Home for Erring and Outcast Girls

by Julie Kibler

  They laughed every day.

  She pulled up from the chair, grasping the grooved metal table edge with fingers and palms too dry for such heat. They should be wet and sticky with sweat. Instead they burned like fire. She shuffled to peer through into the bedrooms. The beds seemed different, stripped of wrinkled linens and worn blankets and the never-ending parade of men looking for a simple place to sleep, stinking of alcohol and rotting teeth, some worse, in clothing rarely laundered.

  She blinked. Haze floated through the windows, which they kept open to try to get a breeze. The house faced the wrong direction for fresh air; mostly it was just the stench of the packing plants down the road that wafted inside.

  But now…now, she catches it, just the hint of it…

  And now, the beds are covered in pure white linens and the light from the window is clear. She’s at the Home again, and she’s so tired. She just needs a rest. She walks toward her bed, on the end, just down from Lizzie and Docie, and pauses to listen for the clamor in the distance. The dinner bell calling them to table. A child laughing on the lawn. A fallen girl singing the chorus of a hymn, in harmony with the creak of garments threaded through the wringer.

  Grace, grace, God’s grace, grace that will pardon and cleanse within…

  Grace, grace, God’s grace, grace that is greater than all our sin…

  Lying on top of the soft bed, not bothering with covers—she’s plenty warm on a nice day like this—she hums along, smiles at those roses on the walls, on the ceiling, because the girls need reminders of beauty, even when they’ve seen nothing but ashes.

  Peace be with you. And also with you.

  She turns her head, and her breath catches. She can’t get a breath. But she’s not afraid. At the door, she sees him, walking toward her, one arm outstretched, his yellow blanket under the other, just where she’d tucked it the day they took him away.

  She sits up to meet him, leaning, tumbling, falling with him into a heap on the floor, and she clings to her Cap, making up for all the lost time and all the lost embraces.

  I’m here, love, I’m here.

  They rest. They’re Home.

  LIZZIE

  Arlington, Texas

  JULY 14, 1933

  Lizzie was on her knees when the call came. They fetched her from the tiny stone chapel built in Brother JT’s and Sister Maggie Mae’s honor, said a man was on the line for her, waiting. She didn’t have to guess. Mattie had said years earlier if anything ever happened, Jim had the number for the workers’ cottage.

  “Lizzie?” he said, and her heart sank.

  She knew, before he even told her, maybe because of his tone, or maybe, as happened so many times before, because she had a sense of sorts.

  Some would say it came from the Devil.

  She would say that wasn’t necessarily so.

  She just knew, like twins knew, when something wasn’t right with the people she loved. And she knew this time. It was why she’d gone to the chapel. Something had felt off this morning, and as was her habit, she went down to pray.

  “What’s happened?” she said. No Hello.

  “It’s Mattie…” Jim’s voice faded, and Lizzie heard it catch, as if he’d choked on a sob.

  “She’s gone?”

  “Yes.”

  Lizzie drew a big breath and released it in a sigh. “When?”

  “It was the heat. She wouldn’t listen to me. I knew she was sick, and she insisted she had to work. It was over a hundred degrees, and she wouldn’t let me help. And now she’s gone.”

  Jim went quiet again, though she could hear him gulping, swallowing, trying to be manly about his tears. She could just see Mattie, so stubborn, same as always, insisting that Jim take it easy, being a decade older and not so spritely anymore—even with her own bad health. Mattie had feared losing him after waiting so long to find him. Now, he’d lost her instead.

  “She told me if anything ever happened, I was to let you know first,” Jim said. “That you’d know what to do.”

  “Yes, you done the right thing. Me and Mattie, we had promises between us.”

  “She’s at the city morgue. The ambulance came, but there was nothing to be done. She was already gone. It happened so fast, Lizzie, and when I found her, she was—”

  “Stop, Jim, I can’t…I don’t want to hear it just now.”

  “It was terrible,” Jim said. “Terrible.”

  “Please.”

  “I’m sorry.” He exhaled.

