Far From Home (20 page)

The pain lessened and Clarissa got her hands on her crutches and pulled herself up. She tried to ignore the heaviness of her body and the discomfort of the knobby handles of the crutches in her armpits as she dragged herself up the steps to the orphanage. The second bell was like a tongue banging her ears. When she was finally inside the lunchroom, the children looked at her with pity. Missus Frances didn't ask how she was or tell her to wash up, but her voice was kind, “I think you had better go to bed; I'll send you something to eat.”

Despite the pain, Clarissa managed to haul her body up the stairs and into the dormitory. She undressed slowly, dropping her clothes across the bed. She pulled her nightgown over her head and got into bed, feeling stunned. Soon Missus Frances came with food: apple salad with savoury dressing. It was the first time Clarissa had seen staff food. She had always wondered what was on the covered trolley. She would tell the other girls about the apple salad.

Clarissa rested in bed the next day, not getting up except to go to the toilet. For the next two days she stayed in the dormitory, her head so heavy she didn't even want to eat. Missus Frances brought her food for the next three days. Each time she cast a critical eye over her patient, exclaiming, “Clarissa, you
must
be more careful!”

From the window, Clarissa watched the other children playing games. They ran into the wind lifting light, energetic arms. It was all so wonderful – the things they could do.

I'll do all that someday,
she vowed.

26
A SAVAGE ATTACK

C
larissa was lying across her bed reading
Little Women
when she heard screaming in the distance. She shrugged it off, thinking that some rascal – Peter most likely – had put a spider in someone's ear, the same as he had done to her last year. The screaming became more intense, and then stopped. She grabbed her crutches and hopped to the window: children and adults were running in the direction of the beach.
Probably just a fight,
she thought, and went back to lie on her bed. She picked up her book and was deep into reading when Cora burst into the room panting, strangling the words she was trying to get out. “Peter . . . dogs!”

“Peter,” said Clarissa in a dismissive tone, “should go where the dogs don't bark.”

Cora's eyes widened in horror; Clarissa dropped her book, and its pages swished shut. Something was wrong. Cora never put a face on her like this; her eyes looked ready to fall out of their sockets.

Cora wrung out her words, her hands clasped: “He's lying on the ground, bitten into and streaked with blood. Dead!”

The last word came like a hammer. Clarissa's head seemed to crack with the blow. Her face and eyes grew heavy; her heart felt like a rock.

Cora fell across her bed, whimpering, “I wished him dead.”

Clarissa looked at her best friend. “But it wasn't that kind of dead,” she said slowly. “I wanted to bat him so many times with my crutches, and I would have if I could have stood without them.” Now she wished she could have saved him from the wild teeth of the dogs. He must have felt the same kind of pain that bit into her hip and foot long after Dr. Grenfell had split her tendons and sewn up her skin.

“Besides,” she added hopefully, “you don't know if he's
really
dead.”

“Yes I do. Uncle Aubrey threw whale meat in the kennel to get the dogs off him; then he dragged him out and put his finger against his neck. He looked up and said, in a strange voice, ‘This boy ain't needin' salve and bandages. His breath's gone.'”

Cora's eyes were downcast. “No one seemed to know what Peter was doin' in the kennel.”

“Maybe he was hanging off the kennel fence and the dogs dragged him in.” Clarissa thought of all the times she'd seen Peter locking his heels on fences and dropping his head, his arms dangling, while the younger orphans watched him with open mouths.

The sound of gunshots drew the girls' attention to the window. They looked at each other. Now the huskies were dead, too.

Missus Frances warned the children at suppertime, as she had done many times before, not to go near husky dogs. “They have a savage nature like the wolves that are part of their ancestry. From the wolves they get their howl and whine. Remember,” the mistress cautioned, “dogs will lick your hand today and eat you tomorrow. They are as deceitful as wolves who, trappers will tell you, are not dead until their teeth show. As long as their lips are together, they have enough life to bite. There has been trouble with dogs in St. Anthony before this. Arms and legs – and faces – have been bitten into and torn. The dogs have to be destroyed after an attack. Once they taste human blood, they don't stop until they get flesh.”

