Chapter 2
The end of the line was a town too new for trees.
Raw lumber buildings stood along a single street, still smelling of sawdust. Beyond them, the wheat began, mile upon mile of it, moving under the wind like a live thing. The rails simply stopped here. Tomorrow, the train would turn around, take on water, and carry Lydia Marsh back east.
Eleven children stood up before the gathered families in the church hall that morning. By noon, ten of them had homes.
It went the way placement days went in farm country.
The strong boys were spoken for almost before she finished reading their names.
The two girls went to town families, a milliner and a wheelwright, both households she inspected herself before approving.
One by one, the papers were signed. One by one, the wagons rolled off between the wheat fields, into the shining distance.
By early afternoon, one child remained.
Micah was nine years old and small for it, with brown eyes too big for his face. He sat on the front bench of the emptied hall with his cap in his hands, exactly as she had taught them all to sit. Patient. Hopeful. Not begging.
He had been passed over at four towns now.
Lydia knew why, though it shamed the knowing.
He was slight. Farm families read shoulders the way bankers read ledgers, and his shoulders promised little.
Never mind that he was the gentlest child in her carload.
Never mind that he had held the little ones’ hands through every tunnel because the dark frightened them.
She sat down beside him on the bench.
“There is still the afternoon,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.” He studied his cap. “I been thinking what I done wrong at the other towns. I smiled more here, like you said.”
“You did nothing wrong. You smiled just fine.” Her throat felt oddly tight. “Some seasons folks want big boys for the harvest. It is no truer a measure of you than the weather is.”
“What happens if nobody picks me, Miss Marsh?”
The question every unchosen child arrived at eventually. She gave him the honest answer because he would learn it anyway.
“You would ride back east with me. To the asylum, until another company goes west in the spring.”
Micah said nothing. His hands tightened on the cap until his knuckles paled. She had escorted him out of that asylum herself, five weeks ago. He had wept at the gate, not from fear of leaving. From joy of it.
“It will not come to that,” she said. “The afternoon is young.”
The afternoon aged. The hall stayed empty. Outside, the wind moved the wheat. The light went long and yellow across the floorboards.
To fill the hours, she had Micah read to her from her father’s Bible.
He chose the story of Joseph, sold by his brothers into a far country.
His finger traveled under every word, careful as a surveyor.
She listened to the small, earnest voice fill the empty hall and thought that any family in Kansas would be lucky past deserving.
“Joseph come out all right in the end,” Micah observed when he finished. “Even sold away like that.”
“He did. God kept an eye on him the whole way.”
“Then I guess I got nothing to worry over,” the boy said, and closed the book gently, as though it might bruise.
The farmer came at five o’clock.
He filled the doorway a moment before entering, a tall man gone lean and hard, like a fence post weathered gray. His clothes were decent. His boots were mended. He removed his hat, which was correct, and looked at Micah first, which was not.
Most applicants looked for the agent. This man looked at the boy the way a buyer looks at a horse he has already decided to bid on.
“Heard in town there was a boy left,” he said. “I farm wheat, six miles out. I have need of a boy.”
I have need of a boy. Not, I have room for one. Lydia noted the words the way she noted everything. Something at the base of her skull whispered, cold and clear. She would remember that whisper all her life.
“Your name, sir?”
He gave it, along with his papers. She spread them on the table by the window and went through every line while he stood waiting.
The papers were in order. That was the terrible part.
A deed to a proved-up homestead. A letter from a grain dealer attesting his accounts.
A reference from a minister two counties over, brief but sufficient, stating him to be sober, industrious, and a widower of good repute.
Nothing missing. Nothing false that she could find.
She questioned him for an hour, longer than she had questioned any applicant that year.
Would the boy attend school? In winter, when the work allowed. That was the standard answer in wheat country, and the Society’s own forms permitted it.
Would he attend church? When the roads allowed.
Would the boy have his own bed, proper clothes, a doctor if he sickened? Yes, yes, yes. Flat answers, each one adequate, none of them warm. She kept waiting for him to fail some question. He failed none.
His eyes were the color of flint, and they never once softened when they rested on the child.
“Why do you want a son, sir?” she asked at last.
“A man alone on a claim needs help. The boy will be fed and raised right. He will learn work.” He paused, then added, as though remembering the shape such things ought to take, “It is a Christian thing, taking in an orphan.”
Every word of it was true. Not one word of it was love.
Lydia looked down at her forms. The rulebook lay open in her mind, plain as print.
