Who out there would want scruffy orphans from the streets of Chicago anyway? Only someone who wanted to work us to death, I'd say, just like Melvin told me. And if nobody took me, would I have to ride back and forth on this train, east to west and west to east, like some Eternal Traveler, giving rise to the legend of Rodzina the Unwanted, and have my story told around fireplaces, kitchen stoves, and campfires to scare little children? Either way I was mighty unhappy.
I went to the toilet at the back of the car. Through the hole in the seat I could watch Illinois race by. Miles and miles of Illinois.
Back in my seat, I bounced and nodded until the rhythm of the train and the whirling of my thoughts had me asleep. When I woke, Mr. Szprot was passing around red jelly sandwiches and apples from the big baskets in the back of the car. Lacey was still sleeping so I took hers too. I ate the sandwiches slowly, letting the sticky sweetness tickle my tongue, but I left Lacey an apple.
"Miss Brodski," I heard someone call. I looked around and there at the back of the car sat the lady from the Orphan Asylum, nodding her head at me. I took myself over there.
"Yes, miss?" I asked.
She frowned, her gray eyes as cold as a February fog off the lake. "It's Doctor."
"Doctor?" I had never heard of a lady doctor. "Really?"
"Never mind. Sit down," she said, pointing to the seat next to her. I sat. She smelled faintly of soap and freshly ironed clothes. "There are more of you children on this train than we expected. Mr. Szprot is in charge of the older boys, but I am responsible for all the rest, and I cannot do it by myself. So I will take care of the babies," she said, nodding at a heap of children of maybe two or three sleeping all nestled together on the wooden benches in front of her, "and you will look after the other children: Horton, Gertie, Chester, Spud and Mickey Dooley, Sammy and Joe, and Lacey there, who is sitting by you. I will depend on you to see that they are clean, fed, quiet, and in the right place at the right time."
Psiakrew—dog's blood—as Auntie Manya used to say. I just wanted to be left alone. "Why me?"
"Because you are the oldest."
Old enough to be in charge of orphans but not old enough to be on my own? Didn't make much sense to me. I wanted to say, "Depend on someone else and leave me alone," but I didn't. I didn't want her to hate me, just let me be. I said only, "Yes, miss."
"Doctor," she said, looking down at the book in her hands.
I turned to go back to my seat and ran smack into someone standing in the aisle. "I beg your pardon, as the convict said to the judge," said a skinny boy with a pale, freckled face. Both of his ears stuck out, his front teeth were missing, and one of his soft brown eyes gazed up to Heaven while the other looked up and down his nose.
"Who are you?" I asked, watching his eyes travel here and there, back and forth, never lighting for a moment on anything.
"Mickey Dooley, at your service," he said, sweeping off his brown wool cap to expose a crop of orange hair. Real orange. Carrot orange. "Orphan, purveyor of blarney, and a genuine bag of laughs. Nice to meet you." He pointed out the window. "And speaking of meat, holy moley, look at them sheep!"
A gang of boys standing behind him crowded around the window. "Them's not sheep; they's buffalo," said Joe.
"Moose!" said tubby Chester, smiling his crooked smile.
"Antelope!" Spud cried, his headful of yellow curls bouncing.
Having lived near the stockyards almost all my life, I knew cows when I saw them but did not choose to join the discussion. I might have to tend these kids, but the lady doctor didn't say anything about my setting them straight. I stumbled up the aisle and flopped into my seat.
At suppertime the train stopped. Some folks got off to eat. Us, we had more jelly sandwiches and apples. It wasn't pig's foot jelly or meat dumplings or sweet cake with raisins, but it was food. My stomach growled like an angry dog. You could hear it right out loud, it had gotten that quiet in the train car, except for the gurgling of Mickey Dooley's laughter and Gertie whining about how her elbow hurt or her toe or knee or someplace. The rest of us sat silently with our hunger, uncertainty, and jelly sandwiches.
Lacey was asleep again, so I finished my sandwich and half of hers and put the apples away in case I was hungry later. I knew I would be. I was always hungry. I loved food. Papa used to say, "Poles are the only people who write love poems about food." Were I a poet like my papa, I would write about cabbage rolls in tomato sauce, pickled herring, and the jelly doughnuts we ate each year on Paczki Day.
