Counting Backwards

4

Carrie

1920

As we walked toward the railroad tracks, Billy was talking a mile a minute.

He was my best friend—really my only friend.

His family lived on a tidy plot of land just up the road from the folks who’d been fostering me since I was six years old.

After Miss Drummond brought me to the CHS facility all those years earlier, it was only a couple of days before she had me placed with Mr.

John and Mrs.

Alice Dobbs.

I still didn’t know what Miss Drummond said to my mama that day when I first got took.

All I remembered was that while Ma continued carrying on in the hallway of the children’s facility, orderlies asking her over and over to lower her voice, Miss Drummond came to talk with me.

She said if I went to stay with certain upright folks across town and helped them keep house, I’d get a warm bed all to myself and a chance to go to McGuffey Primary School.

She told me I’d be allowed to sit at my very own desk five days every week.

When she dangled the possibility of real Crayola crayons, I was ready to do just about anything she asked.

Alice and John Dobbs were all right.

They never hugged me up like my mama did, but they didn’t beat on me neither.

Long as I did my daily chores, the mopping, the laundry, starching, mending, canning, and such, they let me come and go from school, let me have a fair share of their hot food each night.

I was one grade behind the other kids my age in school, on account of getting started late, but I didn’t mind.

Over time, I often forgot I was a year older than the other kids in my schoolroom.

Especially Billy, since he always knew so much more than I did anyhow.

The placement in a lower grade also kept me farther apart from Loretta Dobbs, which was probably for the best.

Mr. and Mrs. Dobbs, they told me to call them “Mrs. Alice”

and “Mr. John”

from the start.

Loretta was the only child they had of their own.

She was two years older than me, and mostly she just ignored me.

The only times we had cross words was when she had friends around and wanted to show off by hassling me.

Then later, she’d try to make up for it one way or another, pushing her dessert toward me when I cleared the table that night or giving me a piece of her scented soap before I took my bath.

I suppose she was glad enough that it was me sweating out the family chores every day and not her.

Miss Drummond never told me how long I’d be staying there with the Dobbs family, but before I knew it, seven some-odd years had passed since I’d started sleeping in the alcove off their kitchen.

Other foster kids had come and gone while I was there, especially in the summers when there was more work to be done, but I’d been there the longest.

Billy thought the reason the Dobbs family took in fosters was because they needed the money they got from the state each time they did so.

I couldn’t really say.

As we walked along Second Street, enjoying the first truly warm day that spring, we kicked at pebbles along our way.

I watched the dust getting thicker on the laces of Billy’s Buster Browns and wondered if his mother would be sore at him for not being careful.

The afternoon felt like any of so many others until Billy surprised me.

“How come you’re all quiet-like today?” he asked.

I looked at him sideways, noticing his freckled cheeks were pinker than usual. He was one of the shorter boys in the class, and it seemed I was gaining inches on him near every day, tall as I was.

I squinted my eyes back at him, like he was being a numskull.

I was quiet most of the time.

It’s just who I was, so it wasn’t worth remarking on it like he’d just gone and done.

Once, I heard Mr.

Dobbs tell his brother that I was a good foster because I kept mostly to myself, didn’t bother nobody—so I didn’t know why Billy was always saying I should speak up more anyhow.

I never did understand how a body could think of so many things to say aloud all the livelong day.

“Is it because of your mama?” he asked.

“My ma?”

We were nearing the corner of Main Street then, and I stopped right there beside the letter box outside Gilmore’s Furniture.

We never talked about my ma.

Ever since I came to live with the Dobbs family, I hadn’t been allowed to see her.

Not once.

Mrs.

Alice told me when I arrived that if I wanted to stay on with her family, I had to make sure to be a nice girl and stay away from trouble.

She told me Ma was trouble, and that I couldn’t be going to the other side of town, not even for a quick visit with her.

Mrs.

Alice said she and Mr.

John weren’t rich folks, but they had their reputations at least.

I hadn’t argued then because I thought for sure Ma would come to see me where I was, so it didn’t matter where I was or wasn’t allowed to go.

But in all those years, she never did come see me even once.

Billy looked then like he was choking on a sucker, his eyes getting wide and cheeks reddening.

“What?”

I demanded. “What did you hear? You know something, you got to tell me.”

