ORPHANAGE

1 0 8 Y O R P H A N A G E C A R O L M U S K E - D U K E S Suddenly awake and afraid, I looked down from my high window into the spinning prism of snow, past the new flattened macadam to the white meadow below. I watched the drifts cover the tall grass, where in Summer, rabbits and whip-poor-wills hid from eager slingshots and family-size plots following the surveyors’ black flags. I’d been awakened by a sound: something stuck, spinning its wheels. A truck, I could see now, as it lunged suddenly out of the deep rut it had made trying to downshift at the top of the meadow path leading to the orphanage below. As the truck lurched free, I could see its tail-gate shudder, gape, then a quick cascade of tumbling shapes. Back-up lights, bright red blurs, vanishing. Moon-lit, my school coat and scarf drawn on, I went spinning down through the sleeping house: feeling its familiar steady rebuke. Slipping out, ghostly in blowing snow, I found them where they’d fallen. Dolls. A scattered family, lying face-up, eyes staring past me at the sky as their silly faces were slowly erased. Kewpie-pouts, clumsy spit-curls. Raggedy-Ann dresses, cheaply made. As if a collection taken at the new church nearby had paid a doll factory to spin o√ a poor version of something loveable. Special delivery. Though now I heard a chime. It must have been Christmas. It must have 1 0 9 R been hours before the nuns led their small charges out to salt the ice and shovel the hill where others sledded. They honored the earth: I’d watched how their gardens grew lush in summer, all the way to the iron gates. I thought how soon they would be gone, along with the living meadow. So why have I kept close for years this dream of them, coming upon the tossed dolls, face after unloved face, in the bright new morning? Holding them tight all the way home. Though there was no home, of course: I knew there never was one. ...