by Jane Steen
She must have sensed my shocked silence, as she looked up and laughed. Catherine Lombardi was a beautiful woman in her mid-thirties, with large hazel eyes, finely arched eyebrows, and a mouth that turned up at the corners as if always ready to smile.
“I thought… my stepfather said that you do not house insane persons,” I said.
“We do not indeed,” replied Mrs. Lombardi, her face becoming serious. “When this Farm was built twenty years ago, it was the common practice to house the insane alongside all the other residents—I believe that is how the tradition of calling our people ‘inmates’ began. That practice was discontinued before the War, and that wing has remained unused ever since, although if we get many more inmates, I will have to reopen it. The padded rooms and restraints are still there; in the spring and fall we check through the wing for evidence of rats or leaks in the roof, so I know it well. It is a depressing place.”
“And yet you still house such different kinds of people together: the feeble-minded, the poor, drunkards and women… well, like me, all in one place. Is that really a good idea?”
I had hit on a subject that was evidently dear to Mrs. Lombardi’s heart. She rose from her desk and joined me near the fire where I was working on a large, plain tablecloth. I had decided to make a simple pulled-thread pattern to embellish the rows of backstitching I was using to make the border more hardwearing, and she bent to admire my work.
“That is truly beautiful, Nell. You have such skill in your fingers. Do you have enough light?”
I assured her that I did, and she sat down to face me.
“I believe that the model we have here is a healthy one. I have observed that friendships will arise between the feeble-minded and those of normal intelligence. Women with better faculties of retention and organization take pleasure in caring for those who are unable to care properly for themselves. It makes us more like a family.” She stretched out her hands to the fire’s warmth and stared at the leaping flames. “Have you started to befriend the women in your room?”
I smiled. “Tess is quite determined to befriend me. Lizzie—poor thing, she must have told me a dozen times about her children who would not make a little corner for her in their homes. And Ada says nothing, but she nods at me, and sometimes I almost think she smiles.”
“And do you find their company unpleasant?”
“Not at all. I have never shared a room in my life, so to be with three other women was strange at first, but we have all shaken down together, and I feel—well, I feel accepted. None of them have asked about—the baby,” I glanced down at my middle.
“And no one will, if I have anything to do with it. You are safe here, Nell.” Mrs. Lombardi patted my arm and rose to return to her desk. I fell silent and went back to my work.
Why did I find Mrs. Lombardi’s promise of safety so reassuring? Did I not crave adventure? But I was seventeen, soon to have a baby, and in some deep, hidden part of me, I was terrified.
NINE
I would not say that life at the Farm was cruel or overly harsh; we were adequately if plainly fed, and cleanliness was a byword among the staff. They also regarded hard work as necessary to a good life, so all except the most incapable were assigned a full day of tasks. Teams of inmates were responsible for washing, clothing, feeding, and reading the Bible to the most senile or imbecile women. Other teams moved through the huge building scrubbing floors, walls, doors, and baseboards so that the House positively shone from the lack of dirt.
Still others worked on butchering, brining, and rendering the huge frozen hog carcasses delivered daily from the cold house. Large flocks of sheep wintered in the barns, and the wool from the previous spring’s shearing still had to be combed and spun, dyed and woven. Smells of animal fats and raw wool wafted constantly about the building and competed with the strong, clean smell of carbolic soap, but the worst of all were the days when the small onions harvested earlier in the year were pickled. Inadvertently breathing in a lungful of the vapors of vinegar and spices could clear out my sinuses like smelling salts. I said so to Mrs. Lombardi, who laughed merrily.
“Be grateful you are not in the Men’s House. They clean the raw fleeces and boil bones to make glue—believe me, the resulting odors are quite impressive. They also manufacture our soap, which is a tedious process.”
“Must these things be accomplished indoors, Mrs. Lombardi?” I asked. “It cannot be good to work in such unwholesome air.”
