Mercy Train

by Rae Meadows

  She’d meant this as a compliment, because he was one of those people who got the grants, the jobs, the fellowships he applied for, one of those people who was well liked because of an easygoing exterior that belied the smart and driven man underneath. But her words hung in the air a moment too long and she couldn’t tell if she’d sounded a little bitter. She couldn’t tell if she’d been mean.

  “That’s not true,” he said. If he was stung, he didn’t let on. “I’ll tell you more about it later.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you, too. Hey, Sam?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hate to be a nudge. But.”

  “The teapot.”

  “I need Franklin’s support. He’s already on the fence. I don’t want to give him a reason, you know? He asked me about it last week.”

  She hid her face in her free hand. She had to throw the body, the spout, and the lid, trim a base, pull a handle, assemble the parts, making sure that the piece actually worked, that it poured easily, while still looking graceful and light, with smoothed joints and upward lines and energy. Then the bisque firing, which might bring out cracks and warping, which would mean starting over. All this before figuring out the colors that would best suit the shape, the precise measuring of chemicals and minerals, and applying the glaze. And then another firing. It was an exhausting, teetering climb to imagine, and she couldn’t get quite enough air.

  “When?” was all she could get out.

  “Two weeks.”

  Sam dropped her head against the steering wheel. “Oh, Jack.”

  “You can do it. I know you can. For me.”

  She chucked the phone into the passenger seat and tried to regain her breath. She glanced back at Melanie’s house and started the car, willing herself to drive away from Ella. But she couldn’t bring herself to go home and face her studio. She felt a curious new sensation of being cut loose. The day stretched out in front of her.

  She could do whatever she wanted.

  VIOLET

  Violet skipped, laughing a little as she slipped on the rain-slick cobblestones. The air was heavy with fish and soot, but it was familiar and it was welcome. The sun had just cracked the sky, the morning still cool in the shadow of the Great Bridge. The sky was a spring-water blue. She stopped atop the small hill on Roosevelt Street to watch the masts of the few ships in the East River, black spindles and dirty sails, moving slowly under the bridge’s span. She had never been across to Brooklyn, had never been on the bridge itself for that matter, but she didn’t think she was missing much. Boston, maybe, or California, or some other place she had heard about—that would be different.

  Violet had escaped from the Home before the sun came up, through a window near the laundry, leaving behind two weeks of hourly bells, bread and molasses for breakfast, bread and milk for lunch, soup for supper, and Bible verse recitation with the Presbyterian ladies who came in every evening to help purify the children’s still salvageable souls. She would not miss the coughing, hiccupy cries of the babies, their faces pink and their noses gooey, or their heavy-footed wetnurses—Italian women with thick eyebrows and ample bosoms—who scowled at the children as they trudged to the nurseries. But she was sorry to have missed today’s bath. She was filthy, her fingernails edged in dirt, her head itchy. Upon admittance to the Home, they’d hacked off her long black hair, leaving it short in back with a jagged line of bangs high on her forehead. The attendant, Miss Nickle, had said it made her eyes look bluer and prettier. Violet didn’t see this as any kind of benefit, but she did like that she felt lighter without all that hair. She felt harder to catch.

  It was a rare still moment in the neighborhood, the small space between the exhale of night and the inhale of morning. No clopping hooves of carriage horses, no puttering automobiles, and even the elevated trains were not yet roaring and screeching. The Fourth Ward was an overstuffed slice of the Lower East Side: tenements, docks, boardinghouses, saloons, dance halls, factories, shops, warehouses, a slaughterhouse, a bone boiling plant, a tannery, a coal yard, a mission, a manure dumping ground, and a police station. No grass, no trees, no open space save the cold river. It was a hive of small dark streets that angled and turned in odd directions, and to outsiders it was an iniquitous place to be avoided. But Violet was glad to be back.

  In just her muslin dress and plaid apron from the Home, she was chilled by the breeze along the wharf. The rigging of the harbored ships clanged against the masts as she walked along South Street, passing grubby kids asleep, tucked in among barrels and shipping containers and crates waiting to be loaded. Garbage and ash wagons were lined up to dump their foul freight onto a barge in the river. Violet held her nose in the crook of her arm. At least it wasn’t yet summer, when dysentery hit the tenements worst, when the noisome smells of filth and decay would become unbearable.

