15000 words

A Placement for Clara Hutland
by Deirdre Dore

The woman who looked young Clara over real good had recently been bitten in the backside by a dog, a mongrel that she, herself, had allowed on the farm, albeit against her better judgment.  The dog had lunged at her as she was reprimanding a boy in her charge and now the left cheek of her rear end was swollen up and hot and as she waited for the orphans to settle down on the platform in front of the train, she shifted from foot to foot and finally complained to the farmer next, she said, ‘it never even bled out, now it’s all just pus’ to which the farmer said ‘well I heard a poultice of formaldehyde mixed with Epsom salts gives amazing instant relief’ which made the farmer standing next to him laugh a blue streak into a coughing fit, until the woman muttered, ‘fools’ and the men moved down the line to yank one or another of the little folk forward for inspection, little folk being how the notices pasted up at the Opera House from the Weekly Sickle had advertised them. 

The woman had her hair pinned into a bun at the nape of her neck and she was fairly tall and serious and lean, even in her skirts she looked ropy. She turned to the sorry lot standing in front of her, city-bred children newly outfitted in ill-fitting dresses and pants, gloves for the girls and canvas shoes, knickers for the boys flapping loosely around their bony hips, others with their hands hidden by sleeves, or wrists gapping out, caps pushed back on their heads, the girls giggling and holding hands or the bigger ones crying. By then they’d figured out what the joyride was all about and some of them wanted their mommas pretty fierce, if they had one to want. Oskaloosa Kansas wasn’t the last stop on the Atcheson Topeka and the Santa Fe but it wasn’t the first either and they’d been pretty well picked over, the good ones snatched into indenture well east of here and Clara not being a baby and not being a boy and not being particularly genteel with her blunt cut bangs and big bones and bold way of looking straight was one of them still left. 
	As the other children on the platform were claimed, Clara, having ridden this train before, whistled to draw attention to herself; the song that popped into her head being I’m a Lonesome Little Rain Drop and when the woman of the dog bite sought out the source of the noise, Clara grinned, all her teeth showing and her eyebrows raised as high as they could reach. The woman blinked in surprise, looking around wildly, and declaimed to the platform in general, ‘I’m in no mood for any of your shenanigans.’ She had one eye that moved with her head and one that moved on its own. The one that moved on its own finally settled on Clara.
	She said to Clara, ‘Turn’. 
	Clara turned a circle, then dropped a curtsy for good measure.  
	She said ‘Open your mouth’ and Clara opened her mouth, swagging her tongue from side to side as well. 
	She said, “Let’s hear your voice do you know the Lord’s prayer” and Clara said, ‘I would except I’m half Jewish’ and the woman slapped her face and said, repeat after me... “Our Father whose heart in heaven.” 

Clara was not technically an orphan seeing as her mother and father were both alive, and known to her, as she was likewise known to them, though when her mother, who was born Gloria and went by Goldie, would march the streets, up and down, Delancey to Broome, calling out Clara’s name, with an accent that reached up from the deep warm part of her throat, her round whiskery face ruddy with the cold and her hair shined clean with cold chicken fat and held back with tortoise combs, her body and mission without variance, sturdy, small and unstoppable, Clara would hide behind a vegetable cart and pretend that she didn’t hear and later she might return home with a bruised yellow turnip to share and climb into her mother’s welcoming lap and bury her face in her soft bosom soaking up warmth and say you smell like onions, yuck as a way of apology. 

As the second youngest child in a family of six and the only girl left at home, she was much admired. Her older sister had moved up to the Bronx and worked at two jobs, in the morning doing laundry at the hospital and later sewing buttonholes and what little she sent home couldn’t keep a coal bin filled past Hanukkah but Clara and her two next older brothers would steal what they could at the docks and smuggle it back to the tenement in their pockets and socks. 

Her father with his dark wavy hair and much more impressive mustache was a mystery to them all. He liked to jingle his keys, which opened nothing that they knew of and whistle and bet on the horses and sometimes his leg shook when he was reading the newspaper and Clara, a toddler on the floor would stick the broken end of a wishbone into the hole in his sock and tickle him but when the children asked him about his own childhood or parents or life before them he would always say the same thing, ‘That’s water under the bridge’ though they knew he was a true born American, raised in the St John’s Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn.  He worked where he could, streetcar conductor, switching to milk wagon and then a stevedore on the docks loading barrels of corn syrup onto a barge. He was fast on his feet, and when the man in charge of the day’s employment would toss the signifying coins out in front of the clamoring men, he would more often than not be one of the lucky ones. Other hard bits stood out for attention like rocks in a stream: his family disowned him when he married a Jew, he had a goyim girlfriend who tended the counter in a pawn shop in New Jersey, he brought home broken watches which he let Clara take apart and once a 10 k gold watch chain. 

But between each job when the going got tough, he had a habit of disappearing, and the last Clara and her mother and her four brothers had seen of him was out their window on a 8th floor walkup on Broome, (that was after they got evicted from Attorney and evicted from Clinton.)  It was 24 degrees cold out and Goldie was ladling out meager portions from a bowl of fish head soup, and they watched him walk down the street, never turning around, in the tipped hat he always wore, a thin man in a thin vest and worn out shoes holding a paper bag of books and tobacco, and a dusty stuffed owl he had found in a saddlebag that had been left at the docks one day. 
	When Julius the oldest yelled Pop! Poppa! He called back over his shoulder, ‘Take care of your Mother’ and hopped up onto the back of a trolley car. He was on his way back to the harbor to board a banana ship for the return trip to South America. 

The year Clara turned ten she learned to fold and sell newspaper flowers down near the Battery. Sometimes a woman in a cloche hat and fur rimmed jacket would stop the driver  of her carriages or car to buy a bouquet for a dime. Sometimes a man bought one. Sometimes a man bought her, or rather a little piece of time with her. 25 cents and she’d lift her skirts and close her eyes which meant she was never really sure what was touching her, hard smooth cold things like the end of a bottle, or candle, or rough and fast like a hand, and she was pretty sure she felt the eraser on a pencil once, which made her think she had met a writer and she imagined being the heroine in his story, older though with breasts that stuck out straight as they were beginning to do and didn’t droop which was mostly a matter of will power or so she believed. 50 cents bought her a salted pretzel, a glass of cold milk, a candy bar and a hot sweet potato roasted on a fire in a rolling oven; enough food to make her sick if she ate it too fast, with 4 cents left over for a baseball card in a box of Cracker Jacks. 

Eventually The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children sent a notice around, and one day two men were waiting outside on the street in front of their tenement apartment with a small truck outfitted with a couple of wooden benches in the back and when the men in their suits called their names, Julius, Leonard, Benjamin, Clara, Abe they were too surprised to know any better and climbed into the back of the truck to be driven uptown to the holding facilities where they were put in quarantine for ten days to shake out whatever might be infesting them, from influenza to lice. All except for Julius who at 16 had judiciously decided the day before to jump a coal train to Philadelphia leaving the remaining Hutland children to be classified as destitute and ordered into state care and remanded to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum on Amsterdam Ave in Harlem where they were placed in different alcoves on different floors according to age and gender. 
 
Clara’s life in the Asylum was supposed to be an improvement and in many ways it was. A bed to sleep in, food to eat, communal showers from a tap whose offerings she had no control of, laundered clothes and drills. A regimen to follow plus a whacking if she deviated or even moved after hearing the command ALL STILL. She still had lice though the haircut and bath and new (to her) clothes had knocked them down to a manageable population and for a little while she kept the last bouquet of newspaper flowers that she hadn’t been able to sell that day, giving paper-folding lessons to any that asked, though the flower looked more like fire-starter than anything nature intended. And within the month she had gathered a little gang of girls who looked up to her, taking the place of the family she was separated from but most especially what she had in her possession were her expectations of at any minute being returned home.  

Goldie, suddenly alone, without a husband, or even one child left of the six she had birthed looked around her empty tenement apartment, and not being a widow and therefore not eligible for the alms available to those women thus deprived, and not accustomed to solitude and destitution combined she went to the court and found the name and address of the judge who had presided over her children’s case and with her hair wrapped in a thin scarf and her apron off, a pair of knitting needles in a bag of broken threads of yarn and a piece of paper of instruction, she traveled the subway uptown to the brownstones near Central Park and walked 5th Ave till she found the number she had been told, and up the stone steps and knocked on the thick polished oak door until a woman wearing a light serge wool fitted suit and small green earrings opened it and said ‘What do you want?’
	Goldie for a moment had no voice and the woman repeated, ‘Well. What is it? 
	Goldie said,   ‘I want my children back.’ 
	When told the Judge wasn’t home, Goldie  sat on the roughhewn brownstones and waited, humming a song learned from her own mother in the old country, a lullaby called Zing Faygeleh Zing which means sing little birdie sing and she knitted. The finely dressed woman opened the door again and said ‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’
	Goldie repeated, ‘I want to talk to the Judge.’
	And from the shadow of the house the Judge stepped up and said, ‘What do you want?’
	Goldie said, ‘I want my children back.’
	The Judge bent forward and told her, ‘Listen carefully. Your children are better off where they are. Count yourself lucky. Now they have food to eat and a decent place to sleep. Forget your children. Go home.’
	Goldie said, ‘I want my children back.’
The Judge closed the door and when it got dark Goldie went home.

