Chapter 3

The next few days convinced Bobby that he was not in a dream. He didn't understand a lot of what went on, but he recognized that something both unaccountable and wonderful had happened to him. He watched carefully, picking up information on rules and regulations, which were actually just a way of behaving that the women insisted on. None of the children were ever beaten, though the two youngest got swats on the butt occasionally. The way they cried made it sound like they'd been beaten, but Bobby knew what a real beating was.

That he had to help out around the house was a given, at least in his mind. One of his jobs was to replenish all the coal buckets for the various appliances in the house that used coal. That included the stove in the kitchen, and another of those amazing water heating things that hung on a wall above the kitchen sink. It was smaller than the one in the bathroom. Additionally there were small pot-bellied stoves set in various places around the house. Not every bedroom had one, though most did. Mavis had one in her bedroom and both of the women who lived in the house - Sally and Meg - had stoves in their rooms. There were ten coal buckets in all that had to be filled daily. The one in the bathroom only needed it once, because, as it turned out, baths were only given once a week. And the buckets in the kitchen needed to be filled several times a day, since those appliances were used more than the others, and laundry was done there.

He was also pressed into service outside, once they went to town and found him clothing and a coat to wear. The local church collected clothing for them, and when it was learned that a simple-minded young man had arrived the donations increased. Suddenly Bobby had more clothing than he had a place to put it all. His bag was soon full and it took Prudence half an hour to convince him that it was all right to put his clothes on the shelf in his room. He had tried to touch nothing in the room other than the bed, because he still assumed that this room belonged to someone else and he didn't want to be thrown out of this amazing place for stealing or doing something wrong.

He found that all meals were like the one he'd walked in on, and that he didn't have to gorge because they got fed three times a day. And in the evening, every other night, Meg usually, but sometimes Donna or Prudence, read to the children from books. Bobby had looked into the parlor, where those books came from, and was astonished to see two whole shelves of them, some thick, most thinner. He'd been afraid to touch them and left immediately, his fingers itching to caress them and read what was on their spines.

He found that pantomiming what he wanted was fairly easy, and his new-found habit of not talking got easier and easier as the need to talk waned. His needs thus far had been simple. He had far more now than at any time in his life he could remember.

He'd been at Milleson House for four days when Meg approached him.

"Bobby? That carving in your bag. Did you do that?"

Bobby wasn't surprised that they'd gone through his bag. When he'd reclaimed it on his second day and gone through it himself, only the cigarette was missing. He didn't blame someone for stealing it. He hadn't really wanted it anyway. You just never turned down anything someone offered you.

He nodded his head.

"It's beautiful Bobby. Why didn't you finish it?" asked Meg.

Bobby pantomimed a knife, opening and closing and then threw it away from him.

"You threw away your knife?" asked Meg, confused.

Bobby couldn't make her understand that it had been stolen from him. He saw a piece of paper on the table, with a pencil nearby, where Mavis had been making a shopping list. He went to the table, flipped the paper over and wrote on the back.

"They steal."

He held up the paper and Meg looked like she might faint dead away.

"You can write?!" she gasped.

Bobby nodded. Everybody could write, couldn't they?"

Meg actually ran, yelling at the top of her lungs "He can write! Bobby can write!"

Within minutes all five women were in the room, clustered around Bobby, who thought now that he had made the fatal mistake that would get him thrown out. There was a general hubbub of noise as the women exclaimed about this "amazing" ability in a boy they thought had the mind of a seven or eight year old. Each one examined the words Meg swore he had written.

Finally Mavis held up her hands for quiet. She turned to Bobby. "Did you write this?" she asked. Meg snorted at being suspected of playing a trick ... or worse.

Nobody looked angry and for once Bobby decided not to go with his natural instinct to deny everything. He took a chance and nodded.

Mavis put the paper down and picked up the pencil, handing it to him. "Write something else."

A lot of things went through Bobby's mind at that instant. He didn't know what they wanted, or what would be the "right" thing to write. He thought of the safest thing and, more slowly than he needed to, wrote:

"Bobby" and then, as an afterthought, beside that, "thank you".

To the women it looked like he had tried to write a sentence: "Bobby thank you."

