think your dad gave me lice.” He brightened. “You can sleep under the wagon.” We all peered beneath the hickory box. The under-carriage of the wagon was white and wormy. Light leaked through the planks, a palsied glow, sopped up by a dark mosaic of soil. In the dead center, the darkness pooled and shifted. Dotes gasped. It was a clotted mass of dogs, spotted dogs, yellow dogs, swimming dogs, all huddled together for warmth.

  “You first,” Maisy said.

  Today I was poking at the fringes of the campfire, gathering stones for my collection, when I overheard some of the other men talking about my father.

  “That Minotaur is spreading sucking lice to the children!” Mr. Grouse said, shaking and red, with a rage out of all proportion to his insect allegation. “He is titillating the milk cows, and curdling our children’s milk!” I flattened myself against the ground and inched forward. The other emigrants were all frowning and nodding. Watching them, I could see the way Mr. Grouse’s anger spread from man to man, the hot, viral coil of it, a warmth the men breathed in like a welcome fever.

  It’s enough to make you hate people.

  I ran off to find Clem. He was out back, catching lizards behind the corral.

  “Howdy-howdy, Jacob…Ow!”

  I butted him in the ribs, sharply, wishing fervently that I had inherited my father’s antlered might. I butted him once, twice, and then stomped on his buckskin shoes.

  “What was that for?”

  “If you don’t know, I am not going to tell you.” I ran off into the sunset, crying hot, frustrated tears, cursing the Grouses at the top of my lungs. Then I lost sight of the wagons, and got scared, and ran back. I hoped Clem wasn’t watching.

  When everybody was ladling soup at the bean cauldrons, I snuck into Clem’s wagon. I stole his sisters’ dolls, the ones the Grouse girls have been making out of cornhusks since Fort Charity, and ate them. In my vengative fury, I forgot to remove the button eyes. My stomach is still cramping.

  I hope the West is big enough for us to really spread out. It’s a terrible thought, one of my worst fears, that we are going to get there, and these people will still be our neighbors.

  Three nights ago, I was sleeping under my own family wagon, my bare arms and face covered in a fine cedar dust from the box, and dreaming of the most ordinary things, chalk and pillows and ceiling boards, pitchers of lemonade and gooseberry pies, when I woke to a hand—not my own—pinching at my cheek.

  “Wake up, Jacob.”

  I rolled over, eye level with the tip of my mother’s caulked boot. I slid out from under the wagon. Ma had Maisy in one arm and Dotes in the other. Their eyes looked shiny and protuberant; their throats bulged with the echo of swallowed coughs. I felt the danger, too, sensed it with an animal intuitiveness, and froze.

  “Come out of there, Jacob.” My mother spoke in a low, careful tone. “Come gather your things.”

  “Why?” I was surprised at how alert I sounded, wide awake, without a trace of grogginess.

  “Circumstances have obliged us,” she glanced nervously over her shoulder, “to part ways with your father.”

  I gaped up at my mother, and let her words sink in. I’d known for some time that a change was coming; I welcomed the idea of it, I wanted it, almost, or tried to want it, like my ambivalent prayers for rain in open country. But parting ways! This was a lunatic move, ghastly and extreme, like digging up coffins because we needed some wood.

  “Jacob,” she pleaded. “Now.”

  We stared at each other for a long moment. I drew my blanket up around my chin, flat with panic, and wedged myself under the carriage.

  “No.”

  Ma bit her lip miserably. She squatted in the dust, inches from my face. I could see my name, two puffs, in the chilly air.

  “Ja-cob!”

  I linked my arm around a wheel axle, and glared at her, daring her to try to grab me. The spokes shifted, ever so slightly, sending up a pearly exhumation of sand and flint. A light came on in our wagon.

  “Velina? Is that you?”

  With a soft, defeated cry, my mother rose to her feet. She glanced down at me a final time, pressing her hand to her cheek. Then she stumbled back towards my father’s voice, the amber penumbra of our wagon.

