Wanderville

by Wendy McClure

  The room fell silent as the head matron stepped up to the small stage at the front of the room. Behind her was the lady with the puffed-sleeve dress, the one who’d given Frances the once-over at lunch.

  “Tomorrow,” announced the head matron, “those of you who hold red ribbons will be going on a very special outing to visit the aquarium at Castle Garden.”

  A cheer went up from the children by the windows. Frances noticed Harold shifting his feet and looking down at the blue ribbon in his hand.

  The lady with the fancy dress stepped forward. “As for those of you with a blue ribbon,” she announced, “you are receiving a very special opportunity from the Society for Children’s Aid and Relief. Tomorrow, you will begin your journey to your new placements . . .”

  The woman spoke so differently on the stage from the way she had to Frances. Her voice sounded like Christmas bells practically. She was talking about placements. . . . Did that mean homes? Frances wondered. She could tell Harold had caught that word, too, from the way he’d straightened up.

  “. . . where you will find a most satisfactory situation with these kind and upstanding families,” the woman continued, “in a most wholesome and healthful environment. . . .”

  This lady was talking some big mouthfuls to be sure, Frances thought. All the same, Frances felt like she was floating, like the ground she stood on hardly mattered, and like she would drift up far above the tar rooftops of all the buildings whose shadows darkened the Howland Mission and Children’s Home. Then Harold’s hand reached for hers, and they clasped tightly.

  The matron spoke up. “Miss DeHaven,” she asked the woman, “won’t you tell them where they’re going?”

  “To a better place,” the woman answered. “Kansas.”

  3

  Placed Out

  Kansas, Jack thought. Not dead, and going to Kansas. Three weeks after he’d escaped the fate that had claimed his brother, this was his life now. It was like he was being punished for surviving.

  On any other day the train shed at Grand Central Depot, a huge, arching expanse of steel and glass and soot and noise, would have been enthralling to Jack. Instead, the hugeness of it all was grim, and the platform he walked along seemed to go on forever.

  In front of him was the man from the Society for Children’s Aid and Relief who was leading him to the train. But Jack kept his eyes fixed on the distance ahead of them, where the tracks vanished into the tunnels at the end of the train shed. Soon he’d be disappearing into that unknown.

  In the days after the fire that killed Daniel, his mother hadn’t wanted Jack to leave the apartment, not even to fetch coal for the stove.

  “I don’t want to lose him, too,” he’d heard her say to his father one night when she thought Jack was sleeping.

  His father, on the other hand, ate with his coat on in the mornings and pushed himself from the table as soon as he was finished, stalking out without a word. At first it seemed he was finally looking for work again, but when he crashed through the door late at night, bringing the stale scent of beer with him, Jack knew better.

  But then one morning Father stayed at the table and didn’t say a word while Mother brought out Daniel’s good jacket and told Jack to put it on. He pulled it over his shoulders dutifully, though it seemed his mother couldn’t even look at him.

  “Am I to go back to work?” he asked.

  His father spoke up at last. “Not to work,” he’d said. “We’re having you placed out. It’s for the best.” It was the first thing he had said to Jack in days.

  That had been a week ago. Now Jack had a new set of clothes—a black wool suit coat, trousers, and a starched shirt with a collar that felt rough as rope—and a cardboard valise. And now he knew that to be “placed out” meant you were put on a train to live with strangers out west. It was called the Children’s Emigration Program, the man from the Society for Children’s Aid and Relief Office had explained.

  “The newspapers call them orphan trains,” he’d told Jack. “But a great many of our placements are not truly orphans, just children in need of a better situation.”

  They might as well be orphans, Jack had thought.

  Now, here in the depot, he could sense his parents walking right behind him.

