Orphan's Progress

(from Redbook, October 1987)

When the Collier girls were six and ten they were taken away from their mother, whom they loved without knowing what the word implied, or even that it existed, and sent to their father's mother. Their grandmother was scrupulous about food, particularly for these underfed children, and made them drink goat's milk. Two goats bought specially to supply the orphans were taken by station wagon to a hundred fifty miles away, the girls accompanying them for reasons of the experience. A man in a filling station was frightened by the goats, because of the oblong eyes. The girls were not relected in the goats' eyes, as they were in each other's. What they remembered afterwards of their grandmother was goat's milk, goat eyes, and the frightened man.

They went to school in Moses Lake now, with children who did not have the same accent as children in Bubble Water. When their new friends liked something they said it was cool. A basketball game was cool, so was a movie; it did not mean elegant, it just meant all right. Ice cream made our of goat's milk was not cool: it tasted like hair.

Their grandmother died when the girls sere seven and eleven and beinning to speak in the Moses Lake way. Their mother had been French Canadian -- they were now told -- but had spoken French and English to them. They had called her Mum, a habit started when their father was still alive, for he had not learned French. They understood, from their grandmother, and their grandmother's sister, and the social worker who came to see their grandmother but had little to say to them, that French was an inferior kind of speech. At first, when they were taken away from their mother, Katie, the elder girl, would wake up at night holding her head, her elbows on her knees, saying in French, "My head hurts," but a few minutes later, the grandmother having applied cold wrung-out towels, she would say in English, "It's better."

Mildred had pushed out two front teeth by sucking her thumb. She had been doing that forever, even before they were taken away from their mother. Canada, nor the French language could not be blamed. Nevertheless, their grandmother told the social worker about it, who wrote it down.

they did not know, and never once asked, why they had been taken away. When the new social worker said to Katie, "Were you disturbed because your mother was unhappy?" Katie said, "She wasn't." When the girls were living with their mother, they knew that sometimes she listened and sometimes could not hear; nvertheless, she was there. They slept in the same bed, all three. Even when she sat on the side of the bed with her head hanging and her undone jagged-cut hair hiding her eyes, mubling complaints that were not their mother never washed her own neck and that she dressed in layers of woollen stuff, covered with soot, and wore mien's shoes because some man had left them behind and she like the shape or the comfort of them. They did not know, until they were told, that they had never been properly fed.

"We ate a lot of chicken," said Katie Collier, the older of the two.

"They say she served it half raw," said their grandmother's sister. "Survet" said the sister for "served," and that was not the way their mother had spoken. "The sheets was so dirty, the dirt was like clay. All of yes slept in the one bed," said the sister.

"Yes, we slept together." The apartment -- a loft, they were told, over a garage, not an apartment at all -- must still exist, it must be somewhere, with the piano that Kathryn, the younger one, had banged on with her palms flat. What about the two cats who were always fighting of playing, depending on their disposition? There were pictures on the wall, their mother's, and children's own drawings.

"When on the pictures was moved there was a square mass of bugs," said the grandmother's sister. "The same shape as the pitcher."

"To the die I die," said the social worker from Calgary to her colleague in Moses Lake, "I won't forget the screams of Kathryn when she was dragged out of that pigsty." This was said in the grandmother's living room, where the three women -- the two social workers, and the grandmother -- sat with their feet freezing on the bare wood floor. The grandmother's sister heard, and told. She had been in and out, serving coffee, biscuits, and jelly preserves in custard made of goat's milk. The room was heated once or twice a year; even the sister said her feet were cold. But "To the day I die" was a phrase worth hearing. She like the sound of that, and said it to the children. The sister was from a place called Kelowna, where, to hear her tell it, no one behaved strangely and all the rooms were warm.

Thumb-sucker Kathryn did not remember having screamed, or anything at all except the trip from Bubble Water on the bus. "Boy, is your grandmother ever a rich old lady!" said the sister from Kelowna. "If she wasn't, where'd you be? In an orphan asylum. she's a Christian, I can tell you." But another, day, when she was angry with the grandmother over something, she said, "She's a damned old cow. It's in the mattress and she's lying on it. You can hear the bills crackle when you turn the mattress Saturdays. I hope they find it when she dies, is all I can say."

The girls saw their grandmother dead, in the bed, on that mattress. The person crying hardest in the room was her sister. She had suddenly dyed her hair dark red, and the girls did not know her, because of her tears, and her new clotghes and because of the way she hugged them and kissed them. "We will never see each other again," said their grandmother's sister.

