Far From Home

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  “You were beaten at home?” Clarissa’s words came out all crusty. She cleared her throat.

  “I got the stick if I didn’t mind me farder.” The little girl’s pale face looked pinched, her eyes bruised blue.

  Cora looked at Treffie. She spoke low and sad. “My father never beat me. The spring ice took him when I was seven. Momma was standing at the coal stove with a black frying pan in her hand. There were pork cracknels in it, hot and popping; she was looking through the window for Pappa to come home with some fish to fry. That first night he was gone I imagined him floating under the ice into the mouth of a whale; the whale would swish him around a bit and then spew him like the whale spewed Jonah in the Bible story. Uncle Sims and my cousin Jim found him the next day tangled in a fish net with ose eggs and starfish. They brought him into our house wrapped in brin. Then they made a box and laid him down in it, with his face covered in a white shroud. Uncle Sims let me touch his hand; it was as cold as a fish. People said they were staying up all night to wake Pappa. I went to bed thinking he would be awake in the morning. When daylight showed, I ran out to touch his hand. It was still key-cold, and I let out a scream that frightened meself. I never paid any attention to people talking about waking the dead after that. ’Twas all a lie. Pappa had sold the fish he had caught the summer before to pay the merchant, thinking to get more fish in the spring. We’d have starved if Dr. Grenfell hadn’t come and taken us to the orphanage.”

  “You can manage here,” Clarissa told Treffie. “You can run and play games like hide-and-seek.” She noticed a string of buttons on fish twine around the girl’s arm. “You can play button-the-button and always have the button.” She laughed.

  “They might come in handy here if you lose a button off yer clothes,” Cora said.

  Treffie stiffened. “I’m keeping ’em,” she said firmly. “Dey’s me memory buttons. Before me family died, dey put a memory in every button, and when I touch ’em, good memories come.” She fingered a large one. “Dis big dodger belonged to me farder’s overcoat. He would hold me against his coat, and I would feel warm even if it wus cold.” Her finger moved to a small, delicate button. “Dis sparkly one come from me little sister Sarah’s dress; she died of the fever.” Treffie’s eyes clouded with loss. “Dis pearl button wus from me mudder’s favourite dress. Me buttons reminds me I wasn’t always an orphan.”

  “I’m not a real orphan,” Clarissa said with a lift of her chin, “even if Dr. Grenfell made me one by bringing me here and leaving me. I have parents and sisters and brothers beyond the waters.” She looked at Cora. “And you’re only half an orphan. You got your mother, your sister Suzy and your brother Owen.”

  Cora nodded, and the girls sat together staring ahead as if they were thinking things too deep to lift in words from dark places inside them. No one spoke for a long time.

  6

  A MORNING FRIGHT

  Clarissa surfaced from sleep with a jerk, not sure if it was the morning bell or the elephant that woke her. She had been rushing to close the dormitory window against a creature that was big enough to crush the orphanage. She smiled in relief. The elephant chasing the orphanage as it rolled down over a hill on cartwheels wasn’t real.

  The senseless dream flew out of her mind and a shudder slid down her curved spine. She had wet her bed, something she hadn’t done in a long time. Narah and Alice, whose beds were next to hers, used to spy on her. They would wait until they thought she was asleep. Then they would reach their hands under her bedclothes. In the morning they would rush off and tattle to the mistress that she had peed. Clarissa could see the glint in their eyes when the mistress pulled her nightclothes back and whipped her wide awake with a doubled rope.

  Now her long fingers came away from a warm, moist spot beneath her. She stared ahead, motionless, alarmed that any movement would waft a scent through the cold air, and the tattlers’ senses would stir to it.

  “You must try harder, Clarissa. Pull your muscles tight down below.” That’s what Miss Elizabeth said to her time after time, standing there with the rope slapper dangling on her arm. She had stared back at the mistress, feeling the after-burn of the rope on her bottom, angry that the woman had added red marks to the white scar Dr. Grenfell’s knife had left on her hip.

