Home for Erring and Outcast Girls

by Julie Kibler

Unspoken gratitude flits behind her smile.

  * * *

  —

  Thursday, the doorbell rings right on time. Laurel looks worried, as if my invitation were bogus or I’ve forgotten. I welcome her enthusiastically.

  She carries her backpack, full of sources for a project due Monday, she says. I shake my head. Due dates right after long holidays are the bane of a librarian’s existence. Of course students shouldn’t wait until the last minute—but they’re going to. They frequently show up in a panic, desperate to locate items for papers or projects before heading out of town. What are we going to do? Turn them away?

  Suddenly, I wonder if Laurel is just humoring me with her presence. Lately, I feel a little ancient. I’m not even forty, and I look young for my age—being tall and slim has become an unanticipated advantage. But I remember eighteen. People in their late thirties were really old.

  I still feel like a kid in more ways than I’d like to admit—and simultaneously decrepit. Aging isn’t for wimps. I think of my mother for a quick second, then put that image away.

  Holidays are bad like that—not for wimps either.

  “It smells so good,” Laurel says, her face now undeniably eager.

  I relax, wondering how long it’s been since she had a home-cooked meal—home-cooked being relative. Once she admitted she liked traditional fare, I ordered from a local farm-to-table restaurant. They guarantee their dinners won’t taste previously frozen, as if they came from the grocery store deli.

  The only thing I’ve truly made from scratch is a pumpkin pie, cooling on the counter now. It does smell good. My stomach growls in agreement, and Laurel laughs.

  “The rolls get ten minutes at three fifty,” I say.

  “Is anyone else coming?”

  “Just us!” I scurry around the corner to the kitchen to slide the rolls into the oven. “I save all my real partying for the cemetery.”

  “Weird,” she says.

  I shrug.

  The meal is so delicious I groan. Then take seconds. When we can’t eat any more, we crash in my living room. “Stay and work on your project,” I encourage Laurel. “No reason to hurry away.”

  I channel surf, finally settling on The Sound of Music as it grows dark outside. I catch myself humming along, even singing a little under my breath.

  “I used to watch this with my mom,” Laurel says.

  My face flushes hot. “Me too.”

  We both sigh. Heavy sighs.

  The movie ends with Laurel asleep on the sofa under a throw blanket, curled into a small ball in the corner. I knew my sofa was magic. I hate to wake her. When a commercial blares, though, she springs up, startled. She obviously doesn’t quite remember where she is and stares through glassy eyes until the cobwebs clear.

  “You okay?”

  She nods. “For a minute, I thought I was at home. It…scared me.” She huddles again under the throw. “I should get going.”

  Before I consider the wisdom, I say, “I have a guest room and an extra bathroom. Why don’t you just stay here?”

  “You sure? I don’t want to impose,” she says, but with a yearning that tells me she wants to stay.

  “Of course!”

  We watch another movie, and then I give her a new toothbrush and clean bath towels. She claims she doesn’t need them, but I push them into her arms anyway. I get her settled in the guest room, which I furnished recently in a fit of domesticity.

  That night, I listen to the sound of my house with someone else in it. There’s never been another human asleep in the other bedroom while I’ve lived here, or anywhere in my house after the movers left, for that matter. Or anywhere I’ve lived for many, many years. The decorated guest room is simply evidence of my weakness for pretty things. Laurel is the first to see or use any of it.

  Somehow the silence is deeper and more comforting than when I’m alone. I’m surprised to find I don’t mind this kind of silence at all.

  MATTIE

  Arlington, Texas

  1910

  In the half decade since Mattie’s arrival at the Home, she’d left briefly three times—after her first summer, to help Sister Jernigan in Greenville for a few months, and twice later, to fill in for cooks at the newer rescue homes in Pilot Point and Texarkana. They’d begged Mattie to stay, but she figured if she was cooking for fallen girls, she might as well run a kitchen where she had friends—family by now.

  But by now, she was tired of the dark memories that chased her endlessly here, like a dog after its tail—not to mention, Mattie had begun to worry she was taking up needed space.

