Orphan Train(38)
“No, ma’am. It’s just . . .” I feel my cheeks redden.
“What is it?”
“I used to be Niamh. Sometimes I forget what my name is. Nobody really calls me anything at my new home.”
“Well, I can call you Niamh if you like.”
“It’s all right. Dorothy is fine.”
She smiles, studying my face. “As you wish. Lucy Green?” she says, turning to the girl behind me. “Would you mind showing Dorothy to her desk?”
I follow Lucy into an area lined with hooks, where we hang up our coats. Then we enter a large, sunny room smelling of wood smoke and chalk that contains an oil stove, a desk for the teacher, rows of benches and work spaces, and slate blackboards along the east and south walls, with posters of the alphabet and multiplication tables above. The other walls are made up of large windows. Electric lights shine overhead, and low shelves are filled with books.
When everyone is seated, Miss Larsen pulls a loop on a string and a colorful map of the world unfurls on the wall. At her request I go up to the map and identify Ireland. Looking at it closely, I can find County Galway and even the city center. The village of Kinvara isn’t named, but I rub the place where it belongs, right under Galway on the jagged line of the west coast. There is New York—and here’s Chicago. And here’s Minneapolis. Hemingford County isn’t on the map, either.
Including me, there are twenty-three of us between the ages of six and sixteen. Most of the kids are from farms themselves and other rural homes and are learning to read and write at all ages. We smell unwashed—and it’s worse with the older ones who have hit puberty. There’s a heap of rags, a few bars of soap, and a carton of baking soda in the indoor lavatory, Miss Larsen tells me, in case you want to freshen up.
When Miss Larsen talks to me, she bends down and looks me in the eye. When she asks questions, she waits for my answer. She smells of lemons and vanilla. And she treats me like I’m smart. After I take a test to determine my reading level, she hands me a book from the shelf by her desk, a hardcover filled with small black type called Anne of Green Gables, without pictures, and tells me she will ask what I think of it when I’m done.
You’d think with all these kids it would be chaotic, but Miss Larsen rarely raises her voice. The driver, Mr. Post, chops wood, tends the stove, sweeps the leaves from the front walkway, and does mechanical repairs on the truck. He also teaches mathematics up to geometry, which he says he never learned because that year was locusts and he was needed on the farm.
At recess Lucy invites me to play games with a group of them—Annie Annie Over; Pump, Pump, Pull Away; Ring Around the Rosie.
When I get out of the truck at four thirty and have to walk the long route back to the cabin, my footsteps are slow.
THE FOOD THIS FAMILY SUBSISTS ON IS LIKE NOTHING I’VE EVER eaten before. Mr. Grote leaves at dawn with his rifle and rod and brings home squirrels and wild turkeys, whiskery fish, now and then a white-tailed deer. He returns in the late afternoon covered in pine-tree gum. He brings home red squirrels most of all, but they aren’t as good as the larger fox and gray squirrels, which he calls bushy tails. The fox squirrels are so big that some of them look like orange cats. They chirp and whistle, and he tricks them into showing themselves by clicking two coins together, which sounds like their chatter. The gray squirrels have the most meat, he tells me, but are hardest to see in the woods. They make a harsh chich-chich noise when they’re angry or scared. That’s how he finds them.
Mr. Grote skins and guts the animals in several fluid motions, then hands me tiny hearts and livers, slabs of deep red meat. All I know how to make is boiled cabbage and mutton, I tell him, but he says it’s not that different. He shows me how to make a gallimaufry, a stew of diced meat, onion, and vegetables, with mustard, ginger, and vinegar. You cook the meat in animal fat over high heat to sear it, then add potatoes and vegetables and the rest. “It’s just a hotchpotch,” he says. “Whatever’s around.”
At first I am horrified by the ghoulish skinned squirrels, as red and muscular as skinless human bodies in Miss Larsen’s science book. But hunger cures my qualms. Soon enough, squirrel stew tastes normal.
Out in back is a homely garden that, even now, in mid-April, has root vegetables waiting to be dug—blighted potatoes and yams and tough-skinned carrots and turnips. Mr. Grote takes me out there with a pick and teaches me how to pry them from the earth, then wash them off under the pump. But the ground is still partially frozen, and the vegetables are hard to extract. The two of us spend about four hours in the cold digging for those tough old vegetables, planted last summer, until we have a gnarled and ugly pile. The children wander in and out of the house, sit and watch us from the kitchen window. I am grateful for my fingerless gloves.
Mr. Grote shows me how he grows wild rice in the stream and collects the seeds. The rice is nutty and brown. He plants the seeds after harvest in late summer for the crop the following year. It’s an annual plant, he explains, which means that it dies in the autumn. Seeds that fall in autumn take root in spring underwater, and then the shoot grows above the surface. The stalks look like tall grass swaying in the water.
In the summer, he says, he grows herbs in a patch behind the house—mint, rosemary, and thyme—and hangs them to dry in the shed. Even now there’s a pot of lavender in the kitchen. It’s a strange sight in that squalid room, like a rose in a junkyard.