Nettie and Nellie Crook

by E. F. Abbott

  Why did Abigail have to be so mean? Some folks just were. She was surely cut from the same bolt of awful cloth as Gertie Chapin. Nettie reached for Nellie’s hand and squeezed, one-two-three.

  “‘One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts,’” Miss Archibald read aloud from the book, “‘just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.’” She looked up hopefully at her students. “Think of it!” she said.

  Nettie thought poison was a good word for Abigail Beebe.

  Miss Archibald looked again to the open book in her hands and read on. “‘Surprising things can happen to anyone who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable, determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place,’” she read.

  Miss Archibald pushed her eyeglasses up the bridge of her nose with one finger, then raised that finger to make a point. “‘Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.’” Her eyeglasses slipped again, and she looked over the rims at Nellie and Nettie, and smiled with what Nettie took to be understanding and encouragement. But if Miss Archibald really understood and wanted to encourage them, she should have kept old Abigail Beebe after school.

  At lunchtime, some of the children walked home to eat, and others, like Nellie and Nettie, stayed at school and ate from their lunch pails. A shadow fell across Nettie’s legs, which were stuck out in front of her on the grassy bank beside the school. She looked up and shielded her eyes with her hand and studied the boy up and down, from his orphanage-issue boots to his newsboy cap.

  The boy pushed the cap back on his head. “Can I sit here?” he said.

  “Sure you can,” said Nettie, “but tell us, who are you going to be today? Will Coffin? Joe Wilson? Jimmy-John Doo-Hickey?” She took a bite of her sandwich.

  “We knew it was you in the store, Joe,” added Nellie.

  Joe dropped his lunch pail on the grass beside the girls and sat down. “Shoot,” he said. “Aunt Jane”—he glanced at the girls—“that’s what I’m supposed to call her,” he explained, “she and her mister are mortal ashamed they don’t have their own boy or girl. I don’t know why. But they don’t want anybody knowing they got me off the train, see.”

  “No, we don’t see,” said Nellie.

  Joe looked at her and cocked an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me nobody’s made fun of you, Nellie Crook. ‘Dirty orphan’? ‘What’s wrong with you if your own parents didn’t want you?’ Stuff like that?”

  Nettie had heard all those things. But she thought of what Miss Archibald had read from that story, the part about pushing out discouraged thoughts and putting in agreeable, courageous ones in their place.

  “You see your brother yet?” Nettie asked instead.

  Joe’s face instantly clouded, and he shook his head. He picked up a blade of grass and threw it. “Nope,” he said. He sniffed and dragged his sleeve under his nose.

  Nellie patted his shoulder. “He said he’d find you,” she said. “Maybe he will.”

  “Even if he did, Mr. and Mrs. Coffin would turn him away,” he said. “Supposably, I’m their nephew, forevermore, and my parents are dead.” He picked another blade of grass and tugged it between his fingers. “That part’s true, anyhow,” he said. “Our parents died a long time ago.”

  Nettie took a bite of the apple in her lunch pail and chewed, thinking. “Remember what Miss Archibald read out loud,” she said after a moment, “about tending a rose so the prickly thistle won’t grow?”

  Joe and Nellie nodded.

  “I wonder,” Nettie went on. “You think those apples we chucked out the train windows are gonna grow into apple trees?”

  Joe sniffed again. Then he nodded. “I can picture ’em,” he said, “all dressed in pretty pink blossoms.” He glanced at the girls and flushed red.

  “I can picture ’em, too, Joe,” said Nellie.

  Nettie leaned back on her elbows in the grass. She remembered the bad dream she’d had that night on the train, the dream where she was falling from high up and deep inside an apple tree. Nobody will know you were here … nobody will know you.… She took a deep breath and made herself have a courageous thought. “I can almost smell ’em.”

  * * *

  That evening, Mr. Chapin worked late at the store. The girls helped Mrs. Chapin prepare the supper.

  Mrs. Chapin cooked almost every meal from a cookbook titled How to Make Good Things to Eat. The book was published by a company called Libby, McNeill & Libby. And every single recipe featured Libby’s canned goods, which Mr. Chapin had in plentiful supply at the store, as Nellie and Nettie well knew from helping to stack the cans three high and five deep on the shelves.