If there had been hubbub before, there was a true celebration now. Even though the women still thought his mental age to be young, they had elevated it to maybe ten or twelve, based on his ability to almost write a complete sentence.

After that the level of baby talk directed toward Bobby went down and the amount that he was expected to do around the house went up. Not that he was strained at all. In fact he enjoyed the work he was assigned. He helped with the children, even feeding one of the babies for Donna one time when there was a spill "disaster" at the table which involved changing the clothes of two children and cleaning up the table, floor and two chairs.

That night it snowed.

Bobby had seen snow before, but never like this. It was western Nebraska, and it snowed two and a half feet.

The next morning he awoke to stretch in his bed, warm and comfortable, something he was gradually getting used to. Sally, whose voice he had only heard perhaps ten times in the six days he'd been at Milleson House, stuck her head through the door and, in her soft lilt, said "Bobby, you're needed to clear the snow."

She was gone again almost immediately, expecting him to get up and do whatever was necessary. He rose and rubbed at the thick slick of frost on the window. His room was on the highest floor of the house, and through the small clear space he'd made he saw a blanket of white that covered everything for as far as he could see. He quickly got dressed and went downstairs.

Breakfast at Milleson House was a casual affair. Mavis got up early and cooked, leaving the food on the stove to stay warm. The children were fed by one or two of the staff as they were pulled from their beds and dressed by the others. So they trickled into the kitchen in ones or twos, sitting down and waiting until food appeared in front of them. Bobby had learned, to his further amazement, that it was all right for him to feed himself whenever he came into the kitchen, and he did so this day, eating quickly.

No adults were in the kitchen when he got there. He had just finished eating a strip of bacon when Mavis hustled in, already looking tired.

"Bobby dear, Donna and Prudence are probably snowed in, since they haven't arrived yet. I need you to make a path to the street so that if they get here they'll be able to get to the house."

Bobby nodded and dressed in the warm coat that was now his pride and joy. It had belonged to Oscar Hammerschmidt, the banker in Hampstead, and it had a real fur collar attached to the thick gray wool that made the coat long enough that it went clear to Bobby's calves. Another gift from the people of Hampstead was a worn pair of cowboy boots, two sizes too large, but, when stuffed with newspapers or socks, stayed on his feet and kept them surprisingly warm as long as he didn't stay out in the cold too long. Though down in the heel, they had been frequently oiled over their previous life and were, for the most part, waterproof. An old coonskin hat that came from who knew where topped off his costume. He'd never have worn it back east, but it kept his head toasty warm ... and this place was different.

Armed with a grain scoop provided by Mavis, Bobby attacked the snow, which was thankfully light and fluffy. Clearing a path to the street took him only ten minutes, so he widened it and then expanded it along the edge of the street in both directions. Next he shoveled the snow from around Mavis' car, which looked almost buried. He knocked the snow off the car and then had to shovel that away as well.

He went back inside and filled all the coal buckets from the big coal bin in the basement.

After that he sat down at the table with a cup of hot tea and waited for something else to do. He automatically got food for the last few children who straggled into the dining room. Finally Mavis, Sally and Meg arrived back in the kitchen and began to feed themselves and the two babies, who they had gotten up last.

Five minutes later Prudence stomped through the door, her skirt crusted with snow. She had put on an old pair of bloomers, which were also crusted with snow and her high topped shoes were white with the snow frozen to them.

"Sorry," she said tersely.

Mavis waved a hand. "I'm amazed you got here at all. Where in the world did you find those?" she laughed, pointing at the white bloomers under Prudence's skirt.

"They're my mother's" said Prudence, grinning. "I'm not quite ready to wear slacks yet. I thought they'd help. Besides, it's only six blocks" said Prudence, rubbing her calves. "I can't feel my legs, though."

It was Bobby who thought of the bathtub. He went and added coal to the fire they kept burning or banked at all times under the water heater and blew the embers to make the additional coal catch. Then he took the big ash bucket, which he had emptied that morning, and washed it out before filling it with hot water. It was a three gallon bucket, made of tarnished copper, but he was able to lug it out to the kitchen, where he set it on the floor beside Prudence, who was eating.

He pointed at the water, and then at her feet.

"Why Bobby!" she squealed. "How thoughtful!"