  Jack wiped his eyes on his sleeve. The depot felt too bright, the sun bearing down on the glass roof. He could see a dozen or more of the Emigration kids boarding a nearby train car. There was a girl whose hair was being brushed by a woman who spoke to her in Swedish or maybe Norwegian, and a boy in a knit cap who shook his head and cried as his father knelt beside him. Some of the children formed tight groups together and shuffled their steps as the Relief Society workers steered them toward the train. Others stood alone. Jack could see that a few of them were pulling at the collars of the outfits they’d been given or else were limping in their hard, new shoes.

  There was a girl about Jack’s age with brown hair pinned up into a crown of frizzled plaits. Her hand was clasped tightly around the hand of a little redheaded kid next to her. Daniel would do that, Jack thought, his breath catching in his chest.

  The girl, Jack noticed, appeared to be giving Grand Central one last, hard look. After a moment, their eyes met. Maybe she was thinking the same thing he was—that the world was moving underneath their feet whether they stood still or not.

  As Jack approached the train, he knew at some point he was going to have to turn back to see his parents, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it just yet. They had come to see him off, and it was supposed to mean that they cared. But putting him on an orphan train when he wasn’t even an orphan was somehow also supposed to mean that they cared. Daniel was dead. Jack was going to Kansas so he wouldn’t wind up dead, either. Jack tried to work it all out, but it wouldn’t come out even in his mind.

  He would have kept on walking to the end of the platform, to the end of the earth, but the man from the Relief Society suddenly stopped at one of the last cars and motioned for Jack to board.

  Jack climbed one of the iron steps leading up into the coach, and then another. He braced himself to enter the train when suddenly a sharp cry rang out over the din of the station. His mother.

  “Jack!” she shrieked. He turned around to see her, and she grasped his hand. She looked much older suddenly, with her eyes red and her brow crumpled. “I can’t do this,” she said, her voice hoarse. Then she clamped one hand over her mouth to keep from crying out again.

  His father turned his head away. “We mustn’t stay,” he said.

  Jack couldn’t speak. He could only nod, his throat burning and tight. Then he boarded the train.

  4

  “Well-Mannered Children Do Not Ask Questions”

  It started with the big blond kid stopping Frances’s little brother in the aisle.

  “What’s your name, mick?” the kid demanded. His hair was yellow-white, and he didn’t look like he had any eyebrows.

  “Harold,” her brother answered.

  “Hair-red?” barked the blond kid. Behind him two other boys laughed.

  Frances stood up to fetch Harold and lead him back to their seat. But by then the blond kid’s friends had moved out into the aisle on either side of him, blocking Harold in. In his new coat, which was a size too big for him, Harold seemed even smaller and very much like a snail that wanted to hide in its shell.

  The train had started moving, lurching with considerably more force than the streetcars Frances was used to. The boys who were picking on Harold braced themselves against the seat backs, but poor Harold stumbled and fell down.

  “Watch out, Hair-red!” one of the boys called out.

  “Are you lame, Hair-red?” said the big blond one—Frances had heard his friends call him Quentin. There seemed to be something wrong with his mouth, she noticed. His top lip looked kind of smashed and curled back oddly, exposing one of his front teeth, which gave t
he effect of a permanent sneer.

  “If you’re lame, Hair-red, the folks in Kansas won’t want ya,” Quentin said. “They’ll send you to live in the trash dump.”

  Harold shook his head, still crouched down in the aisle. “No . . . they won’t,” he said haltingly.

  “Leave my brother alone!” snapped Frances, her face hot. But she was back in a corner of the car, where Quentin and his friends couldn’t hear her. Or else they were just ignoring her, in her new dress that she knew looked foolish. It had a puffy, lacy bow just under her chin, which itched fiercely.

  The train car was all kids, orphan-train kids, and except for two more boys who came out into the aisle to gawk, the rest didn’t dare to make a move as the bullies shoved her brother back and forth.

  “You sure you isn’t crippled?”

  “Got some real spindly legs in those breeches.”

  “You think he’s got one of those mick tempers?”

