Chapter 3
The river came into sight in the middle of the morning, and the children crowded the windows to look at it.
None of them had ever seen such a river. It lay across the whole country like something spilled, brown and slow, with the sun beating dull sparks off the water. A steamboat was working upstream, smoke standing off her stacks in two black ropes.
“The Missouri,” said the agent, passing down the aisle. “Wash your faces now. Comb where a comb will go. We stop at the next landing.”
A stillness went through the car.
Every child aboard knew by now what a stop meant.
There had been four already, four platforms in four towns, and each time the car had come away emptier.
There were rules to it, learned the hard way and whispered bench to bench.
Stand straight. Speak when spoken to. Smile if you can manage it, for the sour-faced ones are passed over, and passed over is worse.
Nobody could ever say which was worse in his heart, being taken or being left.
Nora did not go to the window to see the river. She stayed where she was, pressed against the boy’s side, both hands wrapped around his arm. All night she had slept that way, and she had no intention in this world of letting go.
“Maybe it’s a small town,” she whispered. “Maybe nobody will want anybody.”
The boy looked down at her. All morning he had been quiet, quieter even than usual, and what was in his face, she was too young to read. He had seen the fine warm houses on the bluff above the river, and he could count.
Towns along a river are fat towns. Fat towns want children.
“Listen,” he said. “Whatever happens down there, you remember what’s yours. Say it back to me.”
“My name is Nora,” she said. It had become a lesson between them. “Whatever they call me, I was Nora first.”
“And?”
“And you’ll come find me. Wherever they put me.”
“And?”
“I wait, I stay alive, and I hear the end of the story.” Her voice cracked in the middle of it, but she got it said.
“That’s it. That’s the whole of it.” He put his hand over both of hers, where they gripped his arm.
“Don’t you cry now, when we’re stood out there. Cry tonight if you have to. Not out there. You cry, so they think you’re sickly, so they pass you over, so you go back in the car. And the car runs out, Nora. Away down the line somewhere, the car runs out.”
She only nodded and held on tighter, watching the river come up bigger through the glass.
The train began to slow.
The landing was bright and windy. River smell lay over everything: mud, fish, tar, all mixed.
Beyond the platform a town climbed the bluff, white houses among green trees, a church spire, brick buildings shining in the sun.
Wagons stood in a row with their teams switching flies.
People were already gathering, dozens of them come to see the orphan train the handbills had promised.
“Down now. Form your lines. Little ones in front.”
The agent’s voice was not unkind. It was only tired, and it moved them along the platform the way a current moves driftwood. Twenty-two children left, in two rows, blinking in the light off the water.
Nora stood in the front row, and the boy stood directly behind her. His hand was on her shoulder.
The people of the town came along the rows slowly.
Up close they were terrifying in the ordinary way of strangers, big faces bending down, smelling of soap and horses.
Hands turned a boy’s chin to the light. A woman in gray asked a girl of ten whether she knew her letters.
The girl said them straight through in a shaking voice, all twenty-six, like a prayer.
“Fine healthy children,” the agent was saying, over and over. “City stock, but sound. Raised Christian, every one.”
Nora fixed her eyes on the boards of the platform and did as she had been told. She did not cry. Not when a fat man looked her over and moved on. Not when two sisters from the car went to two different wagons, and the whole platform pretended not to hear what that sounded like.
She was watching a knothole in the boards, minding her half of the bargain, when the shadow fell over her.
“Well now. Here’s a little rosebud.”
The woman was tall, with kind eyes and a great many buttons.
The man beside her held his hat in his hands and had the settled look of a man whose fields are paid for.
They were not old, nor young. The woman crouched down to Nora’s height, which no other grown person on the platform had troubled to do.
“What’s your name, child?”
“Nora, ma’am.” She said it clear, the way it deserved saying.
“Nora.” The woman looked up at her husband, and something passed between them, some old private ache that Nora was too small to read. “We had a girl once ourselves. The Lord took her back before she was two.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“Well,” the woman said. Her eyes had filled, and she laughed at herself, dabbing them. “Listen to her. Pretty manners and all.”
The man spoke for the first time. “Would you like a home, Nora? A proper one. We’re Camden Bluff people, just up the hill there. There’s a room does nothing but stand empty, and a swing in the yard my brother hung that nobody swings on. It’s a lonesome kind of house we keep. We’d be glad of you.”
They were kind. That was the terrible part, Nora thought, years later. If they had been cruel she could have hated them, and hating is easier. They were kind, and they had room for only one child.
“Please, sir,” she said, very small. “There’s a boy.”
