The Girls with No Names

by Serena Burdick

  “I hear you have information for me.” Sister Gertrude’s voice was an octave higher than normal.

  I steadied my breath. “Not yet, but I will have, if you send me to the farm with Mable.”

  A laugh cut through the room. “What gives you the right to stand here making requests of me?”

  It was a dangerous move. Sister Gertrude wasn’t beyond throwing me back in the pit. I planted my feet slightly apart, a posture I’d seen Darvela use to assert herself. “I know the police want Mable’s real name, I heard them say as much. If you give me time, I can get it out of her.”

  My plan, when I had Mable’s real name, was to tell Sister Gertrude that I would only disclose the information to the police. Once in front of them, I’d tell them who I was and make them contact my father before giving up Mable’s identity. This was my last chance. Betraying Mable meant nothing to me.

  Sister Gertrude leaned back in her chair, measuring me to the task. “Most girls are in here because they’re either heading toward drink and prostitution, or have already arrived at it. There’s no reason for Mable to give a false name unless she’s hiding a greater crime. Knowing that girl, I would not put a more heinous act past her.” From her pauses, and deliberate enunciation, it was clear that Sister Gertrude was trying to plant a seed of fear in me. “I don’t like a girl being in here for a crime I’m unaware of. It puts us all at risk. You would be doing your duty to find out her real name. We don’t leave for the farm for another week. I’m sure you can get it out of her by then.”

  I had no idea how I was getting Mable’s name out of her at all. But there was no way I’d do it in a week. “I won’t agree to it unless you send me to the farm too,” I said.

  A twitch started at the corner of Sister Gertrude’s mouth and my heart gave a little jump. I glanced at the marble Jesus, his stony eyes as cold as the ones bearing down on me.

  “Sister Agnes!” Sister Gertrude shouted, standing up and taking a lamp from the shelf.

  Sister Agnes swooped in like a trained bird, plucked the lantern from Sister Gertrude with one hand and me with the other, her fingers curled around my upper arm as she marched me from the room and down the hall. When we passed the door to the laundry without stopping, my legs weakened. “You can’t send me to the pit again,” I cried. “I’ll get sick and the doctor will have to be called in. You’ll have to explain yourselves to him. I’m too weak for the pit.”

  I was met with a grunt, my legs collapsing as Sister Agnes swung open the cellar door. She hoisted me up by one arm and hauled me down like a rag doll, my shoes bumping each step with hollow clunks. She dragged me to the end of the hall, pulled a ring of keys from her pocket and shook them in my face. “I carry these everywhere with me now, thanks to you three.” She set the lantern on the floor and slid back the bolt. “Go on. At least it’s not winter-cold anymore.” She shoved me in and the bolt settled back into place with a clang.

  Darkness swallowed me. Sister Agnes’s footsteps receded down the hall and I heard the steady drip of water plunking against the stone floor somewhere in the dark. A familiar tightness squeezed my chest and I pitched my head between my knees. The doctor hadn’t cured me. He’d just dulled my symptoms for a while.

  Instead of slinking into a corner or curling up in a ball, I unbuttoned my dress, pulled it over my head, wriggled out of my bloomers and lay stretched out with my bare backside on the cold floor. It made me think of the shape of my mother’s back the day she undressed in front of me. I wanted my mother. I bit the inside of my cheek and spat the blood into the palms of my hands. I would not conjure the touch of my father’s fingers on my wrist, the pits in my mother’s scarred hands or the sound of Luella’s dancing feet. These memories were no longer my foundation.

  Closing my eyes, I thought of the final card I’d drawn with Tray. That was my truth. I conjured the lion who came to me in my dreams, the calf, eagle and man, and placed them in the four corners of the room. I gave them wings and eyes and set them chanting, holy, holy, holy, The Lord God almighty. I was the center, the naked woman with her wands. It was my mouth dripping bloodred saliva.

  After a while I grew cold and I sat up and put my clothes back on. At some point the door opened and a tray of bread and water slid across the floor. I ate it, keeping the creatures dancing in the corner. They eased the tightness in my chest and made it possible for me to eat and sleep under their watchful eyes.

