St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

by Karen Russell

  When he wakes up, night has already fallen. He goes and peers nervously over the side of his boat. It’s too dark to tell what’s under the surface of the water. Gherkin must have repaired the Wave Assuager, because he can seen Zenaida’s Medicaid Lifeboat bobbing alongside her slip. Sawtooth slumps into his deck chair and stares up at the sky. It’s a drunken sky, the stars hiccupping light. Great gusty clouds go spinning past the moon. The bright planets feel like pinpricks to Sawtooth’s old eyes. Tonight, the phantom pain banshees through him with a pointless fury. He considers taking one of his pills, then thinks better of it. The doctor is reluctant to give him refills. And the girl might come back. He massages the roaring space where his leg used to be. If she needs the pills badly enough, he thinks, she just might.

  When he was a boy growing up on the swamp, Sawtooth used to know all of the constellations, but now he has forgotten how to find them. Overhead, the sky lurches in unfamiliar, opalescent swirls. All around him, the muted yellow lamps of his neighbors’ boats blink off quietly, one by one, until Sawtooth is left bobbing alone in the darkness.

  Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422

  “Hooey,” Mr. Oamaru says, working his fork with a silly urgency. A single pea is caught between his square front teeth. “That boy can sing. The boy just needs a friend is all. You be that, Tek. You be that friend.”

  My mother’s prim smile confirms that I should be that friend. My Christian sisters nod their earnest, brunette heads. Makeup is forbidden in our household, but my sisters have slathered their lips with beeswax so that each syllable emerges at a blinding wattage:

  “Be that friend!”

  My sisters all have Bible names that start with a pious growl, “Rrrachel, Rrrebecca, Rrruth.” They eat unbuttered peas and fatty gristle and leave the choicest, glaziest cuts of the ham for Mr. Oamaru and me. They are pretty, and this means that charity comes easy to them. They don’t understand the real cost of what they are asking me.

  There is a long silence full of bright, expectant stares and chewing sounds, gulping sounds, tiny metal clinking sounds. Jesus. Peas roll around and around my selfish mouth. Outside, I can hear the reindeer rubbing antlers against the fence wood. Snow waits in the high clouds. Our kitchen window fills with cold early stars.

  “Why should I have to do it? Rangi is creepy, Mom. He’s Moa. He’s mute.”

  “Son,” Mr. Oamaru answers for her. I don’t look over at him, but I can feel his radiant disapproval. “Why shouldn’t you have to do it? The boy is very nearly your cousin.”

  That’s a cheap trick. Everybody in Waitiki Valley is almost a cousin. Marriage here requires an actuary to make sure you’re not blood kin.

  “Rangi Gibson is not my cousin.”

  “He’s your brother,” Rebecca says unhelpfully, “in Christ.”

  “He hasn’t had your advantages, Tek.” Mr. Oamaru twirls a pea on the tine of his fork. “To be orphaned at that age! And Digger Gibson is a heathen and a drunk. He can’t even keep the cemetery grass mowed, much less care for a bastard child.”

  My mother winces at the word “bastard.” Some advantages, I think angrily.

  “Why should I have to be part of the stupid Avalanche at all? Why should I have to freeze my ass off and pop my ears to sing a shitty untrue song about pirates?”

  “Don’t curse, Tek.” Mr. Oamaru raises his eyebrows at my mother. “I wonder who he learned that language from? Nobody in this family, that’s for sure.”

  There it is, the rustle of dead leaves. Dried sap, a branch crack, the whirring teeth of Mr. Oamaru’s saw. My father—my real father—is a limb that got axed off the family tree a long time ago now. My mother coughs and cleans phantom juices off her silver with a cloth doily. My sisters clench their knives.

  “Listen, don’t you bring my father into this….”

  “The Avalanche,” peacemaker Rachel recites, “is very important. It’s a privilege to sing it. It’s a celebration of our past.” Everybody around the table smiles at her.

  “Yeah? Well, I’ve seen how easily the past can get rewritten.” I glare at Mr. Oamaru. “Lyrics change. New authors come along.”