She stood up and started pulling her bloomers off, reaching under her skirt to pull them past her hips. That required some rather significant wiggling, since the waistline of the bloomers was under the waistline of her skirt. Then she had to sit to remove her shoes and pull them off her feet. In the process Bobby was treated to a long expanse of naked legs, spread in a most immodest way that Prudence wasn't aware of because all her attention was on getting her legs and feet bare so she could put them in the hot water.

Meg, however, noticed Bobby's wide eyes as he saw glimpses of Prudence's bare thighs. Not wanting to embarrass Prudence, Meg went to stand in front of Bobby, her body blocking his vision.

"Thank you Bobby" she said sweetly, swaying sideways as he automatically tried to lean to one side to maintain his view of a real woman's naked legs. "Won't you get her a towel too?"

Bobby figured out what she was doing as he swayed back the other direction and she went with him. He grinned sheepishly and turned to go get the towels.

When he came back the women were discussing the fact that school had been supposed to start back up after the Christmas vacation in two more days, but now it was likely that would be delayed. Bobby hadn't though about school since arriving. He'd been to both public schools and in orphanages that had their own school. He didn't like the public schools, because everyone made fun of the orphans and he got into lots of fights. The orphanage schools were fraught with danger, but that was from adults, not other students. He wasn't excited about going back to school, especially if he maintained his mute status. He had no idea how that would go, but he didn't have any reason to think it would be any fun.

He spent the rest of the day taking the older children outside to play in the snow. It was deep enough, especially where he had piled it up with his grain scoop, that he could get on his hands and knees and dig tunnels in it for the younger children to crawl through. They loved it.

Ironically it was an adult who introduced the children to snowballs, and not Bobby. He had thrown a snowball one time that got him a week in the punishment room, so he didn't think about using snow that way any more. It was Meg who came outside, dressed in a coat and dungarees. She threw the first snowball, and she threw it at Bobby, hitting him on his left hip.

He turned to find her grinning at him and making another snowball, which she also threw at him, but missed.

"Betcha can't hit me," she taunted, trying to dart this way and that, but foundering in the deep snow. She laughed as she fell down, but scrambled back up and made two more snowballs which she lobbed toward Bobby before he finally made one of his own. He threw that one and she turned her back, taking the snowball there.

Then the war was on as the other kids mimicked them, and laughter rang out all over the yard. Everything went fine until, at one moment, with her coat hanging open, Meg took one of Bobby's snowballs right in the gap between the first button of her blouse and her chin. The light snow splattered, driving downward into her blouse and filling the cleavage in her bra.

Her look of amazement as she automatically bent forward in a vain attempt to make the snow fall lower, and then her screech, sent bolts of concern to Bobby's brain. He had hurt an adult!

Meg turned and ran into the house, and Bobby, not knowing what else to do followed her. He arrived to see her coat on the floor of the dining room as she danced around.

"It's so cold!" she squealed.

Mavis looked up from some mending she was doing.

"Of course it's cold. It's winter," she said calmly.

"Noooo I got snow down my blouse!" squealed Meg. Her arms suddenly disappeared, like magic, as if they had been sucked into the blouse and then her blouse looked like there were two raccoons wrestling under it as she reached behind her to unclip her bra. The garment dropped to the floor, the empty cups upward and crusted with snow.

"That's better," said Meg, shuddering as she stuck her arms back out the arm holes of her blouse.

Bobby stared. In the heat of the room the melting snow had made the front of her blouse wet, and her spiked nipples poked through the pale cloth, dark enough to be seen through the fabric.

Meg looked at Bobby's shocked face, and then down at the two prominent bumps on the front of her blouse and blushed.

"Perhaps I should go put on another blouse," she said.

Mavis laughed. "Unless you want to put ideas in that boy's head I'd say you're right."

Meg bent over and picked up her bra and then dashed for the stairs, and her room on the second floor.

Bobby, astonished yet again that no one was mad at him for what had happened, turned and went back outside to keep an eye on the other children.

At supper that night Bobby felt like Meg looked at him somehow differently than she had before. She didn't look angry, but she looked at him more often. He was wary of looking back at her.

Coincidentally, that night was bath night.

