Hannah knew that she had better get dressed but the very idea of wearing the combis made her itch horribly. She decided to leave them off. When she got up to reach for her other clothes, she noticed that the floor near the pallet and the pallet itself were covered with what looked like sparkling white dust. However, when she stooped down to examine it more closely, she noticed that it was actually small crystals of what appeared to be sugar. But did they come from me? she wondered.
Impulsively Hannah scraped up some of the crystals in her palm and then stuck out the tip of her tongue. Salt! Not sugar at all, but definitely salt. How odd! Immediately she noticed a cool vapor on her tongue, accompanied by a tingling sensation. It felt as if the salt crystals were dissolving but leaving some kind of residue. She stuck out her tongue tip again and picked off a tiny chip. She blinked. On the tip of her finger rested a flat, nearly oval sliver that seemed almost to glow with iridescence.
A welter of emotions coursed through Hannah. She was intrigued and confused, then nearly overcome with a sudden deep and dreadful shame. Had these strange salt crystals really come from her? She felt compelled to get rid of this…this evidence of her own freakishness. She began sweeping them up in her hands as fast as she could, before the matron came in. She looked around for a refuse bin. But just as she was about to throw them away, she stopped. Her hand froze. She felt something surge up inside her. She closed her hand around the crystals she had gathered and thrust them into her pocket.
By the time the train reached Salina, Hannah’s face had swollen to twice its normal size. A woman of considerable bulk approached her with the matron. “What have we here?” She looked down at Hannah, peering through her pince-nez-style spectacles embedded in a fold of fat that seemed provided especially for the task of holding them.
“She has a rash, Mrs. Phillips. I don’t think it’s any cause for concern. She’s a lovely child.”
Hannah shot the matron a furious look. So lovely that you stuck me in a tiny horrid compartment and half the time you forgot to take my privy pot to empty.
“Just a reaction,” the matron continued. “An allergic reaction.” She spoke nervously.
“A reaction to what?” Mrs. Phillips asked.
“My combis,” Hanna said quickly. “I’m naked under this dress. Naked as a jaybird,” she said pointedly and looked at matron.
“Oh, my! She’ll have to be broken!” Mrs. Phillips said and smiled. “Well, dear, we’re the rodeo capital of Kansas. Bronco busting is our spécialité.” She pronounced the word in a foreign-sounding way.
“You’re going to break me…break me in half?”
“Oh, no, dear,” Mrs. Phillips said with a warm chuckle and took Hannah’s red hand. Hannah saw matron wince. “Breaking is just an expression. It means putting a saddle on a wild thing so it can be ridden.”
Hannah shut her eyes. She wasn’t going to ask anything else.
“What’s her name?” Mrs. Phillips asked matron.
“Let me see a minute. I have it right here.” She had been holding a piece of paper. “Uh…uh…you’re not Loretta.”
“Hannah. I’m Hannah Albury,” she said quietly.
“All right, Hannah Albury, follow me.” Much to matron’s horror, Mrs. Phillips took Hannah by the hand and led her firmly away, apparently not worried about being infected.
In addition to the lack of underwear, the red rash, and her swollen face, Hannah was also emaciated. With every mile that had taken her away from the old port city of Boston and the sea, Hannah’s queasiness had increased. She had eaten very little and by the time the train had reached the eastern edge of the great prairie states, with those undulating fields of wheat and corn, she could not keep even the slightest morsel of food in her stomach.
A quarter of an hour after arriving in Salina, Hannah stood along with fifty other girls and boys, most of them from an orphanage in New York, on a raised platform in the town hall. Mr. Benedict, one of the agents from the New York Children’s Aid Society, announced the names of the applicant families, who then proceeded to come onto the platform and select a child to take back to their farms. Strong twelve-year-old boys were the first to be chosen, followed closely by chubby, irresistible girl toddlers. Polly was the exception. She was the second child picked. Though pudgy and not exactly an obvious choice for farmwork, she was adorable with her dimples and what matron called her lovely quiet ways. Hannah smirked and wanted to call out, “She said I was lovely, too.”