	The next day she traveled the subway again. And the next day after that and the next and every day she waited on the stone steps and sometimes the Judge was home and sometimes he wasn’t, but always the wife was who would sometimes let her in the house to use the toilet or sit her at the table to eat  a piece of buttered bread or sip a cup of tea that Goldie poured into the saucer and drank from before stepping outside  to wait on the steps and when the Judge appeared she said the only thing she knew to say, she had no argument or logic or strategy, only I want my children back. Until the police would escort her off.
	Finally the wife said to the Judge, ‘Sam, please , just give her her children back.’ 
And the Judge to shut his wife up and get some peace in his home made a deal.  ‘I will give you one child,  one out of the four, you choose and then you leave me alone.’

When Clara realized her mother had chosen the youngest boy, Abe, to save and keep instead of her she resolved from that day forward that she truly was an orphan and on visiting days refused to meet her mother in the common room, nor would she allow herself to be escorted to the lower East Side for Sunday visits much as she ached for it. 	Instead she ran away, hopping trolleys till she got to South Pier docks where she studied the tankers, looking for one that might be heading out to Jamaica or Ecuador or wherever she thought they might be growing bananas. When the Childrens Aid would pick her up and bring her back to the Asylum she would be sent for punishment to Mr. Freeman who took her over his knee behind his black mahogany desk and after he had done spanking her bare backside, he sat her on his lap and gave her a cozy talking to, petting her down front and back as if she were a cat until she bit his hand and explained to the Head of the Girls Division that she wasn’t the only girl it happened to, it happened to Pammy and Ethel too but when Pammy and Ethel denied it in tears she was whacked again and a meeting was held at which it was finally resolved she was a candidate for indenture and she was handed a bible and a lunch pail and escorted down to Grand Central Station with a score of other children to be lined up and counted and coached and put on an orphan train where once again it was determined her life would get real better real soon as long as she realized she was to forget her old life, her street life, her family altogether, contact with them strictly forbidden, no forwarding addresses or names divulged, no letters or visits from that day onward, all of which was fine by Clara.

Riding the New York Central Line in a steam locomotive out of Grand Central in midtown was wonderful at first, and the children loved watching the scenery change, coming out from under the skyscrapers of Manhattan to the daylight and straggling squalor of  New Jersey, the buildings and towns getting smaller and fewer as they progressed paralleling the river then veering west, the children singing and going through each other’s cardboard suitcases. But at each stop their numbers grew fewer and what camaraderie they shared and courage they mustered in being together they soon realized was to be short-lived.

The first of Clara’s placements turned sour; a farm couple in Illinois with a lot of experience in potato bugs and none in children had kept Clara for 3 nervous weeks, but when they caught her decorating the big sow in the wife’s wedding dress as she lectured the local children on her version of Darwin’s theory of evolution as she had learned it herself in school they returned her to the Society’s field office in Chicago. Neither Clara nor Darwin was traveling west well.  

Clara, desperate not to think of her mother and brothers again was hell bent to make the next one stick and though the second placement began well on a tidy dairy farm on the outskirts of Grand Rapids when ten days later the pretty wife suddenly found herself with child after some years of trying, Clara was returned. It was another 18 more hours or so of train travel and being passed over before she got off for the last time and met Minnie in Oskaloosa Kansas. 
~
Riding away from the station in the back bench of the cart that Minnie was driving one eye to the mule, the other to the horizon, Clara felt well and truly claimed. Every bump in the trail Minnie would turn around and ask, ‘Are you all right back there?’ 
And Clara would answer, ‘I’m good, I like the bumps’ and even convinced herself that that was true. 
	After a long hour, Minnie’s mule turned into the yard without coaxing and stopped at the barn.  A small wooden farmhouse with a porch out front that looked out on a fenced paddock, a chicken coop, a barn, and nothing much else for miles on end, except a few hills in the distance, a stand of chinkapin oaks and buttonbush in the bottom land and the mirage of a lake in the distance. Behind the house -  an outhouse, a windmill and a gnarled apple orchard. 
	A brown dog bounded up to them when Minnie stepped down from the cart  and Minnie kicked it away saying, ‘Don’t touch it.’ Clara said, ‘Why not?’ Minnie said, ‘Dangerous. Something wrong with it in the head’ and while Minnie gathered the sacks of flour and lard she had bought, Clara bent and patted the dangerous dog. There was not a soul around that she could see, except for a small shadow that poked out from the corner of the barn. 
	She stood in the yard not having any particular idea about what to do next except to notice the heat and the sky. The heat being like a glass globe set down around her full of fever and the sky she had to turn her whole body in an arc one side to the other to even see the wild span of it. While she was noticing the heat and the sky the woman came out with a 6 foot length of rusty chain and leather and said, ‘Chain that dog up to the post and then come inside for an inspection and meet Mr. Toomey. I expect you’re hungry? Well supper is not before 7 so you have to wait whether you like it or not.’ Clara said, ‘I can wait’ and Minnie said, ‘Amen to that, you can wait.’   

The house was dark inside, the windows small and clotted with dust. A wooden staircase in the center of the room led to the second floor. A potbellied stove on the north wall, a small kitchen to the east with a Frontenac wood cookstove, and a worn wooden table, and in the parlour a rocking chair, an easy chair, a piano, plus a home made crystal radioset  on a shelf and a bench. 

In a small alcove under the stairs she was told to undress. It was the third time since she had been rescued a full two months past that she had been made to stand naked in front of strangers. While Clara yanked her drawers down, Minnie yelled out to her husband in the kitchen to stay put where he was until she called for him. 
	Clara was standing bare on top of her pile of clothes even her socks, shuffling from foot to foot when a tall, poor-complexioned, uneasy man, with big ears and thin hair combed flat, rushed in, stooping to keep from knocking his head on the stairs, holding in his hand the old grey wool cap he liked to wear, winter and summer both.   
	‘What’s that you say?’ asked Hollis.
	‘Get out. Get out of here,’ screeched Minnie. ‘I’m inspecting.’ 
	‘Inspecting what?’ 
	‘The girl. For sanitary. Get out.’
	Clara looked from one to the other and said ‘Should I cover myself then?’
	‘Get out you fool,’ Minnie insisted.
	‘Well I beg your pardon, I thought you were being attacked the way you were shouting’ and Hollis gave Clara a quick nervous look and blinked, his eyes which did work in unison were squinched up so tight Clara could not have said the colour except for pale, and he stooped again and departed.

When Minnie was satisfied that Clara wasn’t covered in ringworm or scabies, she was instructed to put her undershirt and drawers on and Hollis was called back. 
	‘Wasn’t much left,’ Minnie said. ‘I mean for choices.’
	‘That’s plain.’ said Hollis. ‘Put your hands out, girl.’
	And Clara stuck her hands out, knuckles up, curling her fingers down to demonstrate the cleanliness of her nails.  But he took hold of her hand and turned it upside down and with his thick calloused finger poked into the tender scallops of her palm where her fingers connected. 
	‘Soft,’ he declared in a way that made it clear he was not delivering compliments. ‘How much?’  
	 ‘She was free,’ said the wife. ‘I wasn’t about to pay.
	‘Turn around,’ the woman said and Clara turned. ‘Should we keep her then?’ 
	‘I wouldn’t be denying you,’ said the man, ‘if you’re sure.’ 
	‘I’m as sure as I can be,’ said the wife.   
 	Looking at the girl’s midsection he muttered under his breath to Minnie ‘They’s different sizes is she deformed?’
	The wife reddened and said, ‘They come in like that sometimes, they’ll catch up to each other I reckon.’
	The man looked at his wife, and he blushed too. ‘Well I’ll be.’ 

Out the window Clara spotted the owner of the small shadow, a boy with his thumb in his mouth, about 8 years old, he wandered into the yard, wearing only a cotton shirt that barely reached his waist, and Clara watched him suddenly squat down to crap. When the boy was done, the brown dog trotted over dragging his chain, sniffed once or twice then ate the small clay coloured turd left in the dirt, and the boy bent over as the dog licked his butt clean.
	Minnie who looked up just in time to witness the conclusion of the exchange shouted, ‘Hollis, you get rid of that dog tomorrow, you hear me. Lord Almighty. I just don’t know what to make of that boy, I really don’t’ and she banged fiercely on the windowpane. 

