Mercy Train (3 page)

“Train leaves tomorrow! Hot meals. Clean clothes. Need a mother and a father? Don't be scared, children. Gather round.”

Two dark-skinned boys were given candies and then told to move along. The women began to sing:

“There the weary come, who through the daylight

Pace the town and crave for work in vain:

There they crouch in cold and rain and hunger,

Waiting for another day of pain.

“In slow darkness creeps the dismal river;

From its depths looks up a sinful rest.

Many a weary, baffled, hopeless wanderer

Has it drawn into its treacherous breast!”

Violet stood behind a lamppost and watched the ragged children collect on the curb, each devouring a lollipop, each looking relieved to be in someone's charge. The women herded the group down the street to a waiting carriage.

Violet was thankful she had a mother. She just needed to find her. She took off toward the Mission. She figured her mother would not be there—Lilibeth was never quite desperate enough for God—but she checked anyway.

Reverend Mackerel, his dark beard grazing his shirt, paced in front of a motley collection of seekers—mostly drunks and sailors this morning—and yelled out his sermon, the same tale he told day after day.

“If heaven had cost me five dollars, I still would've spent it on drink if there was a rum hole within spitting distance. You say you can't be saved? Jesus took hold of me just like He saved wretches, and don't you suppose His arm is long enough to reach across nineteen hundred years and get a hold of you?”

Violet scanned the audience, and then she slunk backward toward the door.

“You, girl,” Reverend Mackerel said, pointing. His left eye bulged.

“I was looking for my mama,” she said. “I best keep looking.”

She quickly ducked back out before he could command her to take a seat.

Before the Home, Violet and Lilibeth had lived for a month in a rear second-floor room on Frankfort Street. When they moved in, the walls had been freshly whitewashed and the window cleaned, and in those cold tail-end days of winter, it was a welcome relief to be settled. But when it had warmed, the thick black dust from the coal yard and the putrid fumes from the nearby tannery—green hides on drying racks were visible from their window—had meant they had to shut the window and stuff rags around the casing.

At the entrance to the tenement, Violet stood and took a breath before walking on the plank bridge over the sewer channel. In the courtyard, women pumped water into their washtubs, a naked baby cried, and muddy cats dived at vermin. She pounded on the door to the room where she and her mother had last lived.

“The longshoreman's got it now,” a girl said. She was pregnant, her arms like sticks. “I ain't seen the southern lady for a long time now.”

Violet held her disappointment in a tight knot in her stomach, trying to keep the fear from springing loose. She had not thought much about what came after getting out, had not considered that she might not find her mother. A girl alone was easy prey. She knew where she needed to go. If her mother had gotten money from one of her boyfriends, she would surely be at Madam Tang's.

Back out on the sidewalk, Violet's stomach gurgled in complaint. She saw a cart on the corner, manned by the one-legged Sicilian who couldn't chase after her. She ran, picking up speed, and swiped two bananas, knocking other yellow bunches to the ground, and kept on running, dodging big-skirted women and top-hatted men who never saw her or didn't care enough to respond to the old man's curses.

She zigzagged through traffic, making drivers shake their fists, zipping through the crowded streets, running, running, until her breath gave out and she had to stop. She wolfed down her haul and threw the peels into the gutter. The sun burned hot on her newly exposed neck. For a moment she closed her eyes amidst the staccato hooves, the grind of carriage wheels against gravel, the jangle of harnesses, the
putt-putt
of motor cars, the clang and hiss of the box works, the hum of conversation and transaction, the cries of seagulls, and sank into a cool muddy stillness—her soul, she guessed—as the world spun in dizzying discord around her.

*   *   *

A year before, as the train had clattered northeast through Kentucky and West Virginia, the second-class wooden seats worn hard, the car stale, Violet had watched the trees and the towns, the fields and the farms, her forehead red from leaning against the window. Violet and Lilibeth switched trains in Charlottesville, and from there they headed north, leaving behind the softness of low-lying southern landscapes, and hurtled by cities, tall buildings of brick and limestone, smokestacks, and behemoth steel train stations. Violet sat up tall, excited by the enormous scale of it all, the motion and commotion, the people rushing around with someplace to be. Lilibeth slept, a blank composure in her face.

