Far From Home (19 page)
Clarissa knew that Treffie had been in the isolation room on the third floor of the orphanage all by herself for a long time. She had sneaked in once to see her. Treffie had turned her thin, white face. In a pitiful, weak voice she gasped, “The coughs come quick, Clarissa. You better leave before you gets a rattle on yer chest.”
Clarissa had tried to comfort the little girl. “You'll soon be a soul with wings that will take you to your mother and father.”
Treffie's dull eyes lightened. Then they closed. The only sound in the room was Clarissa's crutches, thumping across the floor as she left her friend behind.
Clarissa was looking through her dormitory window a few days into the second week of Treffie's hospital stay when she saw Uncle Aubrey pulling a cart across the road. It held a painted white box tapered at both ends. It looked like a dead box.
Clarissa imagined Treffie flying away like an angel, finding a cloud to sit on and drift towards Heaven, towards her mother. Still, Clarissa felt as if an icicle had slipped inside her heart as she went to find Cora.
Cora sobbed quietly as the girls went to the kitchen to tell Cora's mother. She didn't seem surprised.
“The dear child had a poor destiny,” Mrs. Payne said with a sigh. “She lost her father and mother in one year. The father went trappin', and when he didn't come home, Treffie's mother took sick and died. Treffie was left in the little cottage with her dead mother. The poor little thing covered her with sealskins, thinkin' she'd wake up if she was warm. Dr. Grenfell told us that when he found Treffie, she was standin' on the headland as still as a figurehead. Her yellow dress, one he had brought her on his mission the year before, was flickerin' in the wind like candlelight.” Mrs. Payne looked into the girls' miserable faces and assured them, “Now Treffie's safe in the arms of Jesus. She won't be lonely or in pain anymore.”
Clarissa, her mind knocked astray by the loss of Treffie, spent a lot of time looking through her dormitory window. One day Missus Frances, passing by the open door, called to her, “Off with you â get out and enjoy the day. None of us has a hold on life that cannot be forced from our grip.”
“But I can't help thinking about Treffie,” Clarissa murmured. “Thinking when you can be doing, Child, makes for time lost to idleness.”
“I don't want to be doing. If I don't stop and think about Treffie, she'll be gone.”
Missus Frances came close to her and said gently, “As long as you have a mind you can use it to remember, but your hands can still be busy. Trophenia does not need her body anymore. Death brings only a change to life, not an end. Your baby body changed to accommodate your older one. All of our bodies change throughout their lives, and although what happens after we die is a mystery, we know death isn't the end of us.”
Clarissa nodded, and Missus Frances left the room.
Cora came into the room. “I'm going to get some forget-me-not seeds from Uncle Aubrey. We'll have flowers next year for Treffie.”
“I'll go with you,” Clarissa offered.
Uncle Aubrey was quick to get the girls seeds and a shovel, and Cora dug a small trench inside the orphanage fence. Clarissa dropped in a seed for each letter in Treffie's name. Cora looked at Clarissa and dropped seven seeds in beside hers, saying, “God rested on the seventh day.” Clarissa nodded and Cora covered the double portion of seeds. She sprinkled the ground with water brought in a can from the lobby.
Clarissa went back inside the orphanage trying not to think of her little friend as being in the ground. She brightened.
If flowers and carrots can sprout out of the earth,
Treffie's life can sprout too â somewhere.
C
larissa was playing cobby house alone by the snout of a yellow birch tree close to the beach. She missed Cora, who had a bout of summer sickness and was staying close to the orphanage toilets. When the first lunch bell rang, Clarissa dropped hers and Cora's collection of seashells and chainies in a hollow at the base of the tree, and pulled a flat rock over it. She pulled herself to her feet and slipped the crutches under her armpits. She tried to hurry along the path, so she could wash up and get to the table before the second bell rang, but her braces held her back. There wasn't a sign of anyone when she reached the orphanage. The second bell was already ringing. She got her breath; then she turned the handle on the basement door. It wouldn't open.
“I can't be barred out!” she groaned just as a raindrop fell on her nose. She steadied herself and rattled the handle with her good hand. She knocked and waited, sorry now that she hadn't gone around to the front door. She listened for noises coming from inside, but the only sound she heard came from a sudden torrent of rain beating down on her. It filled her eyes and dripped into her open mouth. She looked at the window beside the door, clenched her hand, and, pulling her sleeve down over her knuckles, she let her fist fly at the long, narrow windowpane. Shards of glass fell with a clatter onto the wooden floor inside. She stood quietly, rain and tears mingling.
Through the broken window, Clarissa caught a glimpse of Imogene running down the stairs. She unlocked the door and opened it. Her eyebrows lifted at the sight of Clarissa shivering on the steps. Then, without saying a word, she let the door slam shut. Clarissa pushed the unlocked door open and stumbled inside, fuming at the sight of Imogene running up the stairs. The mistresses would soon know about the window from Tattle-tale Imogene.