  Violet walked up to Water Street and stepped over the gutter stream churning brown. The neighborhood was coming alive: shopkeepers opening up; sailors, fleeced and pilloried, blundering back to their quarters; the box factory night-shift workers stopping for cheap rum; the ragpickers scavenging the heaps of refuse left from the night’s debauchery. Violet looked up to the second floor above the vegetable store, but it was too early for the women in the windows; their services weren’t generally offered before noon.

  Across the street, the two Dugan boys searched the pockets of a drunk slumped outside of a bucket shop called the Tiger Eye. The older one had copper hair and freckles; his little brother had dark hair and olive skin. The others teased them about their mother, calling her a bed warmer or a sailor screwer. But they were just jealous. In the Fourth Ward, having a mother around was a silent, collective longing.

  “What’d you get?” Violet called, as she crossed over to the boys.

  She had learned fast in the city, and she had done her fair share of pocket picking. She liked the surprise of it, the endless possible discoveries. A licorice whip, a deck of cards, a gold nugget—anything could be awaiting quick fingers.

  He held out his palm, dirty in its creases, displaying a nickel and two pennies. Violet tried to grab them, but he snatched his hand away.

  “I’d knock you if you weren’t a girl,” he said.

  Violet teased him with a quick-footed shuffle-ball change, a step she had learned from her mother.

  “You were put in the Home, huh?” he asked.

  “Ran off this morning.”

  “Good thing,” he said. “They might have put you on one of them trains.”

  She’d heard rumors about the trains at the Home, but she didn’t understand why they wanted kids or where they went. She’d seen the Aid Society women in their black coats and fretted brows scurry about, holding the hands of some of the youngest charges, bitty ones she never saw again.

  The younger boy rubbed his runny nose and kicked the drunk’s foot.

  “Let’s go,” his brother said to him, jingling his new coins in his fist.

  “Hey, Red,” Violet said. “Seen Nino?”

  “Nah. I heard some of the newsboys got busted.”

  The barkeep pushed through the swinging doors and dumped a bucket of dishwater into the gutter. When he saw the boys he feinted a lunge.

  “Go on,” he barked, as they scampered away. “You too,” he growled at Violet.

  She stuck out her tongue at him and jumped into the fetid stream, splashing his feet. The water seeped through the soles of her boots, but it was worth it, she decided, for the zing of retaliation.

  As she neared the Mission, she saw Aid Society women milling about in heavy black wool dresses, their stiff bonnets encasing hair that was pulled tightly into puritanical buns. They had baskets of sweets, which they held out for children who made a tentative approach, their desire for candy outweighing their fear of authority.

  “How about you, little sir,” said the oldest of the women, her nose like a small gourd, bending down to a boy with a dirt-streaked face and bare feet. “You want to live w
ith a nice Christian family?”

  He grabbed a handful from the basket and took off down the street.

  Three little girls, no older than five, sat on the curb. One of the women directed a couple of scruffy boys to sit next to them.

  “Train leaves tomorrow! Hot meals. Clean clothes. Need a mother and a father? Don’t be scared, children. Gather round.”

  Two dark-skinned boys were given candies and then told to move along. The women began to sing:

  “There the weary come, who through the daylight

  Pace the town and crave for work in vain:

  There they crouch in cold and rain and hunger,

  Waiting for another day of pain.

  “In slow darkness creeps the dismal river;

  From its depths looks up a sinful rest.

  Many a weary, baffled, hopeless wanderer

  Has it drawn into its treacherous breast!”

  Violet stood behind a lamppost and watched the ragged children collect on the curb, each devouring a lollipop, each looking relieved to be in someone’s charge. The women herded the group down the street to a waiting carriage.

  Violet was thankful she had a mother. She just needed to find her. She took off toward the Mission. She figured her mother would not be there—Lilibeth was never quite desperate enough for God—but she checked anyway.

  Reverend Mackerel, his dark beard grazing his shirt, paced in front of a motley collection of seekers—mostly drunks and sailors this morning—and yelled out his sermon, the same tale he told day after day.