“Mama,” Violet said, placing her sweaty palm on her mother's pale hand as they approached New York.

“Mmm,” Lilibeth said, shifting and wrinkling her nose.

“What are we going to do when we get there?”

“I don't rightly know,” Lilibeth said, her baby-blond hair rumpled from sleep and travel. “It was always about getting away, wasn't it?”

Violet shrugged. She hadn't known they were leaving until they left, but it wouldn't do any good to point this out.

“We'll be okay, Vi,” Lilibeth said. “Some nice person will direct us where to go.”

Her mother sat up and stretched her arms overhead like a child. She had never been a planner or a worrier. For most of her life, beauty had allowed her the indulgence of having others take care of things. Her father had owned a creamery and had done quite well, certainly in comparison to most Aberdeen residents, and Lilibeth, the youngest child and only daughter, was adored and adorned, the jewel of the family. But when her father was caught cutting the butter with tallow and yellow textile dye, he had to struggle like everyone else to scratch a living from the fickle earth. Yet Lilibeth never wavered in her sense of entitlement. She felt deserving of refinements, and when she met Bluford White he seemed to agree.

Violet's father was a lumber grader, a man with hooded eyes and prematurely white hair—how funny, people used to say, that his name was Bluford White—who was neither kind nor clever and was most of the time sullen and mute. Lilibeth said she had been fooled, as a girl of seventeen, into believing his quiet brooding was evidence of dignity. He was a little older, a man of experience, she'd told Violet—he'd lived for a time in Lexington—a man of taste, surely, who recognized that she was a different breed from the farm girls. He said her ivory skin was a sign of purity, her graceful fingers further evidence of her goodness, and to show his devotion he gave her a white silk sachet embroidered with an owl that he had purchased in a shop in Louisville and a silver-plated swan pin with a pearl chip for an eye. Lilibeth hadn't considered that these gifts might be extravagances that would cease, or that when they married Bluford would expect her to clean and cook. She had known he worked in the lumber mill, and even that he ate fried squirrel brains with his fingers, but she'd imagined they would move away to a city where he would make it big doing something or another, and she would assume the life she was always meant to have.

*   *   *

That nice person Lilibeth had chosen to approach, once they arrived in New York City and disembarked from the train into the station's frenzy of travelers, scammers, and beggars, had been Fred Lundy, a man too red-faced and puffy to be handsome, but who retained the imprint of youthful attractiveness. He wore a shabby, dandyish striped suit and ascot, his hair oiled sleek like an otter's pelt under his bowler, and Lilibeth misread his flamboyance as sophistication. He smoked a cigar, scanning the crowd, as a boy shined his shoes.

“Excuse me, sir,” Lilibeth said, so softly he had to lean forward to hear.

Violet stood a pace behind her mother with their small suitcase. Though she sensed things at work she did not understand and felt uneasy about the way this greasy man looked at her mother, she was savagely tired. She just wanted to do as her mother told her. She tried to focus on the shoeshine boy, who was about her age, his hands black from polish, his black shoes gray from dust.

“Why, hello,” Fred Lundy said, looking Lilibeth up and down, appraising her country dress, her southern accent, her refined beauty. “What can I do for you?”

“My daughter and I have just arrived here in town, and you look like the sort of gentleman who could help us get our bearings.” She set down her bag.

He laughed a little, glancing quickly at Violet and then back to Lilibeth. He tossed a coin to the boy and stood.

“You have good instincts, my dear,” Fred Lundy said, picking up Lilibeth's bag. He didn't offer to carry the suitcase.

