Rodzina (8 page)

"Now Splatt had troubles. The king had died, and it was raining. It was pouring. Everywhere else it was sunny, but over Splatt it was raining and had been ever since the king died.

"The townspeople moaned, 'Oh, who will stop the rain? It comes in our windows and chimneys, floods our roads, washes away our flowers, drowns our fish.'"

"Drowned fish!" Spud and Joe, who had joined the bunch at my feet, laughed so hard at that they fell over in a heap, kicking and punching each other. Sammy jumped up and separated the two, made Joe sit down next to him, and motioned for me to go on. I never before saw Sammy
stop
anyone from fighting. A small miracle.

"The princess of Splatt said, 'I promise my hand in marriage to the person who can stop the rain.'

"The tailor liked the idea of marrying a princess and becoming king. He thought and thought. Hmm. Rain. From the sky. Ever since the king died. Hmm. 'I know!' he shouted finally. 'Your king was so great and mighty that when he died and went to Heaven, he made a great and mighty hole in the sky. It will rain forever unless that hole is sewn up.'"

"Never happen," said Spud, who was sitting next to Lacey now.

"Happened here," I said. "So Pan Matuschanski had the townspeople take all the ladders in town, tie them together, and lean them against the sky. Then he took his needle and his thousand miles of thread and climbed up and up and up. When he got to the sky, sure enough, there was a huge hole in it. He went to work and sewed and sewed. Two days later, fingers stiff and back sore, he climbed down the ladder.

'The sun was shining in Splatt. 'Long live the king,' said the mayor, handing him a golden crown while the townsfolk all cheered.

"'And,' said the princess, handing him a jeweled scepter, 'long live my husband.' And he did."

When I finished, Nellie was asleep against my shoulder. Lacey was sleeping too. And Mickey Dooley, Spud, Chester, and Joe. "May we all be kings in the west," I said with a great sigh, as I leaned back in my seat. "Or at least safe and happy." And I slept too.

When I awoke, the other children had scattered back to their own seats. Suppertime and Cheyenne, the last stop for the orphan train, drew near. We stopped in the middle of nowhere for a few minutes. Out the window I could read wooden grave markers lining the road: "Called Home August 12, 1880," one said. And "Ma Dyed 7 October 1869." And "Lillian Bruxton, mother of 12, grandmother of 32, greatly loved and greatly missed, dwelling now with God." The ground was littered with iron stoves, sofas and chairs, tables, and wagon wheels. What awful thing had happened here?

I walked back to the lady doctor's seat. She was smoothing her skirt and examining little holes made by the blowing sparks and cinders.

"Miss Doctor?" I asked. She picked up her book from the seat beside her, and I sat down. "Why is all this stuff out here?"

"The railroad tracks appear to follow a wagon road," she said. "I imagine that as the road gets harder, people lighten their loads. And the markers note the resting places of those too old or too sick or too tired to travel anymore."

Why, can you imagine those poor souls throwing Mama's piano out the back of the wagon because it was too heavy? Or burying a grandma in the dry, hard ground, marked only with an old buckboard seat, and leaving her behind? It made me so awfully sad, my eyes burned for that imaginary grandma buried out here in the middle of nowhere.

Between these sad reminders were hundreds of tiny mounds like fairy hills. Plump little animals, looking like fat-cheeked squirrels with no tails, bounced and scolded as the train started up again. "Prairie dogs," said Miss Doctor.

Watching them took my mind off the world's sadness for a time.

Their furry bodies popped in and out of doorways in those mounds like they were passages to some underground world. I could imagine tunnels under the land leading to prairie dog cities, prairie dog rivers and lakes, prairie dog castles with a prairie dog princess with jewels in her hair and tiny pink slippers on her furry feet. When I started thinking about her prairie dog mama and papa, I could see this imagining was leading me somewhere I didn't want to go, so I took a deep breath and sat up straight. All the tears still uncried inside me, I figured, would make an underground lake at least as deep as anything those old prairie dogs ever saw.

"Miss Doctor?" I asked again, looking over at her.

"Here," she said, handing me her book. "You might find that this answers your questions."
Where to Emigrate and Why,
it was called. Miss Doctor was heading west to live, just like us orphans, just like those people in the covered wagons, just like the Polish tailor. Seems like everybody thought west was a good place to go. I wondered just why she was going. Had she really answered an ad for a wife, like I imagined in Grand Island? Or would she sew up a hole in the sky and marry a prince?