  She had strained to pull her in-between place up inside her like a stopper on a hot water bottle, wanting to pull tight enough to hurt it for betraying her. She had promised herself over and over that she would never wet the bed again, but when her mind went to sleep, it seemed that her body forgot the promise, and she would awake to the feel of wetness and a dread creeping through her whole body.

  Now she waited for the morning bell to clang, and for the other girls to finish in the bath and toilet room. When they had gone down to breakfast and there was silence, she slid out of bed. She gasped at the sight of red stains on her nightclothes, and a red dribble down her lame leg. Her insides were leaking out from her in-between place. “I’m dying,” she told her wide-eyed face in the mirror. “I will probably be gone before Cora and Treffie, and the children in the infirmary who have consumption.” Her eyes stared back at her like dark pools she could drown in. “I’ll probably go to the Protestant side of Heaven and my parents won’t ever find me.”

  She hurried to wash herself with thick, brown toilet paper, thinking she would come back after breakfast and wash out the stains on the sheets – if she didn’t die first. There was a mesmerizing stillness inside her head as she folded a brown handkerchief and put it in the crotch of her flannelette drawers.

  She made her way as fast as she could downstairs before the mistresses had a chance to send her back to her room for being late. The bully boys and the busy noshers would all be sorry when she died. They would write poems about her and think of her with a measure of charity. If she could do it, they would hear her crutches thumping through the hall at night as payment for all the mean things they had said and done to her. Her ghost would knock them over the head with the crutches and they would sit up in bed sniffling. Cora and Treffie were the only children she wouldn’t scare.

  When she passed the office after breakfast, Missus Frances was standing in the doorway looking in her direction. She crooked a finger, the signal for Clarissa to follow her inside. “If I’m going to die, let it be now,” Clarissa prayed, looking up as she made her way to a chair. She sat down and faced Missus Frances across the desk.

  “Clarissa,” the mistress began, giving her a serious look, “Housemother Simmons reports that when she went to change the beds in your dormitory, your sheets were stained.”

  Clarissa looked back at the mistress. Then she let her eyelids drop to hide the guilt she felt. She had hugged her insides in and had stopped picking piss-a-beds after she’d heard they made children wet their beds, and now something even more horrible had happened to her. The red dwarf she had read about in a library book The Norseman’s Tale must have put a curse on her. It was likely his box she and Cora had discovered on Tea House Hill.

  “You might not understand this now,” the mistress said, “but you have two places inside your body that hold eggs.”

  “Eggs!” Clarissa’s eyes widened. Her chin shot up. “Like a hen!” She swallowed, wondering how many eggs were sitting inside her, and why none of them had broken before – considering all the times she had fallen down. She’d have to be careful from now on, so they wouldn’t burst again and run out of her, yellow and snotty-white – or bloody.

  “What happens to the shells?” Clarissa asked in an uncomfortable voice.

  “We are speaking of humans now, not hens,” Missus Frances said sternly. A pink flush moved up the mistress’s face. “Every month from now on, the eggs will break and there will be blood for a few days. When you get married, the eggs left inside you will turn into babies.” The mistress pushed back her chair and stood up, instructing Clarissa to stay put until she came back.

  Clarissa waited on the large wooden chair, her arms tight against her body. “I will
never be the same again,” she murmured. “Something much worse than wetting the bed has happened, something worse than dying.” But then she began to think about it. If this had happened to her, it must have happened to the prim and proper Missus Frances. And it would happen to the other girls in her room. What a surprise they were going to get; she could hardly wait. She felt a laugh bubble up. Her lips were ready to burst apart in a wide smile when she saw Missus Frances coming back. She was holding out white flannelette napkins. “You are to pin these inside your bloomers, and change them as often as is necessary. Make sure you wash yourself down there after every change,” she said in a tight voice. “You will find clean undergarments on your bed.” She placed some silver pins in the pocket of Clarissa’s gimp. “Now you will move up to the next floor to be with the other girls who are growing into women.”

  “Oh no!” Clarissa cried in dismay. “Another set of stairs to climb.”

