Far From Home (4 page)

Cora rushed on ahead while Clarissa regained her footing. She had to get upstairs and wash before supper, or there might not be any food for her. Cora was on her way down the stairs to the dining room when Clarissa left the bath and toilet room, which Miss Elizabeth called a lobby.

Clarissa was relieved to get downstairs and hobble into the dining room before the last bell rang. Looking over at the table of boys, she hoped none of them would wander up Tea House Hill and discover the strange box before she and Cora had a chance to get back there.

4
A NEW ORPHAN IN THE
CRACKER BOX

C
ora and the other girls were sitting on benches lining each side of the long table when Clarissa took her place at the end, placing her crutches against a stool. She sat facing Imogene, one of the older girls. Everyone called her Emma Jane when they weren't calling her Miss Tattle-tale. Imogene was always trying to get in the mistresses' good graces by looking for someone to tattle on. Clarissa hoped Miss Tattle-tale wouldn't discover that she and Cora had been up on Tea House Hill.

Missus Frances, a stout, light-haired American, looked Clarissa's way with a deep frown on her white face; her cheeks were like dumplings against her nose, itself a pinch of white dough. Clarissa felt her heart rising in her throat, as if it would choke her. She expected the whip of Missus Frances's voice to chase her and Cora to bed without supper. The woman's grey eyes shifted away, and Clarissa's heart settled.

Missus Frances lifted her head high and opened her mouth wide to offer thanks for the meal. The children looked at her, ready to follow as her voice lifted to sing the grace.

“Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;

Praise Him, all creatures here below;

Praise Him above, ye heavenly host; Praise

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

Once grace was finished, Clarissa dipped into her rabbit pie, trying not to think of the rabbit all in one piece, like the wild rabbits that hopped among the trees across from the orphanage. She stuck her spoon into the large tub of blackberry jam on the table and spread a heaping spoonful on her slice of buttered bread. Biting into it, she looked longingly towards the stainless steel water jug, swallowing dryly.
No water
until you have finished your meal.
That was the rule. Clarissa chewed her food slowly, hoping it wouldn't get stuck in her throat. By the time she got to the last bite, she was so thirsty she gulped her glass of water and got a stomach cramp.

After supper, Clarissa hobbled towards the stairs with Cora beside her. The girls turned at the sound of the orphanage door opening. They smiled as Dr. Grenfell came inside with a little blond girl by the hand.

Clarissa was always glad to see the Englishman, someone the orphanage helpers called “the man himself”, sometimes with as much reverence as if they were referring to “the Man Above.” He seemed almost as important as God. The mistresses scurried about putting everything in place whenever they heard that Dr. Grenfell was on his way. Clarissa knew he wasn't God. Although Dr. Grenfell had used his knife and his medicine to make some people walk on two feet again, he had left her in pain and on crutches. She looked towards the frail little girl holding the arm of a wooden stick dolly dangling beside her.

“This is your home now, Trophenia,” Dr. Grenfell was saying in a gentle voice, looking down into the child's upturned face.

The door to the mistresses' office opened and out came Miss Elizabeth and the long sweep of her navy dress as she hurried towards the doctor. She smoothed dark hair pulled back into a bun and parted at the crown, showing an even line of white skin. Then she lifted her chin, her jaw as streamlined as a ship's prow, and gave the doctor her best smile, the one she saved, like good clothes, for special occasions. The doctor glanced at her and nodded. “Another child to be in your care, and Frances's,” he said in his crisp English voice. Then he smiled kindly at the children running to gather around him. He listened to news about their activities until Miss Elizabeth, with apologies to the doctor, shooed them off to the activity room, where they were allowed to spend an hour before bed.

Clarissa lingered in the distance and watched the new inmate, one small, cuffed hand holding tightly to Dr. Grenfell's large, gloved one. The doctor was wearing a sealskin parka, its hood trimmed with white fur; only a little of his kind, rugged face showed. Seams ran like white scars up his sealskin boots, their tops tied with twine. Clarissa wondered what he was carrying in the leather purse at his side. Likely a knife and thread, she reasoned, a knife to cut patients open and take out terrible things like the consumption bug, and some thread to tie the skin back up.

