Far From Home (9 page)

The school ma'am dabbed at her dress with a cloth she kept in her desk. Then she looked at the class, her eyelids drooping over her eyes. “One thing about Clarissa,” she said, “you can punish her one minute, but she's smiling the next.”

Clarissa decided to spend her corner time using her imagination. She began to write a story in her mind for Treffie, imagining that it was the sky she was facing and not a dreary old corner.
Clouds are made from angels' hair. When
angels clean their hairbrushes, the hair falls into the sky.
Young angels have dark hair and older angels have white
hair. That's why there are light and dark clouds. Sometimes
the sun comes out and burns up the clouds. Then another
bunch of hair falls from an angel's brush. Angels never go
bald and they never die. That is why we will always have
clouds.

After Miss Ellis let Clarissa return to her place, she copied down her story for Treffie. The school ma'am came down, picked it up and read it with her nose in the air. “You're not short on imagination, but imagination can be a deceitful thing,” she warned her. “It can make a person believe things that aren't true.”

“But it's only a story I wrote for Treffie because she has angel's hair,” Clarissa said earnestly.

“Hmm . . . the new orphan. In that case,” said Miss Ellis, “I will give you an adequate mark.”

Once school was dismissed for the day and the children hurried outside, boys who usually ran on ahead lagged behind laughing. One harbour boy taunted her. “So you want to be a blue furry animal, do yer now? 'Tis der school ma'am's skin dat's blue. T'anks ter you.”

Clarissa leaned against the school and took her scribbler out of her bookbag. She tore its pages to pieces, scattering her stories into the air. The wind lifted them for a moment, and then they fell like snowflakes to the ground. “See if I'll write anything like that again,” she muttered.

Jakot stood jiggling one skin-booted leg beside the sled. Clarissa settled down on it without a word. She passed her crutches to Peter who sometimes carried them; other times he let them hobble over the snow. Today, he lifted them to push the sled. Once he jabbed Clarissa's back and she let out a sharp cry. It mingled with bully boy's laugh. When they got to the top of the first hill, Jakot let go of the sled. Clarissa sat rigid with fear as the sled picked up speed; her eyes widened in horror at the sight of a tree straight ahead. She swung herself to one side and went head over heels into a snowbank. Blood dripped into the snow from where a tooth had cut into her tongue and lip.

Jakot laughed. “That's how to get her partway from school.”

“You big blubber-eater, Jakot – you Eskimo Plague!” shouted Owen as he helped Clarissa up and back on the sled. “I ought to give yer face the turn of me hand. You could have killed Clarissa. A fine fix you'd be in then.”

Peter came up beside them, and laughed scornfully. “'Tis no more than you'd expect from someone whose people drinks girls' pee to make 'em strong, and lifts the skins on the bottom of their igloos to use toilet holes made in the ice.”

Jakot backed away from the boys ganging up on him. “I didn't mean ter let her go,” he whined. “The rope slipped from me cuff.”

Clarissa felt a surge of pity. She had to put up with the Eskimo, and he had to put up with other boys calling him The Eskimo Plague and playing tricks on him. A scar on his lip stood out raw white in the cold air. It was a reminder of when he was younger, and one of the older orphans had tricked him into putting his sloppy mouth on a cold metal bar; his lips had frozen onto the bar. His flesh had torn when he tried to get away.

Peter pulled Clarissa, with jerks and stops, until he had her inside the orphanage gates. Then he tipped the sled over and Clarissa fell into the snow. Owen dropped her crutches beside her. She lifted them slowly, knowing there was no reason for her to rush to get inside the orphanage. She had to go to bed without supper.
I'm so hungry, I can almost swallow
my tongue for food,
she thought as she started up the steps. The other children rushed ahead of her, even Cora.

Clarissa hadn't meant to go outside without having her breakfast. She had been drawn to the beauty of the snow, new and unmarked. Now she would go hungry as punishment. Whenever she was late for breakfast and didn't get supper, the night stretched before her like a long journey she dreaded.

As soon as she reached the inside of the orphanage, Miss Elizabeth spoke, “Get up the stairs!”

It was no good for Clarissa to put on a long face. So many times she had struggled to get home from school, knowing it was useless to rush. Though she was feeling famished there would be no supper for her.

She looked up at the layers of steps she had to climb to be in a dormitory for hours by herself. She stopped to beg. “I only wanted to have fun in the snow.”

“There are rules to abide by,” the mistress replied in a sharp voice, putting out her hand and pushing Clarissa towards the stairs. She lost her balance, and fell on the floor to the clatter of her braces and crutches.

“You are letting your stubbornness overcome your sense,” the mistress added, her brown eyes threatening. “I'm going to the kitchen to get a stick. That will knock the Irish sulk out of you.”

As Clarissa was getting to her feet, she saw the mistress coming back with the rod.
Old Keziah can beat the black man
out of me. I'm not going upstairs and I'm not alI Irish,
she thought angrily
. Missus Frances told me I have French blood
from my mother's side, mixed with the English and Irish
blood from my father.

Miss Elizabeth held the stick and frowned at Clarissa. “I won't let you go to the next birthday party if you don't get up the stairs now.”

The next birthday party would be for her and Peter in January. Last year, when she had untied the parcel holding her mother's birthday gift, she'd found a tiny slide projector with built-in slides of children and animals. She took the projector out of her treasure bag only when she was alone, for fear someone would take it. One day she left it on the bed; when she came back to the dormitory, it had disappeared. The other girls denied seeing it.

Clarissa started up the stairs, passing the lantern that stayed lit in the hall at night, and went into the dark room, wishing for a piece of hard tack. She got ready for bed, and slid under the warm counterpane. She soon drifted past her hunger into a sound sleep.

