Nettie and Nellie Crook

by E. F. Abbott

  “Nellie?” Miss Hill peered doubtfully at Nettie.

  Nettie shook her head. “It’s Nettie,” she said. “Oh, Miss Hill!” She ran into Miss Hill’s open arms. “It’s awful, here. Please, please don’t make us stay. This can’t be our forever home, it just can’t.”

  Miss Hill embraced Nettie firmly and stroked her hair. Then she held her at arm’s length. “Let’s go inside, shall we?”

  Nettie gazed with longing at the horses stamping their feet impatiently and blowing clouds of steam from their nostrils. “Do we have to?” she said.

  Miss Hill smiled. “I suppose not,” she said. She snapped open that big handbag of hers and reached inside. “Here,” she said, passing to Nettie the end of a knitted scarf as she tugged the length of it out of the bag. Nettie recognized it as Miss Hill’s knitting project on the train. “You go and wait in the buggy with Mr. Picket,” said Miss Hill. At the mention of his name, the driver nodded pleasantly and tipped his cap. “There’s a blanket on the seat.”

  “And Nellie?”

  “I’ll send her out directly.” Miss Hill snapped shut her handbag, strode up the porch step, and rapped on the door. One-two-three.

  CHAPTER 17

  And so it was that Miss Hill took Nellie and Nettie away from that house that very day. They had lived there for sixteen long and terrible months. But it was not to be their forever home after all. Someone had reported Gertie Chapin’s cruel treatment of the girls, and word had made its way to the Children’s Aid Society. From the moment she learned that the girls had been placed out to an unhappy home, Miss Hill wasted no time. The girls wondered who it was who had told on Gertie Chapin and sent the message to New York City. Was it Abigail? Was it Mr. Chapin?

  Mr. Picket drove the buggy back to McPherson, Kansas. Nellie and Nettie sat on the backseat of the buggy, their spoon doll, Min, between them. He drove the buggy past the opera house, and Nettie remembered the day sixteen months before, when they’d left here with the Chapins. It seemed so long ago. Now they would live with a new family. But Miss Hill had placed them out with horrible Gertie Chapin. How did she know the new family would not be the same?

  “It’s only temporary,” said Miss Hill. “You will stay with Mary and James Darrah for now, just till we find you a permanent home.”

  Late in the afternoon, the driver stopped the horses in front of a big, beautiful house on a quiet street.

  They were met at the front door by a gray-haired woman wearing a calico dress and a crooked smile. “Come in, come right on in,” Mary Darrah said. Her voice was fast and loud. But not angry-loud, not preachy-loud. It was friendly-loud, like she had quite a lot of friendly feeling to get off her chest, and she couldn’t do it fast enough. She ushered them into a large front room decorated with painted pictures of sky and hills and trees. The big front windows were hung with pretty blue drapes. And on the floor was a floral-patterned carpet.

  An old yellow dog got up from the rug at the same time that a man rose from a stuffed chair. The dog sniffed their hands, and the man greeted them with a gentle handshake each.

  “I’ll have to figure a way to tell you two apart,” Mrs. Darrah said, peering first at one, then the other. “This is my husband, Mr. Darrah, and while you’re here you just call me Aunt Mary. Everybody does. This is Spot,” she said, reaching to scratch the dog’s ears. Nettie glanced at Nellie and grinned. That dog didn’t have one single spot on him.

  “Now, we’ll leave your things in the parlor, here,” said Aunt Mary, “and go through to the dining room straightaway. I’ve got supper ready. Nobody goes hungry in this house, I can tell you.”

  To all of Aunt Mary’s comments, Mr. Darrah added a nod or a smile or a “that’s right.” No demands were made upon the twins to speak or to explain or to sing “Jesus Loves Me.”

  Miss Hill went on her way with promises to write, even though Aunt Mary invited her to stay for a meal.

  And what a meal! There was a roast chicken Aunt Mary had kept warming in the oven, and hot buttermilk biscuits (“These’ll only take a jiffy”), tomato and rice soup (“I make this whenever someone’s feeling poorly”), a baked hubbard squash (“Would you like some butter and brown sugar on that, dears?”), and salmon loaf (“You have to try the little bit I give you, but you don’t have to finish it, because salmon loaf is Spot’s favorite thing in all the world. Of course, I’ve picked out all those pesky bones”). And for dessert? Lime sherbet (“Mmmmmmm”).