Clara could smell something cooking on the stove, it smelled like fine white sugar. Like fine white sugar and butter mixed and her stomach rumbled in hunger.
	She said, ‘I think that boy needs a licking, that’s what I think.’
	‘How old are you girl? asked Minnie.
	‘Thirteen,’ said Clara. ‘You got the papers right there.’
	‘Which near as I can tell make you 12.’ 
	‘Well I’m older than my years,’ said Clara.
	The woman slapped her again and said ‘Truly that’s the last bit of back talk we’ll hear from your little mouth. Amen to that.’
	‘Older than my years,’ repeated Hollis. ‘Is that how they talk in New York City?’ 
	‘I’ll tell on you,’ said Clara.
	‘Who will you tell?’  the man asked.
	‘The Overseer of the Poor,’ said Clara. ‘To start.’
	The wife and her husband looked at each other then burst out laughing.
	‘And then what?’ said the wife. ‘Back on the train? West of here is Indians and drunks. Is that what you’re aiming after?’ 
	Clara said, ‘Maybe.’ Then she said, ‘Are you done inspecting?’
	The wife said, ‘Git the rest of your clothes on, or do I have to tell you everything all at once? For a twelve year old who is older than her years you’re not very smart is what I’m starting to realize. I’m Minnie Toomey and this is Hollis Toomey and you can call us Mister and Missus.’

Clara dressed and looked out the window again and there was that child returned, and he was holding a red and black snake in his hand, it was nearly 6 feet long, thick as her wrist and he was letting it coil round and round his arm. There were no other children that she could see, for miles in every direction nothing but dirt and sky, no wonder he had to make do with dogs and snakes Clara thought. 
	Hollis looked out to where Clara was looking and jumped, ‘Hell. He aint coming in here with that thing is he?’
	Minnie said, ‘Hollis, he’ll keep it away from you, quit your fretting.’
	Hollis said, ‘He better.’
	‘That’s Dummy,’ said the wife, ‘you’ll be taking care of him and helping with the washing up and laundry.  Got any back talk to say to that?’
	‘Why do you call him Dummy?’ said Clara. ‘Because he sucks his thumb?’
	Hollis started laughing and wouldn’t quit, till the dog outside howled in response and Hollis leaned in close to Clara and shouted in a voice so loud she had to pull away and cover her ears, ‘We call him Dummy because he’s deaf, that’s why, if you’re so anxious to know.’ 

~~

The Intentions of Charles Loring Brace

Kansas was turning out to be a complicated sort of state and Clara not being cognizant of what Charles Loring Brace had in mind when he set up the orphan train movement -  which was: fresh air and country living and family values and roofs and stoves and plates of home cooked food and beds with quilts and hot water and lye soap and prayers and schools with miles between all the citizenry and kisses on the head goodnight to take the place of living crammed up tight and childhood criminality, robbings and rag-selling and begging, rats and tenement gangs, or orphanages that were little better than barracks for the Hebrew children and Indian children and Coloreds and Catholics who roamed the streets and alleys and jumped across the rooftops and snuck into movies and prostituted themselves and stole coal and played pool and drank liquor and smoked tobacco before they were even done with puberty in order to stay alive and warm and have an inkling about what good the future might be and who was in charge of what, in short the whole hungry exciting life that Clara had gotten used to - and Clara not being cognizant either that Brace accomplished that, accomplished those good homes that he hoped for but he got the other too, of course he did, there was no weeding out, nor were people evil so much as poorly constituted to make the choice that would stand the test of historical scrutiny - lust and opportunism and woe having always been players at the table -  decided she might just as well keep her mouth shut about things, still smelling the butter and sugar burning till she finally said, ‘Is something burning on the stove?’ and Minnie the wife ran off to the kitchen and Hollis eased himself down on the one soft easy chair in the room and said, ‘There’s a basin by the stove and there’s hot water, bring it here girl and tend to my feet’ of which he had lost a couple or more toes on each to trench foot disease in the war and when it was cold or hot or the day just too blasted long the old aches started up and wouldn’t leave him any peace ‘And from now on your name is Winifred.’  

The commitment between the Toomeys and Clara was based on self-regulating altruism, convenience and mutual need with little follow-up and nothing legally binding, adoption not the true point, unless you were a baby coming out on the Baby Train, so the Toomeys understood they could give her back whenever they deemed fit, and likewise Clara could ask to be replaced if it came down to that within a 4 week trial period.

When Clara asked what the chances were she would ever see her mother again, or her brothers she was told ‘never’ and it was best to forget they ever even existed and Clara said ‘Well that suits me to a tee’ though she never did manage to answer to the name Winifred. 

She was outfitted in feedsack dresses and cotton stockings. She collected the eggs and pitch forked out the shitty hay from the coop. Dummy demonstrated firewood chopping and butter churning which duties they shared. She carried buckets of water up from the narrow creek below the house to the yard where she built a fire under a washtub and scrubbed shirts and socks and dresses on a washboard then fed them through a hand crank wringer before she pegged them up on a line. Dummy followed her everywhere and she threw rocks at him when he stared too long or got too close. She was taught to slop the pigs and this time she refrained from any hijinx in the pigpen. 

Night time life on the farm was the same repetition of dull routines. After supper which usually consisted of boiled potatoes, boiled carrots, a pot of stinging nettles that Clara collected, biscuits and a fried slab of salt pork or salt beef and sometimes baked apples there was whittling, stitching and radio. Dishes Clara washed in the wooden sink, and Dummy dried, plus a kettle of water heated to soak Hollis feet which Dummy, kneeling on the floor in front of the rocker, smeared with whale oil.  Minnie embroidered needlework, a white thewy horse standing in a bold yellow field of wheat under a prairie sky stitched in blue. Minnie as a girl around the age of Clara  had kicked and coaxed and cheered and whipped a tic-ridden skew necked morgan dun into jumping over a hay bale in her yard one day, and again another day as well, and one afternoon over a wheelbarrow until she began to fancy herself a great rider and kicked the morgan up to the glory of a two foot high stone wall which he cleared with room to spare until one evening a cat leapt up from behind the wall and landed on top and the stubby-kneed pony had balked and Minnie’s body had not. 
	She broke her shoulder and head in 5 places, broken it so hard it had knocked one eyeball askew and she lost the courage to ever get up on a horse again though as a grown married woman she kept her farmhouse stocked with glass and needlework and ceramic horse miniatures in homage to the greatness she had inside her once but had gone unfulfilled, not to mention her short-lived beauty.
	For years after the accident Minnie’s parents doubted they would ever rid themselves of their awkward daughter until Hollis was found in another township. Hollis being a couple years younger still had his hair and the attractiveness of youth and when he first showed up following the correspondence, the family noted the uneven enthusiasm in his greeting, and undeniable disinclination to joyfulness at his first sight of Minnie, at which point they quickly threw in an old piano, a barrel of salted pork belly and 25 federal bonds for good measure with Minnie coming up from behind with a freshly baked persimmon pudding. 

Upstairs in the Toomey’s house down the hall from where Minnie and Hollis slept was a forbidden room, a room Clara was told never to go into. It was under the gables, just above the wood stove which in the frigid winter sent its heat directly up from below and there was a window that faced out on the grove of honey locust and box elder growing spindly and tall behind the new tool shed. The first thing Clara saw when she snuck in was a lovely little bedroom, a bedroom for a girl, with pale yellow organza ruffles and cream coloured satin and a gilded mirror on the wall and the second thing she found was a framed photograph on the maple dresser of a girl lying down with her eyes closed in a candy cord blue dress with a ribboned collar and a small flowery cap, her hands clasped on her belly holding a posey and the girl was lying in a wooden coffin, her head on a lace pillow. The next thing she noticed was a pair of girl’s shoes, shined patent leather and kid glove in black and grey that closed with bright red wooden painted buttons and a pair of pink satin ballet slippers with long trailing ribbons. The next time she tried to go in, she found the door locked. 