  “You’ll need to bring her back here.”

  “What?” Confusion and maybe disbelief altered Jim’s voice.

  “She wanted to be buried here. I’ll let the Upchurches know. There won’t be any issue. But you’ll have to get her to us.”

  Jim didn’t respond at first. Lizzie reckoned he turned the situation over in his mind. “I have no money,” he said, finally. “We’re on the relief. Most of the men can’t even afford the nightly rate for a pallet on the floor, and Mattie, of course, you know she won’t—wouldn’t—ever turn someone away. They always ask if they can stay on credit, and, of course, she lets them. We’ve got no cash. I assumed we’d bury her here. I knew she wanted you to know so you could come, though I’m not planning on a big service. We know a lot of people, but not so many we’d consider friends. And, you know…she hasn’t been to church in years.”

  Of course she knew, but to hear Jim confirm it again made her heart hurt.

  “Jim,” she said. “She wanted to be buried here. Even though she done things they didn’t like, both before and after she left, and even after she stopped going to church. This ain’t nothing to do with her spiritual condition. It were a promise we talked about long before she met you, right about the time she went up there. More than twenty years ago.”

  “Maybe she changed her mind—”

  Lizzie interrupted. “No, she hadn’t changed her mind. You got to hear me on this. If you can’t afford it, we’ll pitch in. We’ll figure it out. We have to.”

  Jim promised to call back that evening. Lizzie would take it to the Upchurches and determine how they’d get Mattie home.

  First, though, she went to her room in the workers’ cottage and sat before her desk, a little secondhand one Docie had bought and helped her paint so there’d be a place she could keep practicing her lettering, even if it was for her eyes alone. She clutched her pen and pulled her tablet toward her. Dear Mattie, she wrote…

  Lizzie paused, her hand already cramped. She’d never write the whole thing today, or any day. It was too long. Too messy.

  So she laid her pen on the blotter and rested her chin in her hands. She closed her eyes and talked to Mattie inside her head, just like she talked to God now, certain she would hear…

  Though I done my best to be a good friend and sister, you never believed I could understand exactly the pain you went through after you come to the Home, or that biting pain you felt at seeing me with Docie, or that hollow ache when you held her…

  Mattie had always said Lizzie couldn’t know how closed-in life felt for her. Like as if she didn’t go off and try something new, she’d lose her mind dwelling on things too close to ignore.

  But the truth was, Mattie never knew everything Lizzie had lost. Lizzie had tried her best to forget, and now and again, she woke and realized she’d gone a day and night without remembering, but those times were weeks and sometimes months between. If Mattie had known, she’d have asked how Lizzie carried on without losing her mind, or why she wouldn’t want to forget more often. The second truth was, Lizzie had done what she had to. If it meant staying there all those years to be sure Docie was safe and fed and loved, so be it.

  Even now, she regretted going off that time to try to help her people see the light—even if the Good Book said to—seeing as they’d tried to get her right back in the worst of pla
ces. She shuddered to think if Docie hadn’t come after her—and if they’d convinced Lizzie she was worthless again. Brother JT and Sister Maggie Mae would have cared for Docie like their own, for Lizzie would never have taken her into that life, but her girl would have forever wondered why her own mother left her for good, just as Lizzie had spent a lifetime pondering how her mother turned her out again and again, caring less than if she’d been a mangy dog at the door.

  But staying at the Home so long wasn’t the first time she’d made a choice for Docie.

  She’d told Mattie she was bad luck.

  She’d held Cap, and he died.

  Those puppies? Lizzie was sure she’d killed the runt, only trying to help.

  Bea in the nursery? She’d rocked her one day, and Beatrice died from grippe the next.

  Lizzie knew now it wasn’t bad luck, of course, but just the way things happened. She’d held and cared for so many others over the years, her chances were always good to be where she was most needed.

  Mattie had thought God was punishing her, taking Cap.

  But if she were right, Lizzie would have been struck down long ago.