“These are the tasks that can be put off till winter, Nell. In the warmer months our inmates are constantly busy with lambing and calving, milking, working in the fields, growing and harvesting vegetables… oh, I am so looking forward to spring! Our women are always much happier outdoors, and it is true that it’s much more pleasant to breathe the fresh air than this.”
She wiped tears from her eyes; we had just walked through a hallway redolent of pickling spices. The dimples formed in her cheeks as she watched me and Tess flap our skirts to release the smell of vinegar from them. “Fortunately, most of the vegetables must be preserved in the fall, when we can still open the kitchen windows.”
“And let’s be happy we’re not in the kitchens, Nell,” said Tess. “Imagine peeling onions by the bushel! I do not like the smell of onions. I try not to sit near the onion-peelers at mealtimes.”
We were now in the sewing room, and the large windows revealed that snow was again falling heavily, as it had been since the last week of November. I could hear a party of men whooping and complaining as they cleared a path to the barns so that a team of the more robust women could tend to the livestock while the men cleared out manure and soiled straw.
Between snowstorms the temperature plunged to the bitter cold that caused frostbite and endangered the lives of cattle. Mr. Schoeffel, Mrs. Lombardi’s counterpart in the Men’s House, organized rotating teams of men to spend no more than an hour at a time in the barns and had any that complained of pains in their fingers or feet brought indoors immediately.
I was a privileged worker indeed, thanks to my skill in sewing, which far exceeded that of the other women. When I had finished the cutting out and machine sewing, which were done in the bleak workroom alongside Edie, the other seamstress—a competent worker but sullen and bad-tempered—and Tess, who acted as our assistant, I would take my hand sewing and repairs into Mrs. Lombardi’s office, where the large windows made the most of the feeble winter light. Tess often came with me; Edie was invited but preferred to do her sewing at the smaller of the two workroom tables, grumbling and muttering to herself as she worked.
Tess had formed an almost slavish attachment to me. Seeing that our work produced numerous pieces of scrap fabric that were torn into rags, I instructed her how to cut out regular squares and put them aside to make into handkerchiefs. I also made cardboard templates of smaller squares, diamonds and triangles, and showed Tess how to use them to get every useful scrap out of the waste fabric. When we had enough, I explained to her, we would make a quilt. The excitement that this idea caused Tess seemed quite out of proportion, and I often caught her fingering the bundles of fabric and talking to herself about them.
I also taught Tess how to sew. Her hands were small and stubby but nimble enough, as I could see when she cut the scraps or cleaned up the threads that always seemed to get all over the workroom. So I began by teaching her how to baste pattern pieces together, and then how to make small stitches. She was an apt pupil, and although unable to press seams—she was afraid of the flat iron because it was hot—she soon learned to sew a simple seam neatly, to a standard that was good enough for the everyday shirts and underwear that we constantly had to make to replace those that were past repair.
We passed our evenings in the refectory; after supper, the tables were pushed to the walls or arranged for better socializing. Slowly personalities emerged from the mass of misshapen faces and ungainly bodies, and I began to learn names and understand each woman as a unique individu
al. Many had gregarious, loud personalities, and arguments and tears arose at frequent intervals; but I began to see that they were not serious, more in the way of the arguments of small children who make friends again a few minutes later.
Not all of the women were kind. I was approached by one or two of the other unwed mothers, who for the most part kept to their own small group in the corner of the room. They despised the “idiots” and were scornful of me for keeping company with Tess and her peers. I did not like them; they had bold eyes and sly grins and had been engaged in prostitution before their condition became apparent and they lost their jobs.
One of them, Tilly, a lanky, hard-eyed woman with a mass of pale blond hair, seemed friendlier than the others at first. We talked for a while of life at the Farm, and then she asked me point blank: “How come you’re up the spout and not married? I thought all you classy girls did things the proper way. Married man, was he?”
I didn’t want to answer her, but she kept pestering me until I eventually said no, the man was not married.
“So why won’t he marry you?”
“He doesn’t know I am having his child.”
Tilly’s wide, malicious smile showed teeth that were blotched with brown. “Is he blind, then? Did it with a blind man, did you?”
