The Banished Children of Eve (36 page)

The older children were no longer kept under lock and key. Jimmy sat by the window of the rocking railway car as it traveled across open country, the land brown and flat, rolling waves of grass beneath a sky that curved down to meet the ground at what seemed a continent's distance away. Jimmy was part of the next-to-the-last contingent of children to be given away. They left the train and walked down a street flanked by a dozen or so wooden buildings, a small interruption on the dull, uniform terrain. It was as remote and lonely as any place Jimmy had ever imagined. They were lodged in what looked like a church, but a church without an altar or statues or decorations, just a pulpit and pews. It seemed to match the territory in its plain and unforgiving appearance. Mr. Potts and the matrons left them in the church and went to stay two doors away, in a hotel. The wind blew hard all night and carried the high moan of animal noises, wolves or coyotes or whatever was about, and the small boy who had knelt next to Jimmy on the Hudson River pier sobbed himself to sleep.

The next morning Mr. Potts roused them early. They washed at a pump behind the church, and each child was dressed in a clean shirt. About noon they were lined up in front of the pulpit, and the matrons opened the rear doors. People filled the church, couples mostly, some with their own children. Mr. Potts gave his standard talk from the pulpit, at one point reaching down to put his hand on Jimmy's head. “Good children all,” he said, “perhaps not blessed with the intellectual gifts of our American youth but capable of being molded into men and women of industriousness and obedience.” Jimmy studied the hard, weathered faces of the crowd, thin-lipped wives and husbands with skin the sun had tarnished the same color as prairie grass. Their clothes hung loosely on their frames, drab coats and washed-out
dresses covered with a film of dust. They looked to Jimmy like the inhabitants of the poorhouse who were brought periodically to sweep and clean the grounds of the New-York Orphan Asylum: grim, silent, in need of a good meal.

When Mr. Potts was finished with his speech, the people left their pews and crowded around. A man with a fringe of beard around his face came up and looked in Jimmy's ears, poked him in the ribs and chest. Jimmy pushed the man's finger away.

“There, there,” Mr. Potts said as he took Jimmy by the neck. “Let's not allow the rigors of our long journey to cause in us an uncharacteristic outburst of ill temper.” He ruffled Jimmy's hair. “He's a fine boy, for sure, just brimming with ambition!”

The small boy from the pier was led away by a gray-haired woman. Halfway up the aisle he tried to run back to the other children. The woman grabbed one arm, a matron the other. They dragged him screaming from the church. The man who had poked Jimmy took Mr. Potts aside. They had an animated conversation that Jimmy caught only snatches of: “one of the strongest”… “not to be given away.” They stepped outside. Jimmy watched them through the window of the church. The man reached into his pocket and handed something to Mr. Potts, who quickly stuffed it in his coat. As soon as they came back in, the man strode over to Jimmy. “Boy,” he said, “come with me.”

“Dunleavy,” Mr. Potts said, “this is Mr. Ellingwood. He is offering you the refuge of a Christian home. Go now, in true gratitude and with true determination to make something of yourself.”

Ellingwood said, “Ain't got all day. Come on.”

Another couple had selected an eight-year-old girl and were leading her away. She was screaming and crying, begging not to be separated from her younger sisters, three-year-old twins who stood in quiet amazement at the commotion. The matrons helped remove the older sister.

Jimmy walked outside with Ellingwood. The wind was rising again, rippling across the sea of grass and spraying the
churchyard with dust. Jimmy got up next to Ellingwood on the creaking seat of an old wagon.

“That all yer got?” Ellingwood said. He pointed at the canvas bag in which Jimmy carried the shirt he had worn on the journey, a pair of extra trousers, a bar of soap, and the Bible that he, like the other children, had been issued.

“Yes.”

“Ain't got a hat?”

“Nope.”

Ellingwood shook his head. “City folk,” he said. “A grasshopper got more sense.” He snapped the reins, and they drove off across the prairie under a sky that was rapidly becoming gray and stormy. Jimmy looked back at the town. Lights glowed in the windows. He fought the urge to jump out of the wagon and run toward them.

It was pitch-dark before they reached Ellingwood's homestead. Ellingwood went in first. “Watch yer step,” he said to Jimmy. He stepped down to a dirt floor two feet below the threshold. Ellingwood's home was a one-room sod house. A bench ran along one wall; there was a table in front of it. In the far corner was a sagging bed and a cupboard. The stove, which was beside the door, was glowing red.