  We are flying to the Aokeora Glacier to sing down the snows. It’s one of those rituals whose true meaning is lost in antiquity, a ritual that we continue because of blind tradition and our parents’ desire to booze. You can see the Aokeora Glacier from the red roof of our silo, rising some thousands of feet above our valley. We bake and sell moonpies all year to pay for our trip to the top. (The Waitiki Valley Boys Choir is fiscally dependent on the pity of mothers. Our moonpies look and taste like shoe heels.) The ice planes we hire are four-seaters, and it takes several trips to fly the entire Waitiki Valley Boys Choir up there. It’s a funny sort of concert. We leave our audience so far below us, out of earshot.

  Our families gather at the base of Aokeora and synchronize their watches. They can’t hear us, of course, and they certainly can’t see us, but they crane their necks and imagine. At precisely ten o’clock, the crowd slurs along in rough jolly voices: “Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! The Piii-raates’ Conquest!” For our finale, the choir hits the high C that triggers the Avalanche. We hold that single note for as long as we can. Sometimes the weather cooperates. Then our voices send rocks crunching down the side of the glacier. Snowbursts explode off the cliffs like white fireworks. Chunks of ice plummet into the moat around Aokeora, shooting up whale flukes of water. Two years ago, we sang so well that melt-water hosed our parents’ faces. It’s a way for the parents to hear us, I guess, albeit indirectly. Everybody gets a little sniffly about it, especially the mothers. For some of us, it’s the last year that we can goad our voices to that altitude.

  The Waitiki Valley Boys Choir Proudly Presents

  10:00

  A Stirring Rendition of

  “The Pirates’ Conquest,”

  Conducted by Franz Josef

  10:12

  Avalanche

  10:13

  Punch and Moonpies

  In Waitiki Valley, most everyone is a descendant of the Inland Pirates. Our great-great-grandparents sailed along the glacial river, burned their thieving boats, and then moved inland to meet the locals. The Moa were a peaceful, stationary people, who only killed one another. And then our pirate forebears arrived, swilling brandy and sneezing Mainland diseases all over them. We sing a ra-ra tribute to the pirates every year at the Winter Concert, “The Pirates’ Conquest.” It’s our local anthem, these squirrelly arpeggios that celebrate our pirate forebears’ every ancient offense. Verse 1: The quick extinction of the Moa’s sacred red penguins. Verse 2: The depletion of their greenstone quarries. Verse 3: The invasion of their mothers’ bodies. Verse 4: Their stolen treasure. And what did we bring the Moa in return? Grog and possums. Quail pox. Whores.

  It’s a weird thing to harmonize about.

  Verse 4 is the worst. It’s a lamentation for the pirates’ lost treasure. (Formerly the Moa’s holy relics, although we downplay this detail in “The Pirates’ Conquest.”) Captain Walley and his men hid the profits they’d swashbuckled in the mountains. These pirates assumed, with typical pirate arrogance, that their plunder would stay safely frozen away for an eternity. But maps don’t work in a country of glaciers. The treasure got lost on calved icebergs and crushed into the impasse of moraines. By the time our great-great-grandfathers returned to recover the treasure, X marked a spot that had long since melted into the sea. Bar fights still break out over it every once in a while, the product of our grandparents’ bloody and useless nostalgia.

  The grandparents, hoarse and contemptuous, like to remind us of the true Avalanches, their Avalanches, from the early century. They have a knack for making you feel like you are betraying your pirate lineage just by sitting in a car. “How do you like that city-boy juice, city boy?” they’ll ask, watching you pour berry cocktail from a carton. Our grandparents juiced frozen berries with their own teeth. They sang more sweetly than we ever will. They never sold a single moonpie. They got to the
top of Aokeora with blood and gumption, crescent axes, and it took them five days. It wasn’t uncommon for boys to die.

  All you have to do, they wheeze, is nudge a snow lump over the edge with your voice. Easy.

  Our Avalanche is a setup. It’s a show for the cheap seats. The choir director, Franz Josef, flies up a few days in advance and takes a hatchet to the powder. He picks out snow that’s survived the melt season: loosened with crampons, in regular contact with sunlight, eager to be sung apart or sunk into our valley. We sing, and we pretend that it’s our frail voices that fracture the glacier. Theoretically, the snow could ball up and fall on us, but our parents encourage this death risk with words like tradition, heritage, and rite of passage. They like to believe in the old, boulder-rolling power of our songs. They like to see the evidence of our voices, even if they can’t hear them.

