Power in the Blood

  “Don’t you listen to what she says,” Clay told him. “She doesn’t know a goddamn thing, that lady.”

  “She said …” Drew wiped more snot onto himself. “She said for you to go see her too, Zoe.”

  “Well, I won’t! I don’t have to!”

  “She said. You’ll get in trouble.”

  “She’ll only come and get you,” advised Clay. “Go and listen and nod your head, then she’ll leave us alone.”

  “I’m not going near her. I won’t.”

  She went anyway, and returned with a face like wood. The boys waited, but Zoe wouldn’t speak. Mr. Canby came back from the platform then, and Clay wondered how he’d known exactly when to do so. Probably he’d been watching through the rear door window, like a sneaking spy. Clay was suddenly bitter; the man had disappointed him badly, letting Mrs. Canby do what she’d done to Zoe and Drew.

  There were forces conspiring to separate them, Clay saw it now, and in the deepest part of himself—the part that recognized truth without pressing it through the filter of emotion—he knew that the plans being made by the Canbys would succeed, and the Dugans’ defiant scheme would stand no chance, as Mr. Canby had foretold last night on the platform. Any hope of staying together had vanished right there, been borne away on the night wind. The Dugans were wishing wishes, dreaming dreams, but the physical world would tear these apart.

  Staring out the window again, ignoring Zoe as a punishment for her silence, Clay drove all thought from his mind. To think, to use the brain, was an act that somehow had no effect on what was bound to happen. There existed an inner world, one without actual substance, and over it there towered the outer world, consisting of everything that was not Clay himself. Both places, the small and the large, seemed to exist independently of each other, but it was clear the physical world, the one you could touch and see and hear things in, was more powerful. People like the Canbys ran that place, and people like himself and Zoe and Drew were no match for them, probably because adults had been in the place too long, and knew exactly how it worked. Of course, Mama had been an adult, but it seemed she had never learned the secret of manipulating the real world to her advantage; maybe Mama had been flawed in some way. The helplessness of the young was cruel, unfair, but there was no getting around it, and Clay saw for the first time just why it was that orphans were the weakest of the weak: they had no grown-up person to protect them and steer them gradually into the real place where strength and power lay.

  Clay realized he had experienced a revelation of a kind, but it didn’t make him feel any better. It was the lowly wisdom of the clam, the learning of rocks and stones that had been revealed, and he was not at all sure it should be valued.

  Halfway across Indiana, in a river town, Zoe surrendered. She took Clay aside and told him, “Someone has to be first. It can’t be Drew, he’s too young, and it won’t be you because you’re too stubborn, so it has to be me. That’s them over there, the ones next to the wagon. They seem like nice people. I have to go with them, or with someone. You and Drew have to as well. Remember the name of this place, and the place Drew gets picked in, because he’ll be next, and someday you have to come back for us.”

  “You don’t have to go with them! You don’t.…”

  “I do. Mrs. Canby said if we didn’t let ourselves get picked, we’d just be left in the middle of nowhere, and we’d starve right there.”

  “She’s a liar! They wouldn’t do that. Mr. Canby wouldn’t let her.”

  “She told me he would. We have to be made examples of, she said. I hate her. I want to get off the train. I can’t look at her anymore.”

  Clay felt his anger slide into despair. Zoe would do it, he could tell. He was no longer in charge, eldest or not. Zoe had done the thing that should have been up to Clay; she’d made a decision, a choice, and had proved herself stronger than him. He was ashamed.

  They went to find Drew, who had drifted from Clay’s side. When he was found, Clay stood back and said nothing as his sister talked to and comforted and hugged the boy. Drew was still crying as Zoe announced her choice to the Canbys, then left the station yard with the man and woman who wanted her, perched between them on their high wagon seat.

  Clay felt a humming inside his head. The main street of Wister’s Landing became leached of color and substance. Clay had to sit down on the plank sidewalk, from which position it was easy to hang his head and weep more tears than he had shed even for his mother.

  “Why’d she do it?” Drew sobbed.

