Wanderville

by Wendy McClure

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

  York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Copyright © 2014 Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  ISBN: 978-1-101-61917-9

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Michael

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1: What Happened in the Factory

  2: The Ribbon

  3: Placed Out

  4: “Well-Mannered Children Do Not Ask Questions”

  5: There Are Rumors

  6: A Placement and a Plan

  7: Voices in the Night

  8: A Field of Nothing

  9: A Boy Named Alexander

  10: “I Know Where You Can Find a Home”

  11: The Town You Couldn’t See

  12: Welcome to Wanderville

  13: The Other Town

  14: Becoming Real

  15: The Mice in the Cage

  16: A Plan of Attack

  17: The Liberation of Merchandise

  18: What Happened to Harold

  19: Only Three Return

  20: A Different Kind of Scared

  21: Strangers at the Depot

  22: Returning to the Ranch

  23: Remember, Child, Remember

  24: Tater Thursday

  25: To Tell a Sad Story

  26: Rocks and Hard Places

  27: Citizens against Pratcherds

  28: An Opportunity Presents Itself

  29: The Unstoppable Wagon

  30: Almost Home

  31: A Town that Wanders

  Acknowledgments

  About the author

  1

  What Happened in the Factory

  New York City, Lower East Side, 1904

  Jack didn’t notice the smoke until there was far too much of it.

  It must have been creeping in under the hall door into the front workroom, where he waited between bundle runs. But there was always a little bit of haze in the air here at the factory—four lousy rooms in a tenement, really, but still they called it a factory. There was always dust and cigarette smoke; the garment cutters smoked more than anyone. That was what his brother said, at least. Daniel was the cutters’ apprentice, and he’d gotten Jack the delivery job now that Jack was eleven and strong enough to carry a whole day’s worth of piecework bundles on his back.

  Daniel was sixteen and he made good money. He wore his hair slicked back under a bowler hat that he brushed clean every night.

  And now it was Daniel who pushed open the hall door to the workroom, bellowing the way he did whenever Jack slept late. It took Jack a moment to realize that his brother was shouting, “Fire! ”

  “Fire in the back!” The smoke, an angry, dark bloom of it, seemed to burst through the door with Daniel. Two of the seamstresses stumbled in after him, red-eyed and gasping for breath.

  Jack stood, his legs suddenly shaky.

  “Where’s the fire pails, Jack?” Daniel was scanning the room. “And what are you doing up here?”

  Jack had been taking a break by the front window as usual. In the rooms where his family lived, the only two windows faced an air shaft, where there was nothing to see except brick and, occasionally, a morning cascade of slop from the chamber pots of the fifth-floor tenants. But here the window had a view and he’d watch the traffic below—peddlers’ wagons and hot-corn vendors and all the fellows’ bowlers bobbing along through the crowd. Sometimes there’d even be motor carriages, black and spindly, making their way up Baxter Street.

  “N-nothing,” Jack stammered. He’d fetched a bundle of shirtwaists from a shop on Mott Street to be pieced, and next he had to haul some overcoats over to Orchard to be finished. “I mean, I was waiting. . . .”

  Daniel wasn’t listening. He spun around until he spotted the fire pails filled with water, three of them on a shelf behind the heating stove.

  Jack looked back the way Daniel had come, down a corridor that was usually a dim cave. Now there was a terrible glow, with the lace curtains in tatters of flame and one of the garment racks fully ablaze. He couldn’t see into the back rooms, but he could hear shouting and a wild clamor of footsteps thudding the floorboards.

  Daniel shoved past him carrying two of the pails, but then he stopped at the doorway. “Cripes,” he said under his breath when he saw the flames in the hall. “You’ll have to help me, Jack.”

  Jack’s mind raced. How could he possibly help? “With the pails?”

  Daniel nodded. “Get that last one and wait here,” he commanded. Then he headed down the hall into the smoke and disappeared into one of the back rooms.

  Jack turned to grab the last of the fire pails. One of the seamstresses had already fled, but the other had stayed behind, trying to gather her things and fumbling with her workbag. It was the woman he called Mrs. Buttonhole—after her task, sewing buttonholes on shirts—and usually she was cross and officious. But now her ruddy face was white with fear as she began to stumble down the hallway.

  “Boy!” she cried out. “Where’s the fire escape?”

  Jack realized with a sickening feeling that the fire escape was in the back. And so was the fire.

  “Wait!” he cried, setting down the pail. “Take the front stairs!” He ran over to the front stairwell, which was dark and steep even when there wasn’t smoke. “This way,” he called out to Mrs. Buttonhole, who rushed over and began to make her way down.

  “Come on, boy!” she shouted up when she reached the second floor. “The whole place is catching fire!”