  With any luck, this will be my last Winter Concert. I’m hoping my voice will change later on this summer, and then I will never have to sing down another Avalanche. I ask God to grant me this wish every night. “God,” I pray, “please deliver me from the choir.” I kneel beside my attic bed on bare, hairless knees, and tune a hopeful ear for damage in my voice. I can hear my prayer coming true in the shower, where I sing test syllables. My voice sounds like the doorbell to a condemned building. Shrill, with a new hollowness behind it.

  When I was a much younger boy, my mother was beautiful, but it was a sewn-up tulip kind of beauty. Then my father left. We curled in and blackened. We were heathens, you know, before Mr. Oamaru and his piratical, body-soul conquest of my mother. Mr. Oamaru has had a soft opening effect. He paid her mortage and made my sisters. He made her beautiful again. Everyone notices. Other mothers pay her incredulous compliments, peppered with real jealousy: “Why, you look like a new person, Leila. You look so happy.”

  And you know what? I hate him for it.

  If you’ve seen me in town, I guarantee you don’t remember. Dark eyes, a red lick of hair under a dark hat. I’m not a lacy saint like my sisters, but I don’t think I’m an exceptionally bad kid, either. I love my mother and my sisters, and I do my barn chores enough of the time. My stepdad, Mr. Oamaru, seems most proud of me for the sins that I resist: I don’t chew tobacco, I don’t fake sick, I don’t vandalize silos. Once, he actually complimented me for not “diddling with” the reindeer, as the Tau boys have been rumored to do. These are tough victories to take pride in.

  Like most men in the valley, Mr. Oamaru is a reindeer farmer. He grazes his blue-gray stock on ancestral Moa land. He is a good man who takes good care of my mother. He claims he loves to watch me sing. When we sang down the Avalanche last year, Mr. Oamaru collected an eyedropper of the glacial snow. He wears it under his plaids on a fraying noose knot, a vial of melted time. “You sang well, Tek. You make a father proud.” I wanted to smash that vial on sight. Everybody knows that I’m a lousy singer. On my best days, my voice melts into the other boys’ and I swallow my mistakes.

  “Dad sure loves your singing,” Ruth told me once, her own voice squeaky with jealousy. “He wears that eyedropper everyplace.”

  “That’s just faucet water, dummy,” I heard myself lying. “That eyedropper stuff is all an act. Your dad thinks his pregnant cows sing better than I do. Your dad couldn’t pick my voice out of the choir.”

  And then Ruth was crying and I felt like a monster. But everybody knows that Mr. Oamaru is not my real father. Mr. Oamaru is my mother’s husband. He is my sisters’ father. Not mine.

  Your father left us because he was in a bad way, my mother used to tell me.

  Tek’s father left us because he is a bad man, she tells everybody now. She says it again and again. She’s snowing down a new past for Mr. Oamaru, a tough rock of ice in a sea of time. A new memory for our family to stand on. Tek’s father is a bad, bad man. It was hard enough to lose my father the first time. Now I can’t even hold on to my memory of him as a basically good person. Mr. Oamaru has taught me that loss isn’t just limited to the present; it can happen in any direction. Even what’s done and vanished can be taken from you. Other, earlier memories that we made of my father sink and revert to water. The past shifts its crystals inside me.

  To be in the Waitiki Valley Boys Choir, you need a good attitude, and the ability to sing in a pleasant, undamaged, unchanged singing voice.

  —Franz Josef

  On Saturday, Mr. Oamaru drops me off on the tarmac in the purple-gray predawn. We argue about “The Pirates’ Conquest” on the car ride over:

  “Honestly! Half that stuff is only in there because it rhymes with conquest.”

  Any fool can hear, from the first verse onward, how Waitiki’s history has been retrofitted to the demands of rhyme and meter.

  “Bronze breast, ice chest, crow’s nest, laid to rest, Captain Walley’s scarlet vest. Do you really think that Captain Walley wore a vest?”

  “That song’s truer than you are. Why, we’ve been singing it for longer than you’ve been alive! It’s history….”

