Rodzina
Authors: Karen Cushman
2. Somewhere in Illinois or Iowa
7. The Prairie East of Cheyenne
9. A Thousand Miles from Omaha
Clarion Books
a Houghton Mifflin Company imprint
215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003
Copyright © 2003 by Karen Cushman
The text was set in 13.5-point Caslon 540.
All rights reserved.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003.
Printed in U.S.A.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Cushman, Karen.
Rodzina / by Karen Cushman.
p. cm.
Summary: A twelve-year-old Polish American girl is boarded onto an orphan train in Chicago with fears about traveling to the West and a life of unpaid slavery.
ISBN 0-618-13351-8 (alk. paper)
1. Polish Americans—Juvenile fiction. [1. Polish Americans—Fiction.
2. Orphans—Fiction. 3. Orphan trains—Fiction. 4. Survival—Fiction.
5. West (U.S.)—History—19th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.C962 Ro 2003
[Fic]—dc21
2002015976
eISBN 978-0-547-53348-3
v1.0912
I
WAS TEN YEARS OLD
when Grandma Lipski^ took me to the Polish Cemetery in Chicago to show me her mother's grave. In front of a gravestone marked
Rodzina Czerwinski
she sat and cried, while I watched her, this tough little grandma who never cried.
Many years later, when I thought about writing a book about a Polish girl from Chicago, I decided to call her Rodzina after my great-grandmother. I checked with my father to make sure I had the spelling correct, and I discovered that Rodzina was not her first name, but was the Polish word for "family." The gravestone marked the resting place of the
rodzina Czerwinski
, or Czerwinski family.
Rodzina
is about the search for a family, and I decided that while Rodzina was not my great-grandmother's name, it was the perfect name for the girl in my story. And so she is Rodzina.
I would like to dedicate this book to my family—the Czerwinskis, the Cushmans, and the Lipskis, who were kings in Poland.
O
N A COLD
M
ONDAY MORNING
in March, when a weak, pale sun struggled to shine and ice glistened in the cracks in the wooden street, a company of some twenty-two orphan children with stiff new clothes and little cardboard suitcases boarded a special railway car at the station near the Chicago River. I know, because I was one of them.
The station was noisier and more confused than Halsted Street on market day. Travelers carrying featherbeds and bundles wrapped in blue gingham cloth shoved me aside in their hurry to get here or there. A man in a bright red jacket bumped into me and apologized in a language I did not know. At least I assumed it was an apology, because of all the bowing and tipping of his hat, so I said, "It's all right, mister, but I'd say you should know a little English if you expect to get wherever you're going." He tipped his hat again.
One woman, burdened with children, blankets, a tin kettle, and a three-legged stove, finally put that stove right down on the platform, sat herself atop it, and began to cry. I knew how she felt. I myself was a mite worried—not scared, being twelve and no baby like Evelyn or Gertie to be afraid of every little thing, but worried, yes. It was all so loud and disorderly and unfamiliar.
I forced my way through the crowd and grabbed on to a belt in front of me. The boy it belonged to said, "Hang on tight, Rodzina, afore we're swept into the lake like sewage." It was Spud, whom I knew from the Little Wanderers' Refuge. He and Chester, Gertie, Horton, Rose and Pearl Lubnitz, the baby Evelyn, and I—we had been there together. The others were from the Infant Hospital and the Orphan Asylum near Hyde Park. Orphans, all of us, carrying all we owned in our two hands, pushing and shoving like everyone else.
A lady, standing straight and tall in a black suit and stiff white shirtwaist, put her hands up to her mouth and shouted, but I could not hear much over the din. I finally gathered that she was from the Orphan Asylum and was calling us all together. Letting go of Spud's belt, I stretched myself even taller so I could get a better look at her over that expanse of heads. She was pale and thin, her mouth ill-humored, and her gray eyes as cold and sharp as the wire rims of her spectacles. I should have known they would not send someone kind and good-natured to accompany a carload of orphans.
Roaring and cursing, a short, barrel-shaped man togged out in a checked jacket and yellow shoes pushed his way through the crowd. "You! Orphans!" he shouted, the cigar in the corner of his mouth waving and waggling with his words. "Pipe down! I am Mr. Szprot, the placing-out agent for the Association of Aid Societies. That means I am the boss and you do what I tell you. You are, you know, none of you, too young to go to Hell. Or to jail. So shut your mugs and line up." After my time on the street I was used to being threatened with Hell, so it didn't bother me much, but still I shut my mug. There was silence from the other orphans too, and we walked noiselessly to the train.
Trains had hooted and rumbled behind our house on Honore Street, but I had never seen a locomotive up so close, looming like the fearful dragon of Wawel Hill in the story Auntie Manya used to tell, its smokestack belching sparks, and a line of cars trailing behind like a tail of wood and iron. If I had been younger or smaller, even I might have been scared.
Getting on this train had not been my idea. I wanted to go home. But I had no home anymore, except the Little Wanderers' Refuge, and they had sent me away to be sold as a slave. I knew that because a kid on the street, Melvin, had told me. "That orphanage ships kids on trains to the west," he said. "In freight cars. Don't feed 'em or nothin'. Sells 'em to families that want slaves." He shook his head. "Orphans never come to no good end." I found that easy to believe, so I believed every word.
No, I surely did not want to get on the train, but the crowd of orphans shoved me onward. The long black wool stockings they'd given me at the orphan home itched something fierce, and pausing midway up the iron steps, I bent down to scratch my knees. Three orphans knocked right into me.
"You, Polish girl," said Mr. Szprot, his voice even louder than his jacket, "try not to be so clumsy."