  Nellie and Nettie had flipped through the cookbook more than once to pass the time during Mrs. Chapin’s naps. There were recipes for Libby’s Ham-burger Loaf (served cold), Libby’s Chicken and Tongue, Libby’s Ham Loaf with Creamed Potatoes, and Libby’s Ox Tongue Salad, which included a half-peck of spinach that only made it worse. They’d cooked recipes with Libby’s chipped dried beef. They’d opened cans of Libby’s Vienna sausages, and Libby’s hog and hominy. If Nettie didn’t know any better, she’d have thought all food came in cans.

  But tonight’s meal was fish. Pale white haddock fried in butter in a pan, with lots of little bones to pick out. Even How to Make Good Things to Eat’s recipe for something called Fricadillen was better than Mrs. Chapin’s full-of-bones white fish, and Fricadillen was made out of stale breadcrumbs.

  “Clean your plate,” said Mrs. Chapin. She used her fork to point at Nellie’s dish, set before her on the table.

  Nellie’s plate was clean. She had eaten all of the canned carrots, and all of the canned corn, and all of the pan-fried fish. All that was left was a small pile of bones and a bit of rubbery gray skin.

  “She ate everything you gave her,” Nettie said. “All that’s left is the bones.”

  Mrs. Chapin stared at Nettie. Her eyes were as cold as that fish they’d had to eat. The only sound was the click of her knife as she set it on the rim of her plate. She wiped her mouth with her napkin before speaking again.

  “I said, finish every last bit of your good supper,” said Mrs. Chapin. “Bones and all.”

  “Why, you old—”

  Nellie stopped Nettie with a tiny shake of her head. Nettie swallowed back her anger and kept quiet. It was hard to watch Nellie choke down those fish bones. They must have gone down like thistles in her throat. This couldn’t have been what Miss Hill had in mind when she placed them out. Surely, here, no rose could ever grow.

  CHAPTER 14

  Winter came, and with it, snow—dry snow, in drifts pushed by strong winds across the land. Was it only a year ago that they’d played in the snow at the orphanage? If only Pops Wendell would appear out of the falling flakes, wearing his coat with the furry collar and wiggling his furry mustache, to help them build a snowman. If only he would come and tell them how all would be well, one day.

  Christmas was a sorry holiday. Even in their poorest times, even when Mama was gone for long stretches and Father was away dredging the Erie Canal, they’d managed to celebrate Christmas with a special meal and usually a gift. Christmas here meant a long church service spent pretending that Abigail and Henry were nice friends, and extra work preparing a big meal out of How to Make Good Things to Eat, all to Mrs. Chapin’s cruelly exacting standards. At night, they pretended their painted spoon dolls were their real family, and they hugged each other under the blankets and softly sang to lift their spirits.

  “Silent night, holy night

  All is calm, all is bright.”

  * * *

  Winter passed, and then it was spring again.

  It was just past lunch one Saturday when the sky went green. Nellie said her ears felt like they were stuffed with cotton, and then her eardrums popped. Nettie’s head ache
d. Then they heard the roaring.

  “Run!” hollered Mrs. Chapin. Her bulldog cheeks trembled. “Tornado!”

  Nettie raced out the door behind Mrs. Chapin, pulling Nellie behind her.

  Nettie thought she heard Nellie calling out. She looked over her shoulder. Nellie was hollering, “Wait!” Nettie shook her head, still moving forward against the wind, following Mrs. Chapin. Her skirts whipped against her legs. It was so hard to move. “Wait!” came Nellie’s cry again, like a kitten mewling. “Dolly!”

  Nettie shook her head and tugged on Nellie’s hand. “Come on!” she yelled.

  The wind was whipping so hard it seemed like it was chasing them in particular, as if the sky wanted to swallow them up. They ran to a wooden door set in a frame on a low earthen ramp. Mrs. Chapin yanked the wooden plank back on its hinges to reveal a dark hole in the ground and pushed the girls down inside it. Nettie stumbled.

  “Dolly flew out of my hand!” Nellie said. “I had her with me, and then she was gone.” She started to cry. Nettie found her in the dark and held on tight.

  In the next instant, Mrs. Chapin was beside them in the hole, and the door slammed shut behind her. The tornado roared as loud as the orphan train going full blast, and they were sealed down inside the storm cellar, underground.

