Authors: Emma Donoghue
Astray (19 page)
He shrugs. “You’re a reb.”
“I am not!” Too loud for the narrow pantry. “I’m as loyal as you like. I never asked to come to this nest of traitors.” Her hands shoot up to cup her ears.
Two feet away, he watches the tears brim along her lashes.
“My father was in the cavalry,” she tells him. “So the rebs confiscated our farm in Pennsylvania, turned us out with only bedding and a plate each. Said my little brother had to stay to join their Patriot Army.” Her voice skids. “Mamma sent us three elder girls off to relations, to be safe. She didn’t know my aunt in Hopewell was a turncoat. And my cousins,” she says, almost spitting, “they treat me like a rag to wipe their fingers on. They grudge me my dinner, won’t lend me so much as a petticoat—”
His heart thumps dully in his chest. “Where are they hiding? Your aunt and cousins?”
Her pupils contract. “I don’t know. A long way away,” she says, without conviction.
“When did they leave?”
She shrugs. Her hands creep up through her hair.
He shocks himself by taking them in his. “Pretty ears. Don’t cover them.”
“You’re making fun.”
He shakes his head fervently. “Beautiful.”
She finds him an apple. A knife to peel it. A slice for him, a slice for her. When he tries to kiss her, she pulls away, but slowly. Should he have asked first? Should he have insisted?
“Tell me where they are, these cousins who treat you so badly,” he says, instead.
“It’s just the elder girl, really.”
“The men—the others in my company—they want women.” He flushes, absurdly.
Her fingertips are pressing her ears to her head again, as if to stop them flying away.
“I must bring some women. You understand? Not you.”
He thought she might weep, but she only looks into her lap. She says something, very low.
“What’s that?”
“In the hayloft,” she says, still whispering.
What he tells Williams and Houghton and Byrne, when he finds them upstairs filling their packs with silver plate, is that he heard voices in the barn. Williams whacks him on the back so hard it hurts. “We’ve got ourselves a good little hunting dog,” he tells the others. “Bosch bloodhounds can’t be beat.”
In the barn, the boy is the last up the ladder. A child wails in the lap of a graying lady; a tall girl shrinks behind her. “Well, well, well,” cries Houghton, rubbing his hands like some villain on a stage.
The aunt straightens up. “If it please you, sir—”
“Oh, you’re going to please me well enough, madam, you’re going to please every one of us.”
Williams whoops at that.
“And anyone who puts up a fuss will get her ears cut off.”
The boy hangs back. Mutters something about going for drink.
“Come, now, for the glory of the regiment,” says Byrne, grabbing him by the elbow. “Fire away! Which d’you fancy—fresh meat or well aged?”
The older lady’s eyes are as gray as his mother’s. He wrenches himself out of Byrne’s grasp, almost falls as he scrambles down the ladder.
The thing seems to go on for hours. He waits at the door of the barn, shivering in his thin red jacket.
That night he’s the butt of the whole barracks. The captain puts his thumb on the boy’s collarbone. “What’s this I hear? Can’t raise the regimental colors for the glory of King George?”
The boy doesn’t know what the right answer is.
“Last chance, Half-Bosch,” announces Houghton. “Tomorrow, the Major’s off to Princeton for three days, so we’re going to bring the tastiest fillies in Hopewell back to the garrison. If you don’t produce some manner of female and show us you know how to put her through her paces …”
“The point is,” says the captain, leaning in, breath fragrant with gin, “are you a girl or a man?” His grip shifts from collarbone to throat. “No two ways about it, Half-Bosch. Man or girl.”
“I had one already,” says the boy, pulling away in a fury of terror. “At the farm. I found her the first day. Much prettiest.”
“Ooh, keeping the best for yourself, you rat!” Byrne cackles and smacks his shoulder. “Well, bring her back tomorrow and show us what you’re made of.”
What he’s made of? It’s not a phrase the boy has heard before; it makes him think of the gingerbread boy, who ran and ran until the fox snapped him up. He wakes before dawn and lies like a corpse. He can’t
feel his feet. He finds himself thinking of his mother’s softly creased hands, setting down a bowl of borscht before him. He shoves the memory away. His mother would not know him. He sees as clear as lightning that he will never go home.
