Chapter 11
The orphan train filled the last weeks of the spring the way water fills a low field. Slowly, from every side, until there was nothing else to be seen.
It was on the church porch and in the store.
It was in the blacksmith’s, where men who had never in their lives thought about a child talked of nothing else.
The committee met at the parsonage on Tuesdays.
Lists were drawn up. Families put their names down for a boy or a girl, of such an age, for such a purpose.
The preacher’s wife wrote it all in a ledger and looked worried.
The county was sorting itself. Samantha watched it do so and said nothing.
At the store, the storekeeper’s wife had a list of her own, pinned by the flour barrel, of who was taking and who was not.
At church, the preacher prayed for the little strangers coming among them.
Half the congregation said amen. The other half looked at their boots.
In the Stuart kitchen, the hired girl said her mother would not have one in the house, not for wages.
She asked Samantha what she thought. Samantha said she thought the bread wanted turning.
She had seen it before, from the other end.
She knew what a county looked like from a platform, in the last minute before the row was walked.
Now she saw it from inside, from the parlor, the church pew, the wagon seat.
It looked exactly the same. People deciding, in the same breath, whether they wanted a child and whether a child was worth the risk. Weighing. Doing sums.
The Stuart place put its name down in the second week. Eleanor did it.
She announced it at supper, in the same voice she used for the price of flour.
“I have spoken to the committee. We shall take a boy.”
Ramsay looked up from his plate. “We shall?”
“The yard wants a boy. It has wanted one since your father died and that lazy boy went off to San Antonio. There is wood to be split, hens to be seen to. There are a hundred jobs a strong boy can do that we pay a man for now.” Eleanor cut her meat.
“The Society asks nothing for them. Board and schooling. That is cheaper than a hand by a good deal.”
“You never cared for the notion before.”
“I never had a train coming before. One takes what comes to hand.” She looked at her son. “You have no objection, I suppose.”
Ramsay was quiet a moment. Samantha, across the table, kept her eyes on her plate and her hands very steady.
“None,” he said at last. “So long as it’s understood what he’s for.”
“It will be understood,” Eleanor said. “I shall see to that.”
She said it in her usual way, cool and plain. Then she went back to her meat. But Samantha, who had learned to hear what was under words, heard exactly what she meant. It was not charity. Eleanor Stuart had never acted from charity, and she was not about to begin with a Society child.
To the wives, on the next visiting day, she made that plain, in case anyone should think it.
“A placed-out child is cheap hands,” she said, over the coffee. “That is all it is, and I shall not pretend otherwise. One does not take such a child to raise. One takes it to work. It will be fed, roofed, put to school as the Society requires. And it will earn every crumb of it in the yard.”
“And when it is grown?” the red-faced woman asked.
“Then it will go where such people go, and we shall get another.” Eleanor set her cup down.
“I do not intend to make a pet of it, if that is what you mean. It will be worked. It will be watched. Nothing that matters will be trusted to it. That is what such stock deserves. It is what such stock expects, if it has any sense. Anything more would only confuse it.”
The storekeeper’s wife said that was very sensible. Somebody else said Mrs. Stuart had always been sensible. And Samantha, by the tray with the coffee pot in her hand, listened to her mother-in-law lay out a future she herself had lived. Word for word, as if reading it off a page.
Worked. Watched. Trusted with nothing. Fed at the corner of the table and told to be grateful. Put to school for three months in the winter, because the Society required it, and walked back through the snow to do the milking. Never a pet. Never confused by anything more.
Something old and cold turned over in her chest.
She had thought it was dead. She had thought that twelve years had killed it, or the train south, or the house itself. It was not dead. It only lay very still, and now it moved.
Her hands stayed steady. She went round with the pot and said the cake was fresh.
But she looked at Eleanor, once, over the rim of the tray, and did not smile.
Ramsay said little on the subject, then or after.
Samantha watched for it. She could not help herself. When his mother spoke of the boy she was going to take, she watched his face for something, anything, and found nothing. Not agreement. Not distaste. Only the flat quiet of a man to whom the matter is of no interest one way or the other.
That was his father’s indifference, she understood.
The old man had never had such stock about the place, and had said so.
His son had grown up believing that Society children were somebody else’s affair.
Not cruel. Ramsay was not cruel. He would no more have kicked a boy than kicked a dog.
He simply did not see one. A placed-out child was a fixture his mother wanted for the yard, like a new pump.
He wore his father’s indifference to it as easily as an old coat.
She marked that. She marked it the way she had marked all the rest, and added it to the account.
It was not fair, some part of her said. He had never been shown any different.
A man cannot see what he has never been given cause to look at.
She told herself that on the porch, watching him mend a harness with his head bent, and she believed it.
It did not help. Fair or not, he would take his mother’s boy into the yard and never look at him.
That was the man she was going to marry.
It was a long account by now. Blood tells. You cannot trust bad stock. Might as well take in a rattlesnake. And now this. The easy blank face across the supper table while his mother spoke of working a child. Watching it. Never trusting it with what mattered.
All of it he must never learn about the woman he meant to wed. She lay awake in the blue room adding it up. The total was always the same. If he knew, he would look at her the way he looked at his mother’s new pump.
A great deal she could bear. She had proved that. Not that.
So she said nothing, and the train drew near.
Ten days. Then a week. Then three days. The county counted, as she had once counted in the loft.
The preacher’s wife had her ledger full.
There were to be forty children, everyone said, though nobody knew who had said it first. The Society agent had written to the committee.
The train would come in on the Thursday morning.
The children would be ranged on the depot platform.
The families who had put their names down might come and choose.
On the Wednesday night, Eleanor said that they would all three drive in.
“All of us, ma’am?” Samantha said. It came out before she could stop it.
Eleanor looked at her.
“Naturally. I mean to choose the boy myself. I do not intend to trust that to a committee. Ramsay will drive. You will come, since a Stuart bride does not sit at home when the county is in town.” The gray eyes rested on her. “You have some objection?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I did not think so.”
Samantha went up to the blue room and stood at the window a good while with the lamp unlit.
Every instinct she had told her to stay home. She could plead a headache. She could burn a hand on the stove, and it would be true. There were a hundred ways to do it. Any one of them would keep her from that platform. Every one of them was a coward’s trick, and she knew it.
But it was not cowardice that stopped her. It was something she could not name.
She did not want to go. She would rather have walked into a burning barn.
And yet, standing there in the dark with the valley black beyond the glass, she looked at it squarely.
She found she could not stay away. It pulled at her.
The platform pulled. Forty scrubbed children with paper tags, standing in a row on Texas boards, and the county walking past. She had stood in that row.
The part of her that had stood there was going to be there again tomorrow, whether the rest of her came or not.
No more could she have kept from it than kept from her own name.
In the morning she put on the blue dress. Her hair went up in its pins. She folded her hands so they would not show, and came down.
Ramsay had the spring wagon at the steps with the bays in the traces.
He handed his mother up first, then Samantha, steady, and let her go.
Eleanor sat in the middle, upright in her black silk.
The morning was bright and hard already, with the sun not an hour up.
Swallows were going over the yard. The roses smelled sweet on the porch posts.
It was the kind of day the county would call a fine one.
They drove out through the gate. Samantha did not look back at the house.
She looked ahead, at the road going down through the oak country toward the town. Toward the depot, the platform where her whole life had begun. Against every instinct she owned, she was riding toward it.
Beside her, Eleanor said a word about the heat. Ramsay answered. The wagon rolled on.
And Samantha sat with her hands folded in her lap, her secret closer than her heartbeat. She watched the town come up pale in the morning at the end of the road.