  That night they went to bed early, stuffed full of Aunt Mary’s delicious food. Mr. Darrah brought their things upstairs to their new bedroom.

  “I figure you want to share a room,” Aunt Mary said, “but if you don’t want to, you could each have a room of your own. We’ve got five bedrooms, after all. Plenty of room. This is the one our Jim slept in when he was a boy. It gets the nice light.”

  Mr. Darrah and Aunt Mary stood in the doorway and said good night. They were not like Mama and Father. These people were old, more like grandparents. Nettie wondered about their own grandparents. What had they been like?

  “Bedtime is kept to the minute,” Aunt Mary was saying. “Mr. Darrah and I raised our Jim on early bedtimes, and he’s raising our five grandchildren on early bedtimes, and while you’re with us, you’ll have an early bedtime, too.”

  Mr. Darrah put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Dear, I believe these two tuckered-out children would be fast asleep and dreaming by now if you’d quit talking and leave ’em be.” It was the most he’d said all evening.

  Aunt Mary chuckled and waved with the hankie she had tucked in the cuff of her sweater sleeve. “Sweet dreams,” she said, and then the door gently closed.

  * * *

  The next day, after a hearty breakfast (“Spanish eggs, Mr. Darrah’s favorite”), Aunt Mary took Nellie and Nettie into town to buy them some new clothes (“I don’t know how long you’ll be staying with us, but I won’t have you shivering while you’re under my roof”). A tall, skinny, long-necked woman was coming into the clothing store as they were on the way out, and Aunt Mary introduced the girls to her.

  “Well, don’t you know, Mrs. Jones, we’re keeping them up at the house with us, till they find a new family,” Aunt Mary said in her big, friendly voice. “We’ve plenty of room.”

  Mrs. Jones looked the girls up and down and then leaned close to Aunt Mary’s ear, as if they were friends sharing secrets. “I’m glad you’re not taking them in for good,” she muttered, loud enough for Nellie and Nettie to hear. “Who knows what runs in their blood? There’s no knowing how they’ll come out.”

  Mary Darrah nodded. “Mmm-hmm,” she murmured, and, “Yes, that’s so,” she agreed.

  Nettie chewed the side of her thumbnail, where a little bit of skin never healed right. It was true. They did not know what awful things ran in their blood. They never knew what had happened to break their family apart, and why that old battle-ax Matron at the orphanage thought it better to send them on the orphan train than to give them to the aunt who had come for them. Nettie frowned and stared at the lady.

  “But then again, dear,” Mary Darrah said sweetly to Mrs. Jones, tipping her gray head to one shoulder, “who knows how your own children will come out?”

  Nettie snorted and hid her grin behind her hand. The woman drew her chin into her neck like a startled goose, clutching her handbag to her chest, while her mouth gaped open and shut. After a moment, she closed her lips primly. If Mrs. Jones was anything like that old Abigail Beebe, she’d have ready another barb, just as sharp.

  But instead, the woman started to laugh. “Oh, Aunt Mary, how right you are,” she howled. She tipped her head back on her goose-neck and laughed good and hard. Aunt Mary shrugged, and laughed along with Mrs. Jones.

  Then Mrs. Jones turned to the girls. “You like peanut butter cookies?”

  Nettie nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We sure do,” said Nellie.

  “My cookie jar is always full,” s
aid Mrs. Jones. “How ’bout you come over and have some. Tomorrow work for you, Mary?”

  Aunt Mary nodded, apparently struck dumb.

  “Very good,” said Mrs. Jones. And she went past them into the store.

  “Well, blow me over with a feather,” said Mary Darrah. “Will wonders never cease?”

  CHAPTER 18

  Late one afternoon in early March, the sky grew wild and dark. Clouds gathered on the horizon, and the air grew thick. Little whorls of dirt and grit skittered along the road, kicked up by the wind. Nettie and Nellie were setting the table for supper, and Aunt Mary was stirring good-smelling stew in a pot on the stove.

