Orphan Train

her loving family . . .
    Lost—and found—and lost again. How will she ever tell Vivian?

Hemingford, Minnesota, 1930
    When I get better, I ride to school with Miss Larsen in the black car. Mrs. Murphy gives me something new nearly every day—a skirt she says she found in a closet, a
     woolen hat, a camel-colored coat, a periwinkle scarf and matching mittens. Some of
     the clothes have missing buttons or small rips and tears, and others need hemming
     or taking in. When Mrs. Murphy finds me mending a dress with the needle and thread
     Fanny gave me, she exclaims, “Why, you’re as handy as a pocket in a shirt.”
    The food she makes, familiar to me from Ireland, evokes a flood of memories: sausages
     roasting with potatoes in the oven, the tea leaves in Gram’s morning cuppa, laundry
     flapping on the line behind her house, the faint clang of the church bell in the distance.
     Gram saying, “Now, that was the goat’s toe,” after a satisfying supper. And other
     things: quarrels between Mam and Gram, my da passed out drunk on the floor. Mam’s
     cry: “You spoiled him rotten, and now he’ll never be a man”—and Gram’s retort: “You
     keep pecking at him and soon he won’t come home at all.” Sometimes when I stayed overnight
     at Gram’s, I’d overhear my grandparents whispering at the kitchen table. What are we to do about it, then? Will we have to feed that family forever? I knew they were exasperated with Da, but they had little patience for Mam, either,
     whose people were from Limerick and never lifted a finger to help.
    The day Gram gave me the claddagh I was sitting on her bed, tracing the nubby white
     bedspread like Braille under my fingers, watching her get ready for church. She sat
     at a small vanity table with an oval mirror, fluffing her hair lightly with a brush
     she prized—the finest whalebone and horsehair, she said, letting me touch the smooth
     off-white handle, the stiff bristles—and kept in a casketlike case. She’d saved for
     the brush by mending clothes; it took four months, she told me, to earn the money.
    After replacing the brush in its case, Gram opened her jewelry box, an off-white faux-leather
     one with gilt trim and a gold clasp, plush red velvet inside, revealing a trove of
     treasures—sparkling earrings, heavy necklaces in onyx and pearl, gold bracelets. (My
     mam later said spitefully that these were cheap costume jewelry from a Galway five-and-dime,
     but at the time they seemed impossibly luxurious to me.) She picked out a pair of
     clustered pearl earrings with padded back clasps, clipping first one and then the
     other to her low-hanging lobes.
    In the bottom of the box was the claddagh cross. I’d never seen her wear it. She told
     me that her da, now long dead, had given it to her for her First Holy Communion when
     she was thirteen. She’d planned to give it to her daughter, my auntie Brigid, but
     Brigid wanted a gold birthstone ring instead.
    “You are my only granddaughter, and I want you to have it,” Gram declared, fastening
     the chain around my neck. “See the interlaced strands?” She touched the raised pattern
     with a knobby finger. “These trace a never-ending path, leading away from home and
     circling back. When you wear this, you’ll never be far from the place you started.”
    Several weeks after Gram gave me the claddagh, she and Mam got into one of their arguments.
     As their voices rose I took the twins into a bedroom down the hall.
    “You tricked him into it; he wasn’t ready,” I heard Gram shout. And then Mam’s retort,
     as clear as day: “A man whose mother won’t let him lift a finger is ruined for a wife.”
    The front door banged; it was Granddad, I knew, stomping out in disgust. And then
     I heard a crash, a shriek, a cry, and I ran to the parlor to find Gram’s whalebone
     brush shattered in pieces against the hearth, and Mam with a look of triumph on her
     face.
    Not a month later, we found ourselves bound for Ellis Island on the Agnes Pauline.
    M RS . M URPHY ’ S HUSBAND DIED A DECADE AGO , I LEARN , LEAVING her with this big old house and little money. Making the most of the situation, she
     began to take in boarders. The women have a schedule that rotates once a week: cooking,
     laundry, cleaning, washing the floors. Soon enough I am helping too: I set the table
     for breakfast, clear the plates, sweep the hall, wash the dishes after dinner. Mrs.
     Murphy is the hardest working of all, up early