  “Quit it!” screamed Frances as she tried to push past the onlookers. She could sometimes take on an ogre like Quentin—step right in front of him and stare him down until he flinched, because big, stupid carbuncles like him didn’t know how to deal with girls. But she couldn’t get close enough. “Cut it out!” she cried.

  “Cut it out,” said a voice behind her, a boy’s. Frances whirled around.

  It was the black-haired kid she’d seen from the platform at the depot. He was wiry, with deep-set eyes. He’d been boarding the next car over and she’d wondered what his story was. Now he gave Frances a nod and jumped up over one of the bench seats. Then he launched himself straight toward Quentin.

  Quentin toppled forward with the black-haired kid on his back. “Gah! Get off!” he sputtered. The kid had clamped his hands over Quentin’s eyes so that he staggered blindly, arms flailing. A roar of laughter went up throughout the car. The other boys backed away, and Harold hurried over behind Frances. Finally the kid let go of Quentin’s head and dropped down to his feet.

  “Sorry,” the boy said with a grin. “Thought you were someone else.”

  Maybe his escape from the fire had made Jack a little foolhardy. But after leaping two stories down into a street, Jack thought jumping on the back of some big, dumb towheaded thug was nothing. Especially after he’d seen the scared faces of some of these younger kids.

  Of course, now the bully was pretty steamed. He grabbed Jack by the front of his coat and shook him. “You thought I was what?”

  Just then, the door at the engine end of the car burst open and two women came hurrying up the aisle.

  Frances could feel Harold holding onto the back of her new felt coat. “Stay where you are,” she told him under her breath. She suspected most of the younger children were together in the adjacent car, but she wasn’t going to leave her brother to ride with strangers. She stepped back between seats so that Harold was hidden in the space behind her. She figured the less the Relief Society women saw of him, the better.

  “What on earth is going on?” one of the women called out to Quentin and the black-haired boy. She wore her hair in a loose bun and her sleeves were already pushed up, as if she’d spent the whole morning working. By Frances’s reckoning, she seemed young, about as old as a new schoolteacher. With more than twenty kids to handle on this train, Frances thought, she’d better not be too new. Well, at least she wouldn’t have to look after Harold—Frances did that job better than anybody.

  As for the second woman, she stood quietly in back, but Frances recognized her right away—the lady who had come to the home, Miss DeHaven. Indeed, the sleeves of her black traveling dress had big poufs at the shoulders. On her bodice she wore a blue badge, trimmed with a ribbon frill, bearing the letters S C A & R.

  Quentin had let go of the black-haired boy’s coat but was still glaring at him.

  “Gentlemen, please,” the first woman said to them. “I am Mrs. Routh.” She had a round face with a sweet smile, and she had to clear her throat before raising her voice. “And it is my duty to make sure you children get to Kansas without . . . well, without murdering each other!” She sighed and shook her head. “Is there a problem already?”

  “He jumped on me!” Quentin yelped.

  “I took him for an old buddy of mine,” the black-haired boy explained.

  Frances stepped forward and spoke up. “He thought he knew him from his gang . . .” The names of some of the notorious old Lower East Side gangs she’d heard about raced through her head: the Dead Rabbits, the Bowery Boys, the Plug Uglies, the Forty Thieves . . . “The Ugly Rabbits,” Frances finished, winking at the boy.

  Mrs. Routh sighed. “‘Ugly Rabbits’?”

  The black-haired boy shot Frances a grin—there was no such thing as the Ugly Rabbits—and went on. “Thus I greeted him in our usual scrapping fashion. Which I know is a bit rough. But clearly this fellow is man enough to take it.” The boy extended his hand to Quentin and shook it. “Jack Holderman. Pleased to make your acquaintance. I’m sorry I mistook you for an Ugly Rabbit.”

  Quentin’s eyes narrowed, but he shook Jack’s hand back. Frances had to bite her lip to keep from laughing.

  “Now that’s settled,” said Mrs. Routh, gently steering Jack and the others to their seats, “Miss DeHaven from the Society for Children’s Aid and Relief and I are your guardians on this journey. It will be a long one, and it will be far better on your spirits—all of our spirits—if we’re kind to one another. And patient.”

