Far From Home (13 page)

13
A CLOSE CALL

“I
dare you to walk across the ice on Bottom Brook, fraidy-cat,” Imogene taunted Clarissa. “You've got crutches. That's the same as two gaffs.”

“You can't walk; see if you can swim,” Peter ragged her.

“Fraidy-cat, fraidy-cat!” The voices of Imogene and Peter yanked on her ears like hooks.

Cora's voice was anxious. “Don't go. They're playing a fool's game.”

Clarissa ignored her, moving cautiously until she was standing on the frozen surface of the brook. She pulled back as a tinkling sound rose in the sharp air, the same noise she heard whenever she stepped on a shiny rind of ice over a puddle on the road. She tried to keep her balance as a grey line snaked through the freshwater ice. The ice broke and Clarissa toppled into black water. It widened around her and a piece of ice scraped her cheek and nose like the edge of a dull knife.

This is no way to go to Heaven
, Clarissa thought wildly,
my birthday coming and all
. “Dr. Grenfell,” she called foolishly. She didn't know why she called him. He wasn't there, and if he had been he would think she had done a terrible thing: risking the gift of life God had given her. Never mind that he had done it so many times, travelling on the ice with his komatik and dog team, even when he was warned that the ice wasn't safe. But he risked his life trying to save others. He hadn't done it on a silly dare.

Owen and Peter dragged Clarissa from the water. They and two other boys carried her barrow-style towards the orphanage. Shivers took over her body and her knees were icy knobs inside her cold braces. Her sodden woollen stockings and drawers dragged.
No wonder sheep run from rain; their
wet wool must be a barrel of heaviness
, she thought ruefully.

Uncle Aubrey met the children at the door of the orphanage. He got Owen's explanation as he lifted Clarissa into his arms. He tut-tutted. “There you go – off on ice when you can't walk on land. What possessed you?”

Her teeth chattering, Clarissa answered, “The ice went smooth out over the brook from the land. I thought it was fastened, but then it cracked.”

The caretaker's boots thumped down over the basement stairs. With Clarissa still in his arms, he went past the laundry room with its humongous tubs, its scrub boards and ironing boards, past racks and bins for sorting clothes, past a black potbellied, cast-iron stove laid with flatirons.

In a back room there was an enormous wood-burning iron stove. The waft from a dozen loaves of bread baking in the large oven filled Clarissa's nose. Cora's mother, a slight, worried-looking woman, was at the end of a long work table, kneading bread. A hairnet covered her dark hair, pulled straight back from her face into a fat roll. She shook her head at the sight of Clarissa, and ran to get a blanket that hung on a line by a little coal stove. Clarissa thought,
It's too bad she
never has time to be a mother to Cora and Suzy and Owen.
Once when Cora had tried to talk to her mother, Clarissa heard her answer tiredly, “Sure, you'll have to stop your chatter. You're moidering my brain.” Clarissa imagined her thoughts getting so mixed up her words wouldn't come out right.

Myra, one of the helpers and a former orphanage inmate, was at a metal sink washing dishes. “Dear me,” she said. “You'm a sight.”

Soon Missus Frances was bearing down on her. “Clarissa, you wretch, you've lost your crutches and broken your braces. You'll have new crutches in a few days, but you will sit until then. That will be punishment enough. You will likely sneeze your way through your birthday this year and maybe find yourself over in the hospital with inflamed lungs.”

In the hospital! In bed!
Clarissa thought wildly.
Never
again!

But as she lay in bed that night heat crept across her face and lay on her cheeks like hot pokers. Her body felt peeled . . . raw . . . tired. Someone washed her and then packed her in softness. The edge of something cold was pressed to her lips until they opened. A cool flow poured down her throat. She floated above her pain, and then she was falling down through time. The hands of a grandfather clock revolved backwards; the pages of a calendar flipped back. Clarissa was getting smaller and smaller, shrinking into the little girl she used to be, a long time ago.

She surfaced through her delirium crying, “Nurse Smith!” Her eyes opened to the walls of the orphanage infirmary. She was wrapped in cold blankets and wearing an ice cap. An ice-filled water bottle lay on her feet. Cora was wetting her lips as Imogene looked on.

Clarissa had missed her birthday, but Missus Frances had saved her a mixture of Gibraltar sweets, peppermint knobs, butter rocks and a card of beads to ring into a bracelet. Her best birthday gift was from her mother. She would no longer have to hobble to the library to read
Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland
over and over to keep her courage up.

She lay in bed sucking on a sweet and reading her book: a gift – if not a letter – from home.

14
QUARANTINED AND A
SWEET LESSON

C
arissa's eyes opened in bewilderment. Daylight was coming through the window. She sat up thinking she had slept in and another morning would begin without breakfast. She looked around and saw that the other girls were still asleep. They had all slept in. There was the sound of footsteps in the hall, and then a knock came on the door. “Up, Girls! Just because there's no school is no reason to lie abed all day,” Ilish called.

No school! Clarissa smiled to herself. She stayed very quiet, stretching her legs as much as she could, despite the aching in her limbs. She could spend time reading after she had finished her mending, darning and dusting chores.

The other children awoke as if pulled from sleep into a wonderful daydream. “No school?” Celetta asked, her heavy eyelids opening only a slit.

“Nooo schooool.” Imogene dragged on the words, clearly disappointed. An arithmetic test had been slated for today, and she always got a hundred percent.

“Dusting and polishing, that's what we'll be doing,” moaned Becky.

At breakfast Missus Frances explained, “The orphanage has been quarantined for six weeks because influenza is in the harbour. We don't want thirty little mortals dying of flu.”