“A boy?”
“He’s mine. My... he looks after me. He’s just there.” She turned, and the boy’s hand tightened on her shoulder. “He’s strong, and he doesn’t eat much at all...”
The man was already shaking his head, gentle and final, the way men shake their heads at weather.
“We asked for a little girl,” he said. “One child is what we can do right by. A grown lad of twelve needs land to work, and mine’s all worked. I’m sorry, son. Truly.”
“Take her,” the boy said.
Nora’s head came round. The boy was not looking at her. He was looking at the man, eye to eye, and his voice was steady in the way she knew cost him.
“She cries at night the first while,” he said. “You leave a lamp lit, she does better. She likes stories. She’s smarter than she looks and braver than anybody. Take her, be good to her, and there’s no trouble in her at all.”
“You talk like her brother,” the woman said softly.
“I’m what she has.”
What happened next happened quickly, the way the worst of life does. There were papers to sign at a table, with the agent’s pen scratching. The woman asked Nora to say goodbye quick, like a good girl, for the wagon was waiting on the road home.
Nora did not say goodbye. She took hold of the boy’s hand with both of hers, locked her fingers, and would not let go.
She heard the grown voices go back and forth above her, patient, then less patient. Come along now, child. Come along. In the end the agent knelt and worked her fingers loose one at a time. He kept saying gently that she was a lucky girl, such a lucky girl.
“Nora,” the boy said.
His voice cut through it all, low as ever. Her eyes found his face and held there while her grip was pried away finger by finger.
“Mind your half,” he said. “That’s all. Mind your half, so I’ll mind mine.”
Then the woman’s arms were around her, lifting, and the platform was moving past. Over a blue shoulder full of buttons, Nora watched the boy grow smaller among the children nobody had picked.
She was carried to the table where the papers lay. The woman held her on her lap, rocking her a little without knowing she did it, while the men finished the signing.
“There’s just the matter of the name,” the woman said. “Nora.”
The pen stopped.
“It’s a sweet name, I know. Only my mother was Nora, you see, and she was hard to us all her days, God rest her. I couldn’t be calling it across a yard the rest of my life, that’s the plain truth.”
The woman turned Nora on her knee, looking into her face with real tenderness. “We thought Ada. For the little one we lost. Ada’s a fine name, isn’t it? Short and sweet. Could you be our Ada, do you think?”
Nora looked at her.
She was six years old, worn out, a hundred miles past the last thing she knew. She understood, in the wordless way of children, that this question was not really a question. It had already been answered at the table, in ink.
“Yes, ma’am,” said the girl who was Nora.
It was then, over the woman’s shoulder, that she saw the farmer take the boy.
He was a big man in a hat gone dark with old sweat. He had come late, and he did not crouch down to anybody. She watched him walk the line of leftover children like a man buying a horse. At the boy he stopped, felt his arm, looked at his teeth. Papers were signed at the table.
“That one’s bound for out past the county line,” somebody said. “Long ride.”
The boy went where he was steered, his eyes going back and forth across the crowd all the while and looking for her. Nora squirmed round on the woman’s lap and threw up her hand, high as it would go.
He found her.
Across the whole crowded landing, over the heads of strangers, the boy looked at her.
It was the look from that first night, when he broke his bread in half.
The farmer’s hand was on his collar, steering him at a wagon.
He dug in his heels, twisted half round, and shouted.
The wind off the river took some of the words, but not all of them. Not the ones that mattered.
He would find her. Remember the story. Stay alive, wait, and hear the end.
The farmer jerked his collar so hard his cap fell. The crowd shifted, and the wagons came between. Just like that, the landing was only a landing again. Nora stared until her eyes burned at the place where he had been. Strangers’ backs. A mule team. The bright and empty day.
He was gone.
That night she lay in a clean bed in a white room, in a nightgown that smelled of cedar, with a lamp left burning low. An hour the woman had sat with her, stroking her hair, calling her our Ada, our blessing. The new name sat on her like a shoe not yet broken in.
The house was kind. It would go on being kind for twenty years.
When the door was shut and the footsteps gone, the girl slid down deep under the quilt, where the dark was her own. She did not rightly know what she was doing. She only gathered up what she had left of him, holding it close. A name that was hers, a promise that was his, a story with no end yet.
The end would come to find her. He had said so.
She fell asleep holding that thought, six years old, her fists shut tight around nothing anyone could see. Away north, on a dark road into another county, a boy in a jolting wagon watched the river light fade. He began learning how to wait.
Twenty years would pass before either of them heard the other’s name again.