There's not a blemish on Trophenia's face,
Clarissa thought in awe. She stared at the bright blue eyes in that pale face, the blond hair under a round, blue cap. It was the hair of an angel. Cora's mother had told Clarissa: “Your hair is rich brown, like fresh earth turned up in the spring.”
The colour of
wet dirt
, Clarissa had answered her silently.

Just wait
, Clarissa thought.
Soon Old Keziah will jib off
Trophenia's hair like a tomboy's.
The mistress had done that to Clarissa's thick, heavy hair after she came from the Grenfell Hospital. “When children arrive at The Home,” Miss Elizabeth had explained, “their heads often carry creatures bent on finding new feeding grounds.”

Miss Elizabeth was speaking quietly to the doctor. He followed her into the office with the new orphan by the hand; his sealskin boots chafing against each other, made soft whispers.

As soon as Dr. Grenfell left the orphanage, the little orphan screamed, “Mammy! Mammy!” Her eyes darted back and forth as if looking for a familiar face in this strange place.

Voices wrapped in silk gloves reach towards us when the
doctor is present,
Clarissa thought.
Voices without gloves
reach like sharp fingers grabbing ears when the door shuts
behind him.

Miss Elizabeth's brown eyes narrowed as she looked back at Trophenia. “Your mother has gone to Heaven.”

“She wouldn't go away. She loves me,” the little girl sobbed. “But if she's gone to Heaven, I wanna go too.”

“It's too far and you can't go unless God calls you.”

“Mammy never said she wus goin' to dat place,” Trophenia cried.

“You little heathen – you know nothing about Heaven!” the mistress scolded as she pulled off the girl's dark, shabby coat and Juliet cap.

The new girl looked so thin Clarissa imagined her shoulder blades turning into wings and flying her away to Heaven. She wanted to call to her, tell her not to cry. But she knew if she opened her mouth, nothing would get past the stern look on Miss Elizabeth's face.

The mistress warned: “Stop your whingeing, Child, or I shall put you in the broom closet.”

The little girl's eyes widened and she began to howl. The mistress grabbed her arm and pulled her towards the closet. She opened the door and pushed Trophenia into the dark. Clarissa stared as Miss Elizabeth closed the door and turned a key in the lock. Trophenia's screams grew louder, and then stopped, leaving a heavy silence and a sense that the little girl had disappeared. The mistress unlocked the door and opened it. Trophenia got up from the floor and rushed out, emitting quick, shuddering gasps. Finally she stood quiet, shivering.

Clarissa hobbled over to her. “I'm Clarissa. I can show you around if you want.”

The little girl looked at her. “I'm Treffie,” she murmured.

Miss Elizabeth came between them. “Trophenia,” she said, “has to have food and a bath, and then it will be bedtime. Perhaps tomorrow.”

The mistress nodded to Georgia, a young helper who was passing by, indicating she was to take care of Treffie. Then Miss Elizabeth strode towards the playroom. Clarissa watched as she stood in the doorway and called, “All up now to get your baths and brush your teeth.” Her hand seemed to sweep the children from the playroom.

Clarissa knew what to expect for Treffie. She would get a toothbrush, a towel and a face cloth, and an ordinary comb. She would also get a fine-tooth comb to hang on the wall beside her bed so she could do a regular check for crawlers. The last time Clarissa had picked up a crawler, Missus Frances had blamed it on her mixing with outsiders on the school playground. Her hair was cut, and kerosene, mixed with larkspur, ether and cottonseed, was combed through what was left of it. The concoction was left on all night; it burned her scalp. In the morning, Housemother Simmons came huffing and puffing to wash her hair.

Later that day, Cora's mother, passing by the dormitory, had found Clarissa looking at herself in the bath and toilet room mirror and crying bitterly at the fierce sight of herself. “Now me child,” Mrs. Payne had chided, “sure, 'tis only to get the mites out of your mazard before they hatch and eat you out of head and skin. You'm lucky. In me mother's day, to cure the grippe you had to swallow nine lice every third day for nine days.”