  “Looks like some weather’s moving in,” said Aunt Mary. She tasted the stew, nodded once, rapped the wood spoon on the pot rim, and set it on the counter. “Just right,” she said. “I’m a good cook, if I say so myself,” she said, turning from the stove. It was true that Nellie and Nettie did not miss one single recipe from How to Make Good Things to Eat. “What is it, my dears?” Aunt Mary said when she saw Nellie’s and Nettie’s faces.

  Nellie set a fork on a folded napkin and glanced nervously out the window. “Is it a tornado?”

  “No, dear,” said Aunt Mary, “it’s just a good old storm. Nothing to worry yourselves over, though Spot doesn’t much like thunder.” She leaned slightly and patted her thighs so that Spot would come to her. She rubbed all along the dog’s back, and he closed his eyes and whined with pleasure.

  “It isn’t tornado season, you see,” she said, “and if it was, why, we’d just hustle out to the storm cellar and get cozy. Spot, too.” She crossed the room, leaned over the kitchen table, and looked out the window, then pulled out the chair nearest the window and sat.

  “Come here,” she said to the girls. She put her arms out to draw them to her. “You want to know what I like to do sometimes, when there’s a good storm coming through? The kind like this, with big dark clouds rolling in, maybe some rumbly thunder?” She looked eagerly out the window, peering at the sky as she spoke. “Unless I’m tucked into the storm cellar, I like to sit safe right here at my kitchen table and watch that storm come in. And then I watch it roll on out again. And I say to myself, ‘Well, Mary Darrah, isn’t that just the way of it?’”

  Aunt Mary turned from the window. She tilted her head and gave a sad smile that seemed to take in all of the girls’ past, and maybe their future—a smile that seemed to mean I understand. Nettie smiled back. It felt good to have someone smile at her that way.

  “Storms rage in the life of every person.” Aunt Mary spoke in a quiet voice, almost a whisper. “As long as I draw breath and walk the earth, the storm may come, and come again, and that’s the God’s truth. But it’s just as true that every storm will pass, given time.” She nodded knowingly. “It will.” She put a gentle hand on each girl’s shoulder. “Do you take my meaning?” she asked.

  Nettie thought of the storm clouds in their lives: losing Mama, and Father, and their baby sister. She thought of Leon. She thought of their friends Brenda O’Hare and Bucky, and the little baby left in a basket at the orphanage, the pretend sister they called Sissy, and she wondered where the winds had tossed them. She remembered that awful, dark night in the storm cellar, when they were huddled together, trembling, and how Mrs. Chapin told them it was no time for fairy tales. She wondered, back then, if the storm would ever break.

  But it did. That storm moved on. And they were here, now, in this bright kitchen.

  Nettie chewed the inside of her cheek. “You want to know what we like to do when a storm comes through?” she said.

  “Yes, dear,” Aunt Mary said firmly. “I most certainly do.”

  Nettie looked at Nellie. “We like to tell stories.”

  Aunt Mary smiled wide. “Why, I can’t think of any better way to handle a storm,” she said. Spot came and rested his muzzle on her knee. “Do tell a story right now, won’t you? That stew can wait.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The weeks passed quickly, and it was more than two months later that Miss Hill returned to McPherson and to the big house with two old folks, two little girls, one yellow dog, and five bedrooms.

  “Good news!” Miss Hill declared. She fairly burst through the door when Aunt Mary opened it.

  “Well, let’s hear it, then,” said Aunt Mary, ushering Miss Hill inside. She took Miss Hill’s dark woolen cape and hung it slowly on the coat tree, as if it weighed a ton. Then she led Miss Hill to the parlor. Spot stayed close on her heels.

  “I’ve found you girls a new home—a forever home, isn’t that how you put it?” Miss Hill said, sitting back with a triumphant smile. “You’ll be happy there, I know it. It’s up in South Dakota, on a farm,” she said, splaying her fingers as if she was scattering magic fairy dust. “It’s lovely—pretty as that picture on the wall,” she said, pointing to one of Aunt Mary’s paintings. “The family comes highly recommended and is most eager to have two special girls like you.”

  Nettie watched Miss Hill’s mouth move as her voice went on talking about the big farmhouse, and the nice mother and father, and the barn cat’s new kittens, and the weather there in spring.

  Forever home. Family. It was everything she’d waited for.

  Nettie grabbed her sister’s hand in both of hers and squeezed. Nellie’s eyes told Nettie she felt the same. Finally, they would have what they’d always wanted.