  “She told you, didn’t she? We all have to. There’s no other way—now quit making so much noise!”

  In Illinois Clay tried offering himself along with Drew in several towns, hoping against hope there was a significant difference between three and two, but there was not, and so he told Drew to stand away from him at the next town, and to come tell him if some people he liked the look of offered him a home. Drew didn’t want to, but Clay told him all over again why it had to be that way, and finally Drew agreed.

  Separated from his brother at the next stop, Drew, with his look of disconsolation and loss, held such appeal he became surrounded within minutes. He came to Clay for approval of what he perceived as the nicest people. To Clay they were indistinguishable from the rest of the child-seekers he’d seen, but he told Drew he had chosen wisely, then went to inform Mr. Canby, having waited until his wife was elsewhere.

  “Good,” said Mr. Canby, and strolled over to talk briefly with the couple.

  Clay took Drew aside. “Listen,” he said, “I’ll come back here as soon as I can to get you, then we’ll go back and fetch Zoe, too, and be together again, all right?”

  Drew nodded. It didn’t sound like anything that might really happen, but he appreciated Clay’s saying it. Then he began crying. Clay had to guide Drew over to the people he had selected.

  “He’s my brother,” he explained.

  “We’ll look after him,” said the woman.

  “Depend on it,” her husband added.

  Clay watched another wagon take a part of himself away.

  Mr. Canby knew very well what Clayton Dugan was up to. The number of orphans had been reduced to seven, not enough to warrant the hiring of an entire car for themselves, so they occupied several seats along with regular passengers. Then six of those seven also found homes. One had been selected by a woman riding the train.

  That left Clay, and Clay didn’t want to be chosen by anyone. He made that clear when they stopped at the first big town across the Missouri line. At least a dozen couples were on hand to claim the last orphan, but the boy was pretending he found them unacceptable. He refused them all, politely but pointedly, looking at the Canbys while he did it, letting them know his performance of rejection was for their benefit.

  Mr. Canby didn’t like that at all, even found himself beginning to dislike the boy. He knew what Clay planned—a fruitless continuation of the journey west, just himself and the Canbys, and at every town he would find the people wanting him unsuitable. The Society couldn’t afford any wasteful extension of the trip, not so much as an extra mile beyond what was required.

  The gathering of prospective foster parents was in confusion, each couple believing itself in competition with the rest for the boy in their midst. None of them found his murmured regrets convincing, and so thought he simply couldn’t make up his mind, probably because the poor lad was unused to being the center of attention.

  “Folks,” Mr. Canby announced, holding up his arm, “our young friend here is having a hard time picking out a ma and pa from among so many that’s suited for it, so I’ll just be talking to him for a minute alone, if you don’t mind. Thank you kindly, one and all.”

  He beckoned Clay to him. “Now you listen,” he said, his voice low. “I’ll just say it once. I know your plan, and it won’t happen like you want it to, because I don’t aim to let it happen that way, see? You get back there among those good people and you pick someone, I don’t care who, it’s your choice, but you
make it right quick or by God I’ll wring your scrawny neck. You understand me, boy?”

  “Yes …”

  “Go do what I said. I’ll be watching. I was you, I’d take the feller with the shaved face and his wife, she’s wearing blue. They look like righteous folk to me, but like I say, it’s up to you. Don’t be making fools of good people that’s suffered enough already from their loss. You’re no better than any of them here, and that’s a fact. Now go.”

  Clay wandered hopelessly back among the smiling faces. He’d intended making the Canbys take him still further west, then he’d jump from the train one night and make his own way to the Mississippi and get work on the riverboats. He knew now it wouldn’t happen. Mr. Canby had outsmarted him.

  It seemed easiest, considering his inner turmoil, to take the advice of the man who had proved himself smarter, and go with the couple suggested. Their look of surprise and relief as he approached them was pitiful.

  Clay gave them a lopsided grimace and was embraced.

  4

  He usually tried to surprise her in the barn, while she gathered eggs hidden there by the hens. The eggs were always in the same place, and so was Hassenplug. “Got ’em all?” he’d say, and Zoe would nod, the basket held between herself and her foster father. Both knew that broken eggs would be questioned by Mrs. Hassenplug, so the basket was Zoe’s only defense.

