“You brung it!” she says, flinging back the covers. “Come in here, acting all high and mighty, like you’re better than us . . .”
Her nightgown is bunched up around her belly. I see a dark triangle of fur between her legs and turn away, embarrassed.
“Don’t you dare leave!” she shrieks. She snatches baby Nettie, wailing, off the bed and tucks her under one arm, pointing at the bed with the other. “Sheets need to be boiled. Then you can start going through the kids’ hair with a comb. I told Gerald it was too much, bringing a vagrant in this house when Lord knows where she’s been.”
The next five hours are even more miserable than I imagined—boiling pots of water and emptying it into a big tub without scalding any of the children, pulling every blanket and sheet and piece of clothing I can find into the water and scrubbing them with lye soap, then pushing the sheets through the hand wringer. I’m barely strong enough to load and turn the crank, and my arms ache with the effort.
When Mr. Grote comes home he talks to his wife, who’s camped on the living room couch. Snatches of their conversation waft back to me—“trash,” “vermin,” “dirty Irish bog-trotter”—and in a few minutes he comes through the kitchen door to find me on my knees, trying to turn the wringer. “Lord Jesus,” he says, and gets to work helping me.
Mr. Grote agrees that the mattresses are probably infested. He thinks if we drag them out to the porch and pour boiling water over them it will kill the bugs. “I have half a mind to do the same to the kids,” he says, and I know he’s only barely kidding. He makes quick work of shaving the heads of all four of them with a straight razor. Despite my attempts to hold their heads still, they twitch and fidget, and as a result have little bloody nicks and gashes all over their heads. They remind me of photos of soldiers returning from the Great War, hollow-eyed and bald. Mr. Grote rubs lye over each head, and the children scream and yell. Mrs. Grote sits on the couch, watching.
“Wilma, it’s your turn,” he says, turning to her with the razor in his hand.
“No.”
“We have to check, at least.”
“Check the girl. She brought them here.” Mrs. Grote turns her face to the back of the couch.
Mr. Grote motions me over. I take my hair out of its tight braids and kneel in front of him while he gently picks through. It’s strange to feel this man’s breath on my neck, his fingers on my scalp. He pinches something between his fingers and sits back on his heels. “Yep. You got some eggs in there.”
I am the only one of my siblings with red hair. When I asked my da where I got it, he joked that there must’ve been rust in the pipes. His own hair was dark—“cured,” he said, through years of toil—but when he was young it was more like auburn. Nothing like yours, he said. Your hair is as vivid as a Kinvara sunset, autumn leaves, the Koi goldfish in the window of that hotel in Galway.
Mr. Grote doesn’t want to shave my head. He says it would be a crime. Instead he winds my hair around his fist and slices straight through it at the nape of my neck. A heap of coils slide to the floor, and he cuts the rest of the hair on my head about two inches long.
I spend the next four days in that miserable house, burning logs and boiling water, the children cranky and underfoot as they always are, Mrs. Grote back on damp sheets on the mildewing mattress with her lice-infested hair, and there’s nothing I can do about any of it, nothing at all.
“WE’VE MISSED YOU, DOROTHY!” MISS LARSEN SAYS WHEN I return to school. “And my—a brand-new hairstyle!”
I touch the top of my head where my hair is sticking up. Miss Larsen knows why my hair is short—it’s in the note I had to give her when I got out of the truck—but she doesn’t give away a thing. “Actually,” she says, “you look like a flapper. Do you know what that is?”
I shake my head.
“Flappers are big-city girls who cut their hair short and go dancing and do what they please.” She gives me a friendly smile. “Who knows, Dorothy? Maybe that’s what you’ll become.”
Hemingford County, Minnesota, 1930
By summer’s end, Mr. Grote seems to be having more luck. Whatever he can kill he brings home in a sack and skins right away, then hangs in the shed out back. He built a smoker behind the shed and now he keeps it going all the time, filling it with squirrels and fish and even raccoons. The meat gives off a curdled-sweet smell that turns my stomach, but it’s better than going hungry.
Mrs. Grote is pregnant again. She says the baby’s due in March. I’m worried I’ll be expected to help her when the time comes. When Mam had Maisie there were plenty of neighbors on Elizabeth Street who’d been through it before, and all I had to do was watch the younger kids. Mrs. Schatzman, down the hall, and the Krasnow sisters a floor below, with seven children between them, came into the apartment and took over, closing the bedroom door behind them. My da went out. Maybe he was sent out by them, I don’t know. I was in the living room, playing patty-cake and reciting the alphabet and singing all the songs he’d belt out when he came home from the pub late at night, waking the neighbors.