Orphan Train

couch.
     Snatches of their conversation waft back to me—“trash,” “vermin,” “dirty Irish bog-trotter”—and
     in a few minutes he comes through the kitchen door to find me on my knees, trying
     to turn the wringer. “Lord Jesus,” he says, and gets to work helping me.
    Mr. Grote agrees that the mattresses are probably infested. He thinks if we drag them
     out to the porch and pour boiling water over them it will kill the bugs. “I have half
     a mind to do the same to the kids,” he says, and I know he’s only barely kidding.
     He makes quick work of shaving the heads of all four of them with a straight razor.
     Despite my attempts to hold their heads still, they twitch and fidget, and as a result
     have little bloody nicks and gashes all over their heads. They remind me of photos
     of soldiers returning from the Great War, hollow-eyed and bald. Mr. Grote rubs lye
     over each head, and the children scream and yell. Mrs. Grote sits on the couch, watching.
    “Wilma, it’s your turn,” he says, turning to her with the razor in his hand.
    “No.”
    “We have to check, at least.”
    “Check the girl. She brought them here.” Mrs. Grote turns her face to the back of
     the couch.
    Mr. Grote motions me over. I take my hair out of its tight braids and kneel in front
     of him while he gently picks through. It’s strange to feel this man’s breath on my
     neck, his fingers on my scalp. He pinches something between his fingers and sits back
     on his heels. “Yep. You got some eggs in there.”
    I am the only one of my siblings with red hair. When I asked my da where I got it,
     he joked that there must’ve been rust in the pipes. His own hair was dark—“cured,”
     he said, through years of toil—but when he was young it was more like auburn. Nothing
     like yours, he said. Your hair is as vivid as a Kinvara sunset, autumn leaves, the
     Koi goldfish in the window of that hotel in Galway.
    Mr. Grote doesn’t want to shave my head. He says it would be a crime. Instead he winds
     my hair around his fist and slices straight through it at the nape of my neck. A heap
     of coils slide to the floor, and he cuts the rest of the hair on my head about two
     inches long.
    I spend the next four days in that miserable house, burning logs and boiling water,
     the children cranky and underfoot as they always are, Mrs. Grote back on damp sheets
     on the mildewing mattress with her lice-infested hair, and there’s nothing I can do
     about any of it, nothing at all.
    “W E ’ VE MISSED YOU , D OROTHY !” M ISS L ARSEN SAYS WHEN I return to school. “And my—a brand-new hairstyle!”
    I touch the top of my head where my hair is sticking up. Miss Larsen knows why my
     hair is short—it’s in the note I had to give her when I got out of the truck—but she
     doesn’t give away a thing. “Actually,” she says, “you look like a flapper. Do you
     know what that is?”
    I shake my head.
    “Flappers are big-city girls who cut their hair short and go dancing and do what they
     please.” She gives me a friendly smile. “Who knows, Dorothy? Maybe that’s what you’ll
     become.”

Hemingford County, Minnesota, 1930
    By summer’s end, Mr. Grote seems to be having more luck. Whatever he can kill he brings home in a sack and skins right away, then hangs in the shed out
     back. He built a smoker behind the shed and now he keeps it going all the time, filling
     it with squirrels and fish and even raccoons. The meat gives off a curdled-sweet smell
     that turns my stomach, but it’s better than going hungry.
    Mrs. Grote is pregnant again. She says the baby’s due in March. I’m worried I’ll be
     expected to help her when the time comes. When Mam had Maisie there were plenty of
     neighbors on Elizabeth Street who’d been through it before, and all I had to do was
     watch the younger kids. Mrs. Schatzman, down the hall, and the Krasnow sisters a floor
     below, with seven children between them, came into the apartment and took over, closing
     the bedroom door behind them. My da went out. Maybe he was sent out by them, I don’t
     know. I was in the living room, playing patty-cake and reciting the alphabet and singing
     all the songs he’d belt out when he came home from the pub late at night, waking the
     neighbors.
    By mid-September, round bales of golden straw dot the yellow fields on my walk to
     the county road, arranged in geometric formations and stacked in pyramids and scattered
     in haphazard clumps. In