  It had started when her breasts came. They were not particularly evident beneath her blouse, but they were there, and Hassenplug’s interest in her had escalated overnight, it seemed. First he’d pressed his hands over them in so casual a fashion Zoe thought it natural. “They have to be kept warm to grow,” he’d said, massaging the shallow mounds. This made sense to Zoe, who had often placed her own hands over her developing breasts in exactly the same way whenever they were sore, but Hassenplug’s smile alerted her to the incident’s unnatural overtones. After that first time, she backed away whenever his hands reached for her. It happened only when his wife was nowhere around; this made Zoe aware that her breasts (and presumably the monthly bleeding that had accompanied their arrival) had not only changed her, they had altered Hassenplug beyond all understanding.

  As a farm girl, Zoe knew that male creatures were equipped with a rod of flesh for the penetration of female creatures, and the principle applied also to humans. Until now, she had assumed the difference between animals and people lay in the state of matrimony that existed only in the latter, but Hassenplug was married to Mrs. Hassenplug, not to Zoe, so why did he want her to lift her skirts for him every time she gathered eggs? Wasn’t he able to lift Mrs. Hassenplug’s skirts? It was mystifying, and she hated going to the barn, previously one of her more enjoyable chores. Her father had spoiled the quiet business of egg gathering for Zoe, and it was for this, as well as the confusion his actions aroused in her, that she began to resent his existence.

  Zoe liked her mother well enough, although Mrs. Hassenplug had never paid much attention to her new daughter-beyond teaching her those things that needed to be taught—needlework; cooking; putting up preserves; yardwork; cleaning house, and so forth. It was Zoe’s impression that Mrs. Hassenplug wanted a boy, if only to please her husband, but had accepted her foster daughter as a useful substitute.

  “He’s still wanting a boy to pass the place on to,” her mother told Zoe. “Still trying, he is,” she lamented. It was some time before Zoe realized that Hassenplug’s “trying” meant mounting Mrs. Hassenplug and penetrating her private parts with his rod of flesh. Zoe knew that a son was considered superior to a daughter, in that property could be passed along down the male line, whereas a daughter was simply a burden to be employed domestically, until such time as she could be married off to some young man who wished to use her for the purpose of siring a son to whom he could pass along his property. It was the cycle of human affairs, as such things were understood in Indiana.

  Zoe’s breasts had placed her already precarious position within the household in jeopardy. She knew her mother would not approve of Hassenplug’s gropings in the barn, since Zoe wasn’t married to him. What if someday he should actually force her to lift her skirts, and she had a son! Would she then be considered married to her father in the same way that Mrs. Hassenplug was, in the manner of the Mormons? It seemed an unlikely arrangement this far from Utah, and anyway, the Hassenplugs were Presbyterians, even if they never attended church meetings. Having the son for Hassenplug that his wife seemed unable to provide would not result in any new arrangement of benefit to Zoe, that much was obvious, and so she held the egg-laden basket before her like an armored breastplate, to ward off the man beneath whose roof she lived.

  In the first year, she had waited for Clay to ride up the road to the farm. He would be mounted on a fine pony, and carrying a pistol. She would know him even from a distance, because he was her brother. When he was close enough, he would smile and say, “Sorry I took so long. Pack your things; we have to go fetch Drew now.”

  The dream sustained her well into the second year, then died. No one came riding up the road but an occasional neighbor. Hassenplug never took his wife or Zoe to town, just twelve miles away. “You want something, you tell me and I’ll get it,” he said. He hadn’t considered buying a dress that fit Zoe properly until his wife mentioned how foolish the girl looked in clothing too small for her. When two new dresses of the least expensive kind finally were brought home, they were several sizes too big. “She can grow into ’em gradual,” explained Hassenplug, “so we don’t get no more of this whining about clothes that’s too small. Using the brain, see?” He tapped the side of his narrow head and grinned. Zoe tried on the dresses and wept. He had done it deliberately, to humiliate her, and she couldn’t guess why.