They ended up on the Bowery where, by the time the carriage delivered them, night had fallen and the street had turned into a circus of lights, music, and crowds, with the bone-shaking screech and rumble of the elevated train overhead. Violet clutched the suitcase and her mother's hand as the man ushered them into the parlor of a dilapidated rooming house that smelled of mold and oranges. He paid for the night as Violet and her mother sat on the edge of a wooden bench, both of them stunned silent at where they found themselves—the insouciant depravity of the neighborhood, the blatant untidiness of the lobby. Once inside the crummy room, the ceiling mildewed and water-cracked, the bed covers unwashed, Fred Lundy gave Violet five cents and shooed her out to buy candy.

“Take your time,” he said. “Half an hour at least.”

He pushed her out before she could catch her mother's eye. The door locked behind her.

Violet, just two days out of Kentucky, did not feel frightened because it was all too topsy-turvy to sort through. She walked tentatively into the stream of flowing revelers, moving along, sure she would be stared at, her dress handmade and patched, her hair unbrushed for days. But no one looked at her. She wandered the block, her eyes wide and blurry, the coins damp in her hand. She nearly stumbled over the feet of two boys leaning up against the columns of a theater smoking cigarette butts. When she started to look closely at the darker edges of the street, she saw more kids—scrappy, scratched, dirty kids—laughing, teasing, fighting, stealing. Boys mostly, but a rough-looking girl or two as well.

She found a brightly lit candy store, the first she had ever seen, a decadent array of colors and sugar. The confections she recognized—lollipops, saltwater taffy, horehound drops, jelly beans, and molasses chews—took up barely a shelf of the jar-lined shop. Violet let out a laugh at the selection and thought, New York City!

A woman whose dress was too short, her cheeks heavily rouged, swayed by as a trio of men entered the store. The group talked quietly in the corner.

Violet stared at the woman, transfixed by her brazenly loose walk, her uncovered shoulders.

“Never you mind about that,” the shopkeeper said.

Violet reluctantly turned away from the transaction.

“I want some peppermints,” she said.

He pulled down a large jar of red-and-white swirled candies and held up a tin scoop attached to his apron.

“How much?”

“Five cents.” She held her palm open with the coins.

The woman walked out of the store with one of the men, her arm linked through his.

The shopkeeper took Violet's money and handed her the candy.

“Go on now,” he said.

The waxed paper sack in hand, a peppermint melting sugary and comforting on her tongue, she went back out into the teeming nightlife, dodging a group of sailors, hats cockeyed and cheeks blazing, as they heaved out of a saloon.

When Violet returned to the rooming house, her ears buzzing, too tired to sleep, she found her mother with red-rimmed eyes and snarled hair. Fred Lundy had left, and their room had been paid through the week.

*   *   *

The merchant wagons lined up daily in front of RW & Sons, packed with crates of bruised turnips, quinine tonic, walnuts, flour, smoked oysters, chicory coffee, oleomargarine, and powdered soap. Violet was not up for another run-by—she had nowhere to stow whatever she might be able to grab—but she did see a cigar box on one of the driver's buckboards. It was shiny black, and on its lid was an image of a girl holding a rose blossom. Her friend Nino had admired one just like it in a shop window: a place to put his things that wasn't his pockets. She pretended to play alongside the wagon, whistling and hopping on one leg, before she snatched the box and set off to find him.

She reached Slaughter Alley and peered into the darkness.

“Nino!” she called. “Hey, Nino!”

“Shut up!” a man yelled back.

Nino's Italian parents rode a mule-led wagon through the surrounding neighborhoods sharpening knives. Their apartment was so crowded that when the weather was fair, Nino slept in a rusted straw-padded boiler at the base of one of the bridge supports.

Nino leaped over a puddle into the light of the street. “You look like a boy in a dress,” he said, frowning at her chopped-off hair.

“You don't exactly look like the King of England,” she said.

He pretended to straighten a tie against the neck of his ratty flannel shirt. His knuckles were swollen and scarred from street fights, and around his eye was a fading yellow bruise.

Violet was warmed by the sight of him but tried not to give herself away.

“Where you been?” he asked.

“She put me in the Home,” she said, “but I escaped.”

Nino shifted his coal eyes sidelong to her. He shook his head, not swayed by her bravado.

“You should have stayed in as long as you could.”

She held the box out to him.