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On that first trip to New York I didn’t speak. I watched snowflakes blow in and melt against my clothes, how they shone like tears in the soft winter light. I thought I must have smelled of death, the air around me like match smoke. But no fellow passenger let on.
As we’d buried my brothers and father, my mother had said, This is God’s will for us; pray, pray for mercy. Pray. She said this even as she lay dying; she had kept her faith to the end that this was the work of the Lord. When I did not fall sick, she saw that as a prayer answered. But I had prayed not to be left behind, and I was.
The other passengers smiled and chatted with one another as we rode and smiled at me from time to time. I wanted the relief of conversation also, and a few times I nearly joined in, but instead I could only think of how they would ask me where I was traveling to and why. But to speak would have been to burst, to let out all the anger and grief—anger that I was left behind to roam this world without them.
Here, I knew from my parents, this world, here was where we were tested. The next world was Paradise. To live when they had all died told me I’d failed.
I could have sold the farm that day, could have ridden for help, could have asked my mother, before she died, more questions about her kin, of whom she rarely spoke. If I’d been better at all of what I was to have done in the years before then—but I was not; I did as I did instead. I always knew somehow that I would live apart from them and the farm, and then I was, and I had not prepared.
I was that terrible girl, too stupid to get help, who made a bonfire of her house to undo a patch of winter and filled her mother’s grave with her own hands.
Why is it so loud when you cry from grief? Because it must be loud enough for the missing one to hear, though it never can be. Loud enough to scale the sky and the backs of angels, or to fall through the earth to where they rest. And so it is sometimes when I sing that the notes come from me as if I believed I could reach them where they rest, they sure of a reunion I still cannot imagine or believe in except, sometimes, in song.
Four
I ARRIVED IN NEW YORK’S Union Square in a coach that was little more than a wood drum dragged by horses through the winter dark. As I stepped down, I found a city as strange to me as if I’d been brought all the way to Mars, like in a novel from Jules Verne.
There were at least a hundred girls like me arriving on just that day. The fever had taken more than my family, and the survivors had fled. New beggars angered the old ones, and while I wished there was more to my purse than there was, I did not want to beg, and so I left quickly, as if I knew where I was going, though I did not. The mute doors I passed, their purposes unknown to me, mocked me. The men and women in the street walked, confident and dour, and I was little noticed by them except in occasional stares.
What I had thought was a fine way to dress for leaving looked to the citizens of New York that day, I’m sure, like a farmer fantasy. I was clean, at the least, and my hair braided, coiled under a rabbit-fur bonnet made by my father.
I could see there was water to either side. Water meant boats; boats meant leaving. I put my head into my collar and walked against the wind until I found one of the rivers. The Hudson.
I was directed to the ship lines, where a ticket clerk confirmed I had nothing like the money required to purchase a passage to Europe, by sail or steam. As I walked away from the counter, my life fit in my hand, only as big as the coins in my purse, and it was not large enough. I could pay for a meal or a room, but not both. If I ate, I would have nowhere to sleep. If I chose a place to sleep, I would have nothing to eat.
As I walked the city of New York, not knowing now where to go, I cursed it silently, and my eyes felt like the judgment of angels, as if they could light my way in the gathering dark.
I still did not know where to go or what to do.
My family had been the borders of my world before then, and with them gone, the world had revealed itself to me.