Instead, she watched as couples left with their new “sons” and “daughters.” She studied the faces of the people remaining and wondered if any one of them would see beyond her swollen red face to something else that might make them want her. But she also didn’t want to be wanted—maybe if no one wanted her, they would send her back. She kept her hand deep in the pocket of her dress and felt the little glistening crystals. For some reason she found it calming to touch them.
Just as this notion of being sent back kindled a spark of hope within her, she saw two tall, skinny elderly people standing in front of her with Mr. Benedict. The man wore a preacher’s white collar. “We’ll take the poor thing. For a spell,” the woman said. “We’re Christians, after all.”
Whatever spark had been kindled was suddenly extinguished. Hannah was not being rejected—not totally, at least. Nor was she being accepted. She was to be tolerated for a spell. She was what was left when the bottom of the orphan barrel was scraped, an object of Christian charity.
The Stubbses were nice enough. However, as soon as Hannah set foot in their house, which perched on a hillock at the edge of town, her health began to fail even more precipitously. The crystals created a tiny blizzard every time she got up from the bed in the small room off the parlor that she was given to sleep in. She tried to be careful and collect them, but it wasn’t long before Mrs. Stubbs found them.
“What’s this?”
“It’s me. I don’t know why. I think the air is too dry or something.”
Dr. Rose from town was called immediately. He was solicitous and gentle as he examined her.
He balanced one of the crystals on the tip of his finger. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It appears at first glance like dermatitis. Yet the structure is so odd, the shape, not flat, but…but…” He paused a long time. He never appeared to finish the thought and instead turned toward the Stubbses. “Reverend, do you perhaps have a magnifying glass so that I could examine these more carefully?”
Reverend Stubbs returned from his study with the magnifying glass. “Curious…very curious. I haven’t ever seen anything like this.” Hannah felt a terrible fear well up in her as she watched the doctor squinting through the magnifying glass at her crystals. It seemed like an awful transgression, an invasion of not just her privacy but her being.
The doctor looked up and peered now at Hannah. “Where do you come from?”
“Boston,” Hannah whispered. He blinked as if the answer was somehow slightly unsatisfactory.
“I mean…” He hesitated. “Your parents, do you know anything about them?”
“She’s an orphan, Doctor. Came on the orphan train,” Gertrude Stubbs replied and gave a shrug. But the doctor was not paying attention to her. His gaze was fixed on Hannah.
“Their nationality, child…Irish perhaps? Lots of Irish in Boston, and you with that red hair.”
Now it was Hannah’s turn to shrug. “Sorry,” she replied softly. “I don’t know anything about them.”
“You were collected then as an infant?”
Collected seemed an odd word but she guessed that was how it had been. “Yes.”
“No early memories of anything?”
Hannah had never really thought about early memories. She’d been an orphan since birth. But as she concentrated, intimate, familiar feelings began to stir in Hannah. Like the cool mist she had first felt on her tongue when she tasted the salt crystal, these feelings rose within her, tiny vaporous droplets meandering, dancing slowly in a circle. And with these stirrings
came a longing for some thing, a yearning. How could she yearn for something she did not know?
“Reverend.” The doctor turned to the Stubbses. “Might I trouble you for an envelope? I would like to take some of these…these…” He searched for a word. “Crystals with me as specimens. I am catching the noon train today to attend a medical conference in Kansas City and would like to discuss this…this condition with my colleagues, and perhaps take a closer look at the specimens through a microscope.”
Hannah suddenly forgot her itching as panic welled up within her. She did not like being referred to as a “specimen,” but even more she did not like the idea of half a dozen doctors peering through microscopes at her crystals. If there was a secret about her, it was hers to know, to discover. Not the doctor’s. She had to stop what was about to happen.
“Certainly,” the reverend replied.
Gertrude Stubbs invited the doctor to have a cup of coffee and her homemade apple tart.
“Can’t pass that up!” the doctor replied.
When the reverend came back with the envelope, the doctor picked up the tweezers and carefully plucked some of the crystals that had drifted onto the blanket. He turned to Hannah and asked, “Might I take one of these crystals from your feet? Mrs. Stubbs says that it is your feet that cause you the most trouble.”