Billy had three older brothers, all of them skinny and dark-haired like him, but they was all the most likeable kind of boys, always smiling and goofing off with friends.

Their pa worked at the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant in town, and they always had extra bottles of soda pop to share with friends.

It seemed anytime something was going on around town, Billy heard about it from one or another of his brothers before any of the rest of us kids got wind.

That’s why I believed him even when he said something I never would have expected.

“They took her to the Colony for Epileptics. I heard from Roger.”

I wrinkled up my nose. “The Colony?”

I said, wondering if he meant the place over in Lynchburg. Kids round our parts liked to tell tales about crazy folk from the Colony coming to Charlottesville and causing all sorts of mischief. We all knew it was pretend when they talked about escaped patients twisting the heads off chickens or snatching children from their beds, but we were afraid of inmates from the Colony just the same. Ma was nothing like any of the monsters from those stories.

“She ain’t epileptic,” I said.

Three ladies toting packages were walking toward us. One of them carried a basket full-up with items from the apothecary. I recognized among her purchases the Slo Poke caramels Mrs. Alice always kept on hand for Mr. John. Loretta had once passed me one of those candies in secret, and I hadn’t forgotten yet the feel of that creaminess against the roof of my mouth. The lady nodded at me as I stepped out of her path.

Billy didn’t answer until they’d moved on.

“No, I figured,”

he said, keeping his eyes to the pavement like he didn’t want to say any more. I pushed his arm then, mad, like I was getting ready to fight.

“Say the rest,”

I told him.

“Roger said the Colony is where they take ladies who’ve been up to no good.”

I knew what he meant by that. I’d heard enough folks whispering with Mrs. Alice over the years about how Ma had been working on the streets, that she was making a living through immoral behavior with men.

“But why now?”

I asked. Even though Ma hadn’t ever come to see me, I’d hoped she’d been doing all right, that maybe she’d found a better way to look after Doris and Roy, maybe a steady job that was keeping her too busy to check in on me. I liked to think she was just saving up her money until the time was right to come and get me.

Billy shrugged, but I kept waiting on him to give me an answer.

“Don’t know,”

he said. “Maybe she gave a cop some trouble or something.”

He gestured with a tip of his head that we should take up walking again. I twisted my lips but followed along just the same.

Despite the years that had passed, I hadn’t forgot the way Ma could explode when she got angry, her temper turning her into a tornado time and again. If Ma got into a little trouble, she always seemed to make it worse by yelling back too hard. She didn’t let nobody tell her what was what—that was for sure.

As we reached closer to the train tracks and the row of houses behind them, I wondered if there wasn’t something I could do to help her. I never asked Mrs. Alice nor Mr. John for hardly anything, but I thought that time had come.

When I came upon the house, I found Mrs. Alice already waiting for me. I was old enough to know by then that bad days always had a habit of getting worse, and this day was no exception.

Mrs. Alice was standing on the short wooden steps leading up to the back door, the buttons of her navy housedress pulling against her large bosom, her white hair pinned up in a large, loose bun like always. Some strands had come free now that it was getting late in the day.

“You took your time getting back,” she said.

“Ma’am?”

I asked, not sure why she was waiting on me anyway. I wondered if I’d left the cheese sitting out on the icebox again, and maybe she was about to have my hide. But what she said instead was the worst kind of surprise.

“Tomorrow’s going to be your last day at school.”

We still had three weeks left before the end of the term.

“Are we breaking for summer early?” I asked.

Mrs. Alice shook her head, like she was frustrated that I wasn’t doing a better job of keeping up. She didn’t like to repeat herself.

“You’re not taking a break, girl,”

she said. “You’re finished with your schooling for good. You’ll be focusing your time on helping around the house now. No need to wait for the end of the school year. You’ve completed enough of the sixth grade to get credit for it.”

“But why? Have I done something wrong?”

I was already thinking of all I would miss if Mrs. Alice made good on her threat. Our teacher had been reading to us from The Story of Doctor Dolittle, and we weren’t nearly finished. Each student had also been working on a special presentation for the last day of school, and I’d been excited about mine, preparing to show how I could fly clothespin airplanes.

