and his v’s like f’s. What he’d said came out, “She vants to see you. I haf to take you.”
I stood, folded the thin blanket, and hung it across a rod attached to the wall so that it would be available for the next child who occupied the room, knowing that, like as not, it would be me again.
Volz shut the door behind us. “Did you sleep okay? How is your back?”
Often a strapping preceded time in the quiet room, and last night had been no exception. My back ached from the welts, but it did no good to talk about it.
“I dreamed about my mother,” I said.
“Did you now?”
The quiet room was the last in a row of rooms in a long building that had once been the outpost stockade. The other rooms—all originally cells—had been turned into storage spaces. Volz and I walked along the old stockade and across the yard toward the administration building, a two-story structure of red stone set among stately elms that had been planted by the first commandant of Fort Sibley. The trees provided the building with constant shade, which always made it a dark place.
“Pleasant dream, then?” Volz said.
“She was in a rowboat on a river. I was in a boat, too, trying to catch up with her, trying to see her face. But no matter how hard I rowed, she was always too far ahead.”
“Don’t sound like a good dream,” Volz said. He was wearing clean bib overalls over a blue work shirt. His huge hands, nicked and scarred from his carpentry, hung at his sides. Half of the little finger on his right hand was missing, the result of an accident with a band saw. Behind his back, some of the kids called him Old Four-and-a-Half, but not me or Albert. The German carpenter had always been kind to us.
We entered the building and went immediately to Mrs. Brickman’s office, where she was seated behind her big desk, a stone fireplace at her back. I was a little surprised to see Albert there. He stood straight and tall beside her like a soldier at attention. His face was blank, but his eyes spoke to me. They said, Careful, Odie.
“Thank you, Mr. Volz,” the superintendent said. “You may wait outside.”
As he turned to leave, Volz put a hand on my shoulder, the briefest of gestures, but I appreciated what it meant.
Mrs. Brickman said, “I’m concerned about you, Odie. I’m beginning to believe that your time at Lincoln School is almost at an end.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I didn’t think it was necessarily a bad thing.
The superintendent wore a black dress, which seemed to be her favorite color. I’d overheard Miss Stratton, who taught music, tell another teacher once that it was because Mrs. Brickman was obsessed with her appearance and thought black was slimming. It worked pretty well, because the superintendent reminded me of nothing so much as the long, slender handle of a fireplace poker. Her penchant for the color gave rise to a nickname we all used, well out of her hearing, of course: the Black Witch.
“Do you know what I’m saying, Odie?”
“I’m not sure, ma’am.”
“Even though you’re not Indian, the sheriff asked us to accept you and your brother because there was no room at the state orphanage. And we did, out of the goodness of our hearts. But there’s another option for a boy like you, Odie. Reformatory. Do you know what that is?”
“I do, ma’am.”
“And is that where you would like to be sent?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I thought not. Then, Odie, what will you do?”
“Nothing, ma’am.”
“Nothing?”
“I will do nothing that will get me sent there, ma’am.”
She put her hands on her desk, one atop the other, and spread her fingers wide so that they formed a kind of web over the polished wood. She smiled at me as if she were a spider who’d just snagged a fly. “Good,” she said. “Good.” She nodded toward Albert. “You should be more like your brother.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll try. May I have my harmonica back?”
“It’s very special to you, isn’t it?”
“Not really. Just an old harmonica. I like to play. It keeps me out of trouble.”
“A gift from your father, I believe.”
“No, ma’am. I just picked it up somewhere. I don’t even remember where now.”
“That’s funny,” she said. “Albert told me it was a gift from your father.”
“See?” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “Not even special enough to remember where I got it.”