  It couldn’t have been more than a day or two before Sister Agnes came for me. She stood in the doorway with the lantern, shadows dancing over her face, and I was herded up the basement stairs and out the front door into the glaring morning sunlight, unsure of what was happening. A police officer, with a pasty, thick neck that squeezed out the top of his uniform like an overstuffed sausage, took me by the arm and helped me into the back of a black truck. I slid along the bench next to Tess, a big-boned girl I knew only by name. Other girls squeezed in next to me, and the policeman slammed the doors shut. The engine choked to a start and we lurched forward.

  “Watch it.” Tess shoved me and I braced my legs against the bench and tried not to slide into her as the truck came to a sudden halt. Male voices drifted through the slats. There was a gruff laugh and the sound of a gate clanging open and the truck moved forward again.

  We were driving out. Half a mile and we’d be driving past my house. I held back the urge to jump up and press my mouth to the crack in the door and scream for my parents. What if Mama was crouched in the yard this very minute clearing leaves from her bulbs, or Daddy was standing in the doorway gazing at the sky? What if Luella had come home and was stepping out on her way to dance class, or devising some bright, spring-morning mischief without me?

  We rattled on. The truck swayed and vibrated, the air thick and stuffy. Gas fumes, along with the smell of hot tar, leaked inside. City sounds bounced around like tennis balls inside the metal walls of the truck—horns, engines, clomping hooves and clanging trollies eventually giving way to the lone rumble of the truck, and the crunching of wheels over gravel.

  Time dragged on in silence until the truck jolted to a stop and the doors swung open. “Come on out,” the officer said, chipper, as if we’d arrived at a seaside vacation.

  I squinted, my eyes adjusting to take in a dirt road and a wide, grassy field, the air sweet with honeysuckle. A second truck rattled to a stop behind us, kicking up a storm of dust. A disorderly group of girls tumbled out, Mable at the back. A policeman stepped out behind her, the dust settling over the shoulders of his dark blue suit. He and the other officer ushered us to the front door of a many-windowed farmhouse of whitewashed stone. I smiled. Sister Gertrude had sent me to the farm after all. What was a few days in the pit? I’d won.

  Behind the farmhouse was a meadow sprinkled with purple wildflowers. A quiet thrill filled me as I realized that the only thing trapping us was a fence of skinny, hewn trees, bark flaking from the trunks like dry skin.

  A sturdy woman with a deeply lined face met us at the door and exchanged a nod with the officers. She led us down a low-ceilinged hallway into a small, empty room with faded pink wallpaper and wide wooden floorboards. We stood penned in like cattle, the woman walling the doorway, her brown skirt ballooning out like a mound of dirt from which her torso had sprung.

  “You see this room?” she asked, her eyes skimming over us. “Do you see a lick of furniture in it?” No one answered and she pressed a hand behind her ear with a piqued, “I can’t hear you?” A few no’s were mumbled. The woman smiled. “Very good. You’re not nearly as stupid as the sisters make you out to be.”

  Around me, girls shuffled their feet and crossed their arms, the woman’s hint of a smile enough to boil the coolest of blood.

  “There is no furniture,” she continued, “because there is no sitting other than at the table for meals. This is not a holiday, and I trust Valhalla will not meet your enthusiastic expectations. This is a working
farm. You will rise before the sun and go to bed with it. You will be given rotating tasks, and if the work is too much, you’ll work harder. Baths are on Saturday evening. Sunday is spent on your knees in prayer. I will answer to Miss Juska. If you think you’ve had a hard life, mine was harder. I do not take complaints and will punish the first girl who so much as hints at disquiet. These are not wrinkles of kindness on my face and I don’t give a hoot about your salvation. You’re all going to hell as far as I’m concerned. If those woods tempt you to sneak off, think again. Only one girl has ever tried, and she was eaten by coyotes. Forests are full of them. Bears. Wild cats. They’ll tear your flesh from your bones before you get half a mile and there isn’t another dwelling for twenty. No need for a wall when you’ve got the wild, is what I tell the sisters. If you choose to venture into it, you’re only walking into your damnation faster.”