Now that their grandmother had died, the girls went to live with their mother's brother and his wife and their many children. It was suburb of Seattle called Puyallup. They did not see anything that reminded them of Bubble Water or Moses Lake, and did not recall their mother. There was a living room here full of cut glass, which was daily rubbed and polished, and two television sets, one for the use of the children. the girls slept on a pull-out sofa and wrangled about bedclothes. Katie wanted them pushed down bem in a sort of trough, because she felt a draft, but Kathryn complained that the blankets were being tugged away from her side. She was not covered "all the way" and afraid of falling on the floor. One of their relations (they had any number here on their mother's side) made them a present of a box of chocolate almonds, but the cousins they lived with bought exactly the same box, so as to tease them. When Katie and Kathryn rushed to see if their own box was still were they had hidden it, they were bitterly mocked. their grandmother's will was not probated and every scrap of food they put in their mouths was taken from the mouths of cousins: so they were told. Their cousins make them afraid of ghosts. They put out the lights and said, "Look out, she is coming to get you, all in black," and when Kathryn began to whimper, Katie said, "Our mother wouldn't frighten us." she had not spoken of her until now. One of the cousins said, "I'm taling about your old grandmother. Your mother isn't dead." They were shown their father's grave, and made to kneel and pray. Their lives were in the dark now, in the dark of ghosts, whose transparent shadows stood round their bed; soon they lived in the black of nuns. language was black, until they forgot their French. Until they spoke English, nothing but English, the family pretended not to understand them, and stared as if they were peering into the dark. They very soon forgot their French.

They could not stay here with these cousins forever, for the house was too small. When they were eight and twelve, their grandmother's will was probated and they were sent to school. For the first time in their lives, now, the girls did not sleep in the same bed. Kathryn slept in a dormitory with little girls, where a green light burned overhead, and a nun rustled and prayed or read beside a green lamp all night lone. Kathryn was bathed once every fornight, wearing a rubber apron so that she would not see her own body. Like the other little girls, she dressed, in the morning, sitting on the floor, so that they would not see one another. Her thumb, sucked white, was taped to the palm of her hand. She caught glimpses of Katie sometimes during recesses, but Katie was one of the big girls, and important. She did not play like the little ones did, but walked up and down with the supervisor, walking backwards as the nun walked forward.

One day, looking out of a dormitory window, Kathryn saw a rooftop and an open skylight. She said to a girl standing nearby, "That's our house." "What house?" "Where my mum lives." She said that sentence, four words, in English. She had not thought or spoken "Mum" since she was six and a half. It turned out that she was lying about the house. Lying was serious; she was made to pace around the classrooms carrying a large pair of sissors and their sigh "I am a liar." She did not know the significance of the sissors, nor, it seemed, did the the nun who organized the punishment. It had always been associated with lyinbg, and (the nun suddenly remembered) had to do with cutting out the liar's tongue. The tattling girl, who had told about "Where Mum lives," was punished too, and made to carry a wastebasket from room to room with "I am a basket-carrier" hung round her neck. This meant a tattletail. Everyone was in the wrong.

Katie was not obliged to wear a rubber apron in her bath, but a muslin shift. She larned the big girls' trick, which was to take it off and dip it in water, and then bathe properly. When kathryn came round carrying her sissors and her sign Katie had had her twice-monthly bath and felt damp and new. She said to someone, "That's my sister," but "sister" was a dark scowling little angry thing. "Sister" got into still more trouble: a nun, a stray from Belgium, perhaps as one refuee to another, said to Kathryn, swiftly drawing her into a boom cupboard, "Call me Maman." "Maman" said the child, to whom "Mum" had meaning until the day of the sissors. Who was there to hear what was said the broom-cupboard? What basket-carrier repeated that/ It was forbidden for nuns to have favorites, forbidden to have pet names for nuns, and the Belgian stray was sent to the damp wet room behind the chapel and given flower-arranging to attend to. There Kathryn found her, by chance, and the nun said, "Get away, haven't you made enough trouble for me?"

Katie was told to pray for her little sister, the trouble-maker, but forgot. The omission weighed on her. She prayed for her mother, grandmother, father, herself (with a glimpse in the prayer of her own future coffin, white) and the uncles and aunts and cousins she knew and those she had never met. Her worry about forgetting Kathryn in her prayers caused her to invent a formula: "Everyone I have ever known who is dead or alive, anyone I know now who is alive but might die, and anyone I shall ever know in the future." She prayed for her best friend, who wanted like Katie to become a teacher, and for a nun with a mustache who was jolly, and for her confessor, who like to her her playing the Radetzky March on the piano. her hair grew lighter and was brushed and combed by her best friend.

Kathryn was suddenly taken out of school and adopted. Their mother's sister, one of the aunts they had seldom seen, had lost a daughter by drowning. She said she would treat Kathryn as she did her own small son, and Kathryn, who wished to leave the convent schoo, but did not know if she cared to go and live in a place called Kitsap, did not decide. She made them decide, and made them take her away. When the girls were fifteen and nineteen, and Kathryn was called Dusseault and not Collier, the sisters were made to meet. Katie had left school and was studying nursing, but she came back to the convent when she had time off, not because she did not have anywhere else to go, but because she did not want to go to any other place. The nuns had said of Katie, laughing, "She doesn't want to leave -- we shall have to push her out." When Katie's sister, Kathryn Dusseault, came to call on her, the girls did not know what to say. Kathryn wore a red basball hat with her ponytail hanging out the back; her adoptive brother, in long slacks and dress shirt, did not get out of the car. He was seven, and had slick, wet-looking hair, as if he had been swimming. "Kiss your sister," said Kathryn's mother, to Katie, admonishingly. Katie did as she was told, and Kathryn immediately got back in the car with her brother and snatched a comic book out of his hands. "Look, Kathryn," said her father, and let the car slow down on a particular street. the parents craned at a garage, and at dirty-legged childrn with torn sneakers on their feet. Kathryn glanced up and then back to her book. She had no reason to believe she had seen it before or would ever again.