  “Exercise,” said Missus Frances, “is always good for the limbs. Ilish will bring you your belongings later.”

  Clarissa knew Cora would be a true friend and bring up her treasure bag of secret things which was hidden under the mattress in her old room. She especially wanted her blue handkerchief and the piece of bark with her wish to go home written in it.

  “If you have stomach cramps, rest until lunchtime,” the mistress called after her. “After all, it’s Saturday. The other girls can do your dusting.”

  Clarissa now had another iron railing to totter against, or lean on for a rest before she got to her room. She thought about Missus Frances’s strange words as she struggled up the layers of steps, up past her floor – away from Cora. She felt as tipsy as a lamb must feel after feeding on gowithy bushes. She hadn’t known there were eggs inside her, and the mistress didn’t explain about the shells. Were the broken ones scraping her insides – causing the tearing feeling in her belly?

  By the time Clarissa got to the dormitory, Ilish had finished making her bed by the window. The young helper gave Clarissa a sympathetic smile as she left the room.

  Clarissa fell across the bed and lay there holding her crutches and the napkins. She wondered what would happen to her other eggs if she never got married. Would they keep breaking and dropping out of her until they were all gone? Esther, who lived in the shack down the road, was pooked out and set to have a baby all on her own without marrying anyone.

  Clarissa stayed in the dormitory until the supper bell rang. When she went down to supper, no one acted as if they knew something strange had happened to her. She breathed a sigh of relief. All kinds of questions about her body piled on top of each other until she felt as if her head would burst and scatter them. She imagined black letters floating in the air, and Peter grabbing them and putting them together in words she could never speak aloud. She was relieved when supper was over and she could start back upstairs. She wanted to tell Cora that Missus Frances had moved her upstairs with Imogene, but Cora had stopped to talk with Ettie. Besides, she wouldn’t be able to give her the reason. Not yet. They never discussed the things about their bodies that made them girls.

  Clarissa got ready for bed, pulling a fresh nightdress over her head. She was smoothing it down around her when she felt a bump. Her nipple was like a raspberry bud above skin that looked swollen – as if a bee had stung her. The other side hadn’t changed.

  That night the older girls came into the room whispering. They were not even polite to her; they talked among themselves as if she weren’t there. They were still whispering as they got ready for bed and snuggled under the sheets. Maybe they believe my brain is not as clever as theirs, she thought. But I’m quick enough to notice they’re growing bumps like mine, only a little bigger – and on both sides.

  The next morning Clarissa woke up to dust dancing in sunbeams that fell in a slant over her head from the high window. She felt better, almost happy, until a black spot on the white wall started to move. She let out a scream, her eyes fixed on a black spider.

  Celetta, the girl who had moved from Clarissa’s dormitory the year before, was in the bed next to hers. Her head shot up off her pillow and she glared at Clarissa. “Fraidy-cat.”

  Imogene, in the next bed, simpered, “Oh it’s so b-i-i-g. Knock it over the head with your crutch, why don’t you?” Becky, a quiet girl with thin, black hair and freckles the boys called cow dabs, looked at Clarissa without saying a word.

  “Devilskins,” Clarissa called back, sure that they didn’t want her in the room with them because she was a cripple. She would show them. Her body was curving more and more like theirs, and she was growing breasts like them, even if it was one at a time. She drew in a deep breath and thought: Maybe this is the year I will grow out of being crippled.

  7

  SCHOOL AND A FEARED

  ENCOUNTER

  Clarissa’s clean change of blouse and gimp lay on the foot of her bed as it did every Monday morning. She leaned against the basin in the bath and toilet room, brushing her teeth and washing her face and hands, careful to clean the sleep crusting the corner of her eyes for fear the mistresses would notice. Then she sat on her trunk and stripped off her nightdress, glad that Georgia had been around to close the window and turn on the radiator heat. Still, she shuddered as she pulled on her clothes. The other girls had dressed and pushed their feet into their boots almost in a blink. It took Clarissa a long time to clip her braces and buckle her gaiters. She wished she could wear Beanie boots like the other children, who were nicknamed Beanies by the harbour children.

