Orphan Train(11)
The younger children appear bewildered by this litany, but those of us older than six or seven had already heard a version of it several times at the orphanage before we left. The words wash over me. Of more immediate concern is the fact that Carmine is hungry, as am I. We had only a dry piece of bread and a tin cup of milk for breakfast, hours ago, before it was light. Carmine is fussing and chewing on his hand, a habit that must be comforting to him. (Maisie sucked her thumb.) But I know not to ask when food is coming. It will come when the sponsors are ready to give it, and no entreaties will change that.
I tug Carmine onto my lap. At breakfast this morning, when I dropped sugar into my tea, I slipped two lumps into my pocket. Now I rub one between my fingers, crushing it to granules, then lick my index finger and stick it in the sugar before popping it in Carmine’s mouth. The look of wonder on his face, his delight as he realizes his good fortune, makes me smile. He clutches my hand with both of his chubby ones, holding on tight as he drifts off to sleep.
Eventually I, too, am lulled to sleep by the steady rumble of the clicking wheels. When I wake, with Carmine stirring and rubbing his eyes, Mrs. Scatcherd is standing over me. She is close enough that I can see the small pink veins, like seams on the back of a delicate leaf, spreading across her cheeks, the downy fur on her jawbone, her bristly black eyebrows.
She stares at me intently through her small round glasses. “There were little ones at home, I gather.”
I nod.
“You appear to know what you’re doing.”
As if on cue, Carmine bleats in my lap. “I think he’s hungry,” I tell her. I feel his diaper rag, which is dry on the outside but spongy. “And ready for a change.”
She turns toward the front of the car, gesturing back at me over her shoulder. “Come on, then.”
Holding the baby against my chest, I rise unsteadily from my seat and sway behind her up the aisle. Children sitting in twos and threes look up with doleful eyes as I pass. None of us knows where we are headed, and I think that except for the very youngest, each of us is apprehensive and fearful. Our sponsors have told us little; we know only that we are going to a land where apples grow in abundance on low-hanging branches and cows and pigs and sheep roam freely in the fresh country air. A land where good people—families—are eager to take us in. I haven’t seen a cow, or any animal, for that matter, except a stray dog and the occasional hardy bird, since leaving County Galway, and I look forward to seeing them again. But I am skeptical. I know all too well how it is when the beautiful visions you’ve been fed don’t match up with reality.
Many of the children on this train have been at the Children’s Aid for so long that they have no memories of their mothers. They can start anew, welcomed into the arms of the only families they’ll ever know. I remember too much: my gram’s ample bosom, her small dry hands, the dark cottage with a crumbling stone wall flanking its narrow garden. The heavy mist that settled over the bay early in the morning and late in the afternoon, the mutton and potatoes Gram would bring to the house when Mam was too tired to cook or we didn’t have money for ingredients. Buying milk and bread at the corner shop on Phantom Street—Sraid a’ Phuca, my da called it in Gaelic—so called because the stone houses in that section of town were built on cemetery grounds. My mam’s chapped lips and fleeting smile, the melancholy that filled our home in Kinvara and traveled with us across the ocean to take up permanent residence in the dim corners of our tenement apartment in New York.
And now here I am on this train, wiping Carmine’s bottom while Mrs. Scatcherd hovers above us, shielding me with a blanket to hide the procedure from Mr. Curran, issuing instructions I don’t need. Once I have Carmine clean and dry, I sling him over my shoulder and make my way back to my seat while Mr. Curran distributes lunch pails filled with bread and cheese and fruit, and tin cups of milk. Feeding Carmine bread soaked in milk reminds me of the Irish dish called champ I often made for Maisie and the boys—a mash of potatoes, milk, green onions (on the rare occasion when we had them), and salt. On the nights when we went to bed hungry, all of us dreamed of that champ.
After distributing the food and one wool blanket to each of us, Mr. Curran announces that there is a bucket and a dipper for water, and if we raise our hands we can come forward for a drink. There’s an indoor toilet, he informs us (though, as we soon find out, this “toilet” is a terrifying open hole above the tracks).
Carmine, drunk on sweet milk and bread, splays in my lap, his dark head in the crook of my arm. I wrap the scratchy blanket around us. In the rhythmic clacking of the train and the stirring, peopled silence of the car, I feel cocooned. Carmine smells as lovely as a custard, the solid weight of him so comforting it makes me teary. His spongy skin, pliable limbs, dark fringed lashes—even his sighs make me think (how could they not?) of Maisie. The idea of her dying alone in the hospital, suffering painful burns, is too much to bear. Why am I alive, and she dead?