Bobby settled into a chair while half the kids were whisked off to the big tub and Meg selected a book to read to the others. June Bug immediately crawled up on his lap and leaned back.

Meg had decided to begin (probably for the fourth or fifth time since she'd worked at the home) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. A few of the older children had heard the story before, but that didn't matter. Bobby was hooked immediately as Meg's hypnotic voice began the tale of the little girl and the strange characters she interacted with.

He didn't notice as the bath shift changed, and June Bug crawled down off his lap, to be replaced by Emily, who settled in just as comfortably as June Bug had.

"You're not stinky tonight" she commented. Bobby wanted to laugh. Since the last bath night Emily had sat on his lap at least four or five times. Some nights it was while someone read to them on the cold evenings. On other nights the big Motorola radio was turned on. The adults huddled around it, listening to Walter Winchell or someone else report on the war. Some nights they listened to the Inner Sanctum, or The Shadow, which held both the children and adults in thrall as they listened to the drama play out. Bob Hope was another favorite, though again, mostly with the adults. Emily sat on his lap then too, if June Bug wasn't already there, huddling against him during tense moments in the dramas. She had never mentioned his ... odor ... during those nights. But, it being bath night again, she apparently felt compelled to comment.

Meg looked up from the book. "Emily, everybody has to take a bath, whether they need one or not."

Emily smiled "I know. I just like the way he smells," she said, snuggling against him and pulling his arms around her. She was still wrapped in her towel, her hair damp.

Donna dropped a towel on her head. "You're not even dry yet, little missy. Dry off and get dressed or you'll catch your death of cold.

"I want Bobby to dry me," whined the little girl.

Meg's eyes widened a bit, then relaxed back to normal as Bobby picked up the towel and ruffled the girl's hair with it. Then he pushed her off his lap and pointed to the pile of clothing, looking back at Meg, and then the book in her hands, with a silent plea to keep reading.

Meg went on reading from where she'd left off, even though the kids listening now hadn't heard the beginning. It didn't matter to them. They just loved huddling together while Meg's melodious voice lifted and fell as she illustrated the characters with her voice.

All too soon, at least as far as Bobby was concerned, the other children were back, capering around naked as they picked out clothes from the pile on the floor to wear to bed. They dallied, knowing that, as soon as they were dressed for bed, they'd be hustled off to cold sheets in dark rooms. He wanted to groan as Meg's slim-fingered hands closed the book and she stood up.

"Your turn Bobby," she said, looking at him with a glint in her eye.

Bobby followed her, almost eagerly, this time, to the bathroom. His memory of the last time this had happened to him caused him to react before they even got there. He knew he should take his clothes off, but he also knew that, if he didn't, she would take them off for him. He had enjoyed that last time, so he stood and waited as she filled the tub with hot water.

The glint was still in her eye when she turned and began unbuttoning his rough shirt. The suspenders that had belonged to a dead man now replaced the rope he used to keep his over-sized pants up, and when she pushed the straps off his shoulders his pants fell like they had lead weights in them. They caught on his stiff prong, which bent downwards until the pants were dragged off of them, and then sprang upward again to slap his abdomen with an audible sound. It settled then, bobbing in the air as Meg looked down at it.

She knelt, her eyes glued to his organ, as her hands reached to make him lift a foot out of the pants. It bobbed again as he did that, and kept moving as he lifted his other foot too, placing it to one side. Meg breathed in and found his odor to be much nicer than last time, like Emily had said. She found herself breathing deeply as she stood back up and pushed Bobby's shirt off his shoulders, to leave him standing naked in front of her. She had the strangest urge to hug him ... to feel his body against hers, and blushed at her improper thought.

"In the tub" she said, having to clear her throat.

Bobby got in the tub and sat down, this time, without having to be told. He looked up at the window sill, where the soap was.

Meg felt her nipples tightening under her dress, something that usually only happened when she was in bed, alone with her thoughts. She felt the urge to squeeze them, as she sometimes did in the dark, but resisted. She reached for the soap and got her hands frothy before she began sliding them over the young man's shoulders and back. Her sensitive fingertips felt the welts and healed scars from his past beatings and her heart again melted at the thought of what this poor boy had been through.

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The Orphanage Blues

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