Rodzina Read online

  "How far is it to this homestead of yours?" I asked Myra Jane, who seemed near my age, maybe a little younger.

  "Near twenty-five miles. It's too blamed far to come to town regular, so we jest come twice a year for flour, beans, salt, tobacco, and such. And you." She smiled. "Sure are glad to have you. We don't ordinarily see no other folk but two, three times a year, being our nearest neighbor is six miles away. And he's too ornery for visitin'."

  "Six miles!" I said. "What about school? Where do you all go to school?"

  "We don—" Sarah Dew started, but Mr. Clench turned around and pinched my cheek. "You just settle back and sleep. We'll be home by morning."

  I leaned my head against a flour sack but could not rest. In the sky shone an evil gray moon. My thoughts were all tumbling around. Morning? Too many kids? No neighbors. No school. What a pickle I was in!

  We rode on and on, the wind whipping dirt into my eyes and that's why I might have looked a little weepy. But I wasn't crying. No siree. I had got what I asked for. Why would I cry?

  7. The Prairie East of Cheyenne

  A PALE SUN WAS STRUGGLING to shine when I next opened my eyes. We were riding through a bleak and windswept landscape. Not a building, not a house, not a person, not a tree. My whole body ached from sleeping in a wagon, and I was hungry. Still, part of me hoped that maybe this would turn out well, and that in a warm house somewhere breakfast was waiting for us.

  When we pulled onto a small rise in the flat sameness and stopped, Myra Jane shouted, "We're home!"

  I looked around. Sarah Dew laughed. "You're lookin' for the house, right? Why, it's here underneath us." She jumped down and threw open a door in the dirt heap. "This is our dugout. We built it ourselves. Ain't it grand?"

  "What on earth is a dugout?" I wondered aloud. What it was was a cellar or cave dug into the little hill. But for the door and the stovepipe sticking up, you couldn't tell that house from any other bump in the prairie.

  We all climbed out of the wagon, some faster than others and me the slowest of all. A couple of mud brick steps led down into one small room, dirt floored and dirt walled. More dirt fell from the ceiling, which was, of course, also dirt.

  The dugout was cold and dark as midnight. Mr. Clench lit a lard lamp like the one we had at home, and I felt a feeling like a sock in the stomach. Home. What if Mama was waiting for me in here? And Papa? And they said, "Rodzina, at last you have come." And Mama would give me a glass of tea with sugar and honey cake for breakfast.

  I shook my head and looked around the dugout. In the dim light I could see a saggy bed in one corner, a wooden-box table with a nail keg for a chair in the other, and a little potbellied woodstove in the middle. It looked—and smelled—like animals might live there: bears, maybe, or prairie dogs. But certainly not people, not like this, in a hole in the ground.

  The Clench children were bouncing around, looking at this and touching that, like they were happy to be home. A sudden, furious coughing made us all turn—bumping and jostling each other, it was that crowded—toward the bed in the corner. There lay a woman with her hair all stringy and a thin, sad face. Her bony hands kept moving in a fidgety sort of way. "This here's Myrna Clench," Mr. Clench said to me, his words making little puffs of steam in the cold air. "She's ailin' a mite."

  "Hello, ma'am," I said with a sort of curtsy that felt like the right thing to do, but I did not go too near her for it sounded to me as if what was ailing her was not a mite, but mighty bad indeed.

  Mr. Clench pushed me closer to the bed. "This is Rodzina, Myrna, come to live with us." He pinched my cheek again, turned me around to show her all sides. "She's a sturdy thing, ain't she?" he said.

  I stood there shivering, with my shoulders hunched against the cold, rubbing my hands together to warm them. Here I was, off the train, with a mama and papa and some kids and a house, and it was all wrong. I didn't want to be here. I wanted to go home. To Honore Street.

  While the wind roared outside, we huddled together to breakfast on cold beans and what Myra Jane said was hoecake but tasted to me like last week's sweepings. The Clenches all gobbled like pigs and chickens, smacking their lips and fighting for more. I had to push and shove like the others to get my share.

  Afterward, Myra Jane shooed the boys out and gathered the younger kids around the stove. "Where's your outhouse?" I asked her.

  "Pa says the whole world's our outhouse and no one has a prettier. But Sarah Dew and I dug a trench out back for ourselves. You can use that if you shovel a little dirt in afterward. Just watch for the boys. They're out lookin' for greasewood and buffalo chips for the fire."