It was expected that Clara would excel at the cracked trousseau piano though why she should was never really explained and Clara was made to practice scales and told to hold her hand like houses over the keys and learn each piece of music marked with a tiny pencil check and Dummy was directed to stand by her and turn the pages which he did at random intervals that seemed to work out right almost half the time.  
	Friday nights was ledger reckonings and early bedtimes for Clara and Dummy with Minnie and Hollis quarreling at the table over bushels and dollars and the cost of seed.  
	But Saturday nights was bath and music. For once Hollis heated the big buckets of water on the stove, then poured them into the washtub set by the fire which Minnie got first use of. Unpinning her hair which was golden brown and fell to her waist, all three of them stared while she bathed and Minnie washed keeping one eye on the little needlework on the shelf in front of her and the other on any old thing, pretending she was bathing in a suite of the Elms Hotel, in the beating heart of Kansas City. Then Hollis bathed, then Clara, and finally Dummy. After everyone was dried and dressed again, Clara sat on the rickety piano bench and played the right hand notes for Be My Little Baby Bumblee, and The Bird in the Gilded Cage and Thank God for a Garden and Hollis played on his accordion and Minnie played the left hand notes and sang, with Dummy banging spoons in the corner, and every mistake that Clara made and there were many, Minnie rapped her knuckles until the noise was finished and in the silence that followed Hollis and Minnie stared at each other as if they had suddenly found themselves in Philadelphia in nothing but their farmers rags till Minnie broke the spell and snapped the piano cover down and gathered the score sheets and said ‘That’ll be enough of that. Lock the chickens up and go to bed.’ 
	When Clara turned to obey, Minnie said, ‘Winifred.’ Clara looked around for Winifred. ‘Winifred aren’t you forgetting something?’ 
	Clara said ‘What?’ 
	‘Oh for goodness sake,’ said Minnie. 
	Hollis said, ‘Give the Missus a kiss goodnight.’ 
	‘And the Mister’, said Minnie. 
	Clara looked from one to the other and said, ‘Will you bake a chicken for supper tomorrow?’
	Minnie gasped and said, ‘Are you making a deal with us?’ 
	Hollis laughed, ‘That’s the New York Jew in her, that’s what that is.’ 
	‘Will you?’ said Clara again.
	Minnie said, ‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose I could. What a nerve.’  
	Clara bent and kissed Minnie who turned her cheek to her. Next she bent and put her mouth to Hollis whose breath smelled like liver and didn’t turn his cheek but took her kiss on his own thick lips which he had just licked wet and placed his rough hand on the back of her neck to keep her there a moment longer than she expected till Minnie called, ‘Amen! Baked chicken it is!’ and Hollis let her go, and Minnie continued, ‘If not tomorrow then another day, but you’ll chop its head off and do the plucking.’ 
	Clara looked at Dummy who was already on his pallet behind the stove and asked, ‘I have to kiss him as well?’
	Minnie said, ‘Goodness gracious.’
	As Clara passed Dummy, she bent her head and whispered, ‘I could if I wanted to but you smell like creosote.’

In the morning after Dummy had fed and watered the mules, Minnie hitched them up and she and Hollis went out to work in the fields, telling Clara to keep an eye on the boy and feed him his midday dinner and do weeding after. It was her first unchaperoned responsibility in the house. Dummy eyed her warily as she roamed around the kitchen, poking into the cupboards and boxes, dipping her finger into the honey pot and butter bowl and cottage cheese. On a shelf above the sink she found a Beech-Nut cigar tin, She took it down and shook it, listened to the chinking. She said to Dummy, ‘This here is a trap’ and after fingering the coins she found inside, she put it back. She asked Dummy what he wanted for his midday meal and told him not to expect anything that wasn’t kosher like milk and meat mixed, which she might eat but refused to cook on principle.
	She said, ‘You want bread?’ 
	Dummy was just at that time squatting in the corner relieving himself on a piece of newspaper and Clara said, ‘You got the manners of a heathen animal I don’t care if you are deaf’ and when he was done, Dummy gathered up the paper and threw it in the fire. Clara watched it burn and said, ‘Another one for the record books’ and Dummy cut himself a slice of bread, skewered it on a stick and  toasted it over the flames.  

In the barn Clara decided to test Dummy’s hearing and she said, ‘Where I come from, I know a boy who sucked his thumb after he was not a baby anymore and the man in charge of him brought him up to the roof of the apartment building where they lived which was higher than that windmill, twice as high and made him put his thumb on the iron ledge around the roof and he had a great big axe and he chopped the boy’s thumb off which fell down into the street into the back of a pushcart 10 stories below where an old  German man was selling sausages and the boy’s own mother was just buying herself a nice little supper and the German plopped the boys thumb into a sausage bun and poured mustard on it and fried onions and sauerkraut and sold it to the boy’s mother who ate it up like one two three not even noticing what she was eating, meanwhile the boy’s stump bled all over his shoes and caused him to get a terrible licking when he got home.’ 

Dummy narrowed his eyes at Clara while she was telling this tale. He pulled his thumb out of his mouth and put his hand in his pocket and wiggled out the dried up striped carcass of a coal skink, its tiny black lizard feet lying delicately on his palm and he handed it to Clara who said, ‘Yuck.’  He reached in again and pulled out an empty bullet casing, made of brass and headstamped H16 VII and he held it up to his mouth and blew across it until it whistled. Out in the buffalo grass a meadowlark shee-o-lee eed in response. He handed the casing to Clara. 
	She took it from him and tried to blow across it herself but could make no sound so she gave it back and said, ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’ and Clara lifted her chemise and pulled down her stockings.
	Dummy stared at her, he opened his mouth and let out a noise that sounded more like the rusty brakes of a subway train than it did a human voice and Clara said,  ‘Never mind, you don’t need to make a fuss about it. Baby. Dummy. I don’t like you either anyway.’

Clara found Minnie in the coop raking fouled hay and asked her, ‘Do you ever see any people out here? Any other people?’
	Minnie said, ‘What do you want to see people for? Aren’t God’s natural creatures enough for you?’ 
	Clara said, ‘I guess it’s different for you, you’re just a country lady and don’t know any better.’
	Minnie snapped, ‘I’ll have you know I was raised in Kansas City and I do know any better’ and she loaded up the wheel cart with shit and pushed it past Clara yelling ‘Make yourself useful’ and Dummy’s dog suddenly stopped fetching the sticks that Dummy was throwing to growl at her.  

The next morning after milking Minnie handed Hollis his rifle and Hollis went outside to the porch and whistled for the dog to come and the dog came running up from behind the barn but at seeing Hollis it suddenly stopped short to crouch in the hairy goosegrass, ears flattened, as it looked suspiciously up at him, not sure about the gun or the false note in Hollis’ voice. 
	Hollis called again, ‘Come here boy, come here boy’ and the dog slithered on its belly a foot or two closer, and Minnie called from the porch, ‘Just shoot Hollis, can’t you get a shot from there?’ and Hollis pulled the trigger and the top of the dog’s head above its left ear blew off and the dog fell to the ground and twitched then stood up again and began circling and whining and pawing at what was missing and Minnie said, ‘Give me that thing’ and she ejected the shell and put another in the chamber and shot again and this time the bullet went clear through the dog’s eyeball and he fell down without a sound or a movement, his blood seeping into the dirt along with bits of bone and brain and fur and Minnie yelled out ‘Winifred! Winifred!’ Clara who was showing Dummy how far she could piss standing up came out from behind the barn and Minnie said, ‘Haul that thing off to the compost pile behind the crab apple, then find Dummy and come in for your breakfast.’   
	Clara  stood staring at the mongrel lying at her feet. Dummy had appeared next to her. Clara said, ‘I never even knew its name’ and Dummy wailed a small noise that sounded like yonnngg and Clara said, ‘Yong, you were a good dog, rest in peace and Amen to that.’ And she tied a rope to the dog’s hind foot and drug it off past the compost pile to an unused corner of the yard where Dummy dug out a small hole and together they pushed the dog into it and covered it with soil and leaves and one more short blessing.

The days progressed. Clara quit marveling at the way the land stretched out forever, nothing but prairie grass and plowed fields and chores and at night she dreamed about city streets and trolleys and being chased through the Bowery jumping from one rooftop to the next with her little brother Abe standing on her shoulders and her missing the ledge by inches, falling to a painful death on the street below, waking just before she hit. 

She said to Dummy, ‘You don’t even know what fun is. Where I used to live twenty families would all hang their laundry on lines on the same day on the same rooftop and we used to switch ladies underwear when nobody was looking.’ Dummy was staring at the hole that Yong was buried in. ‘And we had real bathtubs and when we had money we would buy carp and put them in the bathtub alive and play with them till they got turned into gefilte fish.’ Dummy turned from the lumpy hole and headed for the orchard. ‘We played stick ball and you need at least 4 kids to play stickball and sometimes we had 14 and you don’t even have 3 counting yourself!’ 
	Dummy climbed into the apple tree and shook the white blossoms down on her head in response. She felt as lonesome as a stink beetle in the desert. 

In the meantime Minnie’s ass had turned putrid. Clara came in from chores that evening and Minnie was lying face down bent over the kitchen table with her skirts up and stockings down and her ass in the air and Hollis had his bone-handled coke bottle knife out and was scraping at the infested wound, draining the pus free and rubbing in coal tar creosote while Minnie screamed and twitched in agony. Hollis turned and saw Clara watching and he crossed his eyes at Clara in a cruel mockery of Minnie or perhaps a self parody and lisped like an idiot, ‘Got any boils that need lancing?’ 