  By the time the new dresses fit, she no longer thought of rescue by Clay, scarcely thought of him at all, except in dreams of Schenectady. And when the dresses that were too large eventually became tight across her expanding chest, her father’s disposition changed so abruptly she was caught by surprise—in the barn, with the eggs.

  He tried bribery when direct requests for the lifting of her skirts were ignored. Dresses seemed an appropriate commodity for barter. “Just a little piece of loving” was all he wanted in exchange for stitched cloth. Zoe could choose the pattern, the style, even try the dress on beforehand to make sure it was exactly right for her. He would take her to town for a fitting.

  “You take me there,” she said, “and I’ll think about it.”

  Her nerve amazed Zoe, flabbergasted Hassenplug. His little orphan girl was turning into a wily vixen. He laughed and said he’d do the thinking. For a week he gave no sign, then offered her a ride to Wister’s Landing with him on the monthly trip for supplies.

  Mrs. Hassenplug was outraged. “Why her and not me!” she demanded. Her husband thought about it, then smacked her once across the face with force enough to send her reeling into the kitchen corner. “Because I say so,” he said.

  The trip to town was still three days distant, but the slap that preceded it spelled the end of the casual relationship between Zoe and her foster mother. Mrs. Hassenplug, long since reconciled to being the mate of a churl, would have accepted the slap (it was not the first) if the reason for it had not been Zoe. Her man intended carrying this young female in his wagon a distance of twelve miles to town, and another twelve miles home again, just so she could get a dress that fit right. That privilege hadn’t been granted Mrs. Hassenplug since the early years of the marriage, in fact she suspected her husband enjoyed the time spent away from her, actually experienced greater happiness in her absence. Mrs. Hassenplug remembered very well the things she’d been required to do back then in exchange for a trip to town, so it was natural for her to assume the same quid pro quo applied to Zoe.

  Hassenplug’s wife had endured much in pursuit of male progeny. Hassenplug had forced himself on her times beyond number for just that purpose, and she had no choice but to submit, that being her duty; the cornerstone of any marriage was the trans
fer of property to a son. But her suspicions had been nudged when Hassenplug chose from among the orphan train offerings of 1869 a girl instead of a boy. She had seen him approach several boys, it was true, but these had panicked when he described for them his need of a strong back and willing hands to work the finest little farm in the county. They’d be city boys, his wife warned him, but he insisted on presenting himself as some kind of slave driver, and every boy had shaken his head.

  Then he’d gone to the girl, an unremarkable female to be sure, but at least she’d be able to assist his wife. Mrs. Hassenplug had thought her husband was being generous at the time, getting her someone to help out around the house. Four years later, she saw that the unremarkable female had been an investment, not a gift. It was a grievous insult. No woman who had endured as she had should have to fight against something as ubiquitous, as callow, as younger flesh. Mrs. Hassenplug had attempted to halt the course of events by protest and been slapped silly for her trouble. Now what would happen would happen. Mrs. Hassenplug hadn’t been driven to church since her wedding day, but she knew the situation was in God’s hands. No one could have greater need of His help than herself.

  The day of the trip to town dawned fair and warm. Zoe had not heard a civil word from the lips of her mother since Hassenplug announced he would take her with him in the wagon. Zoe was afraid, and already ashamed; she had encouraged the man by saying she would think about his offer, and now that he had followed through with an invitation to town that didn’t even include the presence of his wife, Zoe felt she’d stepped off a cliff, and in so doing made an enemy of the woman who’d been reasonably good to her for a long time.

  She considered reneging on the arrangement, simply staying home, but that option smacked of weakness. Only fourteen, she had a quotient of the Dugan blood that had been strong enough to survive desertion and poverty (Nettie’s blood, that was, not the craven stuff that flowed in the veins of Zoe’s true father, the coward who’d left them nothing but his name). No, she’d go to town and choose a dress, and the devil take what happened. She was careful, though, to slip a small paring knife into her sleeve before joining Hassenplug on the wagon seat.