  When Brother JT said they had girls sleeping in the Home’s hallways, there was no accompanying wink. One wide end of the upper balcony had been converted into a sleeping porch, but in bad weather, they moved the beds inside, wherever they’d fit—including the central hall. It was, in Brother JT’s words, a good problem. After a long haul, their reputation was solid, and the more the public knew about the Home, the more girls arrived. Civil servants and neighbors wrote regarding young women who’d fallen for promises of marriage, were on the verge of homelessness, or were already on the streets. Sister Maggie Mae’s excursions into the vice districts had dwindled, but she remained passionate about reaching girls in the lowest places. The Refuge, created from the old barn with funds Brother JT had raised after May had run off the second time, helped them recover or come off opium or heroin safely, separate from the others. Brother JT said each time the workers gathered to make admittance decisions, it was a meeting of sighs. They had to meet the standards of their particular mission, but too often they felt they were condemning girls to life on the street—or worse, death.

  Saint Gertrude and her preacher lived far off in Denver now, running their own rescue home, and sent word of a new baby nearly every year. Mattie set her jaw with each announcement, while Miss Hallie appeared close to tears. Mattie knew now that she and Miss Hallie weren’t so different—both old maids who had wanted nothing more than husbands and families.

  They’d all made their choices.

  Miss Hallie still carried a torch for the wrong man. Mattie had the best of her there. On the slim chance she ever married, she’d find a strong, handsome man, tall enough to make her feel feminine again, and one hundred percent available.

  Miss Hallie took Brother JT’s teasing too seriously. When he ribbed her over a typographical error, she pouted. Then he gave her puppy-dog eyes, as if he owed her when he was clearly just keeping the peace. Mattie wondered how Sister Maggie Mae tolerated their mutual silliness.

  At the 1909 Rescue Rally in Fort Worth, Sister Susie and Sister Maggie Mae had flanked Brother JT on one end of the crowded pew, with Mattie and Miss Hallie on the other. Sister Maggie Mae’s brown-striped shirtwaist matched her chestnut hair, which she’d pulled up in smart buns on either side. She was as youthful and pretty as the day Mattie entered the Home. The girls marveled that she could pull it off, between helping Brother JT and bearing him five children in fifteen years. The rest of the Home girls sat a row ahead, ready to sing in identical white dresses. Tiny pleats decorated their bosoms, with puffed sleeves on their shoulders. You’d never have known they were rescued girls, as respectable in appearance as any church choir.

  Brother JT had tapped Miss Hallie’s arm with his rolled-up program, then leaned so Mattie could hear. “Can you believe how many folks came out for a rescue rally in Cowtown?”

  Fort Worth was where civilization met the Wild West. Pinstriped bankers walked the boardwalks beside cattle drivers with dung still clinging to their spurs. The city was a popular watering hole, with a scarlet district that rivaled any. Brother JT believed the rampant drunkenness and debauchery was what put so many women on the streets. Supply followed demand, he claimed. He wanted the district shut down. Mattie marveled that she’d ever lived there.

  Brother JT’s proximi
ty in the public venue had flustered Miss Hallie. “You continue to underestimate your calling,” she’d said, finally.

  “You flatter me, Miss V.” He smiled, and even Mattie heard Miss Hallie’s ragged breath. The woman straightened her back and gathered her skirt close, smoothing it alongside her leg so it no longer grazed the fabric of Brother JT’s trousers. Even so, Mattie imagined that the secretary still sensed his warmth across the brief space, as if they touched anyway.

  As the chairman had introduced the speaker, Miss Hallie waved her program gently near her face. A fine sweat beaded her upper lip and the cleft of her chin, and she ran her fingers across them. Mattie couldn’t force her attention away. When Miss Hallie’s arm and skirt relaxed again, Mattie glanced covertly at Brother JT. His right hand rested on Sister Maggie Mae’s, atop her own skirted thigh, but he made no effort to shift away from Miss Hallie. His eyelids drifted until he appeared deep in prayer, but Mattie was certain his leg trembled.