“No, nothing wrong. But Mr. John and I, we need your help with the farm now that it’s coming on late spring and we’ve got the new crops this year. You’ve done all the learning you require. A girl like you has no need for junior high.”

Now, I knew I wasn’t the smartest girl. Mrs. Alice certainly told me so often enough. But I kept up fine with the lessons in class.

When I didn’t just answer “yes, ma’am”

to her like usual, Mrs. Alice added, “You’ll be fine. Getting through most of the sixth grade is plenty enough of an accomplishment, especially for a foster. It’s far more than you’d have done without us, so chin up.”

She said that last bit like I ought to have been grateful. I suppose I was glad that I’d been able to spend the last several years living there, having school, staying out of trouble, away from the drunks and the crime on the other side of town. But I didn’t think the Dobbses had done anything so special. I earned my keep with them, worked hard seven days a week. It wasn’t like they was just giving me everything for free. If there weren’t to be no more school, there was hardly reason at all for me to stay with the Dobbses anymore. What good would it be, picking up after them and Loretta all the time, keeping everything just so?

I looked out to the lawn beside the house, or the “farm,”

as the family called it. It was pretty much just a regular yard, except it was filled with an oversized vegetable garden and a couple of outbuildings for livestock. It wasn’t anything like the pictures I’d seen of real farms, tobacco plantations out in the Virginia country, with them sprawling fields of sand lugs all lined up in perfect, neat rows. Even the local peach and apple orchards were more sizable than the dusty plot of land on which the Dobbs family relied. Even so, since he was often busy at his day job doing maintenance for the town’s railcars, Mr. John hired a boy or two from time to time to help out with the chickens and goats. The boys would come each day, sweating and grunting out there in the coop, or huffing to themselves in the dry grass while they mended fences.

“But that’s the whole reason I even came to stay here in the first,”

I argued, “so as I could go to the school over here.”

“And you did,”

Mrs. Alice said. “It’s been years you’ve been going. You can still see your friend Billy, if that’s what you’re worried about. After you finish chores and he’s done with his school day.”

She was always making comments about me being sweet on Billy, even though I wasn’t. I suppose she couldn’t imagine that it might be the other way around, that maybe a boy, even a freckled, gangly one like Billy, could take a cotton to a girl with shoulders so broad or a face as plain as mine. I didn’t know for sure if Billy liked me that way or not. We didn’t talk about those things, and it didn’t matter to me anyhow.

“When can I go back to my own mama?”

I asked. I’d never said something like that to her before. I didn’t know if she knew about Ma being at the Colony, but I figured if Billy knew, maybe someone had told Mrs. Alice too.

She let out a long sigh at my question, like she was trying to blow away all the Virginia dust with that one breath.

“I didn’t want to mention it,”

she said. Then she glanced over her shoulder toward the street, as if to make sure there weren’t no one else within earshot before she looked back at me. “Your mother has been committed to a facility. You understand what that means? It was high time somebody intervened. At least she’ll have guidance and care in the institution.”

“She don’t need that kind of help.”

I couldn’t hold my thoughts inside. Without school, there wasn’t nothing at the Dobbs house I was scared to lose. “Who’s looking after Doris and Roy?” I asked.

I hadn’t thought about them at first, when Billy told me the news earlier, but once they came to my mind, it was like they started pounding against my insides with metal spoons.

Mrs. Alice pushed her lips together like she didn’t want to talk about Doris or Roy at all.

“I want to go back to my ma’s house,”

I said. “You can tell that lady, Miss Drummond, to come and get me.”

I had pushed too far, and now Mrs. Alice turned redder than the Tommy Toes growing in that garden behind me.

“You listen good and close, Carrie.”

She leaned in and pointed a finger at me. “There is nowhere else for you to go. You leave this farm, and you’ll be on the streets, keeping time with men just like your mother did. If you must know about Doris and Roy, I’m told they’ve been placed in private homes too. At least now you three will stand a chance.”

Her words about my brother and sister stopped me short. I wondered if I’d be able to find them, if maybe they’d been put somewhere nearby and might be getting set to attend the same school I was just leaving. They’d be so grown already, I realized, and I worried I mightn’t even recognize them. But then I figured a body always has to know her own family. Nothing was more important than blood kin. My mind set to racing, and when Mrs. Alice walked away from me, I was already working on a plan to get my little family back together.