The mistress lifted her chin, her voice grave. “After today we will not speak of Peter's mishap. Someone else will soon take his place at the table.” Her eyelashes flittered as if flicking away tears.

That night, the silence from the kennel was more lonely than the dogs' howls had been. The girls in Clarissa's dormitory slipped quietly into their beds and fell asleep without a word. Clarissa awoke to the lonely sound of galing winds. She stirred, relieved that although the wind howled like huskies, it couldn't get inside. The wind used to whip around the old orphanage, looking for open seams in the green wood. Sometimes the wind had a tongue of rain; Clarissa would wake to cold, damp air breathing in her face.

She fell back asleep and dreamed about Peter.
He and
other children are outside the dog kennel hussing the animals.
Some boys dare Peter to climb over the galvanized mess
wire and jump into the kennel with the four husky dogs. Jakot
is grinning. “If you can do that without showing you're afraid,
the huskies won't attack yer.” Peter is acting cocky, but fear
surfaces in his eyes as he drops into the kennel. They widen
at the bared, white teeth of the dogs. The animals turn on
him, fur straight up on their backs, their tails bristling and
their jowls foaming. Peter's heavy pants are ripped from him
and blood drips from torn, white skin into the sawdust-covered
ground. Clarissa balances herself on one crutch and
pushes the other through a hole in the wire kennel and hits
one, two, three, four dogs on their heads. They lift their
snouts into the air and howl as if they are wolves baying at the
moon. Then they run to cower in the corner. Peter crawls
away whimpering; the dogs come back after him. Clarissa
hears him screaming; she's afraid the dogs will leave Peter,
leap the fence and turn on her. The screaming stops; she's
too scared to look back. The other children go shrieking
towards the orphanage. Clarissa tries to follow them, but
huskies catch a whiff of her blood from the monthly eggs broken
inside her. They leap the fence and attack her. She falls
down knowing she will never get away until the huskies have
eaten her legs.
She awoke from her dream, her heart pounding. Peter was really dead!

The next morning, Clarissa overheard the older boys talking outside the orphanage about Peter and the blood on the ground in the kennel. She wanted to dream Peter alive so she could say she was sorry for thinking he was mean – even though he was – and for not believing him when he said his people came from Norse warriors – even if they didn't.

She remembered Peter telling Miss Ellis, in a proud voice, about his father and Norsemen. Clarissa had expected the school ma'am to give him a poke with her ruler, and call him fanciful, but she hadn't. She looked at him as if anything was possible. She said she had heard of a Newfoundland historian – a man named W. A. Munn – who was writing a book suggesting that Vikings had once lived near St. Anthony. “No one knows the many bloodlines in this country,” the school ma'am had answered, as if upholding Peter's belief that he came from Viking blood. Peter had looked around at the rest of the children with a bold and lofty look on his face.

***

“It is important to feel you belong to someone,” Clarissa murmured to Cora as they sat together at the funeral service.

Cora looked at Clarissa. “Peter was good on times,” she admitted reluctantly. She turned her head towards the pulpit, where Reverend Penny was about to start his sermon.

Reverend Penny assured everyone that the dogs had only hurt Peter's body, which was just a box holding his life. They had freed him to go up to God. The Reverend's voice rose solemnly. “We must not think of a person as being dead. Peter is gone away from a torn body into the garden of God. In Heaven he has a new life. He will be there with his mother and father. We all have to pay the debt of nature someday.”

Debt! Clarissa never thought of herself as owing her breath to anyone. She thought it was a gift. It had not occurred to her until now that her body would go into a pitty hole someday. Jakot, Owen, Hipper and Simon looked as mournful as the black bands on their left arms, as they each reached for a handle of the barrow under the white box holding Peter. They carried it out of the church.