  “Prune feet,” the orphans retorted, remembering how wet and prune-like their feet became in mild weather, before rubber bottoms were attached to their sealskin leggings.

  Once breakfast was over, the children hurried to their wooden lockers. They lifted the covers and pulled out their outdoor clothes. Now that the weather had turned cold, the children wore waist-length canvas dickeys over their regular jackets. Clarissa felt warm and cosy inside her hooded dickey, trimmed with a white and red binding. She hauled on her double woollen mitts and then her sealskin overcuffs. The snow that had fallen while she and Cora were coming from Tea House Hill had disappeared like ice cream on a warm tongue. Still, it was cold outside.

  Clarissa walked to school alone, except during the winter months when she was dragged on a sled. The other children, including Cora, went running to play lallick before the school bell rang. It took Clarissa a while to hobble down the steps of the orphanage, out through the gates, and past the hospital. Then she had a steep hill to go down. At the top of the hill was St. Anthony Inn, where summer volunteers from away stayed while they worked for Dr. Grenfell on odd jobs around the hospital. Clarissa dragged her body past The United Church of Christ, and then beyond the graveyard. She turned in to the two-room schoolhouse: one room for the little children and one for the older ones. It was the last building on the point, high above the sea. Most of the children could read the large, white scripture sign on the Grenfell Mission School: “And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord: and great shall be the peace of thy children.” Isaiah 54:13.

  There were six steps for Clarissa’s crutches to swing her over before she got inside the school. Miss Ellis, a tall woman who looked as limbed-out as an old tree with only a couple of shaky branches left on it, was out on the step shaking a wooden-handled brass bell as if she were ringing away a minute with each shake. Clarissa tried to hurry for fear she would have to go stand in the corner if the bell stopped before she reached the steps. She was relieved that they weren’t slippery enough to make her late. The school ma’am’s hand fell to her side just as Clarissa got to the door.

  Inside the school, Billy, a harbour boy, was waddling ahead of Clarissa, legs bent, knees touching. His greasy black hair fell down both sides of his face like tattered fringes on a blanket. Clarissa cringed as the boy went past the school ma’am’s desk, hard knobs dropping out the legs of his pants and hitting the wooden floor. The pupils pretended not to notice except for Jakot, nicknamed Jake,
The Great Big Snake, who sniggered. Miss Ellis ordered him to shovel up Billy’s mess and throw it into the stove. Jakot lifted the shovel from the coal scuttle with a look of disgust at the boy he called a knee-knocked, stinking buck. Clarissa felt sorry for the boy who couldn’t help dropping his poo or letting pee pool under his feet in front of people. But she didn’t want to be his friend – didn’t ever want to sit on the seat he sat on any more than anyone else did. Even Miss Ellis looked at Billy as if he was the only one who ever made a stink or dropped a string of mucus from his nose.

  Clarissa sat with other girls, some her age and some younger, at a long wooden desk. There had been so much for her to learn since she started school when she was nine – so much catching up. It didn’t take her long to learn that the black markings of the alphabet could be named and strung into words, and words shaped into stories. She had discovered that there was no end to what she could do with words when her imagination got hold of them.

  If she hadn’t read it with her own eyes, Clarissa would have scoffed at the story of the earth moving around the sun. It didn’t seem possible that the earth, so big, so still and solid under her crutches, could move so gently under her that she didn’t even notice, and that it was because of this movement that the sun and the moon seemed to pop up in the sky, disappear, and rebound. She liked to lie on the grass in the summer and in the snow in winter watching clouds. Sometimes they moved across the sky like sails on ghostly ships, and then the sails would tear and disappear. The clouds would come back in shapes of animals and angels – in any form Clarissa wanted to imagine. Sometimes she felt that she was moving too, travelling in the sky without her body. One day when there were no clouds, she had imagined the earth turning upside down and landing her in a bright blue bowl of sky she could never climb out of. She had closed her eyes against the frightening thought.