By noon he’s kneeling beside the girl in the pantry, holding on to her hands. He tries not to hear the shouting in the distance.
“They hate me,” she says again.
“How do they know it was—”
“They don’t, they hated me before. But now they hate me because I wasn’t in the hayloft. My aunt’s demented.” Her pupils are huge and dark. “The little one’s not twelve. I never thought—”
“I wasn’t there,” he whispers, eyes down.
Yankee whores, rebel whores.
“She’s been bleeding all night.”
The distant voices are rising. Clarity seizes him. “You come with me now,” he says, jerking his head in the direction of the fields.
“Run away with you? Are you mad? I couldn’t dream of it,” she says, but her face is bright.
She’s misunderstood him, but he sees his chance; he leans in and kisses her. It’s not what he was expecting; lighter, more feathery. “You’re my girl,” he says then in a deep voice.
“I barely know you,” she says.
She’s smiling so widely that he knows he’s won, and something sinks in his chest. “I won’t go without you,” he says.
“But my aunt, my—Where are you going?”
He hesitates. “Who knows?”
“They’ll catch you. Won’t they?”
He manages a shrug. He gets to his feet, not letting go of her hand.
“Let me run upstairs and pack my trunk …”
The boy shakes his head, alarmed at the thought of having to carry such a thing. “No time, little monkey. Just your coat.”
Outside, panting from the hurry, she’s daunted by the icy fields. “Don’t you have anything for me to ride?”
“I’ll lift you over the puddles,” he offers.
The girl laughs. “I can jump them.”
And for a moment, as they set off across the meadow hand in hand like children, he lets himself believe that they are running away. That he is man enough to be a deserter. That there’s anywhere he could take this girl without being tracked down and sent back to Hopewell in chains and hanged in front of his company. That he could bring her all the way home with him to taste his mother’s borscht.
But all the while he knows how it’s going to be. He will lead her into the barracks that must be already filling up with other girls, girls with torn sleeves and bloody noses and scalps, reb girls and loyal, girls whose eyes will tell this girl all she needs to know. When the captain claps and orders Half-Bosch to fire away, this girl will start to scream, and the boy will reach down with frozen fingers and undo his buttons one by one.
The Hunt
Sharon Block’s
Rape and Sexual Power in Early America
(2006) documents the moment in 1776 when British and German troops in New Jersey and Staten Island started systematically attacking the female population. A cavalry commander named Lord Rawdon quipped, “The fair nymphs of this isle are in wonderful tribulation, a girl cannot step into the bushes to pluck a rose without running the most imminent risk of being ravished.” Sixteen girls from Hopewell were held for days on end in a garrison; the rest is my invention.
NEW YORK CITY
1901
I
just now came up from seeing Daddy.
I never walked in here without knocking before. His study is real cold; the back of his big chair is smooth like an icicle. I know every object in this room, but it is as if I have never stepped across the threshold before.
The newspaper folded on the desk says January 18, 1901. I still can’t get used to it, this century I mean. It sounds most improbable.
Doctor Gallagher said he would have to show me if I couldn’t take his word for it. But I’ve never seen Daddy without his necktie, even. I guess I always thought he was a modest kind of man. So when it came to it, today, I just couldn’t bear to lift the sheet that went up to his chin.
Daddy’s face looked kind of peeved, like when Momma was alive and dinner went on too long and I could tell he wanted to stroll down to the saloon on Seventh and smoke a great black cigar.
He looked the same last Saturday, the last time I saw him—only he seemed clammy, then, somehow. Was it the pain? It strikes me now, he must have known; he must have felt it coming. Nobody ever could pull the wool over Daddy’s
eyes. He called me in—he was sitting right here in this chair—and he told me to go stay with my friends in Brooklyn for a week. No reason given, no questions to be asked. No, I wasn’t to call home on the telephone; he didn’t want to be disturbed. “Get on, girl.” I thought it must of had something to do with politics.
I reckon we ought to bury him right away. Before the reporters burst in and get a look at him.