  Her speech ended with a grunt, her intention to frighten us succeeding as I glanced at the faces of girls who knew as little of the natural world as I did. We may have come from different sections of the city, but it was still a city. A forest with coyotes and bears was another peril altogether.

  “Follow me.” Miss Juska clapped her hands and we filed out of the room and up a narrow set of stairs, silent and ordered as ants, the wood creaking under our weight. At the top, Miss Juska’s harsh voice ticked off the girls by groups of six, luck landing Mable and me together. Miss Juska drew a gold watch from her soiled apron pocket, clicked it open and instructed us to change and meet her at the bottom of the stairs in five minutes.

  The rooms were small. Six beds each, three to a wall, crammed so close there was hardly space to walk between them. A single bureau abutted the far wall. Margaret, a girl with dark skin and bushy eyebrows, began pulling open the drawers and tossing rough linen dresses at us.

  I changed quickly, looking out the small, paned window with its dirty, cracked glass. An ocean of thick, wavering trees stretched as far as I could see. It made the wall around the House of Mercy look like a bracelet you could fling off.

  The only thing easing my mind, as I hurried down the stairs to Miss Juska counting the time, was the fact that I didn’t have to escape. All I had to do was get Mable to tell me her name.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Mable

  The night we attempted our escape from the House of Mercy, all I could think about was my mother. If I was scared looking over the drainpipe, imagine her terror at jumping from the ninth floor of that building. It took Edna, flopping to the ground like a fish dropped over the side of a boat, laughing at the stars above her, to shake me out of my own fear. Edna could shake me out of anything.

  During my first months in the House of Mercy, I went about my tasks with a listlessness that would have landed me in my grave if Edna hadn’t hauled me out of my dark thoughts.

  Our beds were right next to each other, and even though I didn’t speak a word to her, she’d gab on and on until I’d fall asleep with her voice threading through my dreams.

  “We’re all hurt and broken,” she said to me one night, almost cheerful about it. “You’re no different. You walk around with that sorry face, as if you’re the only one’s seen hardship. Have you tried looking at anyone else’s face? Everyone in here’s been put through the wringer.”

  She was beautiful, lying in moonlight, her dark hair spread out over the pillow. “Go on and tell me your story. No sense stewing in it. You say the words out loud, and you’ll see it’s not as bad as you think. Somehow, it’s always worse in your head. No matter what you did, it’s not your fault. None of this is. We’re castoffs. That’s why we got to fight for every bit of air we breathe. You go on and get it out. I’ll shut my trap and listen.”

  I made up a story that Edna would believe, about an uncle who took advantage. Men are the whole of our problems I’d heard her say on more than one occasion. She was the protesting, fighting type. Talked as if she’d taken part in every march for women’s rights there’d ever been. Edna reminded me of the woman I had walked beside during the funeral procession, and I found myself wanting to be near her all the time.

  As resistant as I was to female friends, I began to find it empowering being surrounded by women who were ready to fight. It was our strength in numbers that I grew to love. And Edna. I never loved anyone like I loved Edna.

  * * *

  Escaping was her idea. I tried to talk her out of it. “We’ve only got another year,” I said. Truth was, I was scared of what waited for me out there.

  “I’m done.” Edna spat over the edge of the bed onto the dormitory floor. “If we can’t fight our way out of here, how are we going to join the women out there fighting to get the vote?”

  I’d crawled into bed next to her and we lay in the dark making plans for an impossible future: We would find the famed suffragette. She’d take us in and we’d march beside her, living off our victories, breathing in confidence and freedom. I liked this fantasy. I threw a sash over my shoulder and planted myself in the crowd with the same proud look on my face I’d seen the woman wear during the procession.

  “If we’re jailed—” Edna’s voice rose and I pressed my hand to her mouth. She gently bit my finger and I stifled a laugh. “Like I was saying,” she whispered. “It will be worth it. I’d take a real jail over this slave-labor-nunnery any day.”