  But Jack was hurrying back to retrieve the last pail. Help Daniel, he thought.

  “Jack!” His brother’s voice came from down the hall. “Where are you?”

  “Here!” He needed Daniel to know he hadn’t left. That he would help him. “I’m here!” Jack called out again. “I’ve got the water!”

  By now the smoke was so dense he couldn’t make out the window at the end of the hall, but somehow he found the doorway his brother had gone through. “Daniel?”

  The first thing he saw was one of the wicker workbaskets nearby, which stood burning with long and rasping flames. Instinctively Jack swung the fire pail. A soft hiss rose up from the scorched basket as he doused the flames.

  But it made little difference. All the smoke seemed to be coming from another fire, a bigger one. Jack couldn’t even see the far end of the room he was in, but he knew there was another doorway there. And he knew that Daniel had gone through it.

  Help him!

  Jack needed to find another fire pail first or else he’d be no good to Daniel. He went back into the hall and turned every which way, looking for something else he could use, his eyes burn
ing more and more with each step. As he searched in the near-dark, he would have lost his bearings completely if not for the heat he could feel coming from one direction: the back of the shop.

  He kept calling his brother’s name, his lungs aching with the thickness of the smoke, but the only voices he could make out were coming from below, on the second floor. “Anyone up there? The stairs won’t hold!”

  Jack staggered to the front room and toward the only light he could see—his window, with all of Baxter Street below. He could hear cries down on the street. “Fire! He’s trapped!” They called in different languages. “Fuoco!” the Italian peddlers yelled.

  He just needed to climb down to the sidewalk and lead the firefighters around back, where they could help his brother put out the fire. That’s what Jack kept telling himself as he pulled himself through the open window and up onto the sill, barely allowing himself to relish the newfound feeling of air in his lungs. There was a ledge below—maybe he could lower himself down to it, and then to the next ledge below that, and then finally drop down to the awning on the lowest floor. Or he could jump.

  No, he had to jump.

  The fire had spread to the front room. Inside, just behind the window where he sat, the piles of fabric on the worktables were smoldering. The walls were peeling, the air turning liquid in the awful heat.

  Directly below Jack’s feet was the awning for the ground-floor storefront. Two stories down. Or would it be three stories he’d fall if the awning didn’t hold? Either way—

  Jack braced himself and pushed away from the windowsill. Away and down onto Baxter Street.

  Later he could barely remember how it felt to hit the awning, which immediately collapsed like an old hammock but had broken his fall enough that he’d suffered only a scraped shin and a sore shoulder.

  And then somehow after that he was on his feet. He’d searched the crowd on the sidewalk for Daniel, for his tall, thin form and his black hair so much like Jack’s own. But a policeman had taken his arm and was leading him across the street, looking straight ahead the whole time.

  “Where’s my brother?” Jack kept asking. “My brother, Daniel.”

  But the officer wouldn’t turn his head, not even to answer.

  Sometime after Jack had been brought home, another policeman came up the stairs with the news about Daniel. The man stayed in the dark hallway and spoke to his parents across the sagging threshold of their small tenement apartment. Jack watched them from the mattress where he lay. The officer spoke too softly for him to hear, but he knew what the words were.

  His mother swayed where she stood, and his father seized her arm to steady her.

  “Mein lieber Sohn,” she sobbed. “My son!”

  Jack did not get up from the mattress. He flung his arm over his face and pressed it hard against his stinging eyes.

  Hours later, he could still feel himself falling.

  2

  The Ribbon

  Breakfast, as always, was barley gruel with broth.

  Frances Sweeney had a feeling she couldn’t talk her way out of this place. It was the Howland Mission and Children’s Home on Fifth Street, which took in “little wanderers” like herself and Harold. But, Frances thought, when you didn’t have a place to stay and the weather was five below, wandering was just about the last thing you’d be doing. You’d get yourself somewhere fast.

  Which is what Frances and her kid brother did back in February. It had been so bitterly cold out that she’d run out of nerve one night and headed to the mission and delivered to the preachers the story of her and Harold’s plight. The full story, even, the one she didn’t like to tell at all.

  From the outside, the home looked a lot better than other places they’d stayed. When Frances and Harold had first found themselves on their own, they’d slept on pallets on the floors of one miserable apartment after another.

  First they’d stayed with a neighboring family, then a gin-swigging uncle they scarcely knew, then the uncle’s landlady, and then the landlady’s cleaning woman, whom they hardly saw but who let the children sleep in her windowless rear tenement in exchange for chores. The stairs had been soggy, and Harold would wake up coughing his tiny lungs into a fit. They remained there until that night in February when the stove ran out of coal and even the cleaning woman seemed to have abandoned the tenement for a warmer place.