I knew Miss Doctor would likely not answer
those
questions, so I turned to the book to see what it could tell me. Cheyenne, the book said, was named for the Cheyenne Indians, who used to live and hunt all through these plains, but of whom there were not many left because the white folks, after calling their town after them, killed them. Magic City of the Plains, some folks called it, but more often, according to the book, the town was called Hell on Wheels, on account of its being lawless and rough. In fact, it was said, only one man had ever died there with his boots
off
since the town began.

We pulled into the station just at suppertime. The vast sky was growing dark, but I could see tepees, cabins, tents, and a few wooden houses strung along the bank of a creek. A muddy street led to the hotel. By the looks of the rest of the town, folk must have been awful proud of that hotel, it having three whole stories. Cheyenne sure was no Chicago. Guess it took only a handful of houses, a brick church or two, and a lot of saloons to make a city in Wyoming Territory.

The Western Hotel, Saloon, and Billiard Parlor sagged a bit, but there were red plush sofas in a lobby that smelled of floor wax and cigars. On one wall were hung the stuffed heads of poor dead animals, their glass eyes staring straight at me. It was almost enough to put me right off my supper.

Fortunately there were no dead heads in the dining room. Folks had set out a covered-dish supper, mighty welcome after jelly sandwiches. Some of the people of Cheyenne appeared to be bankers or farmers or ranchers, but most were dressed in leather and fringe, looking like they'd just come in from the wilderness. I fully expected Dan'l Boone to walk up and ask to take someone home.

We orphans circled the tables where food was set out: platters of meat, bowls of turnips and potatoes, cakes and pies and hot, steamy cornbread. There were plates and forks but no chairs. I guessed we were expected to stand around and eat. And I was right.

Ladies in long dresses and aprons dished the food out onto our plates. I ate until I thought I'd bust right out of my dress. Afterward a pudding-faced lady in a hat with dead birds on it sang "The Last Rose of Summer." The winners of the school spelling bee spelled their prize words for us:
forlorn, impoverished, destitute, uncertain, outcast.
Those are the ones I remember, most likely because such things were heavy on my mind.

Some big bug in a black suit made a speech. I didn't listen, as I was occupied examining the room. These folks seemed friendly enough. Maybe Miss Doctor was right and not everyone was looking for a slave to wash the dishes or hoe the cornfield. Maybe there would be a family with father, mother, and kids, just some folk with a house to share, who wanted another child, not a hog butcher. Maybe...

When the picking and choosing of orphans began, Mickey Dooley got taken right away, by a youngish man and woman who looked nice enough to want a son and not a servant, but awful gloomy and sad of heart. I thought Mickey Dooley was just the boy to put a twinkle in their eyes and a dance in their steps.

"They look like fine folks," I said to him as they passed by.

"They promised me a room full of snew," Mickey whispered.

"What's snew?" I asked him as a goodbye present.

"I got me a family," he said. "What's new with you?" He winked at me and went off wearing a big smile and his new father's cowboy hat. I was sorry to see him go. All his jokes and cheeriness got on my nerves sometimes, but still it had been nice to know where I could find a smile if I needed one.

Evelyn and several of the babies were taken next. Nellie went with a gray-haired man and woman who looked like they wanted her very much and would never give her up. She gave me a tiny wave and a watery smile as she walked out with them.

A spindly-looking farmer and his wife took both Chester and Spud. Their new papa puffed out his chest with pride, as if those boys were just born to him right there that minute.

Lacey was standing next to me. "Now, remember, don't go telling people you're slow," I said to her, wiping a spot of applesauce off her chin. "You'll never find a proper home if you tell people right out like that before they get to know you."

"I told you, I don't want them to find out later and then not like me. Or send me back. I want them to know right off," she said. She turned and pulled on a woman's red wool sleeve. "Hello, lady," she said. "My name is Lacey, and I'm slow. Can I go home with you and be your little girl?"

The woman jerked away, looking at Lacey as if the girl had bird droppings on her head. "Will someone get this half-wit out of here?" she said. "No one will take her and she is making the others look bad."