Why couldn’t Doctor Gallagher have kept his big mouth shut and let a man rest in peace? I don’t see that the public’s got a right to know. There was a fellow from the
New York Times
on the stairs five minutes ago, hollering though the keyhole. “Miss Hall, Miss Hall. Could you tell? How long have you known? Are you in the dimes now, Miss Hall? Is it true you’ve netted a cool million?”
All today I have kept a good hold on myself, because I am known to my friends as the sort of girl you can rely on, but now it is all starting to shake loose. My mind runs round in little circles. I feel banished from my old life.
My name is Miss Imelda Hall, known as Minnie. I am twenty-two years of age. I help—used to help—my daddy, Mr. Murray Hall, run an employment agency at 145 Sixth Avenue. My daddy was an important man in New York, a pillar of the Democratic Party.
All in all, I am glad I didn’t lift the sheet. There are some things you shouldn’t look at, because what are you supposed to do afterwards? Like that thing I saw once in a trash can behind the market, I believe it was a baby.
Oh, my good Jesus.
If Daddy was here now, he’d give Bridget a smack around the head for letting the fire go out.
He left his hat on his desk. Inside it’s black with grease.
Why, what a fool I was, we all were. Daddy’s friends used to complain that all the years they were going bald as taters, he never lost a hair off his head. And another thing, his face is always smooth, as if he’s come up directly from the barber’s, even when I know for a fact he’s only just got out of bed.
I should have wondered about that, shouldn’t I? But a girl’s not inclined to set to wondering, when it’s her own daddy and he doesn’t care for being stared at. And he never seemed like anything but your regular poker-playing whiskey-drinking good fellow. Not exactly handsome, but a real charmer with the ladies.
It turns my stomach.
How could Momma? How could she? Unless she didn’t know. Could that be true? Could you be married to someone without the slightest idea who they were? And what about all his other girls, don’t tell me none of them knew. I can’t decide who’s the real deviant.
I am sitting here in Daddy’s study at Daddy’s desk in Daddy’s big leather chair, and any minute now he is going to walk in here and catch me.
I know what he would rather I did. “Put a match to the whole damn lot,” he’d say; “no use rooting around in a dead man’s papers.”
But the thing is, Daddy, I’m a little curious. And this is not your private study anymore. You’re not really going to come
across the landing and find me poking about, are you? I can do what I please now. The thing is, quite above and beyond the thing itself, this changes everything. For instance, if Daddy’s not my daddy, who is? I just can’t see a fine upstanding woman like Momma carrying on with another … with a man. Did he tell her, “Go right ahead, Cecilia, don’t mind me”? I just cannot see Daddy putting up with that kind of malarkey.
I’m counting on him to have left something, some kind of clue. Surely it would be here if it was anywhere, wedged in one of these bursting drawers or pigeonholes, slipped in between these old campaign handbills and Democratic Party meeting notices and postal cards to “good old Murray Hall.”
Something you never got around to mentioning, something you always wanted to say. You and Momma did plan to tell me, didn’t you? I expect you just didn’t quite know how to broach it. Surely you didn’t reckon to let me go my whole life through, not knowing who in the heck I am?
This must be it. I knew it would be here. So simple, a folded paper with “Minnie” on the outside: I can hardly bear to open it.
“Gone to hustings, home late, don’t wait dinner.”
Damn him. His notes were never more than ten words long.
This desk is full of the junk of a whole lifetime. My stomach is growling now. I’m dizzy, adrift, lost in a sea of old papers. But what I’m looking for must be in here somewhere.
He always said I had Momma’s eyes and his nose. The senator used to say, “Isn’t she the dead spit of her daddy?”
I must have been adopted.
Now I am making a right mess and papers are falling on the rug but I don’t care. It has got to be written down, surely. Where I was born, how they got me. There must be a letter or a certificate or a photograph, even. Something with my name on.
Could be my name is not my name, of course. It could be staring me blue in the face and I’d never recognize it. Could be I had another name before they adopted me and turned me into Miss Imelda (Minnie) Hall. Maybe I am not an Imelda but a Priscilla or an Agnes. And of course I am not a Hall either. God knows what I am. A stray, a foreigner? Come to think of it, I’ve got no proof I’m twenty-two years old. Could be it’s all lies.
I am not rightly anyone or anything now. Just like a bit of orange peel floating down the gutter.