On humid evenings after supper Hollis turned the radio on and lit a small cigar and settled back in his easy chair. Minnie took up her sewing and her face smoothed out like melted caramel as she listened rapt to Champion Spark Plug Hour or the Goodrich Zippers or National Barn Dance, her foot bobbing up and down to the music. Clara slipped away to the tiny room they had created for her under the stairs and in the dim light of the lamp that shone through the curtain she listened to the shows and wrote secret letters to her father in South America telling him about her incredible talents on the piano and her way with pigs and Dummy’s snakes and nothing at all about Hollis who already on several occasions had crept down after the house was dark and quiet and pulled Clara’s curtain aside where Clara was pretending to sleep, and holding his long thin member in his hand, rubbed it on her mouth and chest and between her pale legs till he quietly groaned out and then snuck back up to his own bed while Clara counted to 50 and opened her eyes and got off the cot to clean herself with one of Minnie’s white knit undershirts that had been left to dry behind the cold stove. 

Once, while sweeping out under the stairs, Minnie found the letters that Clara had been writing and she said, ‘You’re not a stupid girl, you know this is forbidden. Writing letters to these people. We are your people now. You know that don’t you? Answer me, don’t you? Answer. Answer me Winifred. Answer. Answer.’ 
	And every time Minnie said Answer she tore the copybook sheet of paper in half again and again to drop on the floor, which bits Dummy collected the next day to help line the nest of baby mice he had found hidden under the sink. 

One dead calm muggy morning , the milk cow kicked over her pail and the chickens refused to leave their coop for grain, and Dummy disappeared, no one knew where. 30 minutes later the sky blackened and the tornado struck, the wind howling in from the south and the east before switching to the west till it all joined up with itself into a frantic cone of hail and rain, realigning the world as it saw fit, lifting Clara right off her feet and placing her on her back unhurt in a corncrib full of straw and when it subsided just as easily as it had begun sucking itself straight up into the air in a paroxysm of retreat leaving a horrific silence behind, Minnie and Hollis ran around the farm tripping over tumbled crates and milk pails, counting chickens and pigs and sacks of grain and shovels, and Clara searched for Dummy calling Dummy! Dummy! until she heard the thin whistle of a bullet shell and followed it to a downed cottonwood lying across the creek and spotted Dummy trapped underneath up against the bank with nothing but a scratch on his neck and his eyes dark and big as buffalo chips and Clara crawled down into the hole and wedged the log off and sat next to him, put her arm around his shoulders and said, ‘Okay you got me there. That’s one thing I never saw in New York my whole born days’ and stayed there till Dummy stopped shaking . She took him home and fed him hot milk in a bowl with a piece of bread broken up into it and a spoonful of bee honey and fresh churned butter and 3 drops of the essence of real vanilla.

The next day after a hobo had been sent back to the railroads with the small half of a loaf of graham bread, the Placing Agent came, a tall, large-breasted woman with a face permanently splotched in russets and browns and soft flapping arms. She looked around the farm amazed.  The north corner of the barn’s roof had been blown off, one white elm replanted upside down 30 feet to the east, a window in the parlour shattered, one wall of the chicken coop placed nice as you please on top of the burn pile and two prize silver grey dorkings along with it, dazed but still clucking, yet none of the eggs in the nests disturbed nor Minnie’s glass miniatures nor any other significant damage and wasn’t God looking after them she tutted.

Then she turned her attention to the children. She started first with Dummy but she called him Luther. This was when Clara learned Dummy’s real name and first understood that he was also an orphan child who had been placed. The agent looked at Dummy and said, with gestures and with her voice very loud, enunciating slowly and moving her lips in an exaggerated fashion, ‘Lu-ther. Can you un-der-stand me?’ She waited for a response and Dummy nodded. 
	‘Good,’ she said, ‘We’re making pro-gress, what a clever boy you are’ and the kind woman clapped her hands three times into the silence that was thick around her.
	She asked, ‘Lu-ther, are you happy here? I think you’re a very lucky boy you know, there’s not many that would take you in and I see you’ve gained some weight and grown taller too with a very nice haircut.’
	Clara had cut Dummy’s hair two days before and been beaten for a bad job by Minnie with a willow stick that she had had to choose herself being sent out for a second one when the first was deemed too puny.
 	Hollis limped away from the window he had been staring out surveying the luck of the draw that left him not wiped out like some of his neighbours but had in fact done the work he had been planning all along which was replace the rotten boards on the coops and barns with some new red cedar planks, and he came and stood behind Dummy and did what Clara had never seen him do before, which was place his hands on Dummy’s shoulders and gently knead them the way a father would and she saw Dummy shudder. 

The placing agent turned to Clara and said, ‘Winifred, do you like your new home and your new family and your new name? Is there anything you’d like to tell me?’ and Minnie sewed and sewed the needle going in and out, faster and faster the horse’s tail growing longer by the second till it threatened to jump right out of the hoop and Hollis took his hands off Dummy’s shoulders who immediately fled the room and Clara said what she thought she would never say, ‘I want my momma back.’ 
	The placing agent said ‘Winifred, I know exactly how you feel for I too have lost my mother, lost to the influenza sickness, 4 years ago but it feels like yesterday in my heart, so I understand your feelings so well but as we grow up realize that we have to take the good with the bad and I’m afraid getting your mother back is no more possible for you than it is for me’ and she turned to Minnie and said, ‘And are you pleased with your placements?’ and Minnie nodded vigorously, her stable eye fixed on the back of Hollis who was rocking on his feet at the window again, her roving eye on the agent and Minnie said, ‘They are like our own children they are, very good helps as well though they do have appetites, can’t say they don’t’ and the placing agent laughed and said, ‘I hope you’re not spoiling them’ and Minnie said, ‘Oh no, we’re not’ and the agent lifted one eyebrow and Minnie added, ‘Maybe just a little’ and she went back to her sewing, stabbing the needle up and stabbing it down, over and over.
	The placing agent said, ‘It’s a real miracle to see these children lifted out of their former destitution and brought into the fold of Kansas and God by good people such as yourselves and isn’t all this solitude a blessing.’
	She turned to Clara, ‘I’ll be back in a month to see if you have taken to heart what I’ve told you about your new family.’ 

That night while Hollis was with Clara, and the evening still steaming and hot from the sun’s labours, smoke started filling the house, pouring out the woodstove in the kitchen because somebody had inexplicably lit it and stoked it up and opened the woodstove door without pulling out the damper and left it like that and Hollis got off of Clara and buttoned his pants and ran into the kitchen and started swearing and cussing and slapping Dummy and yanked the damper clear until the fire in the stove had caught and Minnie came out in her chickenfeed sack floral nightgown, her breasts flat and long under the cloth, nipples hanging like the teats of a cow, swinging a wet towel till the smoke cleared and said, ‘A fire in June. Could have burned the whole house down, don’t know where that boy’s head is at. Thank God you woke up Hollis’ and Hollis said, ‘I had a feeling ‘bout something.’ 
	‘Amen to that,’ said Minnie and she turned her good eye on Hollis to stare until he shouted ‘Get that evil eye of yours off me and get back to bed.’ 

Early morning of the next day Hollis stood out by the watermill tank dumping buckets of cold water over his head. When he come in, limping a bit more than usual, dripping water on the worn oak floor he said, ‘Not feeling hungry this morning, give my share to Winifred.’ Clara said, ‘I don’t want it’ and Hollis said ‘Yes you do.’ 
	Minnie looked between them, then she slapped an extra egg on Clara’s plate. 
Next she dished a scoop of oatmeal porridge right onto the hardwood table in front of Dummy, because he was being punished for having broken his bowl the day before and for five days would get his food served directly onto the table top. 
	Minnie turned back to the bacon sputtering on the woodstove. She said ‘You look tired Hollis, didn’t ya sleep well last night?’
	Hollis said, ‘No worse than usual, which is plenty enough.’
	‘Were you dreaming about the war again?’
	Hollis was.
	Minnie said, ‘You children think you got it bad, you don’t even know how bad it can be, tell them Hollis, tell them how bad it can be when there’s not a nice warm house and food to eat and there’s somebody shooting at you round every corner.’ 
	Dummy put his thumb in his mouth and Minnie slapped him on the back of the head with the spatula, leaving grease in his hair. 
	‘You can read lips I know you can, you watch your father tell you bout the great war and learn something for a change.’
 