Clarissa wanted to retort,
Then there must have been a
good supply of lice in the place, and no one to run them out
of it
. Instead, she went outside the orphanage, forgetting she would be made fun of when the boys saw her hair. Ilish had put it in clips, making curls tight to her head like lambs' wool. Peter started the taunting, and the other boys took up his chant, “Baaa baaa, brown sheep, have you any wool? Yes, Clair, yes, Clair, a whole head full!”

Clarissa's hair lost its tight curls in a few days. She was relieved when Missus Frances told her she would be allowed to grow it to her shoulders.

Clarissa pulled herself upstairs to the dormitory, thinking about Treffie and what would be done to her hair. When she got to her bed, she dropped her crutches against the wooden trunk. They leaned there like wooden soldiers. There was no padding on them and they hurt her armpits, but they did get her places her feet could not take her. She was glad for that – grateful for what Missus Frances called small mercies.

She stripped off her clothes and laid them across the foot of her bed. Then she went to get a wash before the other girls came for their baths. She was too tired to wait for Ilish to give her a Saturday night bath.

It was a relief to lie in bed, her legs no longer swinging between crutches, her arms at rest from having to help her body get around. It felt good even though the horsehair mattress was hard under her aching right hip. In bed she could listen to her thoughts, instead of hearing older people's voices grating her ears.
Adults
, she thought spitefully,
act as though
time is in their hands to slide children in and out of, and fit
them where they please
.

She could be thankful she wasn't an orphan like Treffie. She would go home someday, although she wouldn't want to go home to a shack like the one Esther lived in. Sometimes her thoughts brought discomforting images of older brothers and sisters waving as she went down the path to a boat. There came the vague memory of a little girl standing in a doorway with a tear-stained face. A face she knew must be her mother's was clouded. She wasn't sure if these images were real or if she had dreamed them.

If she were home, she would likely have a sister to cuddle against in the night when winds blowing in off the sea rattled the windows like the hands of angry ghosts. But she was here – and with girls who didn't like her most of the time. One night she had heard the two girls whose beds were next to hers whispering too low for her to hear anything but her name. Another night, she woke to hear Celetta, one of the older girls, saying to the younger girls, “You can't trust Clarissa not to get up in the night and kill yer with a knife. My father said Catholics are cruel. Sure, you would think they were holding the Devil's mass by the way they swear at everything, using the Holy Name. Then they tattle all their badness to a priest and he tells the Pope and the Pope tells God. By the time God gets it, yer don't know how big a sin 'tis grown.”

“But Clarissa doesn't do that. She's a Methodist while she's here.” That had been Cora, defending her.

Clarissa had stirred to let them know she was awake, and someone said, “Shush.”

Their words echoed through her head during the day, and she imagined that the girls were looking at her strangely. She didn't even know who the Pope was, and she wasn't sure she wanted to. No one seemed to like him at the orphanage or at the church where God came every Sunday like the Holy Ghost; no one could see Him but He was there all the same. He helped people when no one else could or would. Her Catholic religion was something she knew nothing about, something she didn't learn about at the United Church of Christ. A long time ago, someone had gotten into her bag and broken her little statue of the Mother Mary. Ettie, an older orphan, had said, “I bet someone broke your statue because it's an idol and anyone having an idol is breaking the Ten Commandments.”

She was drifting into sleep when Ilish knocked on the door and came in with a fresh flannel nightgown, ready to help with her bath.

Clarissa watched from under the curtains of her eyelashes as Ilish shrugged and laid the clean nightgown on her bed. She left without a word.
She must have known I was tired
, Clarissa thought, feeling grateful. She let her mind drift to the strange, brass-sheeted box. Maybe there was nothing more in it than china cups and saucers for the English nurses' teatime on the hill; likely, though, the box held a trapper's furs and winter supplies – and spiders and sowbugs.

Clarissa sighed with impatience at the thought she might have to wait until next summer to open the box. Missus Frances would be vexed if she discovered her and Cora wandering too far from the orphanage with the bite of a winter wind in the air, the smothering presence of a snowstorm waiting not far-off. It was best to leave the box. For sure, it had been there a long time. Maybe other people had seen it, but they hadn't had the nerve to break the lock. She would open the box at the risk of bringing a curse down on her head.