  The Trail is full of surprises. The following morning, Mr. Grouse announced that two wagons had deserted our party, the Quigleys and the Howells, heading back east. My mother was seated by the campfires, boiling water for porridge, and she received this news without so much as a huh, an anesthetized murmur. I waited for her to look up at me, but she just sat there, staring blankly at the bubbles.

  And then, just when I was at my most muddled, besieged by all sorts of flickering, waxy fears, another surprise. Through the orange transparency of our tarp, I saw my parents’ silhouettes, blurring together into a single, monstrous shadow. I held my eye up to a hole in the cover. Dad’s head was in my mother’s lap. His great eyes were shut. My mother had an iron bucket, and a thin, dirty kerchief. She was daubing a whitish solution of borax, sugar, and alum onto the sores beneath his fur. My dad was running his long, rough tongue over her boots, licking up the lichens and the toxic-colored spoors. His horns scraped against the floorboards. “I love you,” my mother kept muttering, over and over, pushing the rag into his wounds, “I love you,” as if she was trying to torture the true meaning out of the words. My father groaned his response.

  So much of what passes between my parents on the Trail is illegible to me. It’s as if they speak a private language, some animal cuneiform, pawing messages to each other in the red dirt. During the day, my father continues to pull our wagon forward. My mother hasn’t spoken of that evening since….

  Mr. Grouse’s oxen died in their traces today. They were a team, his beloved blue-ribbon leaders, Quick and Nimble. It took three men to cut them loose. All I could focus on was the coiled rope, slack and slick with blood, and the thought that Clem would probably not be interested in ball plays for a while. All the mothers shielded our eyes, and scooted us towards the wagons. They said that the oxen had “failed in the traces,” their euphemism to protect the youngest children, which seemed a little silly to me, since everybody had to step over a big dead ox.

  “Ma,” Dotes asked, making a paper daisy chain in the wagon, “if I die, promise you’ll dig a grave deep enough so the wolves can’t get at me?”

  My mother looked up from her knitting with a bleary horror. “Oh, sweetheart”—she poked her head out the wagon—“are you hearing this, Asterion?”

  We all looked outside, to where Dad was standing in high, dun-colored grasses with the other men. They directed, while he used his hooves to tamp down some perfunctory dirt over Nimble. Lately, the men’s requests have grown a lot less obsequious. Just the other day, Vilner Pratt persuaded my father to wear a silver cow bell so that the company will know when he’s coming. (“You have a tendency to sneak up on a man, Mr. Minotaur.” Vilner shrugged, with an aw-shucks sort of malice. “And to tell you the truth, it spooks our women.”)

  At the sound of my mother’s voice, our father l
ooked up, and waved. His horns and hide have darkened to a dull yellow-gray; the skin hangs loosely from his arms.

  “Ma,” Maisy asked, sucking on the fizzled wick of an old flare. “Is Dad going to fail in the traces?”

  There was a time when my mother would have said no, and reassured us with shock or laughter. These days, she leaves our hair unwashed and our questions unanswered. “How should I know, Maisy? What can I know? You go and ask your father. You go and tell your father,” Ma said, her eyes glinting like nail heads, “what you are afraid of.”

  Finally, we have reached the bluffs. From up here, we can see the midway point, the alkali desert of the Great Sink. It’s a tough landmark to celebrate. The Great Sink is a weird, treeless terrain. Even the clouds look flat and waterless. A wide, dry canal cuts through the desert, a conglomerate rut, winnowed out by a thousand wagons. It looks as if someone has dug out the spine of the desert. The Great Sink reminds me of home, an Olympian version of the trenches that Dad used to paw in our kitchen. When I mentioned this to Ma, she laughed for the first time in many days.

  This patch of our journey feels like a glum, perpetual noon. The lumberwomen are in low spirits; there is no wood for them to hack at. Suddenly, their curses sound hoarse and sincere. Wolves skulk around our wagons by day, just beyond rifle shot. Clem and I scare them off by singing hymns and patriotic ditties. Above us, the pale sky is greased with birds.

  Inside our wagon, Dotes shivers beneath three horsehide blankets. Maisy sleeps and sleeps. Yesterday, Ma wanted us to stop, but my father was afraid of losing the company. At night they stepped outside again, to take a spousal conscience. Ma made me hold up the curtain of modesty, now soiled and tissue-thin, as a courtesy for our neighbors.