Clara ate her egg in two fast bites, she stared at Hollis’ egg and finally ate that too while Hollis, animated and coarse, his voice rising louder and higher, listed off the best of it, like the sound of shrapnel balls and machine gun fire to near deafen ya and rats as big as rabbits and mud up to your backside and doing without rations for days and dysentery and influenza and blown up bodies with their heads missing and legs separated from their torsos, one on one end of the trench, one on the other, all the blood oozing out black and men not even dead with their intestines bubbling out all grey and shiny and crying like babies, holding their own guts together and everybody farting the gut smell and then Hollis being charged with disobeying army orders, for the offense of writing a postcard.
	‘Tell them who the postcard was to Hollis.’
	A long pause till Hollis said, ‘Well, was it to you Minnie?’
	‘That’s right, it was to me. Hollis was concerned about his fields weren’t you Hollis, he always liked his fields plowed straight to match up with the Larsons north of here and Vernon Evans to the south, a straight and pleasing line of wheat from here through to Nebraska, all the way to Canada.’ 
	Hollis started laughing, ‘Well what did you expect, a romantic love letter from the trenches?’ Then he stopped laughing. The bacon sputtered on the stove, a spider dropped down a web string from the ceiling and Hollis turned foul and unpredictable as any prairie storm.
	Minnie said, ‘Hollis has a wonderful sense of humour. Used to be the best thing about him, everyone always said so. That and how young he was and handsome.’
	She twisted her wedding ring round her finger. ‘Hollis went into the war with a heavy heart, that and his uniform and rifle. And he come out missing four toes, a bit of lung and all his religion.’ 
	‘Shut up now,’ said Hollis.
	‘Course he didn’t realize that it was not all roses here on the farm neither.’
	‘I said now shut up.’
	‘None of my family was much help, after they got me married off to Hollis they pretty well turned their back on me, amen to that.’
	‘Did you hear me?’
	‘It was June and I had the threshing, all that threshing, I was baking apple crumbles and lard strudels to trade the menfolk that were left here who surely begrudged me I know that they did, being as Hollis was always pretty stingy with his time when it came to repaying favours and never a word of support from Hollis, who had his orders and had his patriotic duty and his buddies to keep company with and I daresay there were ladies in France, I think there are ladies in France, don’t you think so children?’
	When Minnie turned around still talking, holding the last fried egg on a china plate, ready to finally sit and eat, Hollis slapped her across the face and she dropped it. 
	The little family grew as silent as fish till Hollis said, ‘I didn’t complain did I?’  
	Minnie just breathed, neither eye able to settle on anything in particular.
	‘I never denied you or your folk neither when I arrived in all good faith to wed you and found your eye half cocked did I. Something that was never said a word about it in the letters you wrote, that picture you sent. What did I say when you showed yourself like that?’
	‘You tell me,’ said Minnie.
	‘I’m asking,’ said Hollis ‘for your recollection.’
	‘As I recall you said, never mind. You said - things could always be worse,’ said Minnie.
	‘And what did you say.’
	‘I said, ‘Amen.’ I said ‘Amen’ to that.’ 
	‘And worse they got,’ said Hollis. 

Dummy gathered the broken china up off the floor, separating the egg from the shards and when he had finished brushing off the greasy egg with his fingers, he delicately placed it on the tabletop at Minnie’s place setting.
	‘But they’re picking up now,’ said Clara. ‘Wouldn’t you agree?’

Hollis was out chopping firewood for the winter and Dummy was stacking it, breakfast was long done and Minnie was at the sink washing dishes, Clara drying and it went like that for a few dead quiet minutes that seemed to last forever until Clara said, ‘Mrs Toomey?’ 
	Minnie said, ‘What. What is it.’
	Clara said, ‘I like your hair, you have really pretty hair. Prettier than my mother’s.’ 
	Minnie washed another plate and handed it to Clara and she said, ‘Well thank you very much. Thank you.’

When Hollis and Minnie were out in the fields the next day, Clara went out to find Dummy who was corralling bullfrogs in the slough behind the mule’s pasture. She took his hand and said, ‘Come with me Dummy and don’t say anything, of course I know you won’t.’ She led him back into the house and up the stairs and pulled the grandfather clock forward a bit and retrieved the skeleton key which opened the door to the secret room next to the clock.
	‘People aren’t very good at hiding things,’ said Clara.
	Inside the room she put her fingers to her lips and made Dummy sit down on the sheep hide rug. ‘Soft isn’t it,’ said Clara and she sat down in the white enameled wicker chair and rocked. 
	‘Now that I know that you are an orphan like myself and not who I thought you were, I think I should confide in you what I think happened here,’ said Clara. ‘Mister and Missus had a daughter, see this picture here, that’s her and her name is probably Winifred and she looks like me a little but I guess she’s prettier, even dead she’s prettier but they treated her like a slave, and whipped her and made her sleep in the pigpen and the only time she was allowed into the house was when she was made to practice piano scales over and over and other bad things then one day the little girl couldn’t stand the pain of it anymore and that night when Mister came into the pigpen where she was sleeping she pulled out her little pearl handled pocket knife – and Clara opened a drawer near the bed that revealed a silver comb and brush set and a pearl handled pocketknife which made Dummy’s eyes widen – which just so happened to look just like this one and she stabbed him in the leg right up in the tender part and he grabbed the knife from her and they wrestled but he was much stronger than Winifred because they weren’t feeding her very well and she was very delicate unlike me and he overcame her delicate limbs, she probably had asthma too and when she started to cough and cough he stabbed her in the heart and she died there in the pigpen and he carried her body out and told Minnie that the pigs got her but Minnie knew the truth and they covered the hole in her chest up, you see how she’s lying with her neck and chest so covered up tight with a flower there right over where the hole in her heart would be and they laid her down in a beautiful new coffin and they bought all these pretty things later and put them in her bedroom, the one she never got to sleep in, with the things she wanted when she was alive and never had, even these shoes, you see how clean and new they are, the blue sateen lining shiny like they had never been worn only once or twice and they told the neighbours that she had died of asthma in her bedroom because the window had been left open by their own mistake and they felt just terrible about that and the neighbours all said, ‘don’t blame yourself, don’t blame yourselves’ and with her buttoned up dress no one even asked to see her body and then they buried her in the yard and acted sad and she’s probably out there right now under the elm tree that got blown out which is because the roots were so weak because they had been digging under there plus Winifred’s bones and skin and flesh which soaked into the ground and maybe did something to the tree to make it pull away from her’ – 
	- and Clara had gotten this far in her story when she realized Minnie was standing in the doorway of the forbidden room and Clara stopped talking and looked up and two sharp tears were forming, one in each of Minnie’s eyes and Clara said ‘What.’ and Minnie just stood there and Clara said, ‘He can’t hear me anyway so you don’t have to look like that’ and Minnie said ‘Get out of this room you wicked wicked girl.’ 

And because no one was watching him, Dummy picked up the mother of pearl handled pocket knife and closed the blade and put it in his pocket. 

On Saturday early before the light was up Minnie got started in the kitchen making pot luck dishes for the threshing party at the Leinwetters that was to take place all that day. She shook Clara roughly out of bed and sent her to the well for clotted cream and chilled butter and she whistled Dummy awake from his straw pallet behind the stove, to feed and water the mules and set them in their harnesses. She mixed up cornbread, a recipe for 8 that she doubled, to give everyone a chance for two pieces. There were jars of homemade dill pickles too that she loaded up into the cart and a potato salad with vinegar and hard chopped eggs and bits of bacon. By 6 the sun was up and warming the day and Minnie roused Hollis. When he came in from milking Minnie laid his breakfast down in front of him, eggs and bread and fried potatoes and bacon and he said he were not feeling well and would not be having breakfast, nor would he be traveling to the Leinwetters where he would not be of any use and Minnie said, ‘What. What did you say? Of course you’re going.’ Hollis said he was not because the dysentery had come back and what good would he be if he were always running to the outhouse just when there was threshing work and heaving and loading and running teams and everybody be asking is Hollis in the outhouse again? Minnie said, ‘But you have to go, they’re all coming to help out here next week and what are they gonna think if you never helped them?’  and Hollis slammed his fist on the table and told Minnie to shut her mouth if that was the last thing she ever did and Hollis said, ‘And I’m keeping Dummy here with me as well.’ 
	‘To do what?’ said Minnie. 
	‘Why, you want him? 
	Minnie said, ‘No I don’t want him, he just causes a fuss, I’m only surprised that you do is all.’
	Hollis said, ‘Maybe I’ll teach him how to make a beehive, time he learned a skill.’ 	Minnie said, ‘Well thanks very much for leaving me to pick up all the pieces again, I don’t know what all they’re going to think about you not coming, dysentery or not.’
	Hollis said, ‘You calling me a liar? You telling me my guts aint roiling up right here and now ready to explode out my arse? You want to know what it’s like? You never been in my position, to even know what it’s like!’
	‘Shall I stay with you then,’ said Minnie, her roving eye making a mockery of her good one,  ‘and boil you up some buttonbush bark tea? That’ll fix you.’
	‘You’re going threshing, woman. Don’t you git it?’
	And he clutched his stomach and bent over and groaned. 

