Mercy Train

by Rae Meadows

  The once-neat waves of Lilibeth’s pale hair were mussed, her hairpins crookedly replaced behind her ear. Her dress was white linen and lace, muddy at its hem, and when the wind blew, the slender outlines of her arms were visible through its blousy sleeves.

  “He doesn’t know about you yet,” her mother said. “I didn’t want to scare him off. You understand how it is, Vi.”

  Violet understood. There had been a string of men—pawnbrokers, philanthropists, cardsharps, politicians—since they’d arrived in New York City. Lilibeth played up her lilting accent and delicate demeanor, which Violet found confusing at first, and then annoying, and then ignorable. If city people—men especially—wanted to believe she came from a white-columned plantation house, so be it. As her mother spun tales, Violet never let on that Aberdeen—all of Barren County really—was the pits. There was nothing genteel about it: prairies, caves, and sinkholes, rife with muskrats, wild turkeys, and copperheads. Nino said it didn’t matter anyway because everyone in the city was from someplace else, and really he’d rather be from Kentucky than Calabria, so she should feel lucky.

  Violet didn’t like to think about how her mother would have an easier time without her, and she was still willing to believe Lilibeth knew that there was a chance for something more this time. Her mother could have left her in Aberdeen, Violet reminded herself, and she had not.

  As they approached City Hall, the pigeons scattered, abandoning the crumbs of an old roll, which crunched under Violet’s feet. A group of boys, their pants rolled up to the knees, played toss-penny in the adjoining park. She recognized a thief who worked up on Doyers Street, and Buck, a newsboy with two protruding front teeth. He squinted his rodent eyes at her, always peeved that Nino paid her any mind.

  The thief looked up from the game and whistled—Lilibeth usually elicited reactions—and pulled his shirt out in two points. Violet scowled at him, but her mother didn’t notice as she floated along, smiling a little at the twitter of starlings in the bushes.

  The gas lamps were being lit, and the electric lights of the bridge—a blue-white light every hundred feet that made a chain from Manhattan to Brooklyn—blazed against the veil of dusk, their reflections like dots of fire in the windows of the sooty tenements that skirted the bridge’s massive supports.

  They reached Water Street, the twilight bringing on an air of glittery possibility and sin. In an alley, a ring of wool-capped men, dockworkers, yelled and jeered at a cockfight. Violet lingered to glimpse the birds, which danced around each other, landing bloody jabs with their chipped beaks and sharpened claws.

  “Come on, now,” her mother said. “Stop your dawdling. You, child, need a bath.”

  Lilibeth, with the help of Mr. Lewis, had rented a new room in a building near the wharf, a dormered attic with a window and a sink. The ceiling was low but the room was surprisingly airy, and when Violet sat at just the right angle, she could see a tiny triangle of the river flashing in the city lights. She wanted this to be home.

  “I have a job,” Lilibeth said, her hand flitting to her hair. She turned from the pot of water on the stove and smiled at Violet, a girlish, pleased smile.

  “Really?”

  “Some ironing. For the grocer’s wife, you know, Mrs. Baker. With the funny squished face. Maybe you’ll help me with it?”

  Violet nodded, wanting to keep her mother buoyed.

  “I won’t go there anymore. To the Madam’s.” Lilibeth turned away, her eyes glossy.

  The air from the open window was cool and only a little fishy. Violet tapped the pane with her finger, forcing herself not to grab for the hope that threw out a new line whenever her mother was her mother again.

  “You aren’t sorry you came with me, are you, baby girl?” Lilibeth’s face threatened to fold, her eyes water-clear, exposed.

  “No, Mama,” Violet said. And she wasn’t.

  Her mother filled bowl after bowl with cold water from the sink and emptied them into a tin tub on the floor. She wrapped towels around the pot and added the boiling water.

  “I didn’t know they would cut off your pretty hair,” she said, helping Violet pull the dress over her head. “I’m sorry about that.”

  The warm water turned Violet’s skin pink, and her dirt turned the bathwater gray. She closed her eyes as her mother cupped water over her head. She had missed her mother, an instinctual, wordless ache, no matter how she had tried to convince herself otherwise, no matter how much she did not want to need someone whose eyes seemed permanently cast on some distant shore that no one else could see.