  It’s freezing out. A wreath of icicles forms on the dash. We reach a short airstrip where a bunch of sullen, sleepy choirboys are huddled together, flanked by a small fleet of ice planes. The choir director nods at me and checks a box. Franz Josef has a thick, twitchy mustache and no wife. There’s no magic to his conducting. He waves the metal wand with a grim, efficient panic, as if he’s directing traffic. I miss my cue again.

  “Tek Oamaru! You’re a beat behind us. Chin up, eh? Enunciate, eh? You’re singing down into your chest.”

  Just Tek, I whisper under my breath. I hate rehearsing this evil stuff. It makes me feel like “The Pirates’ Conquest” is still happening. Usually I just lip sync the part about the rapes and fires. If I were braver, I wouldn’t sing at all. I have a secret admiration for Rangi, his genius refusal to carry the tune.

  Rangi’s been in the choir longer than any other boy. If his voice has changed, it’s done so in secret, with the stealth of wine in a dark bottle. If you ask me, it’s a perverse charity to make the mute boy rehearse with the choir. But Franz Josef says there is music like water frozen inside him. He says he wants the Waitiki Valley Boys Choir to be the heat that melts the blocks of song in Rangi. We think that Franz Josef has fantasies of a TV special, or at least a write-up in the Waitiki Gazette:

  Local Choir Director Hailed as Miracle Worker! Mute Moa Youth Has the Music in Him!

  “Sing it with us, Rangi!” Franz Josef says now. He kneels down and pushes his gloved hand into Rangi’s diaphragm, as if he is a doctor fighting for the life of an infant sound. “Me-me-me-ME-me-me-me!”

  Rangi looks as if he might bite Franz Josef.

  Rangi’s a Moa orphan. His adopted father, Digger Gibson, is the cemetery warden. Digger never comes to our concerts. Most days he spends dreaming in the ditches. White face, gray knuckles around a bottle. On his chest you can watch the shovel rising, the shovel falling, a graveyard metronome.

  We know that Rangi can at least mutter because Digger Gibson says he used to talk to the bear. In his group home for orphaned Moa boys, Rangi had a pet cinnamon bear. I saw her once. She was just a wet-nosed cub, a cuff of pure white around her neck. Rangi found her on the banks of the Waitiki River and walked her around on a leash. He filed her claws and fed her tiny, smelly fishes. They shot her the day his new father, Digger, came to pick him up.

  “Burying that bear,” I overheard Digger tell Mr. Oamaru once. “The first thing we ever did together as father and son.”

  Rangi’s given us this global silent treatment ever since, a silence he extends to people, animals, ice. Doctors say it’s an elective mutism; they can’t detect trauma, can’t find a gauze of sickness on his tongue. Rangi has tried to run away from our choir four times now, although he never gets very far—the Valley is walled in on every side by glacial mountains. We think he’s on an insane quest to unearth the bear. He always gets “rescued” at some anonymous spot in the forest, spading up dark triangles of dirt. There are no physical markers to
help him to locate the burial mound, no clues to the bear’s whereabouts outside of Rangi’s childhood memory. Digger never put down a stone. Rangi could dig forever and find only yellow bromide and shallow roots. Stubborn, the grandfathers say. Ungrateful. Typical Moa. This diagnosis has always troubled me. Sometimes Rangi’s gaze darkens and rolls inward, and then I think he must be seeing something that nobody’s invented the words for yet. A slick world that no sound will adhere to.

  “Me-me-me-ME-me-me-me!” Franz Josef keeps prompting. His hand pushes down with more encouragement. “Me-me-me-omph!”

  Franz Josef’s head snaps forward. His wire spectacles and conductor’s wand go flying. There’s a moment of shocked silence, and then the clearing erupts with laughter. Brauser has nailed Franz Josef in the back of the head with a mammoth snowball. Brauser’s a sociopath with a pleasant tenor. He spends most rehearsals around back, torturing stray penguins or pissing his name in the snow. Now he’s smirking at us from the treeline, scooping up more powder. It’s unclear whether Brauser was trying to hit Franz Josef or Rangi. I hope it was the former. That’s one difference between a bully and a hero, I guess: good aim. If Brauser was trying to hit Franz to help Rangi, then maybe there’s more to his malice than I thought.

  Then Brauser starts pelting the altos with indiscriminate glee, making my hero theory less tenable. They cry out in terror. Franz calls a stern halt to our rehearsal. He searches the snow for his wand.