Orphan Train(25)

That night at supper Mrs. Byrne serves chopped beef, potato salad stained pink by beets, and rubbery cabbage. Mr. Byrne chews noisily. I can hear every click of his jaw. I know to put my napkin in my lap—Gram taught me that. I know how to use a knife and fork. Though the beef tastes as dry and flavorless as cardboard, I’m so ravenous that it’s all I can do not to shove it into my mouth. Small, ladylike bites, Gram said.

After a few minutes, Mrs. Byrne puts down her fork and says, “Dorothy, it’s time to discuss the rules of the house. As you already know, you are to use the privy in the back. Once a week, on Sunday evenings, I will draw a bath for you in the tub in the washroom off the kitchen. Sunday is also washday, which you’ll be expected to help with. Bedtime is at nine P.M., with lights out. There’s a pallet for you in the hall closet. You’ll bring it out in the evenings and roll it up neatly in the morning, before the girls arrive at eight thirty.”

“I’ll be sleeping—in the hallway?” I ask with surprise.

“Mercy, you don’t expect to sleep on the second floor with us, do you?” she says with a laugh. “Heaven forbid.”

When dinner is over, Mr. Byrne announces that he is going for a stroll.

“And I have work to do,” Mrs. Byrne says. “Dorothy, you will clean up the dishes. Pay careful attention to where things belong. The best way for you to learn our ways is to observe closely, and teach yourself. Where do we keep the wooden spoons? The juice glasses? It should be a fun game for you.” She turns to leave. “You are not to disturb Mr. Byrne and me after dinner. You will put yourself to bed at the appropriate time and turn out your light.” With a curt smile, she says, “We expect to have a positive experience with you. Don’t do anything to threaten our trust.”

I look around at the dishes piled in the sink, the strips of beet peel staining a wooden cutting board, a saucepan half full of translucent cabbage, a roasting pan charred and waxed with grease. Glancing at the door to be sure the Byrnes are gone, I spear a hunk of the flavorless cabbage on a fork and swallow it greedily, barely chewing. I eat the rest of the cabbage this way, listening for Mrs. Byrne’s foot on the stairs.

As I wash the dishes I look out the window over the sink at the yard behind the house, murky now in the fading evening light; there are a few spidery trees, their thin trunks flayed into branches. By the time I’ve finished scrubbing the roasting pan, the sky is dark and the yard has faded from view. The clock above the stove says 7:30.

I pour myself a glass of water from the kitchen faucet and sit at the table. It feels too early to go to bed, but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t have a book to read, and I haven’t seen any in the house. We didn’t have many books in the apartment on Elizabeth Street, either, but the twins were always getting old papers from the newsies. In school it was poems I liked best—Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley. Our teacher made us memorize the words to “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and alone in the kitchen now I close my eyes and whisper Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time . . . but that’s all I can remember.

I need to look on the bright side, as Gram always said. It’s not so bad here. The house is austere, but not uncomfortable. The light above the kitchen table is warm and cheery. The Byrnes don’t want to treat me like a child, but I’m not so sure I want to be treated like one. Work that keeps my hands and mind busy is probably just what I need. And soon I will go to school.

I think of my own home on Elizabeth Street—so different, but truthfully no better than this. Mam in bed in midafternoon, in the sweltering heat, lying in her room past dark, with the boys whining for food and Maisie sobbing and me thinking I’ll go mad with the heat and the hunger and the noise. Da up and gone—at work, he said, though the money he brought home was less each week, and he’d stumble in after midnight reeking of hops. We’d hear him tramping up the stairs, belting out the Irish national anthem—“We’re children of a fighting race, That never yet has known disgrace, And as we march, the foe to face, / We’ll chant a soldier’s song”—then bursting into the apartment, to Mam’s shushing and scolding. He’d stand silhouetted in the grainy light of the bedroom, and though all of us were supposed to be asleep, and pretended to be, we were rapt, awed by his cheer and bravado.

In the hall closet I find my suitcase and a pile of bedding. I unroll a horsehair pallet and place a thin yellowed pillow at the top. There’s a white sheet, which I spread on the mattress and tuck around the edges, and a moth-eaten quilt.

Before going to bed I open the back door and make my way to the privy. The light from the kitchen window casts a dull glow for about five feet, and then it’s dark.

The grass is brittle underfoot. I know my way, but it’s different at night, the outline of the shed barely visible ahead. I look up into the starless sky. My heart pounds. This silent blackness scares me more than nighttime in the city, with its noise and light.

I open the latch and go inside the shed. Afterward, shaking, I pull my knickers up and flee, the door knocking behind me as I run across the yard and up the three steps to the kitchen. I lock the door as instructed and lean against it, panting. And then I notice the padlock on the refrigerator. When did that happen? Mr. or Mrs. Byrne must have come downstairs while I was outside.





Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011