  “You look more like your father with your new hair.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “He was handsome,” Lilibeth said. “In his way.”

  When they had married, and it became apparent that Lilibeth could not maintain the cookstove or take care of the chickens or even bake biscuits—“Why should I know those things?” she had said to Violet—Bluford made it known that he felt cheated. Any fondness between them had dried up and blown away like crackled remnants of dead leaves.

  “Do you think he misses us?” Violet asked.

  “I don’t think he does,” her mother said, slowly lathering Violet’s hair. “But we don’t miss him neither, do we?” She giggled. “That stupid way he used to walk, all hunched like, you remember? Like he was afraid frogs were going to start falling from the sky.”

  “How about how he ate a biscuit? Tearing the whole top off with his mouth and chewing so the whole world could see what was going on in there,” Violet said.

  “What about his mother? That ugly woman. Her face all pebbled. Belching at the table.”

  “I hated how he called me girl,” Violet said.

  The bathwater was quickly cooling to tepid. Lilibeth rinsed Violet’s hair and helped her dry herself with a thin towel they had brought from Kentucky. She was calmed by her mother’s touch, soothed by her closeness.

  “You were never his,” Lilibeth said, lying on the bed. “I mean, one look at those ice-blue eyes. You were always mine. You made me a mother. You’re the only one who can ever say that.” She closed her eyes.

  Violet pulled one of her old dresses on over her head. “I’m hungry,” she said.

  “Check the cupboard. I can make you something in a bit.”

  “Are you going out later?” Violet asked.

  “Mr. Smith is taking me to the cabaret. I think it will be quite marvelous.”

  Reginald Smith was a poet with sleepy eyes who wore a frayed pauper’s coat but checked the time with a gold watch. His wealthy uptown family gave him a handsome allowance, which kept him in shabby comfort in a sprawling, rattletrap apartment, where, Violet guessed, her mother often slept. When he wasn’t locked away, wringing out a poem that would surely cause a sensation if only he could get it to the right people—“He writes beautiful things, Vi; they wouldn’t know what to make of him back home”—he would dote on Lilibeth and call her darling, and promenade her around town. Violet had met him once. She’d accompanied them to watch elephants being unloaded from a ship, bound for the circus. He jumped around with twitchy enthusiasm, waving his hands like a magician. When the elephants didn’t appear, he bought Violet a giant pink lollipop and exclaimed she was a picture of innocence and beauty. Lilibeth had switched into her languid southern voice in his presence, much to his delight.

  Violet didn’t much care for him, but she didn’t think he was dangerous. She thought he was foolish, a flimsy paper doll. But Lilibeth grew wan and began to stay away for longer than a night here and there. She was both listless and agitated, sleepy but never sleeping, complaining of headaches and sore hips, disdainful of light. It was Nino who figured it out as they watched Lilibeth duck into the staircase to Madam Tang’s while other fuzzy-eyed customers came out.

  “It’s a dope den,” he said. “They smoke the pipes up there.”

  It shouldn’t have been entirely surprising—Lilibeth had been looking to give herself away ever since they had arrived in the cit
y—but Violet felt like a trapdoor had swung open, pitching her into cold darkness. The world had become newly incomprehensible, opaque and shifty. Lilibeth had taken her out of Aberdeen, but now that they were here, Violet had begun to see that she was too much for her mother, begun to understand that her mother might be better off alone.

  Lilibeth rolled over toward the wall. “You’ll be okay tonight?” she asked.

  Violet nodded, even though she knew her mother couldn’t see her, and rummaged through the odd bowls, jars, and pots. The only thing she could find was an onion with one end gone soft and wet, but then in a coffee tin she found a package of pecans and a roll of dollar bills. Maybe Mr. Lewis was all right after all. She sat for a while, watching the last of the light leave the room, crunching on the sweet meat of the pecans, sipping tea, strong and hot. She felt clean and warm and good. She set her cup in the sink, pulled a dollar from the roll, and replaced the can on the top shelf.