I could feel my face burning. “He does not live in my town. And I would not tell anyone his name, because I do not want to marry him.”
Tilly twisted round in her chair, shouted, “She doesn’t want to marry him!” to her friends, who responded with howls of laughter. My face grew hot, and I wished I could get away from Tilly, whose slightly rancid smell was starting to impinge on my senses. She noticed that I was shifting my chair backward and scraped hers forward on the boards so that she was even closer to me.
“Know what I think?” she asked, her voice low and her breath, which smelled of decay and onions, in my face. “I think you’re a stupid bitch. You could have made him marry you and have your baby in a nice, pretty home of your own instead of in this shithole.” She grinned as I winced at the term.
“Wouldn’t make you no better than me, though. You’re a whore just like me, ain’t you? And I didn’t have no choice. My so-called stepdad was in my bed when I was ten and put me on the street soon as I had tits. I’ve sent two babbies to the orphanage already.” A hint of sadness crept into her gray eyes, but then she straightened up in her chair and sneered. “You’re worse ’an me, ’cause you chose it.”
She grabbed my arm and squeezed it hard. “Stupid—little—bitch. Bet you’ve always had everything you wanted, and you chose this. You stay away from us, ’cause we’re better ’an you.”
She sauntered back to her laughing friends, leaving a ring of bruises around my arm and an ache in my heart. Yes, I had chosen this, and she, in some ways, had not. Perhaps she was right that I was no better than she.
The only male I saw at the Farm in those winter months was the long, lean man who opened the gate for the brougham when I first arrived. He often worked in the Women’s House, fixing doors, banging on recalcitrant radiators, and filling the oil lamps. He spoke little, often hummed under his breath, and occasionally chuckled quietly over some internal joke. His name, I learned, was Blackie.
He seemed impervious to the women in the House. One day as I cut out a nightshirt in the workroom, I heard Tilly and her friends try to get his attention as he worked on the squeaky hinge on our door. After ten minutes they gave up, threw a few choice insults in his direction, and moved off. Blackie backed into the workroom, his toolbox in his hand, muttered “Little whores,” and then saw me.
“Terrible sorry, Miss,” he said. His voice was low and raspy, with an accent I couldn’t place; not local, certainly. “I wasn’t meaning to cuss in front of you. Forgot you were there, see.”
“I’ll survive, Blackie. I can call you Blackie, can’t I?”
“You certainly can, Miss Nell. I seen you often enough t’know you’re not like them little hussies. You and me is friends.”
“What’s your real name, Blackie?”
He swept off his greasy black hat, revealing bristling iron-gray hair, and ducked his head; I could see his bald spot.
“Oscar Blackthorn at your service, ma’am. Student of human nature.” His eyes roved over the pattern I was cutting. “Begging your pardon, miss, but that’d be for young Donny?”
“Yes, I think that was the name.”
“He growed an inch or two. You’ll want to cut that a bit longer to keep the chill off his ankeels.”
“Really?” I studied the scrap of paper I’d been sent from Mr. Schoeffel. “It says five feet and nine inches here.”
“The orderly who did that’s a lazy b—critter. He don’t measure; he guesses. Five feet eleven that boy is and growin’ fast. You’ll be doing him a service by giving him some growin’ room.”
“You’re very observant.”
“Like I said, Miss, student of human nature. I sees everything that goes on here. Inside and outside.” He seemed to find that funny and wheezed with laughter for a few seconds before resuming work on the hinge.
“You’ve been doing a lot of work in here this week,” I observed.
“Christmas is comin’. Superintendent will be bringing in a few charity visitors, and he don’t like it if it’s not shipshape. ‘Efficient, Blackthorn’ he tells me. ‘Clean, orderly, and efficient, that’s the sort of institution I run.’ Damn shame—beg pardon, Miss—he don’t try talkin’ to us ’stead of efficientiating us.”