A big boy behind me snickered. "Clumsy Polish girl," he said. "Ugly cabbage eater." Accidentally on purpose I swung my suitcase and cracked him on the knee. I knew he wouldn't try to get even with Mr. Szprot so close.
Once up the steps, I looked back. This was the last I'd ever see of Chicago, this view of soot and ice and metal tracks. On such a cold, gray, blustery morning, it looked like a dead place, but at least it was familiar. Chicago had always meant Mama and Papa and the boys. Now Mama and Papa and the boys were gone, home was gone, and soon Chicago would be gone. I felt like I was jumping out a seventh-story window, not at all sure someone was down below to catch me. I scratched my knees again and, holding tight to my suitcase, went in.
The railroad car had ten or so rows of hard wooden benches lined each side of a center aisle. At the front was a potbellied woodstove for heat, which made the car smoky and stuffy but not very warm. There were, of course, windows, but I soon found that the open windows did not close and the closed windows did not open. In the back was a bucket of water, a dipper, and the toilet compartment. Less comfortable than the Little Wanderers' Refuge, I decided, but better than a Michigan Avenue doorway. I knew, for I had slept in both.
The car was so smoky that I shoved my way to an open window, knocking over Spud and a little girl with a runny nose as I did so. In front of and behind me were kids scuffling and shouting as they too fought for a window seat.
I pushed my suitcase under my seat. All I had in the world was in that suitcase: Mama's red-and-yellow shawl, the statue of the Virgin brought all the way from Poland, a big blue marble with a heart of fire that had belonged to Jan or Toddy—I never knew which—and a handmade card from Hulda that said "Friends 4-ever." On my feet were Papa's boots, which I'd worn since last autumn, when I left mine somewhere while I warmed my feet on the sun-soaked wood of the street. Everything else had been sold to bury Mama.
Mr. Szprot took his hat and jacket off and threw them on one of the seats. "Pipe down, you ragamuffins," he said, little blue veins popping right out on his egg-bald head with bad temper. "You should be grateful for this opportunity to be made into clean and useful men and women. It may be your last chance. So sit down, sit still, and thank God for your good fortune." The cigar in his mouth wobbled as he spoke, its ash growing longer and longer but sticking right there.
Finally we were all sitting, suitcases at our feet, our backs straight, proper and quiet. A tiny girl I did not know sat next to me. We sat there in silence for more than an hour waiting for them to load the rest of the cars.
When at last the conductor sang out, "All aboard!" a great crowd of people came running to the train, including a nun, who dragged two small, bedraggled-looking boys behind her. She stuck her head, white wimple and starched wings and all, in the window to talk to Mr. Szprot, and the boys commenced pushing and shoving each other, bellowing "Did so" and "Did not." I recognized them from my days on the street—Joe and Sammy, blond as broom straw and so skinny they were just bones held together by dirt. Joe was like a wild thing, angry and intense; Sammy was a more ordinary boy but always quick to disagree. Put them together and there was bound to be a fight.
The nun shoved Joe and Sammy on board and ran off, fearful, I think, that Mr. Szprot would change his mind about taking them. I never saw a nun run before. Her black robe billowed like the sails of a ship, and rosary beads swung from her waist. It was a spectacular sight.
"Rodzina, you old potato nose!" Sammy said, leaning over to punch my arm. "Ya got pinched too?"
I nodded. "A Holy Joe picked up a bunch of us kids and took us to an orphan home. But the home didn't want me and dumped me on this train."
"Aww, it won't be so bad. At least we'll eat regular. Just try to leave some potatoes for the rest of us," he said with a snicker.
Joe pushed him. "Get yer bones movin'!" Sammy pushed him back, and so it went until the bespectacled lady separated them and moved them along again.
They'd been eating potatoes the first time I saw them. I had just buried Mama and left our house on Honore Street, and I had no place to go. Walking through cold and windy Chicago in a coat too small and boots too big, I saw a small fire in the doorway of a church on Michigan Avenue, ringed by a crowd of children, big and small and in between, all dirt and sores and hunger. One boy, who had newspaper wrapped around his feet instead of shoes, looked a bit like my brother Toddy. "Can you tell me," I asked him, "where to get something to eat? I am awful hungry."
Some of the other children jeered, but the boy who looked like Toddy said, "Come on. Git yer feet under the table." I squatted next to him; he scooped a potato out of the embers of the fire.
"Hey," said the boy I later knew as Sammy, "look at her. She ain't hardly likely to starve, and I could sure use that potato."
"No, me," said Joe, grabbing at it. "Give it here, Potato Nose."
"Knock it off, you runts," said the boy who looked like Toddy, and he put the potato firmly into my hands. It smelled so good and felt so warm, I didn't know whether to eat it or just hold it. In the end I did a bit of both.
I wished I had a potato now, hot and crusty from the fire. Or a cup of soup with chicken, or ... A whistle blew. With a great burst of steam and the squealing of iron wheels on iron rails, the train began to move. There was a rush of passengers who had to hop aboard, but no one jumped into our car. No one wanted to be an orphan. No one wanted to be packed into a railroad car like a flour sack and sent west to an unknown future, an enterprise I could not help but think would turn out badly, like everything else in our lives. No, no one wanted to be an orphan, including us orphans, only we had no choice.
Sparks, soot, and dust poured in, and everyone who had succeeded in getting an open window now fought and punched for a closed one. It was as if the entire car was full of Joes and Sammys.
I snatched up my suitcase, jumped over the little girl who shared my bench, and grabbed a seat right in front. Smoky as it was so near the stove, I had the seat all to myself.