Orphan Train Girl: Chapters 7–12

But Mr. Reed’s been telling them some stuff she didn’t know, like the fact that the Wabanaki are actually a confederacy of five tribes, including the Penobscot—Molly’s own tribe—that live near the North Atlantic coast.

So if you know you’re going to have to portage, you think carefully about what to pack, right? You need to travel light. You take what’s essential, what you can’t live without, and you leave the rest behind.

He asked the crowd to remember that they would be doing a good deed, saving a child from poverty and sin and depravity.

An earnest young man was beside her, wearing a felt hat.

“Hey, boy! Stop your dallying,” the man called, clapping his hands so loudly that everyone turned to look.

Vivian looks at the recorder in Molly’s hand a little warily, as if it might hiss or bite.

“From where to where?” Molly prompts again.

She had wavy brown hair cropped close to her head, a plain white blouse, and a dark paisley scarf.

The man standing behind the woman was stout and red-faced, with shaggy auburn hair. The buttons of his waistcoat strained across his stomach.

The man standing behind the woman was stout and red-faced, with shaggy auburn hair. The buttons of his waistcoat strained across his stomach.

She used to help her mother when she took in extra work darning and mending.

A young woman with frizzy brown hair knelt on the floor in front of a cloth mannequin, stitching tiny pearls on a bodice.

A gray-haired woman perched on a brown chair, hemming a calico skirt.

Niamh spent the next few hours doing jobs no one else wanted to do: basting garments together with quick, large stitches so that one of the older women could finish them with finer work later; sweeping; collecting pins and putting them in pincushions.

Niamh followed her into a spare and spotless kitchen and out the back door to an outhouse.

The shed was drafty.

Niamh had used a privy back home in Ireland, so the smell didn’t shock her, but she couldn’t help wondering what it would be like out here in a snowstorm.

The sun moves higher in the sky and the room brightens as Molly reads about old Matthew Cuthbert going somewhere in his buggy, and nosy Mrs. Lynde, just dying of curiosity.

Niamh looked at Mr. Byrne, studiously tying his shoelace.

“You insolent girl. I don’t want to hear another word,” she said.

Niamh glanced at her blue-and-white-checked dress, the one she’d been given at the orphanage. “Just the brown gingham. Ma’am.” She’d been wearing the blue dress one day, the brown one the next, day after day.

Molly holds up a shabby quilt with a pattern of rings, all linked together.

It was clear at once that something was wrong. She looked stricken.

At the end of the workday on Christmas Eve, Fanny slipped Dorothy a small brown-wrapped parcel.

He had a black mustache and jowls like a basset hound.

The clock ticked loudly over the mantelpiece.

“I’m a local agent of the Children’s Aid Society, and I oversee the placement of the train riders. Oftentimes the placements work out as they should, and everyone is content. But sometimes it’s necessary...that is...we need to find new accommodations. Do you understand?”

“Not bad,” she says tentatively.

They passed more fields and crossed a dilapidated bridge over a murky stream.

On a bare patch of ground in front of the house, a toddler was crawling on top of a dog with black matted fur.

It’s required that Dorothy attend school, Mrs. Grote. Do you agree to abide by that?

They all turned to see a tall, thin, dark-haired man wearing a plaid shirt and grungy overalls.

Nettie put her head on Dorothy’s shoulder, her crying softening into a fretful whine.

The older children, Mabel, Gerald Jr., and Harold, sprawled across them, tugging a tattered wool blanket and several old quilts from one another.

“Well, it’s true that humans have been oppressing each other since time began,” he says. “Do you think the oppressed groups should just accept it, then? Stop complaining?”