  “If heaven had cost me five dollars, I still would’ve spent it on drink if there was a rum hole within spitting distance. You say you can’t be saved? Jesus took hold of me just like He saved wretches, and don’t you suppose His arm is long enough to reach across nineteen hundred years and get a hold of you?”

  Violet scanned the audience, and then she slunk backward toward the door.

  “You, girl,” Reverend Mackerel said, pointing. His left eye bulged.

  “I was looking for my mama,” she said. “I best keep looking.”

  She quickly ducked back out before he could command her to take a seat.

  Before the Home, Violet and Lilibeth had lived for a month in a rear second-floor room on Frankfort Street. When they moved in, the walls had been freshly whitewashed and the window cleaned, and in those cold tail-end days of winter, it was a welcome relief to be settled. But when it had warmed, the thick black dust from the coal yard and the putrid fumes from the nearby tannery—green hides on drying racks were visible from their window—had meant they had to shut the window and stuff rags around the casing.

  At the entrance to the tenement, Violet stood and took a breath before walking on the plank bridge over the sewer channel. In the courtyard, women pumped water into their washtubs, a naked baby cried, and muddy cats dived at vermin. She pounded on the door to the room where she and her mother had last lived.

  “The longshoreman’s got it now,” a girl said. She was pregnant, her arms like sticks. “I ain’t seen the southern lady for a long time now.”

  Violet held her disappointment in a tight knot in her stomach, trying to keep the fear from springing loose. She had not thought much about what came after getting out, had not considered that she might not find her mother. A girl alone was easy prey. She knew where she needed to go. If her mother had gotten money from one of her boyfriends, she would surely be at Madam Tang’s.

  Back out on the sidewalk, Violet’s stomach gurgled in complaint. She saw a cart on the corner, manned by the one-legged Sicilian who couldn’t chase after her. She ran, picking up speed, and swiped two bananas, knocking other yellow bunches to the ground, and kept on running, dodging big-skirted women and top-hatted men who never saw her or didn’t care enough to respond to the old man’s curses.

  She zigzagged through traffic, making drivers shake their fists, zipping through the crowded streets, running, running, until her breath gave out and she had to stop. She wolfed down her haul and threw the peels into the gutter. The sun burned hot on her newly exposed neck. For a moment she closed her eyes amidst the staccato hooves, the grind of carriage wheels against gravel, the jangle of harnesses, the putt-putt of motor cars, the clang and hiss of the box works, the hum of conversation and transaction, the cries of seagulls, and sank into a cool muddy stillness—her soul, she guessed—as the world spun in dizzying discord around her.

  * * *

  A year before, as the train had clattered northeast through Kentucky and West Virginia, the second-class wooden seats worn hard, the car stale, Violet had watched the trees and the towns, the fields and the farms, her forehead red from leaning against the window. Violet and Lilibeth switched trains in Charlottesville, and from there they headed north, leaving behind the softness of low-lying southern landscapes, and hurtled by cities, tall buildings of brick and limestone, smokestacks, and behemoth steel train stations. Violet sat up tall, excited by the enormous scale of it all, the motion and commotion, the people rushing around with someplace to be. Lilibeth slept, a blank composure in her face.

  “Mama,” Violet said, placing her sweaty palm on her mother’s pale hand as they approached New York.

  “Mmm,” Lilibeth said, shifting and wrinkling her nose.

  “What are we going to do when we get there?”

  “I don’t rightly know,” Lilibeth said, her baby-blond hair rumpled from sleep and travel. “It was always about getting away, wasn’t it?”

  Violet shrugged. She hadn’t known they were leaving until they left, but it wouldn’t do any good to point this out.

  “We’ll be okay, Vi,” Lilibeth said. “Some nice person will direct us where to go.”

  Her mother sat up and stretched her arms overhead like a child. She had never been a planner or a worrier. For most of her life, beauty had allowed her the indulgence of having others take care of things. Her father had owned a creamery and had done quite well, certainly in comparison to most Aberdeen residents, and Lilibeth, the youngest child and only daughter, was adored and adorned, the jewel of the family. But when her father was caught cutting the butter with tallow and yellow textile dye, he had to struggle like everyone else to scratch a living from the fickle earth. Yet Lilibeth never wavered in her sense of entitlement. She felt deserving of refinements, and when she met Bluford White he seemed to agree.