  * * *

  The lanterns were lit, the lights on the bridge switched on, the saloons ablaze. It was night in the Fourth Ward, and Violet sat in the alley behind the Water Street Tavern, a dance hall and saloon, with the boys: Nino, Jimmy—just out of jail—and Charlie, fat-faced and short, who spent his days scooping out rendered fat from giant vats boiling bones and offal. They made Charlie sit down a ways because he smelled like rancid meat.

  “Mikey left on the train,” Nino said, chucking oyster shells.

  Violet took a look at him to see if he was serious. “How do you know?” she asked. “He’ll show up.”

  She reached down to scratch at a scab on her knee; she’d fallen climbing out of the window of the Home.

  “His pops told him he had to go on it. Came at him with a belt. Mikey tried to hide out at the depot, but they must have got him.”

  “Why’d he want Mikey to get on it so bad?” Violet asked.

  “They pay cash money for kids,” Charlie called down.

  “I thought it was preachers who run it,” Violet said.

  Nino shrugged.

  “Well, shit, where do I sign up?” Jimmy said, laughing. “I never said no to free money.”

  “You’re too old,” Nino said.

  “I don’t look a day over fifteen,” Jimmy said, grabbing the jug out of Nino’s hand.

  “Where’s it go anyhow?” Violet asked.

  “West somewheres. Where the farms are,” Nino said.

  Violet pictured the Christmas display she had seen, with kindly animals and baby Jesus in a cozy manger.

  “They make you a slave is what I heard,” Charlie said. “Now pass me that bottle down here.”

  Violet took a swig of the searing rum before handing him the jug. She could not leave her mother, not that her mother would ever let her go anyway.

  The musicians were warming up inside. Violet went around to the front window and positioned herself in front of one of the few uncracked panes, the light inside the bar a smoky golden orange.

  “Twenty cents a dance,” the host called out.

  Twelve girls, their hair decorated with ribbons and flowers, their skirts barely below the knee, milled about on the side of the dance floor until the music struck up, and then they formed two lines, swaying in time. Men in the bar stood and blocked Violet’s view. Now and then she caught a glimpse of the dancers, marching, spinning, and right-about-facing in a quadrille.

  Violet marched in place to the music, even as the fiddler broke two strings. Nino came around the building. He stopped a few feet away from her.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  Violet stopped moving, confused by his tone and his anger shimmering just below the surface.

  “You’re no cherry,” he said, spitting.

  “What’s it to you?” she said, trying to sound angry to cover up the quaver in her voice. Inside, the musicians began a Scottish reel.

  But then Jimmy and Charlie came careening out of the alley, two sailor boys in pursuit.

  “Run!”

  Nino and Violet took off with them, dodging and weaving until they got to the river and collapsed, choking down air and laughing.

  Li, Madam Tang’s errand boy, leaned against a lamppost near them, outside a sailor house.

  “Well, if it isn’t Chinkaroo,” Jimmy said, as Li approached.

  “Don’t you come up there no more,” Li hissed at Violet.

  “I thought you missed me,” Violet said.

  Nino laughed.

  Li wedged himself between two barrels next to them. A big-ended rat trundled by, and Violet tried to hit it with a stone.

  “What’s that smell?” Li asked, covering his nostrils with the tips of his two fingers.

  Nino nodded his head toward Charlie.

  “I don’t even smell anything,” Charlie said. “Hey, Kentucky, do you think I smell?”

  “You reek,” Violet said.

  Warm with rum, she leaned back against a burlap sack and looked up at the ship masts, which shot up and disappeared into the sky. The moon hovered in a sickle. Here she was and she was happy not to be in the Home, happy not to be in Aberdeen. She wished that nothing would change. But if she thought anymore about it she would have to admit that things had already changed. Nino had told her to stop dancing, and she’d felt a shame that was new and ominous. She was a child, a girl, who soon would no longer be one.

  Li jumped up to try to sell his pipe dregs, but the young sailor he’d approached scurried away.

  “Have you tried it?” Violet asked Li when he returned.

  “It’s for fools,” Li said. “That’s what Madam Tang say.”

  “Shut up,” Nino said.

  “What?” Li asked, exasperated.

  “I done it,” Jimmy said. “It’s like tobacco but makes you drunk.”

  “You’re full of shit,” Charlie said.

  Jimmy shrugged and spit.

