Far From Home

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  She looked up at the layers of steps she had to climb to be in a dormitory for hours by herself. She stopped to beg. “I only wanted to have fun in the snow.”

  “There are rules to abide by,” the mistress replied in a sharp voice, putting out her hand and pushing Clarissa towards the stairs. She lost her balance, and fell on the floor to the clatter of her braces and crutches.

  “You are letting your stubbornness overcome your sense,” the mistress added, her brown eyes threatening. “I’m going to the kitchen to get a stick. That will knock the Irish sulk out of you.”

  As Clarissa was getting to her feet, she saw the mistress coming back with the rod. Old Keziah can beat the black man out of me. I’m not going upstairs and I’m not alI Irish, she thought angrily. Missus Frances told me I have French blood from my mother’s side, mixed with the English and Irish blood from my father.

  Miss Elizabeth held the stick and frowned at Clarissa. “I won’t let you go to the next birthday party if you don’t get up the stairs now.”

  The next birthday party would be for her and Peter in January. Last year, when she had untied the parcel holding her mother’s birthday gift, she’d found a tiny slide projector with built-in slides of children and animals. She took the projector out of her treasure bag only when she was alone, for fear someone would take it. One day she left it on the bed; when she came back to the dormitory, it had disappeared. The other girls denied seeing it.

  Clarissa started up the stairs, passing the lantern that stayed lit in the hall at night, and went into the dark room, wishing for a piece of hard tack. She got ready for bed, and slid under the warm counterpane. She soon drifted past her hunger into a sound sleep.

  She awoke startled. For a moment she thought she was back at the hospital and rats were gnawing on the walls. It was only the other girls munching on hard tack. Every second suppertime, Ilish brought out a pan holding cakes of hard tack halved and buttered, ready for the children to take to their dormitories. The sound of the other girls filling their bellies was enough to make Clarissa want to be good, though she often wondered what it was about her that was so bad.

  She was falling back to sleep when a beam of light touched her eyelids. Miss Elizabeth was standing by her bed holding a lamp. “Now Clarissa,” she said, loud enough for the other girls to hear, “be sure to use the lobby before you go to sleep. You know what can happen.”

  It had not happened for a long time and Old Keziah’s words shamed her. Besides, all the water must be drained out of her. She hadn’t had a drink since lunch. She held herself tight as she lay in bed, feeling mortified that the other girls knew she had wet her bed when she was on the lower floor.

  That night she dreamed of a pretty young woman in a white gown, her hair braided around her head. She floated above a wild sea with her hands outstretched. Clarissa reached her hands as far as she could, even her weak left one, hoping to have her small hands clasped in the hands of the woman she knew must be her mother. She strained and strained, but her fingertips could not reach her mother’s. Tears filled the woman’s eyes and spilled down a face that stayed as still as if it were carved out of wood, like the face of the statue of the Blessed Madonna. The tears dripped into the sea and mingled with it. “You have beautiful hands, Mommy,” Clarissa said. But it was as if she had not spoken. Her mother did not answer. Then she drifted away into a black fog.

  In the morning when Clarissa woke up, she fancied she could see herself being lifted into a large boat while her mother cried. She tried to bring the image close, but it stayed veiled – unreal. Something appeared real. A string of beads linked to a tiny cross had hung from her mother’s wrist: the same string of beads she had in her treasure bag. Housemother Simmons had seen Clarissa playing with the beads. She told her: “These are not for playing with; they are beads Catholics say prayers on, prayers to Mary, the Mother of God. Protestants don’t need beads to speak to God.” She raised an eyebrow, her mouth set.

  Clarissa got her treasure bag and poured the beads out into her hand. She tightened her fingers over the cross on her palm for a moment before she put the beads back in the bag. Then she sat pondering her past. She knew there had to be a reason why she was kept at the orphanage. Perhaps Dr. Grenfell knew what it was. Maybe it was his secret. A dark question mark made sickle swipes inside her mind.