After supper the train got under way again. I washed hands and faces and helped Horton and Gertie blow their drippy noses. Because of my brothers I had plenty of experience with drippy noses and other details of child minding, but that didn't mean I had to like it. I must say, I didn't exactly hate it either. I was good with little kids.
The lady doctor and I got blankets down from the luggage racks and passed them out, for the car had grown colder. The other orphans huddled together for warmth, curling around kids they would have ignored in the light of day. Some cried out in nightmares, others whined or grumbled. I sat silent, wrapped in an itchy green blanket.
The gas lamps flickered in the darkness, making shadows dance on the walls and windows of the car. Once Papa's pants froze on the clothesline back of our house and he made them dance like a puppet. Back in the early years, this was, when he used to laugh and make jokes, before he found there was no place in Chicago for a Polish poet.
"Americans," he said, heading out one morning to his job at the stockyards, "are not a book-reading people." I sighed at the remembering and fell asleep, rocked by the jiggling and swaying of the train.
2. Somewhere in Illinois or Iowa
THE STILLNESS WOKE ME shortly after dawn. The train had stopped. I could see some faded wooden buildings and a water tank and hoped this pathetic place wasn't the west.
It wasn't. Just a little town where the train had stopped for water. Some women in checked aprons and muddy boots got on, selling milk and small cakes, which Mr. Szprot bought for our breakfast, but not enough if you ask me.
I gathered the little girls for a trip to the water bucket to rid them of the breakfast still smeared on their hands and faces. As we passed the lady doctor's seat, the train started with a lurch and Gertie stumbled, grabbing at the lady to keep from falling down. "Don't touch!" she shouted, shoving Gertie's hand away. Radishes! Such a fuss over a little milk and cake on her skirt.
I helped Gertie stand back up, straightened her hair and the bow on her pinafore, and started to shepherd her back to the water bucket.
Then she, old Miss Don't Touch, said, "Rodzina—"
I stopped, letting Gertie go on without me. I was used to people saying my name the wrong way, but I wanted to give Miss Don't Touch as hard a time as she'd given Gertie. "That's pronounced Rodzina," I interrupted, making that sound between a D and a G and a Z that it seemed only Polish mouths could make, sort of like the G-sound in bridge or cage or huge, but not quite. The lady doctor sounded like a bumblebee with her Rod-zzzzzz-ina.
"Isn't that what I said, Rodzina
"No, you said Rodzina. It should be Rodzina. Like this: Rodzina."
She looked at me like I was a hair in her soup. "I shall just call you Miss Brodski."
She pronounced that just fine. I thought to tell her, "That's Brodski," and pronounce it exactly as she had, just to discombobberate her, but I didn't want to push my luck, so I nodded.
"Miss Brodski, you must do a better job of keeping these children neat, quiet, and away from me." She took a starched handkerchief from her pocket and began to scrub at the stain on her skirt. "I have enough to do with the babies. Now go."
I washed milk and crumbs off little faces with the water in the bucket, scrubbing a bit roughly, I must admit, but it was not my choice to be doing this. After the children were settled in their seats again, I sat down to suffer another day of swaying and rocking. I could see nothing out the window but more Illinois or Iowa or wherever we were.
Lacey visited the toilet and, after a while, came skipping back to her seat, with Spud, Sammy, and Joe trailing behind her. "Oh, Ro," she called.
"Rodzina," I said.
"We was looking out the window at horses," she said. "I saw all different kinds. Black ones. And black-and-white ones. And a brown one. And a baby one." She bounced in her seat a few times. "I hope we see a mo."
"A what?"
"A mo. You know, what you get mohair from. Like for ladies' coats."
"Who told you that?"
"Spud. He said you get horsehair from horses and mohair from mos."
The boys began to laugh and stomp their feet.
"And you are dumb enough to believe him?" I asked her.
Her eyes filled with tears. "I'm not dumb. Just slow. Them folks at the Infant Hospital said I was just slow and plumb fine to go west and work for my keep."
Spud shouted, "Yeah, she's so slow, she makes molasses look fast."
"Slow as a broken clock," said Sammy.
"Slower than a dead turtle," added Joe.
They stomped their feet again and hooted with laughter.