  Mattie rarely made it through a service without the others wanting to physically lay hands on her for fidgeting, but that night, Mattie herself had hardly stirred, intrigued at this interaction.

  Some things at the Home had changed. Some never did.

  Each May, the Home girls bustled to clean every surface until it shone, baked and boiled and roasted whatever would keep, and spread their freshly laundered Sunday dresses on the lawn to bleach brighter in the sun, then starched them until they could nearly stand upright. In conjunction with the Home’s anniversary and Homecoming celebration, hordes arrived by car or train, carrying camp gear and supplies for the annual Camp Meeting on the grounds.

  “We’re believing for the largest crowd ever to gather in the state of Texas for an event of this kind,” Brother JT had said in a recent service at the Home, “where the lost souls of the cities can find saving and sanctifying power—whether they be women like yourselves, nothing to give but hearts, or everyday folks with deep pockets to help our work.”

  He’d convinced the Interurban railway to discount the ride from the cities out to the Home and enlisted Bud Robinson as their speaker again this year. Uncle Bud was everyone’s favorite. He wasn’t smooth or polished, and he spoke with a lisp and stuttered so often it took him twice as long to say what anyone else could in half the time. But he was so honest, you forgot his rough edges, and before long, his stutter, and then, instead of irritating, the lisp soothed.

  Mattie enjoyed Camp Meeting—one of her favorite times at the Home, when former residents often returned. She always feared the Hydes might return, too, however, and scarcely breathed until they sent their fondest regrets once again, claiming the trip was too far to make from their new home out west—even if many others made the same journey. Mattie expected they felt much the same as she did, seeing as how Brother JT had tried so hard with her, for weeks on end, and then said she could change her mind, no matter how much time passed.

  She would never change her mind, but how could the Hydes be as sure? It was better for everyone involved that she never saw the child again.

  Lizzie, on the other hand, loved Camp Meeting because she didn’t have to set a foot off the property. She still hardly wanted to leave the campus, always volunteering to watch the little ones while their mothers sang or played for events elsewhere. Mattie worried that Lizzie would never leave and wondered if she needed to nudge her in a new direction. Otherwise, she’d be as dependent on the Home in a decade as she was today, and what if something happened? What if, heaven forbid, the Home ever closed?

  In the first service of this year’s Camp Meeting, Mattie’s heart suddenly raced when Uncle Bud called for volunteers to accompany his evangelistic band to Oklahoma City to start a new church. The city had sprung up nearly overnight during the 1889 Land Run, when five thousand settlers raced in. By the time Oklahoma became a state in 1907, the city had over sixty thousand. He’d brought photographs clipped from the Oklahoma City papers that showed bustling streets, tall buildings, and fancy hotels. Uncle Bud needed folks to pitch the meeting tent and carry flyers—and one good cook to keep the workers fed.

  Fort Worth held memories Mattie never cared to revisit. Dallas felt too established and too uppity. But Oklahoma City? It seemed like a place where a person could reinvent herself.

  If she volunteered, she’d see new things. Smell new smells. And just maybe, a man with a similar interest in the mission work might take pity on a former fallen girl and see his way clear to marrying her. Charley had broken her heart—or so she’d thought until she knew how a true broken heart hurt—but she’d loved having the affection of a man. Wanting that seemed safer now that there was no more danger of babies coming, but it would never happen inside the confines of the Home.

  During Uncle Bud’s final altar call, as the crowd readied to disperse for another year, with many already gone home, Mattie headed straight down the aisle like she had more than five years earlier, only this time she exclaimed, “God wants me for your cook,” and fell into Uncle Bud’s waiting embrace. She added quickly, “I’ll go to Oklahoma.”

  He squeezed her hands, then turned her to face the remaining crowd, filled with faces she loved. Uncle Bud asked them to lay hands to bless her call. Her tears flowed, less from the call and more from realizing she was going to miss them all terribly.

  Lizzie forced her way to the front, where she grabbed Mattie’s hand and gazed up at her, her face twisted with competing emotions—most apparent, shock. And was that hurt?