“I got us a boy,” Ellingwood said as he entered.

“Praise God,” said a voice over by the bed. A woman stepped forward into the light. She was thin and small. Her hair was parted in the middle and drawn back from a round, pretty face. She wore a faded plaid dress that was buttoned to the neck and had a tattered red towel tucked into her belt like an apron. “Let's see.”

Ellingwood led Jimmy to the center of the room. “Ain't exactly Samson come back to life, but he's got two hands and two legs and seems fit enough. Name is Jim.”

“Well, Jim,” she said, “how about something to eat?”

Jimmy watched her at the stove. She moved with a quick, lively step and sang to herself. She seemed to be about twenty or so, at least a decade younger than Ellingwood, and
had none of his sourness. She served them a dinner of coffee, beans, potatoes, and salted buffalo meat. They ate in silence. When dinner was over, Ellingwood took a lantern and a blanket and led Jimmy to the shed attached to the side of the house. Amid a clutter of farm implements was a wooden bunk.

“This is where you'll stay,” Ellingwood said. “Be careful not to break nothing.”

Next morning, Ellingwood woke Jimmy before dawn. They had a meal of beans and coffee. Ellingwood gave Jimmy a thick woolen coat that came to below his knees and a fur hat with ear patches sewn on. “Weather is crazy this time of year,” he said. “Ain't telling how fast winter will be on us.” They rode in the rickety wagon across the prairie until they reached a railroad track. Ellingwood drove beside the track for some distance, not telling Jimmy where they were headed. The day was surprisingly hot. Jimmy's nostrils filled with a sickening smell before Ellingwood stopped the wagon. “Here we are,” he said.

Across the prairie in front of them were thousands of animal carcasses, some little more than skeletons, others swelling masses of decaying, putrid flesh. “This is where the buffalo cross the tracks,” Ellingwood said. “Trains get forced to sit here until the herds are past, so to make the time go faster the passengers take target practice on the beasts.” He handed Jimmy a burlap sack. “Everythin' is left behind for the pickin', fur, meat, and bones, tons of 'em. Bring a good price as fertilizer at any railway station.” Jimmy worked all morning at collecting bones, a rag soaked in cottonseed oil tied across his face to keep out the terrible odor. Toward late afternoon, a strong wind came up and the sky clouded over. Ellingwood tied the horses to the track. He and Jimmy lay beneath the wagon as a barrage of hailstones beat hard on the planks above. In a short time, the sky cleared and the day turned warm again.

They worked at bone-gathering all that week. On Sunday, Ellingwood hitched up the wagon. Mrs. Ellingwood sat next to her husband; Jimmy on the floor in the rear.

“We're goin' to church,” Ellingwood said.

“I won't say no Protestant prayers,” Jimmy said. In
the orphanage, the Catholic children, who were 90 percent of the inmates, had stood with their arms folded during the compulsory prayer services. The little ones followed the lead of the big ones, who remembered the admonition of mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, grandparents, the people of the neighborhood:
Don't give in to the rat-noses' ways. Don't let them take away the faith.
Jimmy's dim memories of his mother were mostly of her praying, saying her beads, him kneeling next to her in St. Mary's on Grand Street, the soft, repetitive murmur of the Hail Mary. Little of the faith had he learned since. Mass heard amid a crowd of boys packed into the rear vestibule of a church. More a social gathering than anything else. In the orphanage, a priest visited them every month and said Mass. “Your people have suffered for the faith,” he said each time in his sermon. “They tried to starve us out of it in Ireland and shame us out of it here in America. But we've never allowed ourselves to be separated from it, not then, not now, not ever.”

“Suit yourself,” Ellingwood said. “Stay in the wagon and mumble your hocus-pocus.” Jimmy sat where he was through the hour-long service, and for the next several weeks, each time the three of them drove to church, though the weather grew colder and the snow began to fly, Jimmy remained outside, wrapping himself in the coat he had been given. He never set foot into the church, even to get warm.

