Mercy Train

by Rae Meadows

  “Samuel? What is this?” Annie asked. She pulled her dress over her knees and rocked her feet against the floor.

  “I don’t know, Ann. I don’t hear any hail, though,” Samuel said. “I suppose that’s a good sign.”

  Annie stood and straightened the canned beets, parsnips, and beans, the dugout now their makeshift storehouse. When had he stopped calling her Annie? They had become more formal with each other, more careful. She could feel herself retreating. Today, though, standing next to him when she’d seen the clouds and, thinking they held rain, felt the tightness in her jaw ease, she had imagined again a carpet of wildflowers, trumpet vines, and pale green buffalo grass all around them, and she’d felt an old tenderness swelling. You and me and this family, she had wanted to say. She had offered her silent hand instead.

  “Seems to have passed,” Samuel said. “I don’t hear much.”

  “How could there be no rain with clouds like that?” Fred thought. He was disappointed. There would be no bicycle.

  SAMUEL DISLODGED THE old door with his shoulder and climbed out into the light. The sun was out again, that much they could see. A moment later Birdie and her mother followed through the door, Fred trailing behind.

  “Dust,” Samuel said, as if they couldn’t see for themselves.

  The world was buried under it: the garden, the window ledges, the wheat. Birdie wiped her hand across her face, trailing a mix of sweat and grit. The wind blew the fine sand over her shoes. She could feel it in her eyes and in her throat. Her father looked dolefully out at his buried fields, but he seemed unable to move, unwilling yet to acknowledge what had befallen his land. Annie trudged straight to the garden.

  “You ever hear of a dust storm before?” Birdie asked.

  “I never did,” Samuel said.

  “Think it’ll make the papers?”

  “I think it will.”

  Birdie wanted to talk to Cy about it, to see how he looked at her. His eyes were the color of an April sky before you started to wish for clouds.

  Fred coughed and hacked up blackened phlegm and spat it into the dirt.

  “Learn some manners,” Birdie said.

  “Pill,” Fred thought, squinting his eyes at her. Bossy pill. Wash your hands, Fred. Fill the trough, Fred, Leave me alone, Fred. The rest of the time she only cared about Cy. He’d seen her slip out of the house last night.

  “Birdie, go check on the cows. Take a rag for their noses. Fred, see to the coop.”

  Fred tripped as he ran off and he narrowly missed the corner of the shed. He liked his sister, too. He could make her laugh. When they were smaller they would run into the fields and spin around to get lost and she would sing “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” until he found her sitting, feet out in front of her, in the tall-as-him wheat.

  Samuel watched Birdie walk away, her hair bleached like straw from the sun, and then started toward the fields to see how much had been destroyed.

  THE PEA SHOOTS were lost, as if trampled by a horse. The pole beans hung limp, flopped over, pulled from the trellis and weighed down with dirt. Annie gently lifted a stalk and brushed the dust off its bruised leaves.

  She refused to read the destruction of the garden as a larger sign. God doesn’t use weather as a weapon, she thought. Even her father would agree on that. But she wasn’t so sure about Samuel. With less to do on the farm, he had more time to pray, more time to listen for the still, small voice. “God is displeased,” he had said when she’d found him staring off from the porch a few days before. There was a time when she would have tried to shake him out of it, but his new searching look, his eyes wild and cast up, kept her from saying anything.

  As she set to work tending to her wounded plants, Annie saw how the years out here had ravaged her hands—her skin creased and dry, her nails thick and short. They were capable hands, though, and she did not begrudge them. On the night she’d first met Samuel, she knew she would choose the soil, the sun, the work, over a steady life as the wife of a minister like her mother.

  “ONE, TWO, THREE, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,” Fred said in his head, counting the leghorns, their white feathers now dirty brown, as they bobbed around. “Where are you, ten?” He counted again, but still came up one short. The birds screeched and pecked at his skinny legs, agitated from the storm, as he scattered the kafir corn.

  He wanted it to be like it was before. When Miss Miller taught his class and he gave her a box of chocolate for Christmas before she left to get married. In the fall he would have sour Miss Peterson and they didn’t have the money to give her anything and she would never leave because no one would ever want to marry her.

  Where was that hen?

  In back of the coop he found her on her side, dust clogging her eyes, panting through an open beak, her wattle limp against the floor. His lip quivered and he balled his fists to stop the tears. “Get up, get up, get up,” he thought. He wiped the hen’s eyes with the hem of his shirt. He loved these birds. He rubbed lard on their combs in the winter so they wouldn’t get frostbite. He kept meticulous counts of their eggs—some 230 apiece last year—on a yellow ledger pad under his bed. Leghorns were a nervous breed, and he knew how to hold them in the crook of his arm to calm them.

