Chapter 2
The stove door came open on the second night.
Antonia never saw it happen. She was asleep, or nearly asleep, curled on her bench at the far end of the car with the carpetbag under her head. What woke her was the smell.
She was on her feet before her eyes were open. Her heart went so hard that she could hear it.
At the other end of the car, the iron door hung wide. A red glow lay across the floorboards. Coals had spilled out onto the wood, three or four of them, and one had rolled almost to the bench where the big boys slept. The board under it was already smoking.
Nobody else was awake.
Antonia opened her mouth. Nothing came out of it. She had not made a sound since the fire, and her voice would not come now when it mattered. She stood in the aisle with her fists closed and could not move toward the stove. Her feet would not do it.
Then Miss Dunn came through from the next car with her shawl over her nightgown. She saw the coals. She said, "Merciful heaven," and stamped them out with her boot, one after another.
Then she kicked the door shut with a clang that woke half the children. "Back to sleep, all of you. That catch has been loose since Chicago. I've told the conductor twice. Nobody's hurt."
But the children were sitting up now. Their eyes went to the stove, then to the black marks on the boards. Then, one after another, they traveled down the car to where Antonia stood in the aisle, her red hair loose about her face.
"She was awake," someone said. "She was standing up before anyone."
"She sleeps nearest the end. She's always nearest the end."
That was not true. She slept as far from the stove as the car allowed. But it did not matter what was true. It mattered what was said.
She sat down on her bench and turned her face to the window, where there was nothing to see but her own reflection.
* * *
The two big boys were called Toby Griggs and Pete Sloan.
Toby was twelve, or said he was, with sandy hair and a way of walking as if the car belonged to him.
Pete was smaller and did whatever Toby did a moment after Toby did it.
They had come from the same asylum on Randall's Island.
They had been on the train two days before they found out about the fire.
It was Pete who found out. He asked Miss Dunn straight, in front of everyone, why the red-haired girl never said anything. Miss Dunn was tired, and she did not think. She said that the poor child had lost her whole family in a fire not two weeks past, and they must all be gentle with her.
Toby was not gentle with her. Toby thought about it for the length of one station stop, and then he began.
"Her folks burned up," he told the little ones on the benches. He said it low, the way people say what they mean to be passed on. "Every one of them. Mother, father, a baby too. Burned right up in their beds."
"Poor thing," said a girl named Hetty.
"Poor thing nothing. Ask yourself how she got out and none of them did."
The little ones did not know how to ask themselves that. Toby helped them.
"Fire follows some people. My gran said so.
There's folk that draw it, like a rod on a roof draws lightning.
Look at that hair. You ever see hair like that?
It's the color of a coal." He let that sit.
"And what happened the second night out?
Stove door swings open by itself. Coals on the floor.
Who was standing up when Miss Dunn came in? "
"She was," Pete said.
"She was. Fire killed her family, and fire's followed her aboard. You mark me."
Antonia heard all of it. The car was not so long that a person could whisper in one end without being heard in the other, and Toby did not whisper. She kept her hands still and looked at the fields going by.
It was not so, and she wanted to tell them. She wanted to say that she had been asleep. That she was afraid of the stove. That she would never in her life go near a stove door again if she could help it. But her voice had gone into the fire with the rest. She could not get it back.
So she said nothing.
And the nothing was taken for an answer.
* * *
At a way station in Ohio, they were given supper in a long room with oilcloth on the tables.
There was bread and a stew that might have been mutton. There was coffee for Mr. Croft and Miss Dunn from a big enamel kettle that sat on the stove at the end of the room. The children were put at two tables. Antonia was given the end seat because nobody else would take it.
Pete Sloan reached across as she sat down and took her bread.
He did it in plain sight, watching to see what she would do. She did nothing. He put the bread in his pocket and grinned at Toby.
Above the table hung an oil lamp on a chain.
It had been smoking since they came in. Antonia had watched it, because she watched everything that burned. The wick was trimmed badly, and the chimney was black on one side. She thought it needed turning down. Nobody turned it down.
Halfway through the meal, the chimney burst.
It went with a crack like a pistol. Glass came down on the oilcloth, and the flame leapt up a foot high with nothing to hold it. Hetty screamed. Miss Dunn was up at once to blow it out. The room went half dark and smelled of hot oil.
The station woman said that lamp had cost her three chimneys since summer, and she would have the wick seen to. Nobody was listening to her.
Twenty-two heads turned toward the end of the table.
Antonia had not moved. She sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the dead lamp. Her face was quite still, because she had learned since the fire that a still face was the one possession nobody could take from her.
"That's twice," Toby said into the dark.
An hour later, as they were filing back to the train, Pete Sloan went to fill his tin cup from the coffee kettle. The station woman had just set it back on the stove. Pete took hold of the handle bare-handed.
His howl brought Mr. Croft running. The palm of his hand had gone white and then red across the whole width of it. He stood holding his wrist and crying like a much smaller boy.
"Serves you right for thieving," Miss Dunn said, wrapping it in her handkerchief. "You had bread of your own."
But Toby had a different notion, and he made sure the whole car had it before the train pulled out.