  Greasewood I could figure out. But buffalo chips?

  "Dried dung," said Myra Jane when I asked.

  I shuddered. Those hoecakes were cooked over dried dung? What kind of place had I landed? In Chicago we didn't have much, but we had coal picked from the railroad yards and broken grocery boxes for fuel. Newspapers sometimes. And we had a real wooden outhouse out back with a door and a roof.

  After employing the trench and the shovel, I stood on that prairie, all wind and cold and loneliness. My hair blew into tangles and my nose ran, but at least here outside the dugout there was space and fresh air and nobody dying.

  When I returned, Myra Jane showed me how to twist hay and weeds into tight little bundles for the stove, in case the boys didn't have much luck finding buffalo chips. They spent an awful lot of their lives finding fuel and building up a fire to try to keep warm, I thought. And it was April. What would it be like here in January? I shivered just thinking of it.

  "Where's your pa?" I asked Myra Jane. I hadn't seen him since we first arrived.

  "Huntin'. Fishin'. Or diggin'. He ain't here much. We purty much do what gotta be done." Seemed Myra Jane, Sarah Dew, Lily, and Loretta did the washing and mending and cooking and planted a bit of a garden in the summer. Concertina, now she was three, looked after little Grace. The boys patched cracks in the dugout, searched for fuel, and did some fishing when the rivers were running. They all took turns killing and skinning rabbits and hauling water from the creek two miles away. "And Lennard is a bone pilgrim."

  "A what?"

  "Bone pilgrim. Don't you know anything? He walks the prairie lookin' for bits of buffalo and cow bones. Sells 'em when we get to town."

  "What on earth do folks want with bits of bones?"

  "Make 'em into buttons and fertilizer and collar stays, Lennard says. We don't care long as he gets cash money for beans, Pa's tobacco, and suchlike."

  Mrs. Clench commenced coughing again. "Myra Jane, Sarah Dew, Lennard, anyone," she called in a weak little voice. No one paid her any mind at all. She called again.

  I stood up and said, "Guess I'm going to have to tend your mama," but that didn't shame any of them into doing it, so finally I went over to her.

  "I need to use the thundermug," she said to me, "but it's too full."

  Thundermug? What in blazes was a thundermug? She motioned toward a rusty old coffee can that apparently served as a chamber pot. I didn't mind too much emptying it. I had done such chores for Mama when she was sick. I took the can outside and threw the contents into the trench—after first checking the wind to make sure none of it would fly back onto me. I rinsed it with a little water from the rain barrel, took it back inside, and helped Mrs. Clench to use it. Then I straightened her bed as much as I could. Her sheet and blanket were threadbare and filthy, swarming with bedbugs big as summer plums. I sort of smoothed her hair back and tied it with a piece of string I pulled from the blanket. She thanked me over and over. "My own kids don't care a bean for me," she said. She didn't sound sad, like you'd think she would. She just said it as a matter of fact, like "Sure is cold in winter." That was the saddest part.

  "Where you from, girl?" she asked me.

  I told her some about Chicago, and Mama and Papa dying, and the orphan train.

  "Your family wasn't sickly, was they?"

  "No, just unlucky, I think."

  "That'
s fine. You as strong as you look?"

  "Guess so."

  "Good teeth?"

  "Good enough to eat with." I was puzzled by her questions.

  "Fine, fine," she said, and she closed her eyes.

  "You kids should take care of your mama," I said to them as I joined the twisting again.

  "Don't do no good," said Myra Jane. "You give her water or fix her blankets or clean her up, and afore you know it, she wants you to do it again."

  "But she needs your help. And she's your mama."

  "Not for long. Pa says she's apt to up and die on us anytime now."

  I couldn't believe my ears. "Don't you care? My mama's dead, and I'd give anything to have her back." Once after Mama died, I found a discarded hunk of bread in the gutter and stuffed it into my mouth like a hungry dog. What would Mama say if she saw me, I wondered. Then all my sorrow and loss and longing hit me and I lay down and cried right there on the icy Chicago street and people had to walk around me to get where they were going. Yes, I'd have given anything to have my mama back.

  Myra Jane poked me. "I asked, what did she die of?"

  "Did she die of the galloping consumption like our mama is?" Sarah Dew asked.