Clarissa hobbled upstairs to the hall and stood there streaming wet, her stomach growling like an angry husky. No one would care that she had not eaten since breakfast; no one would notice that her knuckles were bleeding. She dragged off her coat and was hanging it in the hallway to dry when she saw Miss Elizabeth hurrying towards her.
“You are not in time for lunch, so you will not have supper either.” Miss Elizabeth snapped her mouth shut; it took on its familiar pursed shape.
Missus Frances, coming out from the dining room, overheard the younger woman. “Clarissa missed her lunch. She will not go to bed without her supper, even if it is one slice of bread.”
Clarissa warmed to Missus Frances for taking up for her. Mean feelings towards the mistresses made her teeth tighten and grind together like agitated ice pans. As soon as a mistress treated her well, her whole body settled.
Miss Elizabeth's voice softened as she lowered it. “If we don't punish you, the other girls will pick on you.”
They were interrupted by Dr. Curtis, coming into the orphanage from the basement. “Who broke the window?” he asked sternly.
Miss Elizabeth answered: “Clarissa,
your
pet, did that. I've been told it was an accident.”
The doctor lifted one dark eyebrow. He didn't say a word as he went towards the library. The mistress looked at Clarissa. “You must be his pet. He didn't deny it.”
Clarissa didn't know how she could be his pet. She hardly ever saw him. Sometimes he was with Dr. Grenfell when her legs were being examined, but he was never friendly. Still, he didn't seem angry about the window and, if her luck held, she wouldn't be punished for breaking it. Clarissa wondered if Imogene had explained the break as an accident, so she wouldn't be blamed for locking the basement door.
She started up the stairs, stopping when she heard whispering beside the staircase. She couldn't see anyone, but when she got to the second floor, she heard girls' voices raised in a chant. “
Bay Girl, Bay Girl, come to supper: two cods' heads
and a lump of butter
.”
She was sure one of the girls was Imogene.
T
he first weeks of summer were almost too wonderful to bear, especially those mornings when the dormitory room had pooled with sunshine by the time the breakfast bell rang.
One morning after breakfast, Clarissa swung herself down the steps of the orphanage, and out towards the garden by the barns. She listened to cows lowing and horses whinnying. Leaves, wrapped in warm and gentle sunshine, soughed in the breeze.
She turned to see Jakot and Owen lumbering up from the beach with seashells and sand for the coopy house. When the hens ate sand and pieces of seashell, their eggshells were hard and didn't crack in the hands of children collecting them from nests of hay. One wily hen had managed to fly off the ground and land in the lettuce patch which it pecked full of holes. It was clucking against Peter's chest as he clipped its wings. Clipping the wings was Uncle Aubrey's way of dealing with flighty hens.
Clarissa made her way down the beach path. Girls and boys were standing on the low rail of the mission wharf; their arms hung over the top rail as they looked down into the clear water. On the beach beside the wharf, children were blowing up sculpins by hitting them across the stomach with a stick. Young Ben went from breaking seaweed bubbles to teasing a starfish with a twig, getting it to crawl to a rotting caplin alive with flies. Its points closed over the caplin, and the starfish became a ball. It went limp, and then flat as it died under Ben's foot.
Clarissa watched children skipping flat stones across the water without making a splash, trying to finish a rhyme before the stones sank: “
A duck and drake and a tatey, pork cake
. . .”
It was getting close to lunchtime; Clarissa felt tired and hungry. She went back to the orphanage and sat on the concrete wall outside the building. She watched children playing hopscotch and lallick, running, jumping, swinging â moving freely without sticks. Their feet had worn a path through the grass to a set of swings set up in the yard by Dr. Grenfell and Uncle Aubrey. Clarissa's brown eyes almost turned green with envy at the sight of Cora and Imogene on the swings. She would sit on a swing if her left hand was strong enough to hold on, and her feet were able to push her. She wanted to be swinging high and higher, until her feet were hanging in the sky. There were days she wished she were a puffin on the wing.
She closed her eyes, moving her body back and forth, imagining she was swinging through the air. Her eyes flew open as she lost her balance and fell back over the concrete wall to the flat alley below; her braces and crutches clattered like broken bones as she hit the hard ground. The brutal pain in her head was aggravated by the familiar ring of the lunch bell. The other children ran laughing towards the orphanage. Some of them looked her way, but they didn't stop. She didn't blame them. They wanted their lunch, and they needed ten minutes to get inside and wash up before the next bell.
Clarissa lay feeling woolly headed, waiting for the pain to subside. After a while she put her fingers on her head. It was still together. She knew it would be, just as it had been the other times when she had fallen. Last summer she had hit her head on the leg of the table in the lunchroom. A week after that she bumped her head against the radiator in the dormitory. The cut had bled onto her navy sweater with the red trim.