“'Tis a blind lookout, that's what it is. So many children in St. Anthony wandering around with their lips at each other's tin cups,” Cora's mother said later. She poked a strand of Cora's hair behind her ear. “Sure, we're to guard this place with diligence. Thank God, 'tis not Spanish influenza: the sickness that took so many poor mortals a few years back.”

Clarissa nodded at Cora's mother and then moved as fast as she could to get to the study room, before she was waylaid to do chores. She stayed there reading all morning, expecting to be hauled off at any moment to mend or dust. It wasn't until after lunch that Ilish called her into the mistresses' lounge. She laid a cloth and a bottle of lemon wash on a chair. “Dust-and-shine time,” she said with a flicker of a smile as she went out the door. Clarissa leaned on one crutch and, with her good hand, dusted a wooden table, leaving a fresh, tangy smell in the air. Her mouth felt dry, and the dish of candy the mistresses kept in their quarters drew her, tantalized her. Usually she resisted. This time she reached out her hand to take one sweet. Her crutch slipped and she almost fell to the floor. She got a firmer grip, and her hand tightened over a striped hard knob. She lifted the big candy to her mouth and closed her lips around it. Her eyes shut with the pleasure of having a sweet to suck when it wasn't a special occasion.

Suddenly she heard a stir in the room. She opened her eyes quickly. Miss Elizabeth was standing directly in front of her. Clarissa tried to swallow the knob, but it caught in her throat. She coughed and the candy fell to the floor in front of the mistress. Miss Elizabeth stood eyeing her silently, her eyes like bullets. Clarissa hated the silence almost as much as the words that followed it. “Clarissa,” the mistress said in a contemptuous voice, “you have broken one of the Ten Commandments again.”

She said “again” as if there was no hope for her charge. Once before, Clarissa had pocketed some candy for herself and Cora. Imogene, whose head, Clarissa decided, was filled with nothing but gossip, had seen them sucking on the sweets. She had snitched to Miss Elizabeth that Clarissa had bucked candy.

Missus Frances had admonished the children not to be carrying tales, but when the busy noshers did, Miss Elizabeth rewarded them with approving smiles and sweets.

“You will eat your meals in the lobby for a week,” Miss Elizabeth said sternly, her hands on her hips. Her arms, with their dry, pointed elbows, stuck out like handles on a jug.

Clarissa looked at her. Then she went back to her dusting. She wanted to smile for getting such a blessed punishment. The lobby wasn't so bad, especially for breakfast. She could flush her hated porridge down the toilet. It was better than getting her mouth washed out with a hunk of lye soap. She shuddered, remembering that taste.

Although Miss Elizabeth left the candy dish where it was, Clarissa knew that the temptation to take sweets again would be bridled by a sour memory.
Anyway, nothing tastes good
after you've eaten it
, she thought with a shrug that almost knocked her off her crutches.

Clarissa passed the playroom on her way back from dusting. She had no mind to be with the girls from her dormitory, sitting around playing Snakes and Ladders – squealing when they got the highest number of pips. It was one of the few games she enjoyed. But not today. She would go to her room and read.

Ilish brought Clarissa's supper to the dormitory bath and toilet room with an apologetic look on her young, round face. She laid the tray across the sink. Then she got Clarissa a chair. After Ilish left, Clarissa started to eat the vegetable stew. She stopped, her fork in midair, and picked up the glass of water with her left hand. She took a big gulp, and then another; here by herself she could drink the water whenever – and however she wanted to. She drained the glass and then she ate the rest of the stew, brown bread and tapioca pudding. Looking at herself in the mirror, she muttered, with her finger moving in the air as if she were writing lines, “You must not steal candy. You must not steal. You must not . . . You must . . . You . . . !” She licked out her tongue, pretending it was at Old Keziah. Then she washed and left the lobby.

Clarissa changed into her nightclothes and went to bed, pulling the sheets up to her chin.
This place,
she thought
,
grimacing,
is full of snakes and ladders: snakes like mistresses,
and ladders a girl can't climb to get away from tattlers.

15
SURPRISE FROM THE SKY

T
he quarantine ended and the pupils went racing back to school, all except those who were slated to pull Clarissa. Jakot and Peter took turns yanking the sled over the thinning snow. Once the roads were bare, Clarissa would be able to drag herself along on her crutches. It was better than having to be beholden to the orphanage boys.

The boys stopped the sled beside the school and Clarissa picked up the crutches Peter had thrown on the ground. She hauled herself up on them, and ambled up the steps into the school. A stillness settled inside her as she sat in her seat. When Miss Ellis spoke, her voice sounded as if it was far away and muffled. Clarissa's head dropped and slid along her arm. She awoke as if from a blow. Her fingers were caught between the edge of the desk and the school ma'am's ruler.

“This is no place to sleep.” Miss Ellis's voice was stern. “Especially not today.” Her eyes darted to the window, then back. She smiled and her tone turned pleasant. “We have a very big surprise.”

The children lifted their heads, holding themselves quiet as if they were afraid to move for fear of missing the announcement. Their ears perked to a distant, unfamiliar sound getting louder by the second. All of a sudden, a roar filled the air. The startled school ma'am ran to the window followed by her pupils. Clarissa could not believe what she was seeing: a giant, grey craft, shaped like a huge bird, hovered above the iced-in harbour. The other children dashed out of the school, leaving the door wide open. Clarissa followed them. Miss Ellis came out behind her and closed the door. Then she, too, rushed past Clarissa, who tried to hurry for fear the strange craft would disappear into the sky before she got to it. The younger children from the lower classroom had been running as fast as their legs could carry them. Now they hung back as the big bird landed and skidded to a halt.

“An aeroplane,” Miss Ellis explained, her eyes shining. “That's what you are seeing. The first plane that has ever landed in St. Anthony. Be patient until the pilot cuts his engine.”