Clara looked at Dummy who was fingering something in his pocket and said, ‘If Mister’s so bad maybe I should stay and boil button tea.’ 
	Minnie said, ‘Since when did you develop an interest in Mr Toomey’s health affairs?’ 
	Hollis started laughing and said ‘Sure, leave the girl here to boil buttons’ and Minnie said, ‘I will not’ and she yanked Clara’s arm so hard that Clara yelped and slapped a wide cotton hat down on her head, tied the ribbons under her chin and threw one to Clara and said, ‘Wait for me in the back of the cart.’

When they were about a half a mile from the farm and out of sight Minnie  pulled a little cigar out of her pocket, stuck it in her mouth, slipped the reins under her rear and lit the cigar before taking up the reins again. She said to Clara, ‘Listen to me, I’m going to tell you what you might find out from someone else if I don’t.’ 
	She took a puff and exhaled, then continued, ‘Rose began life as a sickly infant.’
	‘Who’s Rose?’
	‘That’s the girl whose room you were forbidden to enter.’
	‘I thought her name was Winifred.’
	‘You’re Winifred.’
	‘No, I’m Clara.’ 
	Minnie smacked the reins on the mule’s back and stuck her chin out and smoked some more and they rumbled along the hard packed loamy road to the Leinwetters till Minnie said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. I just don’t.’ 
	Clara said, ‘Okay, I’m Winifred then if it means so much to ya.’ 
	‘Rose,’ Minnie began again, ‘was a sickly infant at first, something wrong with her lungs, but we pulled her through it you see, mustard plasters on her chest and Hollis keeping a steam pot boiling all night until she was fine, she grew healthy as any child in the county and Hollis took to spoiling her with a honey spoon every night and music lessons and she could make pies, oh that girl could make pie pastry like a grown up woman by the time she was ten, never a back talk out of her, always so helpful and loving and she was our only one you see, I had some troubles after she was born and never could get properly caught again but it didn’t matter to us, we had our Rose who was the envy of Oskaloosa, don’t I know it, I used to dress her hair for her in long ringlets and ribbons some said she looked like me before my accident and I’ll tell you how she died because it was not how you said, not those nasty lies you were telling, she had been with Hollis that day, he had taken the cart into the recruitment office in town, he was signing up to fight that day, and after he came out of the office, while Rosie waited in the cart for him, sitting on top of the mule for the fun of it, a tornado struck and the recruitment office just blew right up, as Hollis tells it, just blew right up into the sky and he was halfway out of there when he got knocked down which didn’t hurt him, less than a flea would have hurt by some miracle but a slat from the recruitment office flew up into the air and landed right on Rosalee, piercing her heart and killing her dead on the spot and sparing the mule.’ 
	Minnie took one long puff, blew out the smoke and threw the cigar down onto the road. ‘That was five years ago this June and I never want to hear you besmirch her name again.’ 
	Clara thought about it for awhile and she said, ‘Am I the new Rose then?’
	Minnie’s breathing got shallow and noisy and she said, ‘Is that what you want? Would you like to be?’
	Clara said, ‘Does it mean I get to sleep in her in her bedroom in her feather bed, and wear her clothes? She’s got a green sateen dress that matches the lining of a coat, I saw it there. And a yellow one.’
 
Minnie sucked her breath in and snapped the reins again on the mule’s back and was quiet for about a hundred yards of bumping along, till she yelled at Clara, ‘Check those pickles in the back and stuff some more straw between them, I can hear them clinking.’ 
	Then she turned her good eye on Clara and said, ‘Fine then. You’ll be the new Rose for us and you can call me Momma and you can call Hollis Poppa and that’s how it will go.’ 
	Clara said, ‘What about Dummy?’
	Minnie said, ‘What about him?’
	‘Does that make him my brother?’
	‘No. Dummy is Dummy. That’s a different sort of thing.’ 
	‘Let me think it over.’ 
	Minnie’s face turned red and she said, ‘I wouldn’t think it over too long. I can already see trouble brewing with this arrangement.’ 

When they get home from the threshing day, dust-grimed and aching, they found Dummy tied up by his right foot to the front porch with the chain from the old brown dog and Hollis hobbling up to them with a bloody bandage wrapped around his thigh. 
	‘He went crazy on me, he just went wild,’ Hollis screamed. ‘Rushed at me when I was bringing the cream in to be churned and stabbed me, I had to chain him up to keep him from attacking me again.’ 
	‘Where’s the cream,’ said Minnie?
	‘What?’ said Hollis.
	‘Where’s the cream,’ said Minnie, ‘Where’s the cream you were bringing in to be churned?’
	‘What are you talking about,’ said Hollis. ‘I’ve been stabbed by that little savage and you worried about the cream.’ 
	Minnie turned to the mule who was standing on his own reins and kicked him and said to Clara, ‘Put that mule away and set Dummy loose and make up a pallet for him in the barn and then finish churning that cream, if there is any.’

Clara piled fresh hay in the cleanest corner she could find, the dying light was pouring in through the slats of the barn wall and setting the dust motes sparkling and it was cooler there than in the house. Clara said, ‘It could be worse you know.’ A flock of barn swallows fluttered above them in unsettlement. Clara sat and cleared the straw away in front of her, down to hard earth and picked up a stick. 
	‘This is how you spell your true name, Dummy’ and Clara scratched out in block letters in the dirt, L U T H E R and she said it slow and clear, moving her lips and tongue so he could see it as it looked when it came from a mouth and she handed the stick to Dummy and said, ‘Now you.’ 
	Dummy scratched it out, pretty close and he added another word after, which looked like W A I T E or W H I T E or W A L F E. They both stared at it for a second and Clara said, ‘Well I didn’t think you even knew who you were to be perfectly honest. I figured you for a half breed Chippewa. With those dark curly eyelashes. I’m a little disappointed now I must confess. Not in you, Dummy, never in you, just your name. I think we should baptize you Luther Broken Tooth. You want to?’
	Clara led Dummy to the watering trough and without an ounce of resistance from Dummy she dunked him in and baptized him in the name of God and her father in South America and Goldie and the Rabbi Herzog and the whole Indian Nation ...Luther Broken Tooth. 
	‘For obvious reasons,’ said Clara. 

She sat with him then thinking about something that had happened a week prior, when 
Dummy had found a milk snake in the barn, banded red and black coiled up in the hay, a clutch of eggs nearby, its eyes permanently opened and glassy under its brille, a lump half way down its body where it had swallowed a rodent, and he had brought it out to show Hollis who ran into a shrub of paw paw and snapped off a branch and shouted ‘I’ll whack ya till your head comes off you get any closer to me with that snake’ and Minnie in the kitchen dropped the basket of eggs she was carrying, half of them breaking stepped outside and slapped Dummy across the face until he dropped the snake into the Kansas dust and as it slithered and coiled away from them Minnie picked up an axe and chopped it in half and Clara watching the redstain bruise form on Dummy’s face, and the snake gore seep out of its body while the head lolled from side to side had said, ‘Well that’s another thing I never saw in all of New York City’ and after due consideration she instructed Dummy on the best way to dispatch Hollis, and not with that tiny knife which didn’t do Rosalee any good and wouldn’t do them any good either. 
	She gesticulated to Dummy that he was to find a snake, and baring her teeth and snapping her jaws then falling down clutching her neck with her tongue hanging out she hoped to make him understand that the snake was to be as deadly as they come. 

They ate a supper of pearled barley and oven baked chicken pie. Clara took a tin plate out to Dummy in the barn plus a cornbread she had kept in her pocket all day from the threshing. When she got back Minnie bathed Clara in the sink, rough dried her bare skin with a coarse towel, combed her hair down flat, parted to the side and trimmed her fingernails to the quick. Hollis watched from the rocking chair, whittling a soft yellow piece of basswood and when asked what it was gonna be, he smiled, quite pleased with himself and said, ‘A surprise’ and when Minnie passed by him, she put her hand on his shoulder and he shrugged it off. 
	Minnie handed Clara a white cotton chemise with handsewn eyelets around the neckline and on the hem and long white cotton stockings and led her upstairs to the forbidden room which was to be hers. 
	From the barn Dummy saw the kerosene lamp appear in the girl’s bedroom window and the silhouette of Minnie pulling back the quilt and Clara disappearing from sight as she laid down.  

