Villainous

Special thanks to my editor, Michele Burke, who shepherded this book through its ups and downs with her usual panache. Thanks to Karen Greenberg, Stephen Brown, and Nancy Hinkel for their wonderful insights and extraordinary patience. Thank you to my tireless agent and friend, Kate Schafer Testerman.

And, of course, thanks to Alisha and Willem for just about everything.

He didn’t want to come out, but he knew he couldn’t stay in there all day. Eileen always said that when he locked himself in, he was only making it worse—giving the other children another reason to make fun of him. And it was hot and it stank, but then outhouses were supposed to stink.

Herman bit his lip as someone knocked at the door. He’d locked the latch but what if it was Bill Tyler? That boy told everyone about how he used to break into homes back in Philadelphia. He even claimed to have picked the lock on Brother Francis’s door once, though Herman suspected that story was just bragging.

“Herman?” called a girl’s voice from the other side of the door. “You okay in there?”

Herman breathed a sigh of relief—not a pleasant thing to do considering the generally poor quality of the air in there. It was only Eileen.

“I’m okay,” answered Herman.

“You gonna be much longer?” she asked. “I gotta go.”

“There’s more than one outhouse,” said Herman. Eileen knew that. She was just trying to get Herman to come out without saying she wanted him to come out.

Silence. Herman started to worry that she’d gone, that she’d gotten so frustrated with him this time that she’d finally given up. She wouldn’t have been the first.

“Eileen?” he whispered against the slats of the door.

“Herman, why don’t you just come out?”

She was still there. That was good, though he still wasn’t about to come out.

“So this is where you been hiding,” said Eileen. “You could at least find someplace that isn’t so darn smelly.”

He still didn’t say anything.

“Herman, that was supposed to be a joke.”

“I know what jokes are.”

“Then you know it’s polite to laugh when someone makes one, even if it’s not very funny.”

“Ha-ha,” said Herman.

“Thank you,” answered Eileen. “Now will you please open the door and tell me what happened?”

“It was that Jake Talbot,” said Herman. “He’s a bully.”

“I heard you two had trouble.”

“He chased me through the yard with a hickory switch. Everyone laughed.”

Another silence.

“Herman, some of the other children are saying that you started it. They’re saying that you put cayenne powder in his porridge.”

“I didn’t!”

“Well, somebody did. I saw the blisters on his tongue.”

“It wasn’t me,” said Herman. “Swear it wasn’t.”

Eileen didn’t answer right away, and Herman wondered what was going on in her head. Did she believe him? Lying came easily; it was something he did well. Maybe the only thing. The trick, he’d discovered, was that to make other people believe you, you had to believe in the lie yourself. If you could fool yourself, you could fool anybody, and at that moment Herman willed himself to believe that he hadn’t snatched a bag of cayenne powder from Brother Leo’s herb cabinet and poured at least half of it into Jake Talbot’s morning porridge. And he willed himself to believe that he hadn’t done all this because he’d seen Jake Talbot and Eileen holding hands last night after supper.

As he often did when things got bad, Herman found himself a lie that was better than the truth.

“Okay, then, Herman,” said Eileen. “If you swear you didn’t do it, I believe you. And I’ll tell Jake Talbot that it wasn’t you and to leave you alone. If he doesn’t, he’ll answer to me.”

Herman grinned as he undid the latch on the outhouse door. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the glare of daylight. Standing there with the sun silhouetted around her like a halo, Eileen looked as bright as the sun herself.

He stared at her until he had spots in his eyes.

“You know you got to stand up for yourself,” said Eileen. “If you didn’t do it, then you should’ve stood your ground and told Jake that. I can’t keep dragging you out of these fixes, Herman. I can’t be your hero forever.”

“I’ll be your hero someday,” said Herman. “Someday I’ll save you.”

Eileen smiled and they walked together back to the orphanage. A few of the monks had gathered near the front to look over the wares of a passing trapper. His was a familiar face around St. Alban’s, a dirty fellow with an unkempt beard and patched-up clothes. From what Herman could tell, the trapper spent more time trying to convince the monks to buy knickknacks than actually doing any trapping. He always had a pouch of trinkets that he’d scrounged from who-knew-where, and occasionally the monks would find something in the pouch for the younger orphans to play with. Today he was trying to interest them in a ragged doll with hair the color of straw. One of her button eyes dangled precariously by a thread.

As Eileen led Herman past, the trapper smiled, tipped his coonskin hat at Eileen, and winked at Herman.

Johnny. That was his name. Johnny.

The inside of St. Alban’s was arranged around a central cloister, the courtyard where most of the orphans carried out chores during the day. The children slept in the bunkhouse, divided into a room for the boys and a room for the girls. They took their meals together with the monks in the frater. There were nine of them right now. Nine unwanted children from all parts.

St. Alban’s hadn’t begun as an orphanage. The little monastery had been built in the wilds of the mountainside to escape the distracting trappings of civilization, even such meager trappings as could be found in the nearby town. But over the years, as more and more wayward children began appearing in the area—the sons and daughters of migrant workers too poor to feed them, or street children from Pittsburgh or Philadelphia who’d hopped a freight train but hadn’t gotten very far—those lost children would eventually find their way to St. Alban’s doorstep.

Right now five of the nine were gathered in the cloister looking at Jake Talbot’s ruined mouth. Brother Leo was dabbing a wet cloth on Jake’s blistered tongue and making concerned clucking noises.

Eileen guided Herman close enough that he could get a good look. Older than Herman by just a year, she already stood a good half a foot taller than the small boy. For several minutes, Eileen didn’t move and she didn’t let Herman walk away. She stood there with her hands on Herman’s shoulders as the two of them watched Brother Leo tend to Jake.
Herman didn’t know why they were watching this, as he’d successfully willed it that he hadn’t had anything to do with it, but if Eileen wanted him to watch for some strange reason, then he was happy to do so as long as she kept her hands on his shoulders. She was gentle and Herman liked that.

People weren’t gentle with Herman much. His mother might have been once, though Herman couldn’t remember her very well. And the monks said that he had a brother somewhere although he couldn’t remember him either. But Herman knew this: that real families were gentle with one another. They held each other, traded kisses and hugs. That made Eileen his family, the only family he knew.

She was his family, not Jake Talbot’s.

Eventually, Eileen let her hands slide away, and with a pat on his head, she wandered off to collect the day’s laundry for the evening wash. Herman drifted back toward the frater and the kitchen, ignoring the queasy knot of guilt that had tied itself up in his stomach. Maybe he could find something to take his mind off it. If Brother Leo was tending to Jake, maybe he wasn’t keeping an eye on his herb cabinet.…

At dinner Eileen didn’t sit with Herman, though he was pleased to see she didn’t sit with Jake either. After Brother Francis said grace, the children dug into their meals, all except Jake. He was miserably sucking on a rag that he kept re-wetting with cool water from the pitcher.

After dinner the orphans marched single file across the cloister to the bunkhouse. The night was crisp and the stars
shone brightly overhead. Herman saw Brother Francis and Brother Leo standing outside and pointing to a different spot of sky in the east. Herman squinted at it, and at first thought his eyes were fooling him because it looked like the sun was already rising. Only instead of being lit with a warm red glow, the horizon was a ghostly, shimmering green. He’d never seen anything like it. Herman wanted to stop and watch, but he was herded along with the other children indoors to their beds.