  Nettie shivered in the dark, tight place with the wooden cover. It was like being inside baby Sissy’s coffin, with the candles lit at each end. A flint struck, and then came the spit of a flame. Mrs. Chapin’s face was lit suddenly by a lantern. She looked all waxy in the strange light. “We’ll wait it out here.”

  “What about Mr. Chapin?” said Nettie.

  “He’ll have gone down cellar at the store,” she said.

  Nettie clung to Nellie and forced herself to keep still. Never had anything like this happened back East. They had huddled together through the dramatic thunderstorms that lit up the sky now and then, especially in the hot, humid summers, but there was a kind of thrill in a thunderstorm, and Mama or Father or at least Leon had always been there with them. This was different. The whole world rumbled overhead, sounds of things dragging and cracking and bumping, like giants having a terrible fight that would shatter the earth.

  Nettie squeezed Nellie’s hand. Then she began to speak to Nellie in a quiet way, to comfort her, and to comfort herself, the only way they knew how. “Once upon a time,” she said, “there were two little princesses—”

  Mrs. Chapin abruptly thrust the lamp at them, and they put up their hands and blinked against the light. “This is no time for fairy tales,” she hissed.

  Long minutes passed, and the world went quiet again. Mrs. Chapin pushed up against the storm cellar door, and they all crawled out and peered around, blinking in the light. Nettie looked up. The sky was as clear and blue as could be, as if the tornado had never happened.

  But the tornado had left its mark. The yard was littered with branches. The entire strip of ornamental trim was gone from the porch, and so were the front porch steps. Some shingles had been torn away from the front slope of the roof.

  Mrs. Chapin surveyed the damage. “Seen worse,” she said. “More of a nuisance than anything, this time.”

  “Dolly’s gone,” said Nellie.

  Mrs. Chapin looked at Nellie with flat eyes. “My dog blew away when I was a girl, ripped right out from my arms,” she said. “And I didn’t cry. Mother said to buck up.” She looked skyward. Her mouth worked, like she was chewing on something. “And that’s what I did,” she said after a minute. “Buck up.”

  Mrs. Chapin bent to pick up a lone shingle from the ground. “I put Scotty right out of my mind, is what,” she said, and walked on toward another torn shingle.

  Nettie touched the back of Nellie’s hand. “You can have Min sometimes,” she said.

  CHAPTER 15

  School let out, and the summer passed in a humid haze. Long hours of work in the garden were brightened by the occasional day spent at the grocery store or fishing with Mr. Chapin, and the seasons changed again.

  One day in that long year of 1912 was worse than all the others. The girls were helping prepare the nightly meal. Min sat on the kitchen windowsill, smiling her red-painted smile. Nellie was humming softly, putting the hot supper dishes on the table, when she tripped on a corner of the rag rug. Down she went. The special divided serving dish crashed to the floor and broke, scattering green beans and boiled potatoes everywhere.

  “Idiot girl!” screeched Mrs. Chapin. She grabbed the spoon doll from the windowsill and hit Nellie across the shoulders with it, once, twice, three times. Enraged, her bulldog face red and shining, she threw the doll on the floor and yanked the buggy whip from the hook beside the door, raised her arm high, and brought the short lash down. Nellie cried out and put up her hands, but Mrs. Chapin gripped her upper arm and pulled her to standing. Again, the whip came down, again and again.

  Nettie threw herself on Nellie’s attacker, but Mrs. Chapin swatted her aside and knocked her flat on the floor. Nettie got up and pummeled Mrs. Chapin’s back with both fists. Again, Mrs. Chapin flung her off. Then she turned and clapped the side of Nettie’s head and pushed her hard. Nettie banged her head on the edge of the table when she went down. Her ears rang, and she felt blood trickle down the side of her face. Nettie got up on hands and knees but could go no further. “Please!” she moaned—a desperate cry, a prayer. “Please, God, make her stop!”

  But Mrs. Chapin did not stop. She whipped Nellie across the back and shoulders and legs till her clothes tore and her skin showed through the slashed woolens on her legs.

  Then Mrs. Chapin seemed to realize what she was doing. She stopped. The buggy whip hung limp in her hand, and she turned away.