I walked right up to the lady with my fists clenched. Lacey might be slow and a pest, but no stranger was going to call her names in my presence, no matter if she had brought gold and diamonds and fresh oranges in her covered dish. "Lacey may be a bit slow," I said to her, "but she is bright enough to know that it is rude to call people names. Unlike some others I see before me."

Miss Doctor marched toward me. It appeared I was in deep trouble. But it was the woman she grabbed by the arm and hustled away, saying, "Rodzina may be too plainspoken, but on the whole I agree with her. Let me show you to the door. We have no child for you." Well, I thought, maybe that lady doctor had a bit of a heart under those clothes we were not allowed to touch.

She returned with a bald, bony old man trailing about a hundred kids dressed in clothes much too big, too small, or just too darned ugly. "Here is the young lady I mentioned," she said to him.

"She good with young'uns?" asked the father.

Miss Doctor nodded. "She does what she is told well enough."

The man walked around all sides of me, looking me up and down. He stuck his hand out for me to shake. "The name's Clench," he said. "Myrna's the wife—she's at home watchin' over the place—and this here is Weasel. And Lennard. Emmett. Myra Jane. Purly. Sarah Dew. Lily. Buck. Fred. Loretta. Big Bob. Concertina. And Grace." The children pulled at my hands and skirt, all talking at the same time, except for the biggest boy, who just hung back and glared. He had a pinched, unfriendly face, big ears, and a mouth overcrowded with long brown teeth. He looked to me like he should be Weasel, but seems he was Lennard.

"We need a right hearty girl to help with the young'uns," Mr. Clench continued, "and be another daughter to Myrna and me. And you'll do. Yessir, you'll do fine." It was done.

I felt like a sack of potatoes, weighed and measured and purchased. But he had said he wanted a daughter. Maybe this would work out.

While Mr. Clench signed a paper, I turned to Miss Doctor. "A family, with a mother and father and children," she said. "Give them a chance." She patted me awkwardly on my arm.

I nodded. "Find a good place for Lacey too, will you?" I asked her.

"We'll be here until Wednesday," she said. "Plenty of time to get all you children settled."

Mr. Szprot himself walked me to their wagon and helped Mr. Clench hoist me and my suitcase in among the bags of beans and flour. The children all piled in after, and off we went.

I was squeezed against the front of the wagon, boxed in by Clench food, Clench backs, and big, dirty Clench feet. At first I tried to keep as far away as possible, but as the night grew colder, I welcomed the warmth of even these skinny bodies. We plodded on mile after mile in that wagon behind a poor mule who looked like he needed a ride more than we did. The farther we got from the lights of Cheyenne, the stranger I felt. Where on earth were we headed? What would happen to me there?

"How far is it to this homestead of yours?" I asked Myra Jane, who seemed near my age, maybe a little younger.

"Near twenty-five miles. It's too blamed far to come to town regular, so we jest come twice a year for flour, beans, salt, tobacco, and such. And you." She smiled. "Sure are glad to have you. We don't ordinarily see no other folk but two, three times a year, being our nearest neighbor is six miles away. And he's too ornery for visitin'."

"Six miles!" I said. "What about school? Where do you all go to school?"

"We don—" Sarah Dew started, but Mr. Clench turned around and pinched my cheek. "You just settle back and sleep. We'll be home by morning."

I leaned my head against a flour sack but could not rest. In the sky shone an evil gray moon. My thoughts were all tumbling around. Morning? Too many kids? No neighbors. No school. What a pickle I was in!

We rode on and on, the wind whipping dirt into my eyes and that's why I might have looked a little weepy. But I wasn't crying. No siree. I had got what I asked for. Why would I cry?

A
PALE SUN WAS STRUGGLING
to shine when I next opened my eyes. We were riding through a bleak and windswept landscape. Not a building, not a house, not a person, not a tree. My whole body ached from sleeping in a wagon, and I was hungry. Still, part of me hoped that maybe this would turn out well, and that in a warm house somewhere breakfast was waiting for us.

When we pulled onto a small rise in the flat sameness and stopped, Myra Jane shouted, "We're home!"

I looked around. Sarah Dew laughed. "You're lookin' for the house, right? Why, it's here underneath us." She jumped down and threw open a door in the dirt heap. "This is our dugout. We built it ourselves. Ain't it grand?"