5.
There were many delicious things about growing up in the poorhouse, and Ruby’s mother enjoyed them all.
The poorhouse in Chinook had been built at the turn of the twentieth century, when similar institutions were built across the country, usually in rural areas. They were also called almshouses, poor farms, and county homes, and they were the last resort for paupers and the poor.Over the hills to the poorhouse,went the country song, a dirge for those driven off their farms by drought, drink, or war.
But for Desirée, the poorhouse was magic.
On the top floor were the attics, spanning the length of the place, and they were accessed only through the back stairwell, a dark, strange, spiderwebby place. But once you got through that, holding your breath against the dark, you pushed open a narrow, elf-like door, and you were there.
The attics stretched out, filled with light from the windows, and it was pure magic, like a space station. Or a boat. Desirée could spend an eternity up there, and sometimes did, only awakening when her stomach growled for dinner and she knew that the matron would be waiting, a knotted whip in her hand.
In the yards were snakes. Long, lithe garter snakes: harmless, but they shat a stinky poo on you in self-defense if you captured them. In the cellars were spooky big beetles: beware. Desirée did not like the cellars. It smelled awful down there, like rotting potatoes. There was no worse smell, she figured, than rotting potatoes.
The wards had long halls and tiny rooms. At the end of the halls were the bathrooms. Sometimes she was sent to clean them. Some of the men were foul, and Desirée watched for them while she scrubbed.
There was the kitchen, of course, where she worked with her mother, with a pantry full of dusty good smells, like nutmeg, cloves, and the black pepper they used to spice the stews. In one big jar was a rattle of long vanilla beans. These were never used and Desirée had no idea what they were for, but she liked to take the jar off the shelf and open the lid. Then it was like all of life rushed out and grabbed her by the face.
But the best place of all?
The library.
The library was in the far wing of the building. It had been designed with edification in mind, by visiting religious leaders. There was a bronze plaque above the fireplace, but no one ever made a fire. No one much came to the library. The residents preferred to play their card games, when they played, in the dining room. They were allergic to the books, not because they were books but because they had come with the sniff-sniff of charity, and one could almost still hear the admonishment of nuns and clergy who thought the poor were poor because they were lazy and stupid.
Not Desirée. She was not lazy, and she was not stupid. Desirée was the last child born at the poorhouse, and the big yellow bus picked her up, alone, at the end of the dirt lane, to take her to the rural school. The teachers at the school left her to her own devices, knowing that the knobby knees under the plaid institutional dress were destined to be inflamed by work, and no amount of book learning would change that. Women of that era married. If they were rich or middle class, they married men of their status who could care for them. The rest were castadrift in a world where they were not allowed bank accounts or credit or higher education, unless it was secretarial school, which was again related to catching a man.
Desirée had no interest in catching a man. She wanted to catch life.
On the increasingly frequent days when the matron lay sick abed with a hot water bottle—Desirée later realized that the poor woman probably had endometriosis—Desirée would sneak down to the library and close the door behind her, and then she was all alone with the lovely books.
When her mother had arrived with her deadbeat husband—who would later be drafted to fight in the war—the poorhouse was already in decline. At one time, over three hundred people had lived here. But then the wars came, and most of the men left to die in fields across Europe, the dust of the dead in their noses. The New Deal was signed, and the Depression lifted. The destitute were no longer forced into the poorhouses. They could be poor at home.
By the time Desirée was born, the only men who were left were those too infirm to fight, or too untrustworthy. They were nose tweakers, Desirée had found: men who liked to pinch. Her nose was stolen on the regular, and half the men had it in their pockets, promising they would return it only for a kiss.
Her absolute favorite books were the encyclopedias, bought from a traveling salesman. You signed a slip of paper and weeks later the books came, in heavy crates delivered on the train. In later years, the encyclopedias would be worthless, but for a breathless moment in American history, they were full of hope: diagrammed, illustrated hope.
In an old leather armchair, Desirée read, turning pages as crisp as silver.Someday, man might land on the moon. Here is an armadillo. It isone of many prehistoric animals. Have you ever seen a sowbug? Sowbugs are some of our planet’s oldest creatures.
Weight tables, with how much a person should weigh according to their height. Instructions for canning and how to bult a teepee. The encyclopedias contained it all.
After exhausting the encyclopedias, she moved on to the gilt-lettered set of classics above the fireplace. Books likeWuthering Heightsand the ignored volumes of poetry.
She loved those long, time-stretched days, when the words reorganized the world into something that could be contained, explained, and imagined. What a mystery it was, she thought. What a damn fine time.
6.
Mitchell’s grandfather had a cabin above the Chinook River, in a rocky place where no one else had built because the land frankly wasn’t good. It was craggy, and the topsoil was thin and acidic from the trees.
Ruby had flown back to Oregon the night before. She was used to flying, and used to driving long distances. It was a huge country, and her work took her across it, a road map of poverty and despair. There were many weeks she spent in a kaleidoscope of towns and cities—in culverts and mobile homes, homeless camps and courtrooms. She didn’t mind. She felt most at home when on the move.
It was morning again, thirteen days before Mitchell Brown was scheduled to be executed, and now she was outside his childhood home. Below the cabin the Chinook River flowed, a brilliant clear green, ruffled with rapids. On the other side of the river were the dark woods, and somewhere beyond them, she knew, was the poorhouse where her mother had been born. She stared in that direction, filled with a sense of foreboding. She had never visited the poorhouse. It would have been too much.
The old man sitting inside the cabin was blind, his eyes as white as smoke. His skin was dark and leathery, and when she knocked on the open door, she saw his head bob up.
“Come in,” he called in a melodious voice. “Unless you’re the tax collector.”
He gave the wheezy laugh of someone who found pleasure in telling the same joke a thousand times.
She crossed the threshold, feeling the air shift. Something felt unsettling. It wasn’t the deeply set windows, covered with stained curtains, or the unused fireplace with the scars of unseen spitting embers on the thin rug in front of it. And it wasn’t the old man, from whom she felt only a wave of kindness.
