Power in the Blood Read Free

which would continue hauling westward through the night. While the car was switched onto a siding, the children were ordered to stand in an orderly fashion along the station platform to receive their first food since breakfast. Mr. Canby opened the wicker basket he’d wrestled with literal single-handedness from the car, and his wife dispensed a meal of bread generously spread with lard. This was followed by two dried apricots for each child. It became clear the basket was not intended to feed so many for very long.
    “What’s needed here,” said Mr. Canby with a grin, “is a miracle of the loaves and fishes, maybe.” Mrs. Canby frowned darkly, and he stopped grinning.
    The new train having been shunted onto the main line, the orphans’ journey resumed. Reinvigorated by food, they could not fall asleep as ordered by Mrs. Canby. The distraction of a passing landscape no longer available to them, the children found renewed interest in one another, and the car soon was filled with a continuous babble of young voices raised to their highest pitch to overcome the grumble and clatter of rolling wheels and the more immediate din of their neighbors.
    “Cease!” cried Mrs. Canby. “You must be quiet!”
    Zoe wished it were possible to change seats temporarily, just so she could talk to some of the other girls, or even some of the boys. It was wearisome to be forever in the same place, looking at the same faces arranged opposite her, not one of which she liked. It had been interesting at first to listen as Kerwin held whispered swearing contests with the boy beside him, an Irish youth named McIlwray, who could not, despite coaching from Kerwin, learn how to pronounce “fuck” correctly. It became a laughing matter in the immediate vicinity of the swearers, and McIlwray grew irritated. “Fock yew,” he said with genuine feeling, and Kerwin responded in kind.
    But that sport had become boring through repetition, and Zoe chafed at her immobility. Occasional rearrangements of seating were made by Mrs. Canby, usually to terminate cases of harassment, verbal or otherwise, conducted by boys against girls. Mrs. Canby even threatened to separate the sexes, girls on one side of the aisle, boys on the other, if such despicable behavior did not cease upon the instant. The threat was not carried out, to Zoe’s relief. For all that she wanted to sample friendship throughout the car, she would have felt lost without her brothers on either side. Mr. Canby slept throughout the worst of this crisis, his snores the object of much stifled giggling.
    Migration among seats being forbidden, the one place anyone could visit, after raising a hand, was the crude privy built onto the car’s rear platform. In daylight it had been exciting to watch the crossties flashing past under the hole in the plank; it caused a delicious shiver to imagine oneself falling through, to be cut in half by the wheels. After nightfall some of the girls preferred using the privy in twos, comforting each other beneath the inadequate light of a swaying oil lamp while they relieved themselves onto a roadbed made invisible by darkness.
    Sleep was difficult on the unyielding benches. The children sat as they had throughout the day, the next shoulder along providing a bony pillow as the night lengthened. Girls used each other’s soft laps, but the boys were denied this comfort, with the instinctive rejection of physical closeness among their kind. Drew was just young enough to avail himself of Zoe’s thighs without embarrassment. Zoe in turn leaned against sturdy Clay, upright as ever despite his closed eyes, behind which he slipped in and out of dreams that showed him Mama beckoning him further west, further west, until he came to a place where the sun lay like a molten ball of gold, a brilliant puddle on a desolate plain, and Mama was nowhere to be seen. Waking, he allowed himself a brief moment awash with tears that went unobserved in the dim car, now quiet as it swayed