  Violet’s father was a lumber grader, a man with hooded eyes and prematurely white hair—how funny, people used to say, that his name was Bluford White—who was neither kind nor clever and was most of the time sullen and mute. Lilibeth said she had been fooled, as a girl of seventeen, into believing his quiet brooding was evidence of dignity. He was a little older, a man of experience, she’d told Violet—he’d lived for a time in Lexington—a man of taste, surely, who recognized that she was a different breed from the farm girls. He said her ivory skin was a sign of purity, her graceful fingers further evidence of her goodness, and to show his devotion he gave her a white silk sachet embroidered with an owl that he had purchased in a shop in Louisville and a silver-plated swan pin with a pearl chip for an eye. Lilibeth hadn’t considered that these gifts might be extravagances that would cease, or that when they married Bluford would expect her to clean and cook. She had known he worked in the lumber mill, and even that he ate fried squirrel brains with his fingers, but she’d imagined they would move away to a city where he would make it big doing something or another, and she would assume the life she was always meant to have.

  * * *

  That nice person Lilibeth had chosen to approach, once they arrived in New York City and disembarked from the train into the station’s frenzy of travelers, scammers, and beggars, had been Fred Lundy, a man too red-faced and puffy to be handsome, but who retained the imprint of youthful attractiveness. He wore a shabby, dandyish striped suit and ascot, his hair oiled sleek like an otter’s pelt under his bowler, and Lilibeth misread his flamboyance as sophistication. He smoked a cigar, scanning the crowd, as a boy shine
d his shoes.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Lilibeth said, so softly he had to lean forward to hear.

  Violet stood a pace behind her mother with their small suitcase. Though she sensed things at work she did not understand and felt uneasy about the way this greasy man looked at her mother, she was savagely tired. She just wanted to do as her mother told her. She tried to focus on the shoeshine boy, who was about her age, his hands black from polish, his black shoes gray from dust.

  “Why, hello,” Fred Lundy said, looking Lilibeth up and down, appraising her country dress, her southern accent, her refined beauty. “What can I do for you?”

  “My daughter and I have just arrived here in town, and you look like the sort of gentleman who could help us get our bearings.” She set down her bag.

  He laughed a little, glancing quickly at Violet and then back to Lilibeth. He tossed a coin to the boy and stood.

  “You have good instincts, my dear,” Fred Lundy said, picking up Lilibeth’s bag. He didn’t offer to carry the suitcase.

  They ended up on the Bowery where, by the time the carriage delivered them, night had fallen and the street had turned into a circus of lights, music, and crowds, with the bone-shaking screech and rumble of the elevated train overhead. Violet clutched the suitcase and her mother’s hand as the man ushered them into the parlor of a dilapidated rooming house that smelled of mold and oranges. He paid for the night as Violet and her mother sat on the edge of a wooden bench, both of them stunned silent at where they found themselves—the insouciant depravity of the neighborhood, the blatant untidiness of the lobby. Once inside the crummy room, the ceiling mildewed and water-cracked, the bed covers unwashed, Fred Lundy gave Violet five cents and shooed her out to buy candy.

  “Take your time,” he said. “Half an hour at least.”

  He pushed her out before she could catch her mother’s eye. The door locked behind her.

  Violet, just two days out of Kentucky, did not feel frightened because it was all too topsy-turvy to sort through. She walked tentatively into the stream of flowing revelers, moving along, sure she would be stared at, her dress handmade and patched, her hair unbrushed for days. But no one looked at her. She wandered the block, her eyes wide and blurry, the coins damp in her hand. She nearly stumbled over the feet of two boys leaning up against the columns of a theater smoking cigarette butts. When she started to look closely at the darker edges of the street, she saw more kids—scrappy, scratched, dirty kids—laughing, teasing, fighting, stealing. Boys mostly, but a rough-looking girl or two as well.