  9

  WAITING FOR CHRISTMAS

  “A few more days of the blistering voices of grownups splashing vinegar into the cuts of children’s lives and it will be Christmas.” Clarissa looked up from the pages of Just Looking At You, and the complaint of the book’s forlorn heroine. “That sounds like this orphanage,” she muttered.

  Clarissa loved Christmas, not only because of the gifts, but because it came with a glad spirit that moved through the orphanage, touching even the mistresses and making them laugh.

  The Saturday before Christmas, Clarissa and Cora were on their way to their dormitories when they heard voices coming from the Grenfell shop on the first floor. Clarissa sneaked along the hall slowly, trying to avoid tapping her crutches too loudly on the wooden floor. The door to the shop was open a few inches, and the girls could see barrels of clothes and goods that had been gathered from the kind people of the United States and Canada and shipped to St. Anthony weeks ago. Miss Elizabeth’s and Missus Frances’s heads were down in the barrels; they were busy pulling out tuck-away gifts for the children. “We had better not let them see us, or we’ll get nothing,” Cora cautioned Clarissa. She slid quietly past the door and up the stairs to go to her dormitory. Clarissa followed, her brown eyes alight with the anticipation of a Christmas surprise that would not come from Canada or the United States – or even the North Pole.

  The girls stopped at a window near the stairwell, both of them wrapped in thoughts of Christmas gifts. Outside, in the dusky afternoon, a light shimmered up from the harbour. “’Tis a glim – a reflection the ice throws off on its way to shore,” Clarissa had overheard Uncle Aubrey tell Miss Elizabeth as they stood on the orphanage steps last week. Now the bay lay silent under ice thickened into a seascape, as residents explored the large surface on foot and on sleds pulled by huskies, their cacophony and breath rising in the dry, empty sky.

  Like walking on water, Clarissa thought as she watched Dr. Grenfell running across an area of ice now used as a football field. The dapper-looking doctor often showed up unexpectedly, arriving over the hills on a dogsled, or walking down from his home to tumble with the boys in the snow. He beckoned for the lads, as he called them, to come play football with him. A cap rose in the air and came down on its crown. Peter got to be captain of one team and Jakot of the other. They set up josh posts in the ice and picked their players without arguing, but only because of the doctor’s presence. He always took turns playing with each side, kicking the ball, a pig’s bladder, as vigorously as any of the boys. Afterwards he would always declare, “It was all jolly good fun.” Sometimes the doctor set up obstacle courses on the ice, and included the girls in the game – all the girls except Clarissa.

  She shifted her gaze from the window to look at Cora, but her friend had gone. When Clarissa turned back to the window, she saw her running across the ice. The window was open a crack, and she could hear Cora calling to Ettie and Becky.

  Clarissa took her time getting downstairs. She hauled on her coat and mitts and went outside. She sat on the cold orphanage steps all day, yearning to be able to hit or toss a ball. Peter passed her after the game had finished. He taunted, “You’re deformed!”

  “You’re misinformed,” she shouted at him.

  He looked back at her with a puzzled look. She knew he was wondering if the word misinformed had as terrible a meaning as deformed.

  At the dining room table the next morning, Treffie coughed as if her insides were going to rip open and scatter her heart and everything else around the room. Miss Elizabeth came and stood over her. “Your handkerchief, Trophenia. Put it to your mouth. When you cough like that, your breath can
be dragged into the nostrils of anyone near you. Then they will be coughing it back out like you are doing. We don’t want that, do we?”

  Treffie looked at Miss Elizabeth, her eyes wet and drawn; she didn’t answer.

  “Take your elbows off the table, Trophenia,” the mistress said, tilting her head towards the little girl. Treffie jerked her arms away so quickly her glass tipped over, spilling water over the table. Her shoulders began to shake, and her little hands shot up to cover her face.

  “We allow for accidents,” the mistress said in a voice as hard as a stick, “but in future, Trophenia, don’t act so hastily, and do not have the same accidents, or we will consider them bad habits that need to be broken. Rules,” the mistress added, “are to be enforced. See this wooden ruler?” She held up a heavy, thick stick. “Does it bend? No, it does not. Does it have measurements on it? Most certainly. And that is why punishment for infractions vary.”