"What exactly do you mean, slow?" I asked Sammy.
"You know. Feebleminded."
I drew back. It was bad enough to share my seat with Lacey and wash her sticky face, but now she turned out to be feebleminded. Did they expect someone would want a feebleminded orphan?
The only feebleminded person I had ever known was Noodlehead Weber, who swept the floor at the candy store. Some of the kids threw rocks at him, but Mama wouldn't let me. She was always nice to him and made me call him Clarence and never Noodlehead.
I reckoned Mama would want me to be nice to this little girl and not call her Noodlehead or laugh at her. I promise, Mama, but don't expect we're going to be friends or anything.
"I ain't feebleminded!" Lacey shouted, her little face turning from pink to bright red. "Just slow."
I said, "Seems to me some people are feeble-minded and some are plain ugly. Like them." I pointed to the boys. "Just be grateful you ain't them."
"I ain't ugly," said Joe, standing up and waving clenched fists in my face.
"Sammy," I said, "make your brother behave."
"Joe ain't my brother," Sammy said.
"I don't care. Just keep him quiet."
Lacey and I sat back, lost in our own thoughts. The boys jostled and snickered for a while longer and then got bored with that. They sat down on the floor, warming their backs by the stove, and Spud pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket. They started up a poker game, betting peach pits and marbles instead of money. Also James A. Garfield campaign ribbons, empty thread spools, broken spectacle parts, and anything else they found in their pockets. I guess the betting was more fun than the poker, for soon I heard Sammy call out, "Reckon I kin hold my breath longer than any fella on this here train."
And Joe said, "Bet you there are at least fifty flies stuck on that flypaper."
"I could count to a hundred before we see another tree, I wager," Chester shouted, coming to join the others, and more marbles and junk changed hands. I think someone could have been found to bet on whether or not the sun would set that night.
The gamblers shouted and squealed, their ruckus accompanying the squealing, jangling, and tooting of the train in an awful sort of music that sounded like a brass band played by monkeys.
A skinny old conductor came in to check the stove, his big, fuzzy ears sticking way out from under his peaked cap. He whistled while he worked. I got up and went over to him. "How long," I asked, "will it take to get to Grand Island?" Miss Hoolihan had said that would be the first orphan stop.
"Oh, three or some days," he said, scratching one of his huge ears, "depending on how often we got to pull over to let an express train go by. A little longer if we run into train robbers or a blizzard or a prairie fire, if we run off the rails or a bridge is washed out, or some such."
Train robbers? Washed-out bridges? Blizzards and prairie fires? Was he pulling my leg or were we really facing such dangers? He tipped his cap to me and whistled himself off.
What was I doing here? Was it a punishment for being an orphan? There were days and days of this misery ahead—noise and swaying and rattling and worrying. I would not survive. I will lie right down here in this aisle, I thought, and die of swaying and rattling and washing up. And there will be no one to mourn for me. I was almighty blue.
I rocked and stumbled back to my seat. Lacey was eating an apple. She gave me a scared smile.
"Are we almost there?" she asked.
"Where?"
"Wherever we're going."
"We're going lots of places, but we ain't at any of them yet," I said.
As I watched the land rush by, the skies grew darker and darker. A flash of light preceded the sound of thunder. Mickey Dooley shouted, "Put the frog out, Bill. I think it's gonna rain!" And it did. It rained cats and dogs. Walking sticks and flowered hats. Plum cake and sausages, fishbowls and fur-lined caps. Washed-out bridges and prairie fires and who knows what else.
Thunder rolled in once more, and lightning danced in the sky. Screaming and trembling, Lacey pulled her skirt up over her head. I turned away from her. Being scared, like having lice, was something one was supposed to keep to oneself.
The gamblers turned to racing raindrops, cheering them on, betting on which would be first to reach the bottom of the window. Marbles and peach pits changed hands again.
"Hey, Potato Nose, want to get in on this?" Sammy asked. "Try your luck?"
I shook my head. I had plenty of luck—all of it bad. If I wagered with them, I'd no doubt lose my boots, my hair, and my seat on the train and end up bald and barefoot, lost on the prairie. No sir. Not me. I would not bet on anything good happening for me.