She awoke startled. For a moment she thought she was back at the hospital and rats were gnawing on the walls. It was only the other girls munching on hard tack. Every second suppertime, Ilish brought out a pan holding cakes of hard tack halved and buttered, ready for the children to take to their dormitories. The sound of the other girls filling their bellies was enough to make Clarissa want to be good, though she often wondered what it was about her that was so bad.

She was falling back to sleep when a beam of light touched her eyelids. Miss Elizabeth was standing by her bed holding a lamp. “Now Clarissa,” she said, loud enough for the other girls to hear, “be sure to use the lobby before you go to sleep. You know what can happen.”

It had not happened for a long time and Old Keziah's words shamed her. Besides, all the water must be drained out of her. She hadn't had a drink since lunch. She held herself tight as she lay in bed, feeling mortified that the other girls knew she had wet her bed when she was on the lower floor.

That night she dreamed of a pretty young woman in a white gown, her hair braided around her head. She floated above a wild sea with her hands outstretched. Clarissa reached her hands as far as she could, even her weak left one, hoping to have her small hands clasped in the hands of the woman she knew must be her mother. She strained and strained, but her fingertips could not reach her mother's. Tears filled the woman's eyes and spilled down a face that stayed as still as if it were carved out of wood, like the face of the statue of the Blessed Madonna. The tears dripped into the sea and mingled with it. “You have beautiful hands, Mommy,” Clarissa said. But it was as if she had not spoken. Her mother did not answer. Then she drifted away into a black fog.

In the morning when Clarissa woke up, she fancied she could see herself being lifted into a large boat while her mother cried. She tried to bring the image close, but it stayed veiled – unreal. Something appeared real. A string of beads linked to a tiny cross had hung from her mother's wrist: the same string of beads she had in her treasure bag. Housemother Simmons had seen Clarissa playing with the beads. She told her: “These are not for playing with; they are beads Catholics say prayers on, prayers to Mary, the Mother of God. Protestants don't need beads to speak to God.” She raised an eyebrow, her mouth set.

Clarissa got her treasure bag and poured the beads out into her hand. She tightened her fingers over the cross on her palm for a moment before she put the beads back in the bag. Then she sat pondering her past. She knew there had to be a reason why she was kept at the orphanage. Perhaps Dr. Grenfell knew what it was. Maybe it was
his
secret. A dark question mark made sickle swipes inside her mind.

9
WAITING FOR CHRISTMAS

“A
few more days of the blistering voices of grownups
splashing vinegar into the cuts of children's lives and it
will be Christmas.
” Clarissa looked up from the pages of
Just
Looking At You
, and the complaint of the book's forlorn heroine. “That sounds like this orphanage,” she muttered.

Clarissa loved Christmas, not only because of the gifts, but because it came with a glad spirit that moved through the orphanage, touching even the mistresses and making them laugh.

The Saturday before Christmas, Clarissa and Cora were on their way to their dormitories when they heard voices coming from the Grenfell shop on the first floor. Clarissa sneaked along the hall slowly, trying to avoid tapping her crutches too loudly on the wooden floor. The door to the shop was open a few inches, and the girls could see barrels of clothes and goods that had been gathered from the kind people of the United States and Canada and shipped to St. Anthony weeks ago. Miss Elizabeth's and Missus Frances's heads were down in the barrels; they were busy pulling out tuck-away gifts for the children. “We had better not let them see us, or we'll get nothing,” Cora cautioned Clarissa. She slid quietly past the door and up the stairs to go to her dormitory. Clarissa followed, her brown eyes alight with the anticipation of a Christmas surprise that would not come from Canada or the United States – or even the North Pole.

The girls stopped at a window near the stairwell, both of them wrapped in thoughts of Christmas gifts. Outside, in the dusky afternoon, a light shimmered up from the harbour. “'Tis a glim – a reflection the ice throws off on its way to shore,” Clarissa had overheard Uncle Aubrey tell Miss Elizabeth as they stood on the orphanage steps last week. Now the bay lay silent under ice thickened into a seascape, as residents explored the large surface on foot and on sleds pulled by huskies, their cacophony and breath rising in the dry, empty sky.

Like walking on water
, Clarissa thought as she watched Dr. Grenfell running across an area of ice now used as a football field. The dapper-looking doctor often showed up unexpectedly, arriving over the hills on a dogsled, or walking down from his home to tumble with the boys in the snow. He beckoned for the lads, as he called them, to come play football with him. A cap rose in the air and came down on its crown. Peter got to be captain of one team and Jakot of the other. They set up josh posts in the ice and picked their players without arguing, but only because of the doctor's presence. He always took turns playing with each side, kicking the ball, a pig's bladder, as vigorously as any of the boys. Afterwards he would always declare, “It was all jolly good fun.” Sometimes the doctor set up obstacle courses on the ice, and included the girls in the game – all the girls except Clarissa.

She shifted her gaze from the window to look at Cora, but her friend had gone. When Clarissa turned back to the window, she saw her running across the ice. The window was open a crack, and she could hear Cora calling to Ettie and Becky.

Clarissa took her time getting downstairs. She hauled on her coat and mitts and went outside. She sat on the cold orphanage steps all day, yearning to be able to hit or toss a ball. Peter passed her after the game had finished. He taunted, “You're deformed!”

“You're misinformed,” she shouted at him.

He looked back at her with a puzzled look. She knew he was wondering if the word
misinformed
had as terrible a meaning as
deformed
.

At the dining room table the next morning, Treffie coughed as if her insides were going to rip open and scatter her heart and everything else around the room. Miss Elizabeth came and stood over her. “Your handkerchief, Trophenia. Put it to your mouth. When you cough like that, your breath can be dragged into the nostrils of anyone near you. Then they will be coughing it back out like you are doing. We don't want that, do we?”