"He took her bread. Not one hour ago. And look at him." He held up Pete's bandaged hand like a flag. "That's what you get. That's what the jinx does. You cross Jinx Jenkins, and you burn."
Jinx Jenkins.
The name went down the car from bench to bench. By the time it reached Antonia at the far end, it had stopped being a word Toby said. It had become her name.
* * *
In Nebraska, a family nearly took her.
It was a town called Hollis Fork, or a name near it.
They were put in a line on the church platform, the twenty-three of them, washed and brushed.
The farming people came up one at a time to look.
The little ones went quickly. A red-faced woman took Hetty and kissed her on the spot.
A man with one arm took two boys together because he needed two.
Antonia stood at the end of the line because that was where the line put her. Her eyes were on the people, not her boots. She had not learned that yet.
A man and a woman stopped in front of her.
They were older than most, with gray in the woman's hair under her bonnet. The man had a beard cut square, and kind, tired eyes. The woman bent down and studied Antonia.
"She don't say much, Mr. Croft tells us."
"No, ma'am."
"That's no matter. We've had enough talk in our house to last us. Our girl was a talker." The woman's voice went strange for a moment, and then came back. "She'd be about your size, if she'd lived."
The man put his hand on Antonia's head. His palm was rough and warm. "You'd have your own room," he said. "It's small. There's a window looks on the orchard."
A window that looked on an orchard. Antonia thought about it. Something in her chest had been closed like a fist since the fire. She thought about the orchard so hard that it began, very slightly, to open.
"We'll take her, Mr. Croft," the man said. "Where do we sign?"
Mr. Croft had the paper out. He had the pen out. The woman had taken Antonia's hand. Hers was dry and firm. She was already saying, "We'll get you a coat, first thing. That one's no good for winter."
Then a boy came running up the church steps.
He was twelve or so, out of breath, with straw in his hair. He went straight to the man with the square beard, pulled at his sleeve, and said a few words Antonia could not hear.
The man's face changed.
"When?"
"In the night. Walt smelled it about four. He'd left the lantern hung in the loft after milking, he thinks. The hay's gone, and the west wall. They saved the stock."
"The barn," the woman said. She let go of Antonia's hand. "Our barn burned?"
Nobody had said the word jinx. Nobody needed to. Pete Sloan was standing three places up the line with his bandaged hand held out in front of him where everyone could see it. Toby beside him was smiling the way he smiled at the little ones before he told them stories.
The woman's eyes went to Antonia's hair. Then to her husband.
"We'd best get home."
"I reckon so."
They went down the steps and across the churchyard to their wagon. The man climbed up and took the reins. The woman climbed up beside him. Neither of them looked back. Not once. Not even at the gate.
Mr. Croft put the pen away.
"Well," he said to nobody in particular. "There'll be other stops."
* * *
There were other stops.
There were stops in Nebraska, then in Kansas, and at each one the same scene played out, only faster.
The children had learned how it went now, and children are quick.
At the first stop after Hollis Fork, Antonia heard Toby telling a farmer's wife about the fire before Mr. Croft had finished reading out the rules.
Mr. Croft heard it too. He put down his paper.
He took Toby by the collar and walked him the length of the car.
At the far end, by the water can, he sat him down with Miss Dunn between.
His voice stayed low. He said that the Society had rules about slander.
A boy who spoiled another child's placing, he said, could go back to Randall's Island on the next train east. He had sent boys back before.
Toby said yes, sir. Toby said it was only a story.
His ears went red, and he said nothing to anyone for the whole of the next stop.
It made no difference.
At the second stop, it was Hetty's friend Susan, who had never been unkind to anyone. She whispered the name to a boy from the town while they waited to be shown.
At the third, Mr. Croft did the talking himself.
He went down the line ahead of the families.
To each one he said that the last child was a girl of eight, an orphan by misfortune and nothing else.
He would thank them not to listen to children's tales.
A farmer's wife heard him out with her hands folded.
Then she said her own girl had it from a boy on the platform before the train had stopped rolling.
She supposed there was no smoke without fire.
It was not meant unkindly. She went on up the line and chose a boy.
Mr. Croft stood with his paper and stared at the door of the car. The story had got off the train ahead of him. He could not put it back on.
After that, nobody needed to say it. The families came up the line with the story already in their faces.
Antonia learned to stand at the end. She learned to hold her carpetbag in front of her with both hands and to keep her eyes on the toes of her boots. When she looked up, people looked away. It was easier not to see them do it.
She learned to count. Six stops. Seven. The car emptied by twos and threes. Hetty went. Susan went. The one-armed man's boys went. Even Pete Sloan's hand healed, and the bandage came off, but Toby kept the story going anyhow, because he liked it.
Kansas was flat and yellow. It went on forever. The train ran across it for two days. At the end of the second day there was a smudge on the western sky that did not move like a cloud.
"Mountains," Miss Dunn said. "That's Colorado, children. We're nearly at the end of the line."
Antonia watched the smudge until the light went.
Nearly at the end of the line. She turned the words over. She had ridden across half a country now, and at every stop of it a door had shut. There was one stop left, and then there was no more line.
She put her hand in her stocking and closed it around the button.
Then she looked back down at her boots.