When the rain finally eased, I could see only flat fields and scattered black patches of plowed earth. Late in the afternoon, we passed the first house we had seen in some hours. Leaning on the fence was a boy who looked like he had been waiting for us. The engine tooted; he waved and then hung there until the train passed, even longer maybe. Maybe he's still there, waiting for us to come back.
They should send some orphans to that kid, I thought. Never had I seen a face so lonely. I bet he'd be good to them and not make them work too hard, so grateful he'd be for their company. And at night they could pop corn and tell stories, and when the train passed by, they could all go wave to it together and then talk about it after supper.
As the light failed outside, the conductor lit the gas lamps. Mr. Szprot passed out jelly sandwiches again. And apples. And sticks of celery. I wondered what he and Miss Doctor ate. Did they have to be satisfied with jelly sandwiches like we did? I looked behind me to check. Mr. Szprot was snoring in his seat. Miss Doctor was occupied with the littlest kids, cutting up apples for them to share. Maybe she didn't eat at all. I wondered what had happened to her sandwich.
I stretched my feet out toward the stove, letting the heat defrost my toes. "I hurt," said a little voice in front of me. Gertie, of course.
"You ain't going to vomit, are you?" I asked, pulling away.
She shook her head. "But I hurt all over."
"Maybe you're just cold. Sit here by the stove a minute." She tried to climb into my lap, but I crossed my legs and settled her between Lacey and me.
The big boy who had called me Cabbage Eater swaggered over to warm his hands. "Hey, Herman," Sammy said from his seat across the aisle, "I remember you from Chicago."
"Call me Hermy the Knife," the boy said, fingering something in his pocket that might or might not have been a knife. He was one scary-looking fellow—what my mama would call a chuligan—with his greasy hair, crooked nose, and a shadow above his lip that just might be the beginnings of a mustache. "Yeah, I remember you. You and your brother."
"Joe ain't my brother," Sammy said.
"I thought you was happy in Chicago," said Joe. "How come you're on this train?"
Hermy shrugged. "I'm
here, but I ain't sticking around. Taking off as soon as I get the chance. Don't want nothin' to do with no hicks, hayseeds, rubes, clodhoppers, yokels, or bumpkins."
"Don't you want a family?" Gertie asked Hermy.
"Don't need no family," said Hermy. "I got my gang, the Plug Uglies, and we don't let nobody push us around—especially some yokel from Yokelsville." At that Hermy the Knife stopped and noticed who was speaking to him. "Hey, it's Gertie the Whiner. And Cabbage Eater, and looky here, they're sittin' with Cabbage Head, who don't know how many beans make five. You three are just right for Yokelsville."
"Cabbage Eater! That how you got so big, eatin' cabbage?" asked Sammy.
"And don't forget potatoes—we seen her eat plenty of potatoes," Joe added.
"Yeah, our potatoes."
I turned and looked out the window again. Could I just take off like Hermy? I was old enough and big enough to take care of myself, but we weren't in Chicago anymore. Where were we? And where would I go from here?
I fell asleep but was awakened sometime later by the sounds of crying. That wasn't unusual in this car full of orphans, but this crying was right in my ear. Gertie. Of course.
"Shh, Gertie. Cuddle up with Lacey and go back to sleep."
But she kept crying, and the other kids began to stir. "Come with me," I said, pulling her by her hand to the back of the car.
The lady doctor was looking out the window. I couldn't see why—it was just darkness out there. Black darkness.
Gertie blubbered again and pushed her face into my skirt. "Miss," I said.
"Doctor," she said.
"Gertie here won't stop crying. And she's waking up all the other kids."
The lady doctor turned to us. "Leave her with me. I'll take care of her." The gaslight flickered on her glasses, shooting off sparks in my direction. I shivered, glad it was Gertie and not me left with old Miss Don't Touch.
3. Omaha
IT WAS STILL DARK NIGHT when we all had to wake, trudge off the train from Chicago with our suitcases, walk through the sleety Omaha railroad yard, and climb aboard the Union Pacific train that would take us the rest of the way to Grand Island. I stumbled as I walked, having gotten used to the rocking and swaying of the train. Our car looked just the same as the last, except that all the windows closed, so we were soon settled down again, I by the stove, Lacey next to me once more.