Hannah’s mind was working furiously. She couldn’t say no.
“Don’t worry. It won’t hurt,” the doctor added.
But when he uncovered her feet and he plucked what appeared to be a crystal from between her toes, she felt a stabbing pain.
“Oh. I am sorry, dear.” He was clearly flustered. “Well, I think I have enough.” He took the envelope and placed it in the open leather bag with his stethoscope and other instruments and then followed the Stubbses into their kitchen.
The moment he was out of sight, Hannah slipped from her bed and went into the reverend’s study. On his desk was the sermon he had been working on for next Sunday’s church service. It didn’t take her long to find an envelope identical to the one he had given the doctor. She slipped the empty envelope into the leather bag in place of the one with the crystals. He had tucked in the flap, and she doubted he would open it until he was at the medical conference.
That afternoon Hannah took a turn for the worse. She felt parched, as if she were breaking into little pieces, losing herself bit by bit, and she lay feverish in her bed. Mrs. Stubbs had left the door open so Hannah could call to her if she needed anything. But Hannah knew that all she needed was to get away. Outside she could hear the whine of the wind across the prairie. The sound was dry and sibilant. So different from the blustery gusts off Boston harbor.
A visitor had come to discuss church activities, and Hannah could hear her talking with Mrs. Stubbs. The subject was not the wedding and baptism that would be occurring on the same weekend. Nor was it the new embroidered altar cloth that had provoked much discussion because of its bright colors and elaborate design. Rather they were speaking of Hannah.
“Doc Rose left for Kansas City and she took a turn for the worse. There’s that new young doctor over in Pilcher but I think there is something very peculiar afflicting this child. I mean Doc Rose took some of her skin specimens with him.”
“Skin specimens! My word!” Elisabeth Blanchard exclaimed. “What are you talking about, Gert?”
“I didn’t tell you about the skin?”
“No, you didn’t. Just a rash you said.”
“Oh, no, much worse. There’s something very strange about the child. These sparkly tiny bits that look like sugar or salt, she sheds them. Doc called them crystals. Like a blizzard. I tell you, Elisabeth, I spend half my day sweeping up after her. I swear the child has more layers than an onion. I mean, Lord knows—oh, pardon me—but I’m desperate. Lord knows what she’ll look like when she’s finished peeling away. She’s a fright as it is. Enough to scare the black off a crow!” Her voice dropped. “I’m scared that she might die on us.”
It was as if she were blaming Hannah for having the nerve to die, when they might be held responsible.
“What does Doc Rose say about this condition of hers?”
The reverend came into the room and interjected, “He says it’s strange. ‘Outlandish!’ he called it.”
“Oh, he’s always with those big dramatic words,” Elisabeth Blanchard said.
But to Hannah the word did not seem dramatic or big or complicated at all. It seemed accurate. That night she grew even sicker and sweated so mightily that the sheets were not just damp but wringing wet. She smelled salt, and when she somehow propped herself up, she saw that where her head had rested there was a glistening imprint—like the rime of frost on a windowpane. Only it wasn’t frost, it was salt. She lifted the top sheet and gasped as she saw that her arms had left a similar salty imprint. Weakly, she climbed out of the bed and pulled the blankets all the way back. It was as if a salt ghost had slept in the bed.
Outside, the wind was blowing, blowing hard. In her bare feet Hannah managed to walk over to the window in the parlor. She felt not exactly weak, but so light it was as if she had no weight, as if she had dissolved and were no longer flesh and bone, but something almost vaporous. A small rolling fog bank. She drifted through the darkness of the house to a window that faced east, and gazed out longingly.
Hannah had heard talk on the train that Kansas was known for its terrible tornadoes that started in the spring. She listened while some described unimaginably enormous funnel clouds that spun wrathfully across the prairies, sucking up anything in their path. Houses, buggies, entire buildings. There was even a story about a freight train being ripped from the tracks and flung into a town several miles away, where it landed on top of the town’s train depot and smashed it to bits. Hannah looked out the parlor window, scanning the horizon that now appeared purple against the blackness of the sky for a funnel cloud. If a tornado could pick up a train and fling it several miles, couldn’t it suck her up and spit her out back east?