Soon the snow made it almost impossible to venture very far from the house. The bone-picking ended. Their daily fare became an unchanging round of beans, potatoes, and coffee. One day in January, Ellingwood rode a horse to town to buy some provisions. The sky was clear when he left, but by early afternoon the clouds rolled in, and soon the snow swept down in a solid mass, an obliterating descent of white that lasted well past dark. Jimmy joined Mrs. Ellingwood for dinner, something he had never done before. She had banged on the door of the shed and told him to come in. He was surprised at her thoughtfulness. She had always been polite to him, but it seemed to Jimmy that
she regarded him as little more than a cat or a dog, an unthreatening and almost unnoticed part of the domestic complement.

Jimmy dug into the beans as soon as he sat down. He was ravenously hungry. She didn't touch her plate. “You're from New York, Jim?” She rested her head on her palm.

He nodded and went on eating.

“Must be something to see, the women in their silk dresses, hair all done up and wearing ornaments of gold, and the men in their fine frocks, smelling like spice, the whole town driving around in big fancy coaches, with their servants in tow.”

“There's a lot of that in New York,” Jimmy said. He shoveled more beans into his mouth.

“My husband says it's a wicked place, noisy, dirty, impious. Says that most of the people don't work, live off politics, and that criminals abound and whores and drunkards are everywhere. It belongs to the foreigners, he says, and let them have it. America's got no use for it.”

“Could be,” Jimmy said, “but I ain't never given it much thought.” The wind swept past the sod house with a steady scream. Jimmy felt his physical hunger subside, but another kind of hunger filled him, hunger for the bustle of Manhattan streets in wintertime, lighted store windows, tinkle of shop bells, the evening crowd stepping out on the Bowery, the echo of women's laughter. Suddenly, for the first time since he'd left, he understood that he would return, that he had always intended to return, that although he had grown used to thinking of himself as a footloose Paddy without a hometown, he had one all along: New York.

“Like to see it for myself,” Mrs. Ellingwood said. “My husband is probably right, it might well be a fearsome swamp, but at least I'd know for myself.”

They sat for a while with no other sound than the wind. Jimmy toyed with what was left of the beans. The hunger inside for going home turned into an ache. He felt as if he would cry. Mrs. Ellingwood stood up and walked over to the bed.

“Jim,” Mrs. Ellingwood said, “come here.” She unbuttoned her dress and let it fall around her feet. Underneath
was a white shift. She let that fall, too. She folded her arms across her naked breasts. “Jim,” she repeated, “come here.”

He didn't move. He studied the dark triangle between her legs. He had taken pleasure with himself on occasion, imagining naked women as he did, riding up into them, his hand simulating what he thought the tug of a woman's body must feel like, but he had never been with a woman before, never seen a woman's body in its full fleshiness. He was aroused.

Mrs. Ellingwood got into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. “Come to bed, Jim. Don't be afraid.”

His excitement was mixed with fear. He felt his heart pound. He hesitated, then rose and walked over to the bed.

“Take off your clothes,” she said.

He removed his pants and shirt, becoming fully erect as he did. He climbed in. The bed was warm from her body, like the glow of a soft fire. She took him in her hand, stroked him. In an instant there was an uncontrollable flood in his loins, an unstoppable surge. He rolled on top of her the second before it happened, spilling his seed on her leg and stomach. He was embarrassed and didn't know what to say. She got up and fetched a rag, wiped herself clean, and did the same to him. Neither of them said anything. She put her arm around him. They lay there silently until he fell asleep.

He wasn't sure how long he had been asleep when he felt her hand between his legs, rubbing gently, stirring him erect. He rolled toward her. “This time we'll make it last,” she said. He kissed her on the lips. Her mouth opened. He put his tongue in. He cupped her breast in his hand, squeezed the nipple between his fingers. She closed her eyes. “Suck them,” she said. He put his mouth on her right nipple and drew on it, caressing it with his tongue. After a few minutes he did the same with the left. She took his hand, brought it down to the opening between her legs, separated his index finger from the others and rubbed herself with it. “Like this,” she said. “Do it like this.” He slipped his finger into the tight, wet space, and rubbed. She moved with the motion of his hand, her firm stomach undulating up
and down. She took his hand away, pulled him on top of her, and he slipped into her, his buttocks pushing him in, in and out, the surging feeling returning to his loins, the mattress springs groaning with the movement of their bodies until a shudder of release ran through his body and she cried out with pleasure. They slept after that. At the first light of day, she woke him as she had before, and they did it again.