  * * *

  When Mr. Chapin came home from the store, his wife was sitting at the kitchen table alone, eating her supper. Potatoes, beans, and the pieces of the broken dish still littered the floor.

  “Gertie?” Mr. Chapin said. He removed his hat and twisted it in his hands.

  Mrs. Chapin kept chewing and did not speak.

  “Gertie, where are the girls?”

  Mrs. Chapin swallowed and picked her teeth before turning to her husband and gesturing with her fork at the mess on the floor. “You see what they done,” she said.

  Later, after he’d put ointment on Nellie’s cuts and helped Nettie bandage them, Mr. Chapin brought some food upstairs to the girls’ room.

  “Here’s some soup and bread,” he said, “plus a bottle of cold Coca-Cola.” He set a tray of rattling dishes on the table under the window. Then he fished around his pockets. “And here I brung nice new hair ribbons from the store, one for each of you, so you can tie ’em up matching, the way you like.” He reached into his pocket again. “And a pack of chewing gum.” His hands shook as he passed a slim packet of Wrigley’s Spearmint to Nellie. She took the pack and smiled weakly.

  “You don’t want to chew that around Mrs. Chapin,” he said. He rubbed a hand down over his face, and for a moment, his small chin quivered. “She doesn’t like chewing gum,” he added in a trembling voice.

  Nettie looked numbly at the pack of gum. Mrs. Chapin didn’t like a lot of things.

  Mr. Chapin closed the door quietly behind him, and Nettie heard his footsteps clump heavily down the stairs. They ate their very late supper, glad they didn’t have to go downstairs and see Mrs. Chapin after what she’d done. Then they changed into their nightgowns.

  Nellie lay down on her tummy, so as to cause less pain to her wounds. She put her head on the pillow and closed her eyes. “Tell a story, will you, Nettie?” she said in a small, tired voice.

  Nettie sat on the edge of the bed, looking straight ahead at the wall, and cleared her throat. “Once—” she started, stopped, and tried again. She didn’t know if she could trust her voice. “Once upon a time,” she went on, “there were two little twin princesses, as fair as fairies, as gentle as lambs, and as strong and true as an oxen team.” She paused for Nellie to make the sounds of the lambs and the
oxen.

  But Nellie was quiet.

  Nettie swallowed hard and looked down at her hands in her lap. She didn’t know if she could keep going with the make-believe. “The twin princesses loved each other,” she said, her voice breaking.

  “Go on,” said Nellie after Nettie was quiet for too long.

  Nettie sniffled, and Nellie lifted her head from the pillow. “What is it?”

  “I wish I could have stopped her, Nellie,” Nettie said, “but I couldn’t.” She dragged the sleeve of her nightgown across her nose.

  Nellie rested her head on the pillow again. “There isn’t anything you coulda done, and there’s nothing we can do. We’re stuck here in this awful place.”

  Would this really be their forever home?

  * * *

  It would not be the last time Gertie Chapin took out the buggy whip. But one small, good thing came on the heels of the whipping. When Nellie showed up in class with cuts and bruises, Abigail’s taunts abruptly stopped. “I fell off a bicycle,” Nellie told the children. Maybe Abigail, of all people, didn’t believe Nellie’s lie.

  CHAPTER 16

  One winter morning, Nettie went out in the cold to visit the privy. On her way back to the house, she stopped in her tracks. She hugged her arms against the chill and squinted. Her toes were cold in her boots, and she stomped her feet. Coming up the road was a smart buggy pulled by a pair of chestnut horses. As she stood and watched, the passenger’s hand reached up, raised in greeting. By instinct, Nettie lifted her hand. When the buggy drew closer, she imagined she knew the woman sitting beside the driver. Mama? Her heart beat fast, in time with the horses’ clip-clopping.

  The passenger began to hop down from the buggy without even waiting for the driver to come to a complete stop in front of the house. And across the frozen ground stepped someone she and Nellie had thought they’d never see again.

  Of course it was not Mama. It was Miss Anna Laura Hill, the Children’s Aid Society caregiver who had been so kind to them on the orphan train. There she was in her dark wool cape and matching hat. There was her broad smile, her twinkling eyes, steely now with determination, the lines of her forehead creased with concern.