Out their bedroom window Minnie could see the moon from her bed, it was still low in the sky and the colour of dirty laundry. She watched it long enough to notice that it had risen higher and still Hollis wasn’t snoring. 
	‘You asleep?’ she asked him.
	‘No,’ said Hollis. ‘I can’t.’
	Minnie sighed. She said, ‘I’m glad to see you’re taking to the girl. I wasn’t sure you could.’
	Hollis cut her short, ‘I been thinking.’ 
	‘What?’ said Minnie.
	‘About farming.’ The loud stuttering bellows of an army of bullfrogs drifted in through the window.  After a few moments he continued,  ‘Thinking that we might could give up farming. I mean if we wanted. Nothing’s to say we’re chained to this life.’
	Minnie’s heart quickened and she held her breath. 
	She said, ‘Give up farming?’
	‘Just talking out of my head,’ said Hollis, ‘don’t pay it any mind.’
	‘Well, we might,’ said Minnie. ‘We could. Just as a thought.’ 
	Hollis said, ‘Cause my heart aint wholeheartedly been in it much since –.’
	‘I know,’ said Minnie. ‘But what would we do? How would we make do?’
	‘Well, I been thinking about getting a little closer to town, I could maybe get a job in that bridle bit factory or they’re hiring at Osage Carbon. Cash in them Atchison Bonds till we got on our feet, got this place sold. You could do something too. Some sewing or ladies work, I bet there’s call.’ 
	‘There’s my brother in Kansas City,’ Minnie said. 
	‘Well, that’s your end of things, I aint asking,’ said Hollis.
	‘And what about these two we got here under our roof?’
	‘Well we aint married to them are we? It’s not like they’re our own. We give em the best we could while we had them, aint that enough?’  
	‘She’s no Rose,’ said Minnie. 
	‘She’s not even a Winifred,’ said Hollis. ‘I only allowed her in for your sake.’ 
	‘Oh well,’ said Minnie. 
	‘I’m sorry about everything,’ said Hollis. 
	‘Nothing to be sorry about,’ said Minnie, ‘you done your level best.’
	Hollis jerked out of bed and stepped towards the window where he slammed it down against the amphibious droning in the distance. ‘Minnie,’ he started. He had his back to her and Minnie noticed how his shoulders had grown bony and lost their vigour. 
	‘Shush Hollis. No need for anymore talking. Come back to bed.’
	Hollis laid back down next to his wife. ‘I always knew you were too good for me.’ 
	‘Oh well,’ said Minnie. ‘Amen, to that.’ 
	After a stretch of labored silence, Minnie reached over with her hand to feel for Hollis’ manhood between his legs and finding just a soft tender rope of warmth she started stroking him. 
	A couple minutes passed and Hollis said ‘Never mind Minnie, just go to sleep.’ 
	Minnie took her hand away. The moon reached higher, the plains stretched out flat underneath, warm and rumpled as a quilted blanket. 
	Minnie said, ‘If we’re gonna be going I want to do it right away. We don’t owe anybody, we’ve paid our dues.’ 
	Minnie fell asleep then and Hollis didn’t. After a bit he said, ‘Mebbe they should be told now before we change our minds’ and when Minnie snored back in response he got out of bed, his mangled feet aching and cold white on a warm June night and he limped down the hallway to what had once been his own daughter’s bedroom but was now inhabited by a near stranger. 
	Clara in her new bed, under a sunflower quilt, watching the same moon rise, was expecting him, her nightgown pulled up around her neck. 
	‘Just so you know,’ whispered Hollis, ‘we’re gonna keep you as our own, you and Dummy both, you can count on that at the very least. No need for anymore anxiety on that account.’

When he finished with his quick and venal activity he put a whittle doll down on her pillow and left.   Clara waited some time for her mind to settle before she got out of bed and looked out the window at the barn where Dummy was sleeping and she picked up Rosalee’s red buttoned shoes and thought about Hollis’ words then watched as Hollis crossed the yard to deliver the same horrific promise to Dummy. 
 
In the boxcar with the moon long past gone and the sun not yet born Clara said to Dummy, ‘I’m not that worried about the Indians and I hope you’re not either.’ 
	It was some hours later and they were watching the dim hope of dawn reveal the countryside fleeting by, from their safe haven of a moving coal fueled steam locomotive not quite fully loaded with grain sorghum. The clank of the iron wheels turning on the tracks resounded in their bones and bodies and the night air smelled sweet and smoky seasoned as it was with burning coal and prairie wildflowers. 
	Clara said, ‘I think you might be Indian yourself, I bet you are, only an Indian could love a snake the way that you do. Plus with a name like Luther Broken Tooth.’ 

Clara laid the soft corduroy satchel that she had found in Rosalee’s chest of drawers, and had stuffed with butter and apples and potatoes and a jar of honey and a Sally Lund Minnie had baked the day before as well as the Beech Nut Tobacco tin full of egg money, she laid it next to them in the scattering of sorghum and said, ‘This will do us for quite some time.’ Last from the satchel she pulled a bone-handled coke bottle knife and Hollis’ worn wool cap at which  Dummy blinked and she said, ‘Don’t fret yourself Dummy, we aint keeping it if you don’t want it’  and threw it well and clear out the open doorway of the railcar into a weedy ditch. 

The train was labouring towards its westward destinations, chugging across the prairies, and the plains, through the wheat fields and the corn, through Riley County and Clay and Cloud  past the windmills and granaries, cross the Smoky Hill River and past the bison, the farmers already at their chores and the wild sunflowers and sagebrush and yucca on to the Arkansas River and the shelterbelts and windbreaks and old fields and as the landscape rose up higher and higher and ached by, away from everything Clara knew - the candy stores and fire escapes and ice wagons and Rabbis and her own lonely momma singing a lullaby in foreign words Clara never learned the meaning of - she started to cry and Dummy watched her for a minute as her body sputtered like a broken engine in small snorts of breath that she was trying hard to hold back and he pulled three potatoes out of the brown corduroy and one at a time threw them into the air and caught them each, and like that he began to juggle, never looking at Clara, but keeping his focus on the spuds spinning and rising, again and again, never dropping a one. Clara wiped her nose on the sleeve of Rose’s pale organza dress and said, ‘Dummy, you have a god given talent there that is almost as good as the Chinese magician I saw once who cut his own little daughter in half.’  

The freight car grew colder then, it still wasn’t time for the sun and Clara and Dummy had already been up half the night walking and pretty soon Dummy had fallen asleep in the grains to the lull of the chugging train, slept just as he sat with his head dropped down over hanging on his chest and Clara opened up the big twill overcoat she had stolen from Minnie and she pulled Dummy into her, never waking him up and wrapped the two of them in its warmth and laid down in the straw. She said, ‘I think we can charge anybody 5 cents to watch you juggle, paint those spuds in red beet juice to liven things up, and we could charge the moon, especially if you can find some snakes and put them in a basket to coil in front of you. I seen that once. We’ll be okay I just know it. I got some tricks myself too that you don’t know nothing about. If we even need them that is, though I hope we don’t.’  

She leaned back against the wall, preparing to sleep. “When you’re older I might marry you Dummy, just for them curly eyelashes.’ When the train stopped at Elinore the old brakeman looking in at them said ‘What the blazes’ and Clara said ‘I wouldn’t mess with us if I were you’ and he grunted, ‘Wouldn’t dream of it’ and threw a tin canteen of water into the car plus half of a day-old rabbit pie wrapped in brown paper and signaled the impatient engineer all clear.  

In the morning Minnie woke alone in her bed. She had slept in late and the sun was up over the horizon already but the cooking stove was cold, no water on to heat, and it was quiet terribly in the house. 
	She called ‘Hollis?’ She looked out the window where the milk cow stood bawling in the yard anxious to be milked. 
	‘Clara!’ she called. ‘Hollis.’ She whistled for Dummy. 

Minnie found Hollis in the barn near the pallet Dummy had slept on the night before, naked from the waist down, his member lying limp and grey as a mealworm on his thigh, his eyes wide open full of surprise and disappointment, a carved wooden poppet dolly on his back and Minnie couldn’t comprehend it for a minute. 
	She said ‘Hollis, what are you doing? What are you doing in here like this?’ 
	Then she saw the blackness of his blood that had congealed under his head all over the dirt and straw and the deep purple hole in his neck that had long since finished pumping and seeping out his life. A big brown blotched gopher snake lay coiled in the corner, hissing and harmless as the day is long, swallows flapped above and in the yard the milk cow continued to demand her rightful share of attention. Minnie put her roving eye to skitter over the corpse of Hollis and turned her good eye west where Clara and Luther were waking halfway between Sage and Rozwell, the sweet summer smell of cottonwoods blooming and Clara was cutting up a hard apple with a dirty knife, and telling Luther, ‘Never mind about any of it, Luther, it’s nothing but plain water under a big strong bridge that you and me just happen to be crossing.’

End