Orphan Train

floor. Twisting in the quilt, I look up to see what happened. I feel a
     rough hand on my head. I want to move, but am trapped in a cocoon.
    “You do what I say.” I feel his stubbled face on my cheek, smell his gamy breath.
     I squirm again and he puts his foot on my back. “Be quiet.”
    His big rough hand is inside the quilt, and then it’s under my sweater, under my dress.
     I try to pull away but I can’t. His hand roams up and down and I feel a jolt of shock
     as he probes the place between my legs, pushes at it with his fingers. His sandpaper
     face is still against mine, rubbing against my cheek, and his breathing is jagged.
    “Yesss,” he gulps into my ear. He is hunched above me like a dog, one hand rubbing
     hard at my skin and the other unbuttoning his trousers. Hearing the rough snap of
     each button, I bend and squirm but am trapped in the quilt like a fly in a web. I
     see his pants open and low on his hips, the engorged penis between his legs, his hard
     white belly. I’ve seen enough animals in the yard to know what he’s trying to do.
     Though my arms are trapped, I rock my body to try to seal the quilt around me. He
     yanks at it roughly and I feel it giving way, and as it does he whispers in my ear,
     “Easy, now, you like this, don’t you,” and I start to whimper. When he sticks two
     fingers inside me, his jagged nails tear at my skin and I cry out. He slaps his other
     hand over my mouth and rams his fingers deeper, grinding against me, and I make noises
     like a horse, frantic guttural sounds from deep in my throat.
    And then he lifts his hips and takes his hand off my mouth. I scream and feel the
     blinding shock of a slap across my face.
    From the direction of the hallway comes a voice—“Gerald?”—and he freezes, just for
     a second, before slithering off me like a lizard, fumbling with his buttons, pulling
     himself off the floor.
    “What in the name of Christ—” Mrs. Grote is leaning against the door frame, cupping
     her rounded stomach with one hand.
    I yank my underpants up and my dress and sweater down, sit up and stumble to my feet,
     clutching the quilt around me.
    “Not her !” she wails.
    “Now, Wilma, it isn’t what it looks like—”
    “You animal!” Her voice is deep and savage. She turns to me. “And you—you—I knew—”
     She points at the door. “Get out. Get out! ”
    It takes me a moment to understand what she means—that she wants me to leave, now,
     in the cold, in the middle of the night.
    “Easy, Wilma, calm down,” Gerald—Mr. Grote—says.
    “I want that girl—that filth —out of my house.”
    “Let’s talk about this.”
    “I want her out!”
    “All right, all right.” He looks at me with dull eyes, and I can see that as bad as
     this situation is, it’s about to get worse. I don’t want to stay here, but how can
     I survive out there?
    Mrs. Grote disappears down the hall. I hear a child crying in the back. She returns
     a moment later with my suitcase and heaves it across the room. It crashes against
     the wall, spilling its contents across the floor.
    My boots and the mustard coat, with Fanny’s precious lined gloves in the pocket, are
     on a nail by the front door, and I’m wearing my only pair of threadbare socks. I make
     my way to the suitcase and grab what I can, open the door to a sharp blast of cold
     air and toss a few scattered pieces of clothing onto the porch, my breath a puff of
     smoke in front of me. As I put on my boots, fumbling with the laces, I hear Mr. Grote
     say, “What if something happens to her?” and Mrs. Grote’s reply: “If that stupid girl
     gets it in her head to run away, there’s nothing we can do, is there?”
    And run I do, leaving almost everything I possess in the world behind me—my brown
     suitcase, the three dresses I made at the Byrnes’, the fingerless gloves and change
     of underwear and the navy sweater, my school-books and pencil, the composition book
     Miss Larsen gave me to write in. The sewing packet Fanny made for me, at least, is
     in the inner pocket of my coat. I leave four children I could not help and did not
     love. I leave a place of degradation and squalor, the likes of which I will never
     experience again. And I leave any last shred of my childhood on the rough planks of
     that living room floor.

Hemingford County, Minnesota, 1930
    Trudging forward like a sleepwalker in the bitter cold, I make my way down the driveway, then turn left and plod up the