Mercy Train Read Online Free PDF Page A

daily in front of RW & Sons, packed with crates of bruised turnips, quinine tonic, walnuts, flour, smoked oysters, chicory coffee, oleomargarine, and powdered soap. Violet was not up for another run-by—she had nowhere to stow whatever she might be able to grab—but she did see a cigar box on one of the driver’s buckboards. It was shiny black, and on its lid was an image of a girl holding a rose blossom. Her friend Nino had admired one just like it in a shop window: a place to put his things that wasn’t his pockets. She pretended to play alongside the wagon, whistling and hopping on one leg, before she snatched the box and set off to find him.
    She reached Slaughter Alley and peered into the darkness.
    â€œNino!” she called. “Hey, Nino!”
    â€œShut up!” a man yelled back.
    Nino’s Italian parents rode a mule-led wagon through the surrounding neighborhoods sharpening knives. Their apartment was so crowded that when the weather was fair, Nino slept in a rusted straw-padded boiler at the base of one of the bridge supports.
    Nino leaped over a puddle into the light of the street. “You look like a boy in a dress,” he said, frowning at her chopped-off hair.
    â€œYou don’t exactly look like the King of England,” she said.
    He pretended to straighten a tie against the neck of his ratty flannel shirt. His knuckles were swollen and scarred from street fights, and around his eye was a fading yellow bruise.
    Violet was warmed by the sight of him but tried not to give herself away.
    â€œWhere you been?” he asked.
    â€œShe put me in the Home,” she said, “but I escaped.”
    Nino shifted his coal eyes sidelong to her. He shook his head, not swayed by her bravado.
    â€œYou should have stayed in as long as you could.”
    She held the box out to him.
    â€œWhat do you got there?” He took it and looked it over, opening and closing the hinged lid.
    He didn’t say anything, but she knew he was pleased.
    He walked away, and Violet ran to catch up, stepping over the putrescent frothy blood running in a crooked stream from the slaughterhouse. The drainage line to the river was always getting clogged.
    She was struck by how Nino looked older, his shoulders broad, his arms long and muscled. Gangs didn’t bother with the boys until they were old enough to be valuable, but Nino had already been approached by the Batavia Boys on account of his size. He didn’t want to be a gang runner, but he didn’t have any illusions that he wouldn’t be one. Newsboys graduated to be criminals. Violet knew what her options were. She could be a sewing girl, a paper-flower seller, or a prostitute. She didn’t like to think about the future; none of the kids did. They feared growing up because, when they became adults, they would no longer be invisible. They would live in flophouses or sagging tenements and drink and gamble away what little they had. They would fight. They would be picked over by kids as they slept off their hangovers on the sidewalk. Or they would be dead.
    â€œWhat’d I miss?” Violet asked.
    â€œSame old garbage,” Nino said. “Some lady jumped off the bridge. Filled her stockings with sand. But she lived, I guess.”
    Nino couldn’t read, but Ollie, the newsboy captain, read them the headlines before they headed out with their papers.
    â€œYour grandma’am still sick?” she asked.
    â€œCoughs and rattles the whole place. She’ll be dead by fall, my papa says. Not soon enough, he says.”
    â€œMy mother’s gone again.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œI can’t go up there alone.”
    Nino shook his head. “Ollie’s giving me Cherry Street. Evening edition.”
    â€œYou’ll be back in time,” she said.
    Nino crossed his arms and clamped his hands into his armpits.
    â€œI got to do something on the way,” he said.
    They walked. Nino kicked a stone along