Clarissa and Cora walked together down the road to the graveyard. An old fisherman, standing there, watching and puffing on his TD pipe, said, as if to himself, “These are dog days: July and August. The Dog Star, the brightest star in the night sky, rises and sets with the sun, and no one knows what effect this could have on wild dogs.” He went down the road shaking his head.

Thinking of Peter barred inside a box reminded Clarissa of the other box up on Tea House Hill. She wondered if she and Cora would ever have the nerve to pry up the cover. Closed boxes seemed to hold dead things. Her face brightened. Or treasures.

A cloud crossed her face. She shouldn't be thinking about treasures with Peter just dead. Guilt settled inside her.

27
NEWS ABOUT GOING HOME

C
larissa had been twelve for six months when Missus Frances called her into the office. She stood, leaning on her crutches, wondering what awful thing she had done now.

“Your mother has written to us,” the woman said quickly. “She has sent for you to come home.”

Clarissa's eyes widened. Her voice came out in a hoarse whisper. “My mother wants me to come home.” Her body swayed as if an earthquake had started beneath her feet.

Going home had been her daydream and her night dream through the long years, sustaining her through every hard blow. But now, sitting in the office looking across the desk at Missus Frances, her concept of home fled as swiftly as if it were a dream she had awakened from. An icy feeling swept through her.

“Your mother feels it is time for you to be instructed in the Roman Catholic faith.”

“Did she say . . . uh . . .?” Clarissa couldn't finish her sentence under the probing eyes of the mistress.

“Yes?” The woman's lips pulled tight as she waited for Clarissa to finish.

Clarissa drew in a deep breath. “Did she say she missed me?”

“Now, Child, why would she tell me that? You've been gone for most of your life. You may not have been missed, but you are wanted home.”

Clarissa wasn't sure what to think, what to say, what to feel. She had wanted so much to go home, praying the Protestant way to get there. She had never been a real orphan; now she wouldn't have to be a Protestant either.

“You came here because your parents were concerned about your health. You were kept here at Dr. Grenfell's request. You are going home because your mother is concerned about your religious instruction. Likely there will be many adjustments to be made on both sides. Understand, Clarissa, that you will be going home to an outhouse and a water bucket and a galvanized tub for bathing. Though your family has social and economic standing in the community, the place itself is backward. You will not have the privileges you have enjoyed here.”

Missus Frances turned the pages of a file in front of her. It was from the orphan logbook. “Let's see what has been written about you: ‘. . . a fair-skinned child with chestnut hair and brown eyes.'

“You came to the Grenfell Hospital in 1915, where you were treated for infantile paralysis. You were home once. That was in 1917 when you were four, and Dr. Grenfell was away. When he returned, he wrote a letter asking your mother to send you back to the hospital. Let me see. Yes, here it is. You were brought back in 1918, when you were five. That was in the last year of the war. It was a strange time to send a child away; torpedoes could be anywhere.

“On October 18, 1920, you came to the orphanage from the hospital. You will like to hear what else has been written about you. ‘She is very meek towards older people. An obedient child – gets on remarkably well. She has won the affection of the staff by her responsiveness and courage. She is a very bright child and good in school. She helps around the orphanage. Clarissa is very good-looking.'”

Clarissa looked at the mistress. “They . . .
you
think that about me?” she whispered. “That's how I am seen? I wish I had known that all these years. I thought I was in everyone's way.” To herself she added,
If I had known anyone thought I
was smart and good-looking, I would have been nicer to
myself in the mirror
.

“You never complained.” The mistress's voice was gentle.

But I did inside
.
There were times I wanted to squeeze
the sides of Miss Elizabeth's face together until her eyes
were back to back, making her nose look as long as a rat's
tail.

She suddenly felt an attachment she wanted to hold on to. There was no such place as home outside the orphanage. She was familiar with this place and the people around her, even if she didn't like all of them.