  "No. It was something else," I told them. The day Mr. Wcydozky told us Papa was dead at the stockyards, kicked in the head by a runaway horse crazy from the smell and sound of pigs, that was when Mama started dying. She got weaker and weaker, so when the fever came, it carried her right off. "I nursed her as best I could, brought her water, brushed her hair, and washed her face. You can do the same for your mama." I thought of all the orphans who'd pay their last nickel—if they had a nickel—to have a mama, ailing or not. My eyes watered and I wiped them on my dress, but I swear it was just the smoke.

  "Pa says not to fuss—he'll jist get us a new mama," said Sarah Dew.

  "But you're a family. You got to take care of each other."

  Suddenly Myra Jane leaped up, grabbed a shotgun off the wall, and aimed it right at me. Psiakrew! I shouldn't have preached at them, I thought. Now Myra Jane's mad as blazes. She's going to shoot me, and I will die an orphan I

  She swung the barrel a bit to the right before pulling the trigger. The gun was almost as loud as my heartbeat. Dirt sprayed everywhere. "Are you a crazy person," I shouted at her, "shooting that gun in here?"

  She said nothing but bent down and picked up a snake, yellow with dangerous-looking orange stripes.

  "Myra Jane," I said, "you saved my life." I hate snakes worse than the Kaiser, the Devil, and Otto Bismarck, as Papa used to say.

  "This ain't nothing but a hungry old rat snake lookin' for the mice that nest in the roof," she said. "It wouldn't hurt nobody. And it ain't bad eatin'."

  Eating? Not me. No sir. In my life I had eaten pigs' feet and duck's blood and cow's stomach, but I wasn't eating any snake. No sir.

  Sarah Dew brought in a kettle full of water from the rain barrel. Myra Jane put in some greens, a few withered potatoes, and the chopped-up snake. "Stew," she said to me with a smile.

  "What else you eat around here?" I asked her, hoping for something besides snake stew and hoecakes.

  "Mostly jackrabbit, prairie dog, catfish, sage hen—whatever Pa and the boys find out there. In the spring we grow a few greens and things before it gets so hot that everything dries up and blows away. In the fall there's wild plums, fox grapes, and ground cherries. And we most always got beans."

  Me, I'd starve to death out here. Who could live on snakes and prairie dogs? No roast pork with prunes? No sauerkraut? No spice cake or fresh lemonade or stuffed cabbage rolls? My stomach growled, and I sighed.

  Mr. Clench came home around suppertime. "Smells mighty good," he said. "I can always trust my girls to make me a supper fit for a king." He licked his lips and gave me a big smile as he sat down on the nail keg by the table. Sarah Dew gave him a bowl of stew, and I ladled out a cupful for Mrs. Clench. The rest of them stood around the pot and shared out the stew with one spoon. The first few times the spoon came to me, I shook my head, but finally I got so hungry from the smell and all the hay twisting and mama tending I had done, I took the spoon and had me a heaping spoonful of snake stew. It was hot and didn't taste too bad. Not kiełbasa or roast pork but a sight better than dried-up old jelly sandwiches. There was silence in the dugout until every drop was gone.

  After her cup of stew cooled enough, I fed some to Mrs. Clench, spoon by spoon. She didn't want to eat, kept shaking her head and turning away, so I distracted her mind by telling her about the orphan train and Miss Doctor.

  "A lady doctor?" she asked. "Are you sure?"

  "I'm sure. Of course right now she's just a nursemaid to a trainful of orphans, and she doesn't seem to think much of the job."

  "A lady doctor. Imagine." Mrs. Clench swallowed some stew and shook her head. "Me, I wanted to be a schoolteacher. Thought I'd like that, all dressed up in starched cottons, pointing at a map and saying, 'Now what is the name of this state here east of Wyoming?'"

  "Why didn't you?"

  "Married Clench at fourteen, had all these here babies, and soon I'll be dead as a beaver hat. That's my whole story."

  "Your mama and papa let you get married at fourteen?"

  "My mama was dead and my papa was drunk and no one asked if I wanted to." She looked at me. "How old are you? You look to be fifteen or so."

  "Twelve," I answered. "And I don't want to get married. Or be a schoolteacher or a lady doctor." I was thinking so much about me at that point that I entirely forgot to spoon stew into Mrs. Clench. "I want to go to school and come home and do homework on the kitchen table and talk about all the things that happened that day. I want someone to tell me when to go to bed and boil eggs for me at Easter." I swallowed hard. "Guess what I want is my mama and papa back."