  Mattie had never mentioned she’d been thinking of leaving with Uncle Bud. Lizzie would be anxious, and she’d have reason to be. Mattie regretted not warning her. Lizzie would worry as she had constantly, ever since…Well, and she’d make Mattie admit she wasn’t interested in the ministry alone. The conversation would be touchy.

  Mattie was torn, too—mostly because she’d have to say goodbye, for now, to Lizzie, and to Docie, who was growing into a pretty young girl, smart and good at her sums, and you couldn’t keep her in books. Docie no longer sneaked in with Mattie, but she trailed her at bedtime, asking about worldly things she wasn’t supposed to care about—but that she knew Mattie liked too. Mattie kept it simple but believed even if Lizzie never left, Docie would need to find her own way outside the Home one day. Without disgrace hanging over her like the fallen girls, she might chase dreams of her own.

  Mattie kept her smile on her face and lowered her eyelashes as Uncle Bud prayed over her. If the people crowding her seemed more moved by her call than she did, it wasn’t anything new. She’d never been propelled by emotional excess. She was propelled by the need to make new memories to cover the old—and by an adventure she couldn’t wait to begin.

  LIZZIE

  Arlington, Texas

  1910

  When she dared to peek, Lizzie watched Mattie’s face, for the prayers went on and on. She knew Mattie’s mind wasn’t entirely on them, but that didn’t surprise her one bit. Mattie’s mind always wandered, and today was no different. Mattie had been looking for a way out of the Home forever, especially once her heart had a chance to mend some, and then her body too.

  Well, now she’d get it. She’d go away, as Lizzie had expected.

  And Lizzie would be left alone.

  “Where’s my girl?” Mattie exclaimed as the crowd finally loosened around them, but Docie had already run off to play chase with the visiting children until their parents took them home. She was oblivious to what Mattie’s decision meant, and Lizzie wouldn’t spoil her fun.

  At Camp Meeting, the children didn’t whisper behind Docie’s back like the girls at the Arlington school she attended still did, often sending her home crying. Lizzie loved watching her run and play carefree this one weekend a year. This year, Docie had carried the Bible for the pledges, while the middle Upchurch children had carried the American and Christian flags. She’d stood at the front, upright and proud while the crowd recited the pledge to God’
s Holy Word, and Lizzie’s heart had nearly filled to bursting.

  Lizzie shrugged away from Mattie and pointed out Docie and her friends. They’d captured a smaller boy, and he screeched inside their ring until Miss Hallie showed up to shut down their boisterous behavior. Lizzie half regretted pointing, for Mattie saw Miss Hallie’s mouth open and swooped over there.

  “Docie, come give Aunty Mat a hug, darlin’. It won’t be long until I can’t do it every day.” Docie dropped the other girls’ hands, and the little boy escaped. Miss Hallie continued to look askance, but it was too late to read the riot act once the others ran away.

  Docie threw her arms around Mattie and sobbed on her shoulder. Lizzie couldn’t decide whether to be happy with Mattie for saving the kids from Miss Hallie, or cross because she’d made Docie cry again, here of all places. It didn’t take much to set her off. It wasn’t always that she was upset. She was just fragile, every way. And she’d share anything with anyone. Her exuberance was the best reason for fencing her in here at the Home for a good long time. She clung to Mattie now, and Mattie patted her. “Don’t cry, honey. I’ll visit every chance I get, and you and your mama will come see me too!”

  Lizzie simply shook her head and tried to stanch her own tears. She’d ventured up that way once, long ago, one too many times. And she’d never let Docie go alone—leastways not until she couldn’t keep her from it. Mattie caught Lizzie wiping her eyes, and said that for all they knew, she wouldn’t even like Oklahoma City.

  Lizzie knew better. So many girls who’d left had promised they’d visit, but the Homecoming group was always slim. Mattie would likely never come this way again. Moreover, without all the painful memories to chase her around like ghosts, Mattie would thrive.

  As for the city, Mattie would adore it. And what would Lizzie do without her?