  And they didn’t want to go.

  CHAPTER 20

  “Come and get it!” shouted Aunt Mary, though these days Nellie and Nettie called her Mother Darrah. It was September, and it was Sunday morning, the day of the twins’ baptism. After the morning service, there was a big lunch on the grass outside the Congregational church.

  “Come and get your fried chicken. Come and get your green salad and your macaroni salad. I’ve got sheet cake and shortcake and apple pie, too.” Mother Darrah’s delicious food was spread out on a folding table, and not one single thing had come out of a Libby’s can. It seemed like half of McPherson had turned out to welcome Nellie and Nettie, now known as the Darrah twins, into the church family.

  * * *

  Six months had passed since Anna Laura Hill came to call at the big house and take the girls away to their forever home in South Dakota.

  Nellie had knelt and buried her face in the ruff of Spot’s neck, and the good old dog had howled along with her sudden tears.

  Nettie had opened her mouth to speak but found she couldn’t say the words. What if they didn’t have any choice about South Dakota? What if they had to go? Worse, much worse—what if Aunt Mary didn’t want them to stay? Hot tears sprang to her eyes, and she wiped them away. She started again to explain, but Aunt Mary spoke for her.

  “We’ve grown very fond of Nellie and Nettie here,” she said, addressing Miss Hill. “Isn’t that right, James?” She went on without even waiting for Mr. Darrah’s reply, which was a hearty nod and a “Yes, that’s so, dear.” “And the thing of it is, we’d—well…” She jammed her fists into her hips. “We’d like for them to stay with us. Here.” She pointed at the parlor’s floral-patterned rug. “For keeps.”

  Nettie squeezed her eyes shut to stop the tears from falling. She could hardly believe her ears. Could it be true? Did Aunt Mary and Mr. Darrah want them—really want them? Forever?

  Aunt Mary clasped her hands under her chin. “Can’t we keep ’em as our own?” she said. “Can’t our dear girls stay?”

  Silence filled the room. Everything was as quiet as Aunt Mary’s paintings of sky and hills and trees. They held their breath and waited for what Miss Hill would say next.

  And what she’d said was “Yes.”

  * * *

  “I’ve brought my famous peanut butter cookies,” sang Mrs. Jones now, on the green grass outside the church. “I know you Darrah twins love ’em.” Mrs. Jones winked at Nellie and Nettie, and they grinned back. For someone who had wondered what bad blood might run in the veins of two placed-out girls, Mrs. Jones sure made good cookies, and
her cookie jar was always full, just as she’d promised them the day they met.

  The minister, Mr. Fellows, wandered over to the girls, carrying a plate of chicken and macaroni. “My apologies, again, Nellie,” he said, looking straight at Nettie, “and Nettie,” he said, turning to Nellie, “for mixing the two of you up, and baptizing you in the wrong names.” He gazed up at the vast blue sky. “But the good Lord won’t mind, if you don’t,” he said.

  Nettie grinned. They never minded being mixed up. That was half the fun of being identical twins, with matching braids and matching ribbons in their hair. The other half was always having a best friend, right there handy. No matter what, no matter where.

  Mother Darrah cut a slice of apple pie and put it on a paper plate. “Here you go, Nettie,” she said. Nettie reached for the plate but Mother Darrah didn’t let go, so for a moment, they were holding it between them. “I’ve always said we have plenty of room in the house,” Mother Darrah said. “But I hope that you know—surely you girls must know by now—we also have plenty of room in our hearts.” She nodded once and let go of the plate. “Now go and eat your apple pie, and here’s a piece for Nellie. There’s more if you want it.”

  Nettie went over and sat beside Nellie on the grass. The pie tasted wonderful—buttery, sweet, and tart, with lots of cinnamon.

  “You ever think about those old wormy apples we threw from the train?” Nettie said.

  Nellie nodded and managed, “Mmm-hmm,” her mouth full of pie.

  “You figure the train conductor was right, and people will know we were there?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Nellie’s mouth was still full.

  Nettie slowly finished her pie. She didn’t believe anybody would ever know that two twin girls had planted some of those apple seeds along the route of the orphan train. But it didn’t matter. Because somebody in particular knew Nettie and Nellie now, really knew them. Somebody loved them.