  “Do you see any doctors around here?” Dad asked, making a big show of looking under a rock. He squeezed the rock in his fist, crushing it to powder. “Any medicine? Be brave, Velina. We have to press on now, we are over halfway there—”

  He broke off abruptly. I had lowered the curtain. My arms were tired, and I had to itch my nose. Our eyes met, and my father saw something in my expression that made him trot over.

  “Jacob.” His teeth were shining. He wobbled a little, eyes burning, his hair on end, full of a radiant, precarious cheer, like our town drunk. He touched the nick in his horn to my cheek.

  “Don’t pay her any mind, son. We’ll get there. Have a little faith in your father.”

  Then he picked me up and waltzed me through the ashes of our campfire. “Hold on, son!” He charged around and around the corral, making his shoulder muscles buckle and snap like oilcloth, an impromptu rodeo. “Gee!” I pleaded, giggling in spite of myself, “Haw!”

  “Don’t let go!” I yelped, even though I was the one holding on to his horns.

  Then Dad spun me away from my mother, beyond the edge of our camp. We waltzed straight to the edge of the bluff.

  “Look at that, Jacob.” He whistled. “Look how far we’ve come.”

  Viewed from my father’s shoulders, the desert stretched for eons, flat and markerless. It was an empty vista, each dune echoing itself for miles of glowing sand. A silent, windless night, where any horizon could be the West. The heat made me mistrustful of my own vision: I couldn’t be certain if the blue smudges I saw in the distance were mountains, or mirages. The wagon trains camped below us were no help. With their snubbed, segmented ends, they looked like white grubs, curling into themselves, each head and tail identical. Tiny fires spangled the dark.

  “Do you see, now?”

  I peered into the desert.

  I had no idea what my father saw out there, or what he wanted me to see. Still holding on to his horns, I pivoted, slow and halting, in a direction that I desperately hoped was West.

  “Oh! Yes!”

  Dad grinned. The firelight limned the absent places in his hide, the burn marks in his skin. Some of his bull’s hair had come off in my fist. He lowered me to the ground, and then whispered directly into my ear, as if this was a secret between men:

  “They say the clover grows wild all over the West, Jacob. So green, so lush and dense! So high, son, that when you wade through it, it covers your face….”

  Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows

  “So what happens,” Badger wanted to know, “during the Blizzard?”

  Badger sidled up behind me during recess with no introduction, stepping across a yellow line and onto the rubbery surface of the tether court. We’d never spoken before. Badger’s father had given me a ride home from school a few times, and even then we didn’t speak. We sat in a hot, awful silence and waited for the lights to change.

  “I dunno.” I shrugged. “It’s Adults Only.”

  Badger slammed his fist into the tethered ball. It swung between our faces.

  “What do you mean you don’t know? Your father works at the damn place!”

  He grabbed me by the shoulders and rocked me a little bit, back and forth on the balls of my sneaks, and it was like we were dancing.

  “I dunno.”

  Badger’s breath smelled like egg sandwich. He had zillions of blackheads on his pug nose.

  “I don’t think my pops knows, either.” My pops mostly did maintenance work at the Palace of Artificial Snows, fixing up the giant snow fans and rewiring the Zamboni. Sometimes he’d bring me along. I’d feed cherry snow to the orangutans and pretend not to notice when Pops flirted with the Ice Witch. (All of the fathers flirted with the Ice Witch, not just mine. I think it was a nervous reaction to her leotard. Her flesh-toned tights and all those rhinestones.) He got me certain perks, sure. Free skate rentals, gelatinous bags of sno-cone mix (“Liquid breakfast!” Pops grinned in the a.m.). But the Blizzard was Adults Only. Even if Pops could have finagled a pass for me, I wouldn’t have wanted to go. Adults Only was shorthand for boring, or scary, or some combination thereof. I’d heard the rumors, and I wasn’t interested.

  “Well.” Badger nodded. “We’re going. Next Wednesday. Bring some money.”