  He looked at the ravaged bird and knew there was only one thing for him to do. He put his foot on its body, grasped its small quivering head in his hands, and yanked as hard as he could. The neck gave way with a pop. Fred kneeled down and cradled the creature to his chest like a gift.

  BIRDIE SWEPT THE kitchen floor. Dust had made its way through every crack and window seam, settled on every surface. The counters, the clock, the sink, the table, the telephone. But it felt good to clean up the mess, she was strangely invigorated by the excitement of the day. As she wiped a wet rag across the windowsill, she wondered what it would be like if she and Cy lived someplace like Oregon, where she heard everything was green and blackberries grew in wild thickets.

  Later, when the storms kept coming, she would think back on this day and try to recall the expectation she had felt when the kitchen was clean and she’d sat down with a fork and the mulberry pie.

  She scraped the dust off the crust, and dug in.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  RAE MEADOWS is the author of No One Tells Everything, a Poets & Writers Notable Novel, and Calling Out, which received the 2006 Utah Book Award for fiction and was named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  ALSO BY RAE MEADOWS

  Calling Out

  No One Tells Everything

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  MERCY TRAIN. Copyright © 2011 by Rae Meadows. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Design by Kelly S. Too

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Henry Holt edition as follows:

  Meadows, Rae.

  Mothers and daughters: a novel / Rae Meadows.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-4668-1794-4

  1. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Motherhood—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.E15M67 2011

  813'.6—dc22 2010028956

  Reading Group Gold Selection

  MERCY TRAIN

  by Rae Meadows

  About the Author

  An Interview with Rae Meadows

  On Writing Mercy Train

  An Interview with Rae Meadows and Her Mom, Jane Meadows

  Keep on Reading

  Reading Recommendations

  Reading Group Questions

  For more reading group suggestions,

  visit www.readinggroupgold.com.

  About the Author

  Born in
Brussels, Rae Meadows grew up in Cleveland and San Diego before attending Stanford University as an art history major. After years in unsatisfying advertising jobs in San Francisco, she wrote her first story, which led to local workshops and eventually the MFA program at The University of Utah.

  While in Salt Lake City, she answered phones at an escort service, the experience of which inspired her first novel. Calling Out received the 2006 Utah Book Award for fiction and was named an Entertainment Weekly Must-Read, a Book Sense Notable Novel, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and one of the Best Books of 2006 by the Chicago Tribune. Meadows was also named one of five Poets & Writers Debut Writers to Watch. Her second novel, No One Tells Everything, was named a Notable Novel by Poets & Writers, and it was awarded Honorable Mention in the 2008 Anne Powers Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared in various literary magazines.

  She lives with her husband and two daughters in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  “‘No More donuts…. Basically, it means get to work.”

  An Interview with Rae Meadows:

  Q: What is the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?

  A: No More donuts. My first writing teacher, Lewis Buzbee, gave me a pencil printed with that advice. Basically, it means get to work.

  Q: What is the question most commonly asked by your readers? What is the answer?

  A: Were you an escort? No! (Meadows’s first novel, Calling Out, featured a character who worked at an escort service.)

  Q: What are some books that have been important to you as a writer?

  A: Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson

  As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

  The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway

  Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

  Beloved, by Toni Morrison

  Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson

  To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf

  Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan

  In the Lake of the Woods, by Tim O’Brien

  The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles

  Q: What are your hobbies and outside interests?

  A: My main interest is pottery. I have my wheel in the basement. Since becoming a mother, I have not been able to devote much time to it, but working with clay will be a lifelong pursuit.

  Q: What is your favorite quote?

  A: From a fortune cookie: All things have beauty, but not everyone sees it.

  Q: What was your inspiration for Mercy Train?

  A: I wanted to write a novel from three perspectives, and when I learned of the orphan trains, I knew immediately that one of the characters would be eleven-year-old Violet. At the time I thought I would write the whole novel as historical fiction, but then I became a mother and everything changed. Motherhood became the lens, and the multigenerational story fell into place.

  “The subject of my fiction often seems to emerge from a serendipitous collision of ideas.”

  Q: How did your own entry into motherhood affect your novel and your characters?

  A: It was huge. This idea of displacement that motherhood brings was certainly something I experienced. You engage with the world one way and then all of a sudden you make a dramatic shift to focusing on the well-being of your child. I wasn’t sure where the writer part of me fit in anymore. The three characters in the novel deal with their recalibrations of self in their own ways.

  Q: Tell us about your stylistic choice to weave the three story lines together moving in and out through time and perspective.

  A: Memory is rarely linear. A smell can take you back thirty years in an instant. I wanted the juxtaposition of perspectives and time periods to have a kaleidoscopic effect, particularly since memory is such a big part of the novel. I wanted to show how the stories of Violet, Iris, and Sam are inextricably interconnected. I also liked the challenge that interweaving these stories posed to me as a writer. I had to make sure the jumping around worked thematically and rhythmically, and didn’t leave a reader feeling lost.