  It was her idea to use the new girl, Effie. Edna had a thing about weak girls. She thought they should all be sacrificed to make room for the ones strong enough to change the world.

  The night we tore off into the dark, freedom alight in our limbs, I made the mistake of looking back. Edna never looked back. “Not my problem,” she would have said. It was the pitiful look on Effie’s face, and her thin helpless form in the dark, that sent guilt darting through me. My love for Edna was a double-edged sword, because it brought out a surprising set of emotions that I’d turned away from, feelings of shame and heartache. But when Edna reached for my hand, I thought no more of Effie as I dashed toward a future bright with deception.

  At the bottom of the hill, the ground rose up unevenly and we stumbled, holding onto each other as we groped our way to the nearest tree. The sharp, insistent braying of the dogs reminded me of the yapping coyotes I’d listened to on full moon nights, with Papa sitting on the stone slab in the yard.

  The dogs fell silent and I felt a flood of urgency. “Hurry up,” I said, hoisting Edna onto the first branch and climbing after her, her dark shadow crawling overhead as she slid hazardously from the branch to the wall on her stomach.

  “I can’t move an inch or my fat bottom will roll right off,” she said, laughing.

  This was not a joke. The dark, the silence and the height of the wall unnerved me. “Hold still until I get to you,” I commanded, easing off the branch onto my bottom, my feet dangling into a black abyss. All I could see were those girls leaping from the Asch Building. “Take my hand,” I said, helping Edna to her knees. She sat up and pressed her body next to me.

  “Praying never did me any good, but now might be the time for it, even if God’s forgotten us,” she said.

  “The devil’s the only one who’s ever listened to me.”

  “We’ll pray to the devil then. He’s the only one who would want to keep the two of us fiends alive anyway.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “They’ll be coming for us before we get a foot into freedom, at this rate.”

  “I’m ready.” She squeezed my hand.

  “On a count of three. One, two, three.”

  We dove into slippery darkness, our hands parting. It’s amazing the pictures that can go through a person’s head in a few seconds: my mother’s battered face, Renzo’s soft brown eyes, Aunt Marie praying on her knees and the twins twisting their hair in the mirror.

  As I struck the ground, the images were knocked clean out of me. I landed so hard I couldn’t breathe. I gasped and struggled to sit up, a slow p
ain rising up my right leg. “Edna?” Her quiet, dark shape next to me triggered the horror of the fire and the falling girls until her snorting, hiccupping laughter sailed out.

  I dropped onto my back, tears springing to my eyes. “Stop laughing and help me up,” I said. A trickle of warm blood ran down my calf, but I didn’t care. We’d made it. We were over the wall. We were together. I could smell pine needles and hear tree trunks creaking in the high breeze.

  “Lord have mercy on our souls, we did it!” Edna rolled over, the stars winking out as she kissed me, pressing her hands into my upper arms. The kiss was slow and tender, as if we had all the time in the world.

  I could have stayed forever in that blessedly happy moment.

  Naked branches snaked into view as Edna pulled away and stood up to help me to my feet. “Are you hurt?” she asked, supporting my waist with her arm.

  “I think my leg hit a rock.”

  “Is it very painful?”

  “No,” I lied, wrapping my arm around her shoulder and dragging my useless leg along as we stumbled over roots and rocks, blood oozing into my shoe.

  It was slow going and we’d hardly made a dent of progress before the dogs started up again. The sound sank me with dread, my leg throbbing with every howl like salt being rubbed into the wound. The memory of the coyotes came back, my father’s clear, calm face in the moonlight as he raised his rifle and shot into the dark. It hadn’t done any good. In the morning all that was left of our hens were scattered feathers. I remember thinking you can’t beat em, Papa.

  “You’re going to have to go on without me.” I slid my arm from Edna’s shoulder, steading myself on one foot. “No sense us both getting caught.”

  “I won’t leave you,” she said, but in her voice, I heard she was prepared to.