Orphan Train

truth, he’s afraid
     he could get mad enough to hurt them.
    As the weeks pass and the weather gets warmer, he takes to whittling on the front
     porch until late in the evening, a bottle of whiskey by his side, and he’s always
     asking me to join him. In the darkness he tells me more than I want to know. He and
     Mrs. Grote barely say a word to each other anymore, he says. She hates to talk, but
     loves sex. But he can’t stand to touch her—she doesn’t bother to clean herself, and
     there’s always a kid hanging off her. He says, “I should’ve married someone like you,
     Dorothy. You wouldn’t’ve trapped me like this, would ya?” He likes my red hair. “You
     know what they say,” he tells me. “If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead.”
     The first girl he kissed had red hair, but that was a long time ago, he says, back
     when he was young and good-looking.
    “Surprised I was good-looking? I was a boy once, you know. I’m only twenty-four now.”
    He has never been in love with his wife, he says.
    Call me Gerald, he says.
    I know that Mr. Grote shouldn’t be saying all this. I am only ten years old.
    T HE CHILDREN WHIMPER LIKE WOUNDED DOGS AND CLUSTER TOGETHER for comfort. They don’t play like normal kids, running and jumping. Their noses are
     always filled with green mucus, and their eyes are runny. I move through the house
     like an armored beetle, impervious to Mrs. Grote’s sharp tongue, Harold’s whining,
     the cries of Gerald Jr., who will never in his life satisfy his aching need to be
     held. I see Mabel turning into a sullen girl, all too aware of the ways she has been
     burdened, ill-treated, abandoned to this sorry lot. I know how it happened to the
     children, living this way, but it’s hard for me to love them. Their misery only makes
     me more aware of my own. It takes all my energy to keep myself clean, to get up and
     out the door in the morning to school.
    Lying on a mattress at night during a rainstorm, metal ribs poking at me from under
     the thin ticking, water dripping on my face, my stomach hollow and empty, I remember
     a time on the Agnes Pauline when it was raining and everyone was seasick and my da tried to distract us kids
     from our misery by getting us to close our eyes and visualize a perfect day. That
     was three years ago, when I was seven, but the day I imagined is still vivid in my
     mind. It’s a Sunday afternoon and I am going to visit Gram in her snug home on the
     outskirts of town. Walking to her house—climbing over stone walls and across fields
     of wild grass that move in the wind like waves on the sea—I smell the sweet smoke
     from turf fires and listen to the thrushes and blackbirds practice their wild songs.
     In the distance I see the thatched-roof house with its whitewashed walls, pots of
     red geraniums blooming on the window-sill, Gram’s sturdy black bike propped inside
     the gate, near the hedge where blackberries and sloe fruit hang in dense blue clusters.
    Inside, a goose roasts in the oven and the black-and-white dog, Monty, waits under
     the table for scraps. Granddad’s out fishing for trout in the river with a homemade
     rod or hunting grouse or partridge across the fields. So it’s just Gram and me, alone
     for a few hours.
    Gram is rolling dough for a rhubarb tart, back and forth with the big rolling pin,
     dusting the yellow dough with handfuls of flour, stretching it to cover the brimming
     pie dish. Now and then she takes a puff of her Sweet Afton, wisps of smoke rising
     above her head. She offers me a bull’s-eye sweet, which she’s stashed in her apron
     pocket with a half-dozen half-smoked Afton butts—a mix of flavors I’ll never forget.
     On the front of the yellow cigarette box is a poem by Robert Burns that Gram likes
     to sing to an old Irish tune:
    Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes.
    Flow gently, I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise.
    I sit on a three-legged stool listening to the crackle and spit of goose skin in the
     oven while she trims a ribbon of dough from around the rim of the pie dish, making
     a cross with a remnant for the center and brushing it all with a beaten egg, finishing
     with a flourish of fork pricks and a sprinkle of sugar. When the tart’s safely in
     the oven we move to the front room, the “good room,” she calls it, just the two of
     us, for afternoon tea, strong and black with plenty of sugar, and currant bread, sliced
     and warm. Gram chooses two teacups