  They both had their secrets. She should have told Mattie, but they never talked about the babies. Mattie never let her cross that line, not about Cap and not about Ruth, the baby she gave away. Lizzie had a line, too, but she never breathed a word of it, not even to Docie.

  She couldn’t bear it. She knew Mattie couldn’t either.

  Lizzie had birthed Docie in Indian Territory—Oklahoma now—going up in a covered wagon with her Ma and Hugh, who wanted to try for free land, only stopping to bed down at night. That kind of birth might have done some other woman in, but Lizzie was young and strong, even for all her shame.

  Docie was a strong little thing too. Lizzie didn’t know how she’d have survived otherwise—not from her own precautions. Docie fought from the moment she came, maybe before, when she curled in Lizzie’s womb, for Lizzie never took care even when she realized she was expecting. She hadn’t the energy. She knew her time was coming but no notion how to tell it from bellyache or weary bones. The first pains nearly knocked her flat. She screamed for her mother from the rear of the wagon. Her ma had gone to bank the fire, with Arch already asleep on his bedroll under the wagon.

  Ma shushed Lizzie as she came rushing back and hardly helped her swing up to the wagon bed. Ma believed Lizzie could only blame herself. Willis had shown up enough that nobody else ever questioned if he was the daddy of the baby in Lizzie’s belly, but Ma picked out the details after he ran off, of every man who’d used her.

  Lizzie was the guilty one. Ma always believed it.

  Ma said to stop her bellowing. The land grants were by lottery that time, but they didn’t trust the Sooners. They had to travel sunup to sundown to register in time. If Lizzie didn’t want Arch leaving her beside the trail, she was to keep quiet.

  Lizzie didn’t for a minute think her ma was lying, not that time. Lizzie was little more than a nuisance now that she was old enough to keep Arch off her. She’d been shocked they let her ride along, but Ma said she’d be another set of hands to cook or drive the team.

  Lizzie gritted her teeth and bit her lips raw when each wave hit. She’d have done her Injun granny proud the way she sweated and grunted through labor, so quiet after that first holler she’d surprised Arch the next morning, sitting by the fire with a squalling little bundle.

  She was lucky Docie came in a few hours, healthy and about to bust a lung with her wailing once she woke to cry for mother’s milk.

  Lizzie did her best to feed her, ignorant as she was—and with a ma less interested in her granddaughter than her daughter. Docie did the rest, her little mouth grabbing Lizzie’s teat even as they slept off the birth.

  The wagon rolled up to the Territory and it was hot as damnation on the plains, with Lizzie’s lips so parched she feared her baby wouldn’t survive. But Docie had proved to be the stronger of the two, determined to make her own way even when it wasn’t strictly wise.

  Lizzie had named her after a lady who gave her advice about birthing. Her wagon had trailed theirs until a broken wheel took them out while Arch repaired it. She and Lizzie walked a bit, near enough to feel safe from the Injuns, but distant enough for quiet talks. Her name was the prettiest Lizzie had ever heard, and she asked her to spell it out on an old bill of sale. Theodocia. But that was an awfully big name for a tiny baby whose mother couldn’t write the letters. Her husband called her Docia. Lizzie had thought it would do fine for her scrap of baby girl. And May seemed pretty for a middle name.

  Docia May Bates.

  At least Willis gave her a last name.

  They made it to the land office to register in good time. While they waited, Lizzie’s folks dropped her at her youngest stepbrother’s place, which he’d won in the earlier run—probably by cheating, though he’d generally treated Lizzie better than the rest.

  Ma and Arch lost out on the lottery but didn’t claim Lizzie on their way back to Texas. Her stepbrother’s wife seemed to think she was some kind of threat. They’d be stuck with two extra mouths to feed. Maybe he’d told her how his brother and father had done her when she was younger, and she thought Lizzie had brought it on herself too. Or maybe she’d wanted to keep her husband from Lizzie’s wickedness. Either way, she couldn’t be shut of Lizzie fast enough.

  So they put her out.