  On Writing Mercy Train

  The subject of my fiction often seems to emerge from a serendipitous collision of ideas. For Mercy Train, I began wanting to write about my grandfather. He was the youngest of eight children, born into rural poverty in Barren County, Kentucky. When he was three, his family moved north to Illinois so his father could take a job in a lumber mill. I planned a sweeping story about family history and migration, imagining my great-grandparents at the turn of the twentieth century, packing a wagon, seeking more for their children than they could eke out from their small parcel of Kentucky land.

  Then my mom happened to ask me if I’d ever heard of the orphan trains. I hadn’t, and I was immediately enthralled. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, under the direction of The Children’s Aid Society, orphaned, delinquent, and poor children from New York City were shipped out on trains in the hopes they would be adopted by Christian farm families in the Midwest—without anything set up in advance or any screening of potential adopters. Whoever showed up at the makeshift viewings could simply take home a child, as if picking up a sack of cornmeal from the mercantile.

  I was shocked I’d never heard of this fascinating piece of American history. But the orphan trains were no secret; there has been plenty written about them, mainly devoted to personal accounts of orphan train riders. Most of what I read on the subject was folksy and sentimental. It wasn’t until I turned to the history of child welfare that the underside of the Orphan Train Movement became apparent: there was no protest or regulation of the trains because they were effectively draining New York City of a poor, useless class, delivering these children to labor-starved areas where they could be put to work for very little or for free.

  I started to envision a novel about two disparate characters brought together by one of the trains. One would be a girl who leaves Kentucky with her mother and ends up in New York City’s dismal Fourth Ward. The other would be an ex–Civil War doctor who runs the Wisconsin Insane Asylum, allowing me to delve into the history of Madison, where I’d lived for the past five years. I spent hours poring over photographs and asylum records at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and I read everything I could about the orphan trains and New York City in the last years of the nineteenth century. I was ready to write.

  “Mercy Train…is a manifestation, I hope, of the writer I have become.”

  And then I had a baby.

  Motherhood turned my life on its head and made me question myself in a way that was scary and new. The first year was a time of euphoric highs and soul-doubting lows, and as the months slid by, I feared I would never want to write again.

  When my daughter was a year old, I finally sat down with all my old notes and creaked out some pages. But I was a different woman than I’d been before becoming a mother, in the obvious ways, of course, but also in subtle shifts of perception, longing, and contentedness. And I was a different writer, too. When I wrote about the doctor, it felt clunky and studied, dark and gothic in a way that no longer felt right. What I wanted to write about—what I now felt compelled to write about—was motherhood. Admitting this allowed the novel to take shape. Springing from the original inspiration of my grandfather’s life, it became an exploration of mothers and daughters through three generations, anchored by the story and legacy of a scrappy girl named Violet who boards an orphan train in 1900.

  Mercy Train melds my family history, the orphan trains, and the experience of becoming a mother. It is a manifestation, I hope, of the writer I have become.

  An Interview with Rae Meadows and Her Mom, Jane Meadows

  Q: Jane, after reading Rae’s novel, do you feel like you have a different sense of the complexity of the relationship between the two of you? Rae, did you think differently of your relationship with your mother after you had spent so much time with Iris, Sam, and Violet?

  J: I have always thought my relationship with Rae was pretty straightforward. However, it occurred to me at one point while reading Mercy Train that si
nce Rae’s characters had complicated relationships with their mothers, that perhaps complexity had been part of our relationship, at least for her, and that I had been unaware of its presence. The self-reprimand soon followed that if indeed this was a factor, then I should have caught it and tapped into it.

  R: My mom and I have had a remarkably unfraught relationship, but I did think about her often while I was writing this book. She has lived so much life—she’s beautiful and amazing at eighty-one—and I think in pondering questions for the characters, it made me wonder what it would be like to see my mom as a young single woman or newly married or a first-time mother. This past Christmas she mentioned that she once had dated a professional hockey player named Moose, and I was reminded of how even though I have heard a lot of stories about her life, there is an endless supply of things I don’t know.

  Q: Do you think (as Iris mentions) that having children is a way to try and understand one’s own mother? Jane, did you learn a lot about your mother when you had children? Rae, did you?

  J: Perhaps many might find this to be helpful, but personally I never sought to better understand my mother. I didn’t need to. She was an honest, loving, demonstrative being whom I loved and trusted.

  “I feel like I have learned so much about my mom since becoming a mother.”

  R: Although for me it wasn’t a conscious thing, I feel like I have learned so much about my mom since becoming a mother. That intense, unfailing love mixed with worry that she exuded is something I know now on a gut level. My mom had breast cancer when her daughters were eight, five, and three, and I don’t think I fully understood what strength and courage this required until I became a mother and tried to imagine myself in the same position.