  Clarissa sighed, but not loud enough for Old Keziah to hear her. The mistress liked to answer her own questions while the children stared at her, some of them with eyes so round and protruding Miss Elizabeth could almost knock them out of their heads with one swipe of her ruler.

  Most of the children had learned that, although the mistresses were against bending the rules, they didn’t mind bending a ruler on someone’s behind.

  10

  DISAPPOINTMENT AT CHRISTMAS

  The eve of Christmas slipped in through a dark morning and opened up into a crystal-white day. The scent of Christmases past seemed to waft against Clarissa’s nose; the gaiety of the season came like a red candle, its flame a dancing ballerina. She felt her insides liven in the shining hope of Christmas. Even miserable Miss Elizabeth is going to enjoy Christmas; she won’t be able to help herself, Clarissa thought as she made her way to the dining room.

  “Chew, chew, don’t talk.” Today Miss Elizabeth’s voice was gentle as she came into the dining room, where the children’s whispers had burst into chatter. The children looked towards her as her thin lips opened into a smile – a Christmas surprise.

  Later, when the children were dismissed, they scattered into the hall. The mistress’s pleasant look disappeared into a frown at the sight of what she called highjinking conduct by boys wrestling on the floor. She tutted, “You boys are bent on hurling the Christmas spirit out the window.” Afraid that the dreaded words “no lunch and no supper” would fall on their ears, the boys got up and scampered up the stairs.

  Still, Christmas is the best of times, even better than birthdays, because a glad spirit is in so many people at the same time, Clarissa thought as she stood on the orphanage steps after lunch. Everyone’s thoughts are strung together in the hope of getting a Christmas box that will make them forget all the bad things that ever happened to them. She would be able to forget the housemothers and mistresses’ scoldings, the orphans’ taunts, her uncertainty about ever leaving the orphanage, if there was a present from her real family. Her heart somersaulted in anticipation.

  From where she was standing, Clarissa could see the Grenfell Hospital. Against its front walls, on packed snow, harbour dogs lay with their tails curled over their noses. The dogs looked up at the windows, now and then, as if searching for a familiar face and a treat. A guarded look crossed their faces and their ears stood up straight when they heard the squeals of children and the howls of huskies mingling in the afternoon air. They knew what would happen to them if a temperamental husky got loose from its traces.

  Dr. Grenfell had given the orphanage boys a husky dog team. Now Jakot, Peter and other older boys were on their way up Fox Farm Hill to cut a tree and greens to decorate the orphanage. The huskies bristled and lifted their heads, howling like wolves as they pulled the sleds past barking harbour dogs. Jakot, the driver, swung his whip through the air, making it whistle like a strong wind. He bragged that one day he would be as good as his Uncle Joe. The old trapper could whisk the button off a coat, or knock a cigar from someone’s mouth with his fifty-four-foot whip.

  Clarissa moved out by the gates to listen to the shouts of children and the yapping of dogs. Today she felt peace among the noises.

  When the supper bell rang, she followed the rest of the children indoors. She stopped to watch Caleb Rose, who was as meek and as mild a boy as any mistress could want, painting Santa Claus in water colours on the dining room wall. He was finishing the tip of one of Santa’s black boots, about to touch down on a red brick chimney. Clarissa made her way to her seat, feeling a delightful shudder, even though she likened Santa Claus to fairies.

  “Let us say our prayers,” Miss Elizabeth called, watching to see that her charges closed their eyes. The children mouthed Christmas prayers for the coming of the Christ Child, and then ate quickly. The younger children were eager to go to bed and settle down to sleep as fast as they could, so that Christmas morning would come more quickly.

  The mistress clapped her hands and dismissed the children. “Off to bed with you now, you younger boys and girls. Do not make a squeak,” she warned. “You are in bed to sleep and to grow up while you are doing it.”

  “I’ll shove off to bed, I will, too, Miss,” Peter piped up, a mischievous look in his eyes, “if you’ll answer a riddle.”

  “A riddle! Very well, seeing it is Christmas,” Miss Elizabeth answered tolerantly. “A scrap of lenience for levity, if you will be brief.”