  Li unfolded a piece of newspaper. Inside were black sticky ashes.

  “Who wants to smoke?” he asked, pulling a small reed pipe from his pockets and waving it in his fingers like a cigar.

  “Atta boy,” Jimmy said, his voice deep. He had slipped past childhood, no longer one of them, no matter how hard he pretended it wasn’t so. Nino had told Violet that Ollie was going to pull Jimmy’s papers; he had aged out of being a newsboy. A scar bisected the back of his hand.

  “I got a dollar,” Violet said. “What should we do with it?”

  “Where’d you get a buck, kid?” Jimmy asked.

  “I stole it from my mother.”

  “That ain’t stealing,” Nino said. “What’d she ever do for you that wasn’t really for herself?”

  A group of white-suited sailors walked by, singing a drunken round of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

  “You boys want magic oriental potion?” Li said to them. He jumped up to make a deal.

  “Don’t get yourself shanghaied, fellas!” Charlie yelled.

  “Woo-hoo!” Jimmy whooped. “Let’s really get drunk.”

  Outside of the Tiger Eye, they saw the police clubbing a man, an Italian Nino recognized from the slaughterhouse. The blows were wet thuds, the man already out. In the shadows, men watched, their eyes hungry and hot. Bloody sludge ran in the grooves between the cobblestones.

  “Come on,” Violet said to the others.

  As they moved in from the water, the carrion scent of the bone boiler grew stronger.

  “Hey, Charlie, it’s starting to smell like you around here,” Jimmy said, kicking over a pile of rotten vegetables outside a shuttered market.

  The Dugan brothers sat on the stoop of their tenement, throwing rocks at passersby.

  “Mother busy in there, Red?” Nino said.

  “Fuck off,” he said. “At least she ain’t as poor as Job’s turkey.”

  They went to Willy’s, where they would get served as long as they sat out back in the alley. Violet had been drunk many nights since arriving in New York, and once even before she’d left Aberdeen. She’d sat in the outhouse with a jell
y jar of her father’s homemade potato brew and choked down the firewater until her face flushed and her limbs felt loosey-goosey, and going back in that house, with its rough plank floor and tilted walls and parched woodsmoke air, which held on to the ghost of the dead baby boy her mother had given birth to, didn’t seem as bad as before.

  The alley was a rubble of passed-out men and garbage. It was late and cold, and Violet shivered.

  “I’m sleeping out tonight. If you’re wandering around,” Nino said to her.

  “She got us a room. I wouldn’t want her to worry,” Violet said, too eagerly, embarrassed by the naked hope in her voice.

  Nino chuckled a little. “Okay,” he said.

  “Hi-ho cheerio, lads and lady,” Jimmy said, clanking their tin cups so hard the rum sluiced over the sides.

  * * *

  Lilibeth did not return to the room that night. Violet lay in the bed that smelled of smoke and flowers and listened to the fighting in the room below, fists on flesh, broken glass, drunken sobs, until the crack of the early morning sun. She wondered what it would be like to know pure quiet, to sleep without the fits and starts of her heart catching, to hear her own breath.

  When she finally sat up, her head throbbed and her tongue felt like sandpaper. The room was marble cold. There were a few chunks of coal in the bin, which she tossed into the stove, struggling to get a flame to catch. Thankfully there was old coffee in the bottom of the kettle. She rooted around for a shawl in Lilibeth’s floral carpetbag, a gift from Bluford before they were married, to take on their honeymoon, a night in a hotel in Lexington that never happened. Sometimes Violet thought Lilibeth left Aberdeen just so she finally had a reason to use her bag.

  In the corner of the room there was a teetering stack of laundry Mrs. Baker had brought over: shirts, trousers, petticoats, and dresses. Violet ran her finger along the brocade trim around the collar of one of the dresses, a velvet ribbon tie at the neck. She held it up to her front and wondered how it would feel to wear it, to feel the skirt swishing about her legs, to feel like someone new. But her fingers fumbled on the complicated buttons and laces, and she got tired from holding up the unbearably heavy dress, her hands shaky with hunger. She draped the dress back on top of the pile. She poured coffee into a chipped little cup—it tasted bitter and burned—and set the iron on the stove.