She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she hadn’t heard the creak of the Stubbses’ feet on the floor as they walked into the parlor, holding their bedside candle. They were stunned when they saw Hannah standing by the window. She looked like a silvery specter in the night, no more substantial than the tumbleweed that whirled across their yard. She seemed to float rather than stand, and her skin appeared almost translucent. Her eyes were luminous and her red hair fell in rippling cascades to her waist. So peculiar, so “outlandish” did she appear that Gertrude Stubbs went limp and sagged against her husband. But her husband’s eyes were fixed on the glittering crystals that had been silvered by the moonlight streaming in through the window. They seemed to blow about Hannah’s feet like a radiant mist. He thought at first it was the moonlight that infused the crystals with the vibrant hues, but when he looked closer he saw colors he had never seen in the moon’s path—soft iridescent hues of lavender and gold, twinkling shades of rose and green that matched the strange green highlights that he suddenly noticed in her hair. Was she real? A shade? A spirit? Had she just died and left this shimmering dust in her wake as she passed out of this world to the next?
“Child?” The Reverend Stubbs took a step closer while his wife clung to him as a drowning person would to a scrap of wood in a storm-torn sea. “Child,” he repeated. “What are you doing here by the window?”
Praying for a tornado! Hannah was tempted to say. Praying for anything to get me back. Finally she simply said the truth, “I have to go back East, back to Boston. I’ll die here if I don’t.”
Gertrude Stubbs seemed to straighten up a bit. She leaned toward Hannah. “You really think so, child?”
“I know so,” Hannah replied. “I have prayed to God every night. I must go back. This land is not good for me. It would be a blessing for me to return to Boston.”
“A blessing?” The reverend and his wife both whispered the word and looked at each other. Who were they to deny a blessing to one of God’s creatures, stra
nge though she may be? The reverend cut off the thought as he looked down at the iridescent crystals that now seemed to him like a pathway pointing east. “Yes, you must go back,” he said forcefully. “You must.”
And so it was arranged that Hannah would return on the next eastbound train. The very thought of it seemed to initiate a miraculous restoration. Her appetite improved. She was able to keep down simple foods and the rash began to disappear.
The board of The Boston Home for Little Wanderers had declared that she was too old to remain there in the orphanage. And Miss Pringle had said in no uncertain terms that she was not suitable for domestic service. But Hannah knew she would have to find something that she was suitable for. Of one thing she was certain. She had to return to the sea.
3 “THEY ALL FIT”
HANNAH LOOKED OUT onto Boston Harbor at the steamer and the stevedores unloading the cargo. There was precious little difference between herself and burlap bags of coffee beans, she thought, both commodities for trading. If spoiled, they were dumped or burned. An inspector on board the ship walked down the gangplank, now nodding to the shipping agent that all had been received in good order. Anything contaminated would not have been permitted to off-load at this pier but would have been taken by a garbage tug to be sunk at sea or destroyed on “trash island,” which was obscured by a thick veil of oily, dark smoke.
When Hannah had arrived back at the home, she was delighted to find that Miss Pringle had been replaced by a gentler woman, a Mrs. Larkin. Mrs. Larkin was younger, prettier, and possessed of a soft, lovely voice that was nothing like a needle but more like water bubbling in a lively stream.
“I don’t see why you would be unsuitable for domestic service, my dear. Perhaps not upstairs serving tea immediately, but certainly you could help in the kitchen. Can you sew, Hannah?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, there you go!” she said cheerfully.
Then Mrs. Larkin opened a folder and raised a finger, declaring, “Aha! The Hawleys. Mr. and Mrs. Horace Hawley, number Eighteen Louisburg Square, three daughters, ages nine to sixteen.” She looked up with a merry light in her hazel eyes. “Oh my goodness, if they are anything like my sisters and me, their clothing will need constant attention and repair. I think this is just the place for you.”