Mrs. Grote barely looks at me. She sends a child out to be fed or calls me to fix her a cup of coffee. She makes me nervous. I do what I’m told and make an effort to avoid her. The children sniff around, trying to get used to me, all except for two-year-old Gerald Jr., who takes to me right away, follows me like a puppy.
I ask Mr. Grote how they found me. He says he saw a flyer in town—homeless children for distribution. Wilma wouldn’t get out of bed, and he didn’t know what else to do.
I feel abandoned and forgotten, dropped into misery worse than my own.
MR. GROTE SAYS HE’LL NEVER GET ANOTHER JOB IF HE CAN MANAGE it. He plans to live off the land. He was born and raised in the woods; it’s the only life he knows or cares to know. He built this house with his own two hands, he says, and his goal is to be entirely self-sufficient. He has an old goat in the backyard and a mule and half a dozen chickens; he can feed his family on what he can hunt and find in the woods and on a handful of seeds, along with the goat’s milk and eggs from the chickens, and he can sell things in town if he has to.
Mr. Grote is lean and fit from walking miles every day. Like an Indian, he says. He has a car, but it’s rusted and broken down behind the house. He can’t afford to get it fixed, so he goes everywhere on foot or sometimes on the old mule that he says wandered off from a horsemeat truck that broke down on the road a few months back. His fingernails are rimmed with grime made up of axle grease and planting soil and animal blood and who knows what else, ground in so deep it can’t be washed off. I’ve only ever seen him in one pair of overalls.
Mr. Grote doesn’t believe in government telling him what to do. Tell the truth, he doesn’t believe in government at all. He has never been to school a day in his life and doesn’t see the point. But he’ll send me to school if that’s what it takes to keep the authorities out of his hair.
ON MONDAY, THREE DAYS AFTER I ARRIVE, MR. GROTE SHAKES MY shoulder in the darkness so I can get ready for school. The room is so cold I can see my breath. I put on one of my new dresses with both sweaters layered on top. I wear Fanny’s mittens, the thick stockings I wore from New York, my sturdy black shoes.
I run out to the pump and fill a pitcher with cold water, then bring it inside to heat on the stove. After pouring warm water in a tin bowl, I take a rag and scrub my face, my neck, my fingernails. There’s an old mirror in the kitchen, spotted with rusty stains and freckled with black specks, so ruined it’s almost impossible to see myself in. I divide my unwashed hair into two pigtails, using my fingers as a comb, and then braid them tightly, tying the ends with thread from the packet Fanny made for me. Then I look closely at my reflection. I am as clean as I can manage without taking a bath. My face is pale and serious.
I barely have any breakfast, just some wild rice pudding made with goat’s milk and maple syrup Mr. Grote tapped the day before. I am so relieved to be getting out of this dark, fetid cabin for the day that I swing Harold around, joke with Gerald Jr., share my rice pudding with Mabel, who has only just started looking me in the eye. Mr. Grote draws a map for me with a knife in the dirt—you go out the drive, turn left there where you came in, walk till you get to the T section, then go over that bridge back yonder and on till you get to the county road. Half an hour, give or take.
He doesn’t offer a lunch pail, and I don’t ask for one. I slip the two eggs I boiled the night before when I was making supper into my coat pocket. I have that piece of paper from Mr. Sorenson that says a man named Mr. Post who drives the kids to school in his truck will be at the corner at 8:30 A.M. and bring me back at 4:30 P.M. It’s 7:40, but I’m ready to go. Better to wait at the corner than risk missing my ride.
I skip down the driveway, hurry up the road, linger on the bridge for a moment, looking down at the reflection of the sky like mercury on the dark water, the foaming white suds near the rocks. Ice glistens on tree branches, frost webs over dried grasses in a sparkling net. The evergreens are dusted with the light snow that fell last night like a forest of Christmas trees. For the first time, I am struck by the beauty of this place.
I hear the truck before I see it. About twenty yards from me, it slows to a stop with a great screeching of brakes, and I have to run back along the road to get on. An apple-faced man in a tan cap peers out at me. “Come on, darlin’. Don’t have all day.”
The truck has a tarpaulin over its bed. I climb in the back, laid with two flat planks for passengers to sit on. There’s a heap of horse blankets in the corner, and the four kids sitting there are huddled in them, having wrapped the blankets over their shoulders and tucked them around their legs. The canvas cover gives everyone a yellowish tint. Two of the kids appear close to my age. As we bump along, I hang on to the wooden bench with my mittened fingers so I don’t fall onto the floor when we hit a rough patch. The driver stops twice more to pick up passengers. The bed is only big enough to seat six comfortably, and eight of us are crammed in here—we’re tight on the bench, but our bodies give off much-needed warmth. Nobody speaks. When the truck is moving, wind slices through the gaps in the tarp.