  Mrs. Clench leaned back on her pillow and waved me away. "I'm plumb tired out from all this eating and talking," she said.

  I helped Sarah Dew and Myra Jane scrape off the dishes, spoons, and pot. "Myra Jane, if you show me where the broom is, I will sweep up a bit," I said.

  Myra Jane snorted. "What hay and dry grass we got, we burn. Ain't none to waste on frippery like brooms. You better learn that right off." Perhaps this was for the best, for I had no idea how to clean that place when I couldn't tell just where the dirt ended and the house began.

  Lennard banked the fire, and the others pulled horse blankets and quilts out of a wooden trunk. We girls wrapped ourselves in the blankets and settled on the floor—all except for Concertina and Grace, who slept in the bed with Mr. and Mrs. Clench.

  The boys went outside. "They sleep in the wagon," Myra Jane said.

  "Ain't it awful cold out there?" I asked her.

  "They come in if it starts snowin'. They ain't stupid."

  Lennard stepped on me on his way out. "Why does he hate me?" I asked.

  "He don't hate you. He hates ever'one," said the girl to my right. Lily? Loretta?

  "Why?"

  I could feel her shrug. "Way God made 'im, I reckon."

  Sarah Dew snuggled up on my left side. "I want to sleep right close by you. I won't get to when you move to the bed."

  Why, I wondered, would I get to sleep in the bed? Maybe the children all took turns. I thought of the bedbugs and shivered. I preferred the floor.

  It was as noisy in the dugout that night as if the whole city of Chicago was sharing it with me instead of just one family. The wind screeched and whined, Mrs. Clench coughed, Mr. Clench snored. The girls were restless, twitching and murmuring and snorting.

  When I finally fell asleep, I was as restless as the rest. My dreams were part memories, part nightmares. I was walking down the stairs from our house on Honore Street. Mr. Czolgowicz, the super, grabbed my arm and said, "You need a place to sleep, kopytka. I got a bed. Are you willing to share it?"

  I ran from him. The night was growing darker and colder. Delicious smells came through the open door of a tavern near Canal Street, and I stopped to sniff. "Pretty lady,"
whispered one man loitering outside the tavern, "come home with me and I will feed you roasts and chocolate cakes." Another grabbed my arm and shouted, "Wrap those long legs around mine, dearie, and I will buy you beer." And he turned into Mr. Clench.

  I was wide awake now. I feared I was in a fix. I lay there scared and worried all night and never did go back to sleep.

  The next day it rained. Mr. Clench hung around the dugout, watching me and getting in everyone's way. I ignored him best I could. I took care of Mrs. Clench and cleaned her chamber pot again. I showed Myra Jane and Sarah Dew how to mix up some cough syrup for her from onions and sugar, the way my mama showed me. "Didn't nobody ever teach you this?" I asked them.

  "Papa said we should every once in a while tie a piece of peppered meat on Mama's chest, but we ain't often got meat to spare," Myra Jane answered. "And we won't have to worry about that when she's gone and you're our new mama."

  A terrible fix!

  I took to hiding behind Clench's children as much as I could, to keep away from him. I changed Grace's diaper, told stories to Lily and Loretta, and helped Myra Jane cook up a pot of beans. Big Bob took to me like ants to a picnic. Every chance he got, he climbed on my lap, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and went right to sleep. Because of my brothers, I've always been partial to little boys, their dirty little hands and the sweaty smell of their hair. I sat a long while with Big Bob in my lap and smelled his hair.

  Right before supper Clench grabbed me. "Let's go for a little walk, you and me," he said. I gave him the stink face, but he just laughed and pinched my cheek. "Now, none of that ornery stuff. You better learn to like me. You're gonna be here a long time."

  "Leave me alone!" I shouted. "I'm too young for this. I'm only twelve!" Clench laughed again and hugged me. "Don't touch me! Go away!" The children stood around us, looking mighty pleased at the thought of a new mama.

  Who was there to help me way out here? Mama! Help me, Mama!

  "Elgin, leave that child alone!" I thought for a minute Mama had actually heard me and was coming from Heaven to help. "You ain't gonna ruin another girl's life like you ruined mine." It was Mrs. Clench, who had pulled herself to her feet. "Why, she ain't hardly older than your own daughters. Take her back to town and find yourself someone who is old enough and willing to be a mama to my children, or I swear I will haunt you from the grave."