  Peter grinned and recited: “Four legs up cold as stone / Two legs down, flesh and bone / The head of the living in the mouth of the dead / Tell me the riddle and I’ll go to bed.”

  Everyone laughed, and one of the orphans shouted, “I know – I know the answer!”

  Peter said, “Whist!” with his finger to the side of his mouth, a habit of Housemother Simmons’s. But Ben, a young boy who had a tight little face, a harelip and dark, sad eyes under blond hair, called out, “A man walking with a bark pot on his head, Miss.”

  Peter looked sullen. “’Tis the mistress I wanted to answer.”

  The mistress’s eyebrows lifted. “Come on with it, then. What is the real answer? A bark pot? What is that?”

  Peter crinkled his nose and replied, “Young Ben gave the answer. A bark pot has four legs and is used to soak fishermen’s sails and nets in tree bark and buds to keep them. And you thinks we’re the ignorant ones. We knows what we knows, and you knows what you knows. I think meself, Miss, that makes us equal.”

  The mistress looked at him as if she wanted to set his eyes afloat in soapy water. Instead, she said in a tight voice, “Off with you now.”

  The young orphans were shooed up to bed. House helpers trailed behind, making sure the children went straight to their own dormitories. They ran off shouting riddles to each other.

  “What grows with its roots up?” called Ben.

  The other orphans chanted, “Conkerbell! Conkerbell! Jack Frost hangs it from the roof. When it hits the ground, it rings.”

  Clarissa stopped to look at Caleb’s painting of Santa. She had never seen a smiling Santa before; this one had a gold tooth, like the one Missus Frances had but rarely showed. Clarissa smiled back at Santa. Then she trailed the other girls, who were just starting up the stairs. Missus Frances called out, “Come into the parlour, Girls.” They all turned towards her, eager to get inside the staff’s living quarters.

  Clarissa had been only as far as the lounge. Now the girls followed Missus Frances through the lounge to a cosy little room. Clarissa once heard the older girls talking about the time Dr. Grenfell had asked them into the room. He sat in a big, green armchair, having a cup of tea from a small teapot that Missus Frances had placed on a little gate-leg table covered in a white lace cloth. He had leaned forward with his cup, and told the girls about his grave ordeal on the ocean. He said he would never forget what happened after he set out with his dog team across a frozen bay to visit a patient. The wind changed, setting him adrift on a small pan of ice with his dogs; he had to sacrifice three of them to save himself and the other dogs. Clarissa’s stom
ach turned over at the thought that if Dr. Grenfell had died, she would not have had a doctor to help her walk – even with the help of crutches.

  “Your mind, Clarissa, where has it taken off to now?” the mistress asked.

  “It’s right here inside my head,” she answered and sat down quickly.

  When the girls were seated, the mistress began to read the younger orphans’ letters to Santa. Clarissa listened to their dreams: a new pair of boots, a doll, a wind-up truck, a cat . . . their own mothers and fathers.

  “We can try to make your dreams come true, except for wishes to have parents and live animals,” the mistress told them. She added, with a twist to her lips, “A cat would not last too long around here with all the dogs.” She took pencils from a metal cup on the mantel and pulled sheets of paper from the tablet she held in her hands, passing one to each girl. “Here, write your wishes.”

  Clarissa looked at her and said softly, “My wish is to go home – and I’ll go someday.” Her words tightened over the promise to herself, her body trembling with anticipation. The mistress lifted her eyebrows. “You seem contented here.”

  “That’s because my mind doesn’t put everything I think on my tongue,” Clarissa answered.

  “I dare say ’tis many a sigh you’ll make before that day,” Celetta said with a satisfied look on her face.

  “I will go home,” Clarissa answered in a stubborn voice, “and I will get well and have two good legs and strong arms and no more pain in my limbs.” She lowered her head, and bit her lip to keep the tears inside.

  Imogene rolled her eyes. The other girls pretended not to have heard as they wrote their wishes in front of the hearth where fire leaped and danced above wood crackling in the large grate. A flanker popped out on the stone shelf and Cora exclaimed, “Strangers are coming!”