An applicant of attested character, with means of support, agreeing to the Society’s terms, shall not be refused save for demonstrated cause.
She had no cause she could write in any blank.
A feeling was not a cause. A whisper at the base of the skull was not a cause.
And the train left at eight in the morning.
She told the farmer to return at seven, before the train, for her decision. He put on his hat and went. Through the window, she watched him drive off, sitting his wagon seat straight as a rifle.
That evening, she wired the supervisor in New York. She spent her own coin on it, choosing the words carefully. One applicant remaining boy. Papers adequate. Have doubts. Advise.
The answer came back before the office closed, brisk as a slammed drawer.
Doubts are not grounds. An adequate placement is better than none. The asylum is full. Place the boy.
She sat up late in her boarding house room with the telegram on the table. The lamp hissed. Moths tapped the glass. Somewhere below, a piano played in a saloon, tinny and cheerful, until midnight shut it off.
The choice looked simple, laid out in ledger columns.
On one side, a proved farm, three meals, schooling in winter, papers binding it all.
On the other side, the asylum. She had seen its dormitories.
Iron beds in rows, a hundred to a room. Boys went into that place, and something went out of them, quietly, the way heat leaves a stove.
Against all that, she could set only the flint of a man’s eyes.
Her father would have prayed over it, so she prayed over it.
The prayer kept circling back to the same hard question.
Was her judgment truly warning her? Or was she only a tired woman, three years on the trains, grown too proud of her own readings?
She had been so certain, always, that she did not read the lookers wrong.
Perhaps certainty itself was the sin. The rulebook was built by wiser heads than hers, precisely so that one woman’s feelings could not outweigh a child’s bread.
Toward two in the morning, she decided. She would trust the system. A hundred placements stood in proof of it, against one whisper.
She blew out the lamp. In the dark, she could hear the wheat, even here in town. It moved all night at the edges of everything, dry and endless, a sound like whispering with the words worn off.
Sleep came badly all the same.
At seven, the farmer’s wagon stood outside the church hall. At a quarter past, the papers lay signed on the table, his hand crabbed and hard, hers neat beneath it. It was done in less time than it takes to tell.
Micah wore his cap and carried his bundle, everything he owned in one knotted square of cloth. At the wagon, he turned to look up at her, and his big brown eyes were shining.
“He picked me,” the boy said, wondering at it. “Out of everybody he could have waited for, he picked me.”
“He did.” The words came out level. She was proud of that, later, in the bitter way one is proud of scars.
Micah glanced at the farmer, already up on the seat, then back at her. He lowered his voice to the pitch children use for the questions that matter.
“Is he nice, Miss Marsh? He don’t smile much.”
The whisper rose up in her one last time, cold at the base of her skull. She heard herself climb right over it.
“Farmers out here are quiet men. Quiet is not the same as unkind.” She crouched and straightened his collar one final time, as she had straightened it across half a continent. “I am sure he will be good to you.”
“Then I am sure too,” Micah said. “You never been wrong yet.”
He trusted her completely. That was her doing. Five weeks of combed hair, steadied nerves, and certainty had taught him that Miss Marsh’s word was the floor of the world.
Solemnly, he shook her hand like a little gentleman. His fingers were cold in hers, small as a sparrow. She wanted, suddenly and against every regulation, to keep hold of them. Instead, she let go, because letting go was the whole of her profession.
Then he climbed up the wheel, seated himself beside the farmer, and waved.
The wagon rolled out between the wheat fields.
She stood in the road and watched it go, the way she had watched a hundred wagons.
The wheat closed around it. For a long while, she could follow the dust. Then the wind took that too.
The road stood empty, the land shining clear to the horizon as though nothing had happened on it at all.
At eight, the eastbound train pulled out.
Through the window, the raw little town slid away, then the water tower, then there was only wheat.
It ran beside the train for an hour, green under the morning sun, beautiful past argument.
Somewhere in the middle of all that beauty was a low farmhouse, six miles out, with a small boy learning its rules.
Lydia sat by the window with her ledger on her knees and entered the placement in her even hand.
Micah, aged nine, placed with a wheat farmer, six miles out. Papers complete.
The unease rode with her past the first water stop and the second. It will pass, she told herself. It was only tiredness. Only a spinster’s fancy, overruled by wiser heads. By Omaha, it will pass.
She fell asleep that night to the sway of the car, still telling herself so.
It was the last night of her life that she slept without it.