“Like going exploring?” Frances teased.
“I said I started changin’ them. It’s hard to do all that changin’ at once.”
“Captain Taylor said Mike was a fine young man, and you are too, Eddie. There’ll be lots of good things in life for you,” Frances said.
Aggie suddenly appeared at Frances’s side. “Miss Kelly, some of the little children are getting hungry. Like Lizzie. Mary Beth said I didn’t know what I was talking about, but I know when a baby gets fussy because she’s hungry. I know a lot more than Mary Beth knows. And you did say I was sort of in charge. When are we going to feed the little ones?”
Frances pulled out her pocket watch and glanced at it. “It’s not yet noon, but I think we’re all getting hungry,” she told Aggie. “I’ll open the hamper, and if you’d like, since you’re my special assistant, you can give everyone an apple—except Lizzie and Nelly, of course. I’ll peel and chop their apples.”
“We get apples?” Aggie’s eyes lit in anticipation.
“Along with bread and cheese,” Frances said.
She and Aggie set to work giving the food to the children. Some of the adults at the back of the car brought out food they’d brought with them, but Frances noticed that Reverend Diller had nothing to eat.
Frances motioned to him, and he came to the front of the car. “Please join us. We have plenty to share,” she said.
He looked away in embarrassment. “I—I was in a hurry to leave. I didn’t think about packin’ food.”
“Then please share with us,” Frances said.
Daisy Gordon piped up. “Miss Kelly, David’s already started to eat, and we didn’t say a blessing.”
Jessie nodded. “At the asylum we always said a blessing.”
Frances turned to Reverend Diller. “Will you lead the children in a prayer, please?”
She folded her hands and prepared to pray, but he nodded toward Daisy and said, “I’d like to hear this little girl lead the prayer. She’d be happier with the prayer she’s used to than the long blessin’ that preachers say.”
Daisy didn’t need prompting. In a loud, singsong voice she recited, “Bless us, O Lord, for thy bounty which we are about to receive.” She smiled, shouted “Amen,” and bit with a crunch into her apple.
Reverend Diller took the food Frances had given him back to his seat, while Frances sat by the window, enjoying the bread and cheese and the scenery of softly rolling hills. But a cry from deep within her heart shattered this moment of peace. Oh, Johnny—how much I miss you!
9
IT WASN’T UNTIL long after nightfall that quiet settled on the railway car.
Frances had told all the stories and poems she could remember from her classroom readers to the thirty sleepy children. She’d helped make them comfortable on the hard coach seats. After the lantern had been extinguished and the railway car was lit only by the light of a full moon, she wandered among them singing some of the soft Irish songs that Ma had always sung to ease her children into sleep.
When most of the children had fallen asleep, some of them pillowing their heads on their seatmates’ laps or shoulders, and no more lonely sniffles were to be heard, Frances removed her hat and relaxed in the front seat. She retrieved her carpetbag from under the seat and pulled out a pencil and the journal Johnny had given her. There was enough moonlight so that she could see to write. She desperately wanted to put her thoughts about the children on paper to keep.
She stroked the blank page of the journal before she found herself writing about Johnny and how much she missed him. Had she been wrong to leave without talking it over with him? Had she hurt him too much to ever make things right between them? Frances sighed as she wondered if her questions even mattered. Johnny had turned away from her. He’d turned inward, obsessed with anger at those who had injured him. Johnny couldn’t come to her with an open heart because his heart was filled with bitterness. She wrote:
When I return to Kansas, will I see Johnny ever again? What will my life be without him? Perhaps I should move to St. Joseph and live near Ma. Maybe it would be better to
She jumped as Reverend Diller slid into the seat next to her. Flustered, Frances closed her journal with a snap.
“First off, I want to apologize for grabbin’ your arm like I did,” Reverend Diller said. “Sometimes I have bad dreams, and when you touched me I thought … Well, there was someone in my dream, and I was fightin’ back. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“It’s all right,” Frances said. “It was my fault. I didn’t mean to startle you.”