  But here inside the home was a gloom of another kind. The dormitory had tall windows, but the neighboring buildings were even taller, so that the sun came in for only an hour or two at midday, making scant patches of light on the floors. The smallest kids sought out those sunny spots to play in, and even though he was seven now, sometimes Harold did, too, looking strangely angelic whenever the sunlight shone behind that red hair of his. Or so Frances thought. Otherwise, though, you never felt warm enough in the home, not even in spring.

  It was April now, and Frances was itching to get out of here. She didn’t want to get used to this place. She especially didn’t want Harold to get used to it, either. Even if he sometimes still asked if they were ever going back to Auntie Mare’s.

  “I can’t believe you remember that place,” she said whenever he brought it up, her stomach lurching each time. “You were so young when we left.” That was always her answer. Better than saying no, they weren’t going back.

  They didn’t talk about what they were, but sometimes, when Frances read aloud to Harold from her old Third Eclectic Reader with the cracked spine, they would come to a poem on page eighty-eight called “The Dead Mother” and, above it, a definition: Orphan, one whose parents are dead. Harold never let Frances turn the page until he had read it silently to himself.

  Now, before the midday meal, the children of the home lined up for Hygiene to show that they had scrubbed up. Frances didn’t see the point in checking, since the soap they had to use smelled so strong it made your eyes sting. Plus, anyone with eyeballs could see how red and chapped all the kids’ knuckles were from the scalding water that ran from the taps.

  There appeared to be a new matron on duty today, and she was making her way down the line. She stopped in front of Frances and considered her for a moment. Frances, in turn, pondered the way the puffy mutton sleeves on the matron’s dress made her look taller than she actually was. None of the other matrons were clothed as finely as this woman.

  “How old are you?” she asked Frances.

  Truthfully Frances had turned eleven back in March and had gone past the home’s age limit. She knew she was getting old enough to work as a hired girl somewhere, but she couldn’t leave Harold behind.

  “Ten years old, ma’am,” she replied.

  The woman with the big sleeves leaned closer, as if to study her.

  Frances could feel one of her braids coming loose. The older she got, the thicker and woollier her hair had become, until all she could do was plait it and pin it to her crown. Aunt Mare had sometimes called her “Saint Frances with the auburn halo” to tease her.

  The woman stepped back at last. “Well,” she muttered, “this one’s a slattern.”

  “Pardon?” Frances said. She was used to getting scolded for her hair, but something about this matron was different. Colder.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” the woman said. And then she continued down the line.

  Dinner today was stewed tripe with potatoes.

  “It’s beef,” Frances told her brother. “Sort of.” One day she’d tell him what it really was.

  Sometimes after dinner, one of the mission women would stand at the head of the long tables and read aloud something from the Youth’s Companion, which Frances wouldn’t have minded just reading to herself instead of hearing some busybody drone it to death. But today one of the elderly matrons was walking up and down the benches with a basket on her arm, handing out something to every child.

  “Candy?” Harold asked hopefully.

&nb
sp; “I don’t think so,” said Frances. “Whatever it is, it’s something silly.” She got a better look and could see that each child was being given a little ribbon—blue or red. They weren’t being handed out any which way, but sometimes the matron would stop and look to someone across the room, cocking her head to solicit approval. Frances turned to see who she was checking with and discovered that it was the woman with the puffy mutton sleeves on her dress—not one of the matrons, she suddenly realized, but a lady.

  Frances felt a tap on her shoulder. The old matron was standing right over her now with the basket. She pressed the ribbon into Frances’s palm. “Now don’t you dare lose this,” she said.

  The ribbon was blue. Frances turned it over. There was nothing printed on it. Nothing remarkable about it at all.

  “Harold,” she asked, “what color did you get?” She turned to her brother, who, only moments after being given his ribbon, had scooted off the end of the bench.

  “I just dropped mine,” Harold whispered from under the table.

  “You dropped it?”

  “It’s down here somewhere,” Harold muttered. Frances could hear his shoes scuffling around.

  “Pick it up,” she whispered back. “Let me see what color.”

  Just then, the big bell at the front of the room was rung to call them to attention.

  “Dear children!” the head matron called. “If you received a red ribbon, please come by the windows. Blue ribbons, you may stand at the front. Gather quickly!” All the children scrambled off the benches toward their places, but Frances hung back, waiting for her little brother, who was still scurrying around under the table.

  She felt a hand at the back of her neck. “Let’s not dawdle,” said the old matron, steering her toward the front of the room. Frances couldn’t help but notice that most of the blue ribbon holders were closer to her age than Harold’s.

  She heard her brother’s voice behind her. “Frannie!” She turned and saw that he was holding up his ribbon. His blue ribbon. He caught up with her, and she let out a breath that she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding in.