He began humming loudly again, and I returned to my work. I had not yet seen the superintendent. The only other staff member who lived off the premises was Mrs. Lombardi, whose home was in Prairie Haven; in this bleak, freezing weather, a Negro orderly called Michael drove her to and from the Farm in a small sleigh.
I heard voices approaching. Tilly and her friends were returning. High-pitched laughter echoed along the hallway; it had a cruel note to it.
I was absorbed in my task, lulled by Blackie’s humming and distracted by the gyrations of the baby inside me, when I heard the sound of running feet. Tess pushed past Blackie into the room. Her fine hair, normally so neatly arranged, was escaping from its bun; her face was flushed and tears spattered her glasses.
“Tess?” I put down my scissors and held out my arms to her. “What on earth is the matter?”
Tess flew to me and put her short arms as far round me as she could—by now my bump made that maneuver difficult, especially as she had her precious Bible in one hand.
“They took my ring!” she wailed, and I felt the baby kick extra hard in protest at the noise. Tess trembled against my protruding belly. It didn’t take much effort to guess who “they” were.
Blackie darted out into the corridor, then stuck his head back around the doorjamb.
“They’ve gone.” He crossed the room to us and laid his hand on Tess’s disarranged hair in a fatherly fashion. “Did them little bitches—beg pardon—get you alone again? I tole you, Tessie, you got to be careful around them gals.”
Tess sobbed. “They called me a cretin. I’m not a cretin. I know what that is. Madge is a cretin, and she can’t talk, she just makes noises; she’s dirty, and she wets in her clothes. I’m not like that, I’m not!” Her tears formed a damp patch somewhere in the region of my armpit. I patted her shoulder, then pushed her upright very gently and took off her glasses, using a piece of scrap cloth to dab at the tears running down her rounded cheeks. Blackie carefully pried the Bible out of Tess’s hand and set it down on the cutting table.
“There, Tessie,” he said, his expression tender. “Don’t you listen to them sort. You’re worth ten of ’em, girlie.”
“How did they get your ring?” I stroked Tess’s right hand, checking for bruises.
Tess began to calm down and blew her nose rather ineffectually into the scrap cloth. She took a few deep breaths.
“I gave it to them. They said I had to give
them my ring or my Bible.”
I sighed in exasperation, wondering how best to help my friend. The hallway outside echoed with voices, and I recognized that of Miss Dee, an orderly whom Tilly and her friends nicknamed ‘Gree-Dee’ because of her corpulence.
“… not permitted.” She sounded wearily frustrated. “Tell me at once where you are supposed to be this morning instead of wandering about the building.”
“Don’t know, Miss Dee.” The voice was Meg’s, one of Tilly’s friends, in a tone of flat stupidity.
“Forgot, Miss Dee.” That was Bella, the joker of the group. Stifled sniggering from the others accompanied her words.
“Well, you are now assigned to the preparation kitchen. There is a very large pile of root vegetables to be peeled and chopped for soup. Proceed there immediately.”
Whines of protest ensued, and I took the opportunity to slip out into the corridor. Blackie followed me, leaning against the doorjamb and staring hard at the women who turned to look at me.
“Excuse me, Miss Dee,” I said. “I believe that one of the women has a ring in her possession that belongs to Tess O’Dugan.”
Miss Dee’s double chins wobbled in outrage. “Nell, isn’t it? Are you accusing these women of stealing?” She turned to face the group, whose stares had become a shade more poisonous. Tilly shot me a warning glance and fished in her pocket, bringing out Tess’s little silver ring. Stealing was dealt with in the Women’s House by a month spent sluicing chamber pots, and it was well known that Miss Dee would thoroughly search the clothing of an accused woman.
“Found it, Miss Dee. Ain’t that right, Nellie?”
I stared at Tilly, trying to put a wealth of meaning into my face. Blackie was also watching her with narrowed eyes.
“It could be that she found it, Miss Dee. I can’t say for certain that she stole it.” I held out my hand for the ring, and Miss Dee dropped it into my hand. The other women had gone silent.