  “I’m hungry,” whimpered a girl a few rows back. Frances wanted to hush her. If there was one thing she’d learned from orphanage life, it was that you didn’t complain.

  But Mrs. Routh said only, “My goodness!” and checked the watch on the chain around her neck. “No wonder we have some empty stomachs among us. It’s already past one o’clock. Miss DeHaven, perhaps you can speak more to the children about what to expect while I fetch the dinner pails?”

  “Of course,” Miss DeHaven said with a thin smile.

  Mrs. Routh went out the door to the next car. When it fell shut, the only sound was the metronome rhythm of the train, and though it swayed quite a bit, Miss DeHaven remained steady. Perfectly still, in fact. Only her face had changed. Her smile had gone flat.

  “What to expect,” Miss DeHaven said. “It’s quite simple. Don’t expect.”

  A boy sitting near Jack raised his hand.

  “Put that down,” she snapped. “I said don’t expect. Don’t expect me to answer questions. Well-mannered children do not ask questions. Don’t expect to have your sticky chins wiped clean by Mrs. Routh and me, or your shoes buttoned. And when you meet your benefactors, don’t expect that the pity you see in their faces will get you anywhere. It’s just pity, and you should be ashamed of it.”

  The quiet throughout the car was punctuated only by the dull clattering of the train. Frances held her breath. At the home this woman had spoken so melodiously when she’d stood with the matrons and addressed the crowd in the dining hall, but here her voice was cool and measured—and, Frances was sure, her true manner of speaking.

  “I know your kind,” Miss DeHaven went on. “You have become accustomed to hardship, and that is your only virtue. It is my duty to keep that virtue cultivated in you for the next four days. I believe that when you get to Kansas”—she paused and scowled at two little Swedish girls sitting in a row near her—“if you get to Kansas, you will appreciate how well I have prepared you.”

  Harold had been crouched down against Frances to stay out of sight, just as she’d told him to do. She felt his little shoulders become tense with fear. Still, she didn’t dare look down at him until Miss DeHaven turned her back.

  “I don’t want to go to Kansas!” whispered someone in the row in front of them, a tall boy named Lorenzo.

  “Don’t want to go?” Miss DeHaven whirled back around and glared in Lorenzo’s direction for a moment. Then she touched her rib
boned badge and smiled sweetly.

  “It doesn’t matter what you want,” she told the boy. She raised her voice so that everyone could hear. “It doesn’t matter what any of you want! We know what’s best.” She narrowed her eyes. “And we know better than you.”

  5.

  There Are Rumors

  “You’re all so quiet now,” Mrs. Routh remarked as she walked down the aisle with a basket full of wrapped sandwiches under her arm.

  She doesn’t know, Jack thought. She couldn’t have heard what Miss DeHaven had said to them, could she? Both women were in the train car now, passing out the food. At least Mrs. Routh was working his end of the car and not Miss Meansleeves. From what he could see, Miss DeHaven liked to pick up each sandwich by its corner, pinching it like she was holding the tail of some dead creature, and then drop it into a lap.

  At home right about now, his mother would be setting out the dishes on the oilcloth with the flower pattern, the yellow and blue roses that were the only real color in the apartment. The potatoes and cabbage would be too hot, and so he and Daniel would have to wait to eat them, making funny faces at each other to pass the time. Jack idly began scrunching his mouth in imitation of Daniel’s best expressions.

  He heard a giggle. The little redheaded kid in the row in front of him had turned around and caught Jack making faces. Jack gave him a nod and grinned at the kid—Harold, he’d overheard his sister call him. Now Harold was like a friendly puppy, the way he kept looking back at Jack.

  Just then Mrs. Routh stopped at Jack’s row. She handed him—gently—a sandwich wrapped in brown paper. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until his nose picked up the tang of pickles.