  “Hey, Pops?” I called out. He was spattered with oil, pretending to be asleep on the couch. “How was the Blizzard?” Flakes of snow or dandruff were stuck to his jacket. I ruffled his hair. I lifted a twenty from his wallet. “Guess what? I made a friend today.”

  The bus let us out across the street, by the line of wilting palm trees. We stared at the ugly domed building in front of us: the Palace. It looked like a rusty spaceship, surrounded by filth and Buicks. Humid exhaust floated around the dingy blue stucco. From its nondescript exterior, you’d never guess that the Palace housed two thousand square feet of winter inside.

  The Palace of Artificial Snows

  Skating Rink

  Perennial Snow Banks

  Den of the World Famous Apes on Ice!

  We walked across the long parking lot. Waves of heat broke against the ugly cars. Black asphalt. Sunlit metal. Secrets locked in trunks. A thirsty Saint Bernard whimpered as we passed, her tongue lolling out a crack in the driver’s-side window. What sort of sadist would bring a Saint Bernard to the tropics? I reached two fingers through the crack and tried to pet her.

  “Poor old pup. Shh,” I whispered. My petting was pretty ineffectual. “Shhh…”

  Badger drew up behind me with a metal pipe in his hand. He swung it once, twice, smashing through the backseat window.

  “There you go, doggy!”

  Often it was scary to hang out with Badger.

  We saw Badger’s father’s Datsun in the parking lot. He must’ve been in some kind of hurry to get inside—the driver’s-side door was hanging open. What a cheap, evil car. Whenever they drove me home from school, I would sit tall on my coccyx bone and try to resist the slickery vinyl. It smelled like cigarettes and women’s shampoo; or else it smelled like subterfuge and aerosol blasts of lemon. Dark windows, the leering grille of the Datsun.

  “See?” Badger said. “I knew he’d be here.”

  I nodded. It’s not like there had been any debate about this. Everybo
dy on the island knew that Badger’s father practically lived at the Palace. My pops said we shouldn’t begrudge him this, an icy reprieve from Badger’s mother.

  “Looks like a lot of people are here.”

  The Palace of Artificial Snows became extra-popular in summer, when it was a frozen oasis on our island. Outside, the world was all melt and swelter. But inside! Sweat froze on your face. Gherkin served fizzy sodas with names like Hoarfrost and Red Penguino. I loved it there. I would skate in tight, contained circles, and dream about winter.

  The doors slid open, and we stepped into a polar centigrade.

  “Hurry up, Reg.” The doors slid shut. The sun vanished behind us. “We might as well pick our hiding places now.”

  We hid under the booth, chewing on yellow stuffing from the torn upholstery until the lights went low. It felt especially chilly over there, in the roped-off section of the Palace: UN ER R NOV T ON. The old snack bar had a pleasant, homey dilapidation: split cushions, ancient popcorn on the tables, the flickering blue and violet bulbs. A nice contrast, I thought, to the newer sections of the Palace, and the hideous perfection of the Ice Witch. From our damp square of carpet, we had a view of the whole rink: the plush DJ booth, the rental lockers. To our left, you could hear the hooting of the apes.

  They kept the apes in a metal warren of cages by the shoe lockers. To the extent that you can love a mute and captive monkey, I loved those apes. Gorgeous pelts! The orangey red of starfish and pigeons’ feet. Unlike the Blizzard, the Apes on Ice! Show was a treat for all ages. Five o’clock, every Wednesday. Pops and I used to go together all the time when I was younger. Nowadays, that sort of thing would never be legal. It was a pretty appalling extravaganza, even then.

  “Hey, Reggie, check out that big ’un!”

  Badger pointed at Cornelius, who caught us looking and rattled the bars. But it was an affected rattle—as if he were only pretending to feel wild and dissatisfied for our benefit. Cornelius beat his chest once, and winced. His gray, heart-shaped face frowned beneath a red corona of hair, like a jilted king on stupid rental skates. Those orangutans never tried to escape—they were inbred captives who knew only this artificial winter, the choreographed dances that we bribed them to do. But they’d bite your fingers, if you provoked them. They’d fidget and scratch.