  Lizzie and Docie wandered, staying first with a widow lady who said Lizzie could help her for their keep. But Lizzie was slow on her feet, with a baby to suckle. The woman didn’t seem sorry to send them on. Before, Lizzie had always been in the company of family or acquaintances. She’d always had a place to lay her head, at least. Now she had a baby to shelter too. Her desperation that first night was new.

  She found a deserted sawmill and thought to hide with her baby until sunup. But a man surprised them inside. He said he’d get a room in town in exchange for something to warm him.

  Lizzie didn’t blink, though it was the first time after Docie’s birth, and she was not quite healed. He paid no mind—and said he’d keep them longer too. She could do for the baby during the day and keep him company by night. Docie rarely fussed, snug in a nest of rags in the little trunk Lizzie carried. As long as it wasn’t too often, she could rise from the pallet where she slept with the man and see to her.

  Joe wanted to go west. He left his wagon in town and they rode his horse to an Injun settlement. They stayed going on five months, through the worst of winter, warm and fed. The squaws welcomed Lizzie and the baby, teaching her curing and easy beading.

  When they left, they went west to the mountains. They squatted half a year in an abandoned miner’s hut, living on what Joe trapped or shot and what Lizzie grew from seeds from trading skins. Docie was more than a year old by then, and getting into things. Lizzie feared she’d fall down the old mine shaft.

  At harvest time, they returned to the valley to pick cotton. Lizzie carried Docie in a sling on her back. She was seventeen and hunched over like an old woman.

  After the cotton, Joe said they should head home. He came from a town not far from where her ma and Arch always lived, so she went.

  Joe sold the horse for meal and supplies and to pay his brother-in-law to get a team for the wagon. He used Lizzie to pay for their keep in a section camp in the woods, and promised it was just the once. Four or five nights, he held on to Docie while the railroad men kept at Lizzie. Then his brother-in-law returned, and the horses pulled them to East Texas.

  At home, Joe had a wife, a grown daughter, and a son barely older than Docie. The wife was no more surprised to see Lizzie than Lizzie was to see her. With her husband gone most of a year, she likely reckoned he’d been up to something, but Joe promised Lizzie would earn her keep.

  He didn’t sleep with Lizzie right out like he’d done before, but he didn’t hide his nois
e when he came to her. The wife’s corner stayed quiet. Lizzie tried not to be in the way, though Docie played with Joe’s son. Once the wife figured out Docie wasn’t Joe’s, she was inclined to be civil, pretending Lizzie was household help. If she heard Joe’s noise at night, she didn’t say.

  Three months on, Lizzie realized she was expecting again—she’d weaned Docie except for night, when she needed her quiet, but the blood hadn’t come in two months. She kept it secret until it was impossible to ignore the bump, even when she tied her apron high.

  Joe didn’t say anything at first. But one day Lizzie was sweeping, and he said it was past time for them to move along. He gave her a dollar to get to her aunt’s in Longview, not far away.

  That began the true test of Lizzie’s will to keep her babies alive.

  Her aunt kept them a while, until Willis showed up out of nowhere and said he wanted her back. He took her girl, too, though he knew she wasn’t his flesh and blood.

  If Lizzie had stayed with her aunt, things might have been fine. She would have put them up as long as Lizzie pulled her weight. But she trusted that man again. Willis took them to a room over the saloon in Tyler. Her husband said she’d earn their keep by living in sin with the saloonkeeper or anyone he found in the daytime while Willis did odd jobs. He said if she did not do what the saloonkeeper wanted, he’d kill her and Docie too.

  Lizzie believed him after how he roughed her up when he’d had a few drinks.

  Her time came near and the saloonkeeper pushed Willis to pay cash for the room. Willis said he’d take them to her ma. Instead, he took them to a logger camp and told her to live in sin with the workers to get money. For the first time, Lizzie refused, though she feared he’d beat her.

  Instead, he ran off and left them there.

  Lizzie carried Docie, dragging their trunk, until they wandered into a section camp. A man said he’d drive them—if she did what she’d refused to do for her husband earlier. The man was more honorable than most. The next day, he took them to her aunt’s as he’d promised.