WINTER ' FOURTEEN
you and me are just alike.”
“We’re alike?”
“Yeah. Look at us. We both got freckles and our ears stick out to the sides more than anybody in history.
You know what I was told when I was a little girl?”
“What?”
“They said there was this old mule who had too much bran to eat and when he farted it hit me in the
face and caused all these freckles.”
“Ha! Ha! They told me the same thing, Grandma.”
“See? I told ya. You got a Ma and Pa but they’re never home. I never had a Pa and my ma died when I
was a baby so I don’t remember her. I grew up in a home for orphan girls. Do you wanna hear about how
I grew up and got married and all?”
Archie nods his head as he smiles directly at Grandma; he loves her so much. And he’s the only one in
the whole-wide world who can understand her because she talks so bad with her teeth gone and all. Ever
since Lonnie brought him home for dinner he has been coming here after school to stay with Grandma.
Lonnie and Paulie don’t come home till dark. Andy and Molly are staying on a farm working. He slides
across the couch and wraps his arms around her, laying his head on her breast. She pulls him close and hugs
him tight.
“It was back in Topeka Kansas, they say my mother was walking down the road and carrying me. It was
wintertime and she laid down on that road and froze to death. Some farmer come along picked me up and
took me home. But he was too old to have a young’un around the house so he took me to the Emma Broward
Home for Girls. They named me Emma Broward because no one knew my name or where I come from.”
Grandma pauses and takes a loud slurp of tea. Archie laughs to himself: Cab Cleebo would hit the
ceiling if he heard somebody slurp like that.
“The women that run that home were mean, very strict, and never had nothing nice to say about anybody.
And the food was awful. Even us that knowed nothing else never liked it. The only thing I liked was oatmeal
and milk with sugar sprinkled on. The desert was nasty, tasted like something rotten. When a new girl
showed up we would give her our desert. She’d be happy ‘till she found out what it tasted like. Then she’d
be in trouble ‘cause you couldn’t leave the table till you finished all your food. It seems like they would figger
out what was going on and put a stop to it, but they never did.”
“We worked ever’ morning, making beds, cleaning house, washing dishes, doing laundry, and taking the
chamber pots out to the outhouse. Everybody wanted to do the chamber pots ‘cause it was a chance to get
away from your housemother. We’d empty the pots into the shit hole and scrub ‘em with water from the
well. I always stayed outside till they come looking for me.”
“Ever’ afternoon we had reading, writing, arithmetic, and religious training. That religious training
turned me against religion forever ‘cause those who taught us was always better than us. And they let us know
it too.”
“All we talked about was getting adopted. People was always coming by, picking out a girl, and taking
her home. We heard some of those girls come to a bad end because their new family was mean and rotten
to the core. Still, we wanted to take our chances and hoped a nice family would take us. I was eleven or
twelve when it dawned on me I was never gonna get adopted: I was too ugly. When I realized that it tore me
up somethin’ awful.”
The Linnet's Wings