In such houses, of whatever class, there’s no time for kids. But children are scarce in this world and therefore prized. I was well-formed, nothing about me to suggest a mue, but as a whorehouse product I was a ward of the State, not eligible for private adoption. The policers took me from my mother, whoever she was, and put me in the Skoar orphanage. She would have got the payment usual in such cases, and would then have had to change her name and move to some other city, for the State preferred that wards of my sort should know nothing of their origin — I learned mine only through the accident of overhearing a blabbermouth priest at the orphanage when I was thought to be asleep.

I grew up at the orphanage until I was nine, the usual age for bonding out. As a bond-servant I still belonged to the State, which took three-fourths of my pay until I should be eighteen. Then, if all had gone well, the State would consider itself reimbursed, and I would become a freeman. This was the Welfare System.

At the orphanage nearly everything got done with patient sighs or silence. It was not crowded. The nuns and priests wouldn’t stand for noise, but if we kept quiet there were few punishments. We were kept busy at easy tasks like sweeping, dusting, laundry, scrubbing floors, cutting and carrying firewood, washing dishes and pans, digging the vegetable patch, weeding and harvesting it, waiting on table which meant watching scum gather on the soup during Father Milsom’s prayers, and emptying the sacerdotal chamberpots.

In spite of considerable care and kindness we grew up familiar with sickness and death. I recall a year when there were only five boys and eight girls, and work got tough — the average population was around twenty children. Our guardians suffered for us, praying extra hours, burning candles of the large economy size that combines worship with fumigation, bleeding us and giving us what’s called vitamin soup which is catnip broth with powdered eggshell to stiffen the bones.

There was no schooling to speak of at the orphanage. In Moha schooling belonged to the years between the ninth and twelfth birthdays, except for the nobility and candidates for the priesthood, who had to sweat out a great deal more. Even slave children had to go through a bit of schooling: Moha was progressive that way. I well remember the district school on Cayuga Street , the weariness of effort that never found a real focus, and now and then a sense of something vital out of reach. And yet our school was very progressive. We had Projects. I made a birdhouse.

It wasn’t much like the ones I’d made for fun, off in the woods on my lone, out of bark and vines and whittled sticks. The birds themselves were uneducated enough to like those. The one I made at the school with real bronze tools was lots prettier. You wouldn’t want to hang it in a tree of course — you just don’t do such things with a Project.

My bond-servant pay wasn’t docked for school hours; a good law saw to that. All the same, compulsory progressive education is no joke, when it takes so much time out of your life that might have been spent at learning somethmg.

The only child friend I remember from the orphanage time is Caron, who was nine when I was seven. She didn’t grow up with me but was sent to the orphanage after her parents liquidated each other in a knife brawl. Only a few months and then she was bonded out, but in that time she loved me. She was quarrelsome with everyone else, constantly in trouble. Late at night, when the supervisor dozed off by the one candle, there’d be some flitting back and forth between the boys’ and girls’ sides of the dormitory, although the penalty for getting caught at sex games was twenty lashes and a day in the cellar. Caron came to me that way, slipping under my blanket bony and warm. We played our fumbling games, not very well; I remember better her talk, in a tiny voice that could not have been heard ten feet away. True-tales of the outer world, and make-believe, and often (this scared me) talk of what she meant to do to everyone in the institution except me — all the way from burning down the building to carving Father Milsom’s nuts, if he had any. She must have been bonded out away from Skoar, I think. When I was bonded myself, still lonely for her two years later, I never won a clue to what had happened to her. I learned only that the lost do not often return in life as they do in the kindly little romances we can hear from the story-teller beggars at the street-corners for a coin or two.

Caron would be thirty now, if she’s alive. Sometimes, even in bed with my Nickie, I recall our puppy squirming, the wild inconsequences of childhood thought, and imagine that if I saw her now I would know her.

I do remember one other, Sister Carnation, smelling of crude soap and sweat, who mothered me and sang to me when I was very small. She was mountainously fat with deep-sunk humorous eyes, a light true voice. I was four when Father Milsom checked my whines of inquiry by saying Sister Carnation had walked with Abraham. So I was sick-jealous of Abraham tifi someone explained it was only a holy way of saying she had died.

I was bonded out as a yard-boy at the Bull-and-Iron tavern on Kurin Street , and worked at it till a month after my fourteenth birthday, which is where I mean to begin my story. Board at half price; after that and the State’s three-fourths were taken out, I had two dollars a week left, and I supplemented the board unofficially too. Oat bread, stew, and whatever can be “uplifted” as Pa Rumley of Rumley’s Ramblers used to say — a boy can grow on that. And the stew at the Bull-and-Iron was thicker and better than anything at the orphanage — more goat and less religion.

2

On a day of middle March a month after my fourteenth birthday I sneaked away from the Bull-and-Iron at firstlight, goofing off. It had been a tough winter — smallpox, flu, everything but the lumpy plague. Snow fell in January an inch deep; I’ve seldom seen it so heavy. Now, winter bemg gone, I ached with the spring unrest, the waking dreams. I wanted and feared the night dreams in which some fantastic embrace short of completion would wake me with jetting of the seed. I knew a thousand ambitions that died of laziness; weariness of nothing-to-do while everything was yet to be done-most children call that boredom, and so did I, although childhood was receding then and not slowly. I saw the intolerant hours slip past, each day befooled by a new maybe-tomorrow and no splendid thing coming down the road.

There was a frost in Febry[2] on my birthday; people said it was unusual. I recall seeing from my loft window that birthday morning a shaft of icicle clinging to the sign over the inn doorway — a noble sign, painted for Jon Robson by some journeyman artist who likely got bed and a meal out of it, along with the poverty talk Old Jon burped up on such occasions. (Only Jon Robson’s daughter Emmia remembered it was my birthday, by the way; she slipped me a shiny silver dollar, and a sweet look for which I’d have traded all the dollars I owned, but as a bond-servant I could have been slapped in the stocks for having such a thought about a freeman’s daughter.) The sign showed a red bull with tremendous horns, ballocks like a pair of church-bells; representing the iron was a bull-ring dart sticking out of his neck and he not minding it a bit. Mam Robson’s idea likely. For a harmless old broad she got a surprising bang out of the bear-pit, bull-ring, atheist-burnings, public hangings. She said such entertainments were mor’l because they showed you how virtue triumphed in the end.

The wolves sharpnosed in close that winter. A pack of blacks wiped out a farm family at Wilton Village near Skoar, one of the families that risk dwelling outside the community stockade. Old Jon told every new guest the particulars of the massacre, to make good table-talk and to remind the customers how smart they were to come to a nice inn behind a city-type stockade-reasonable rates too. He might be still telling that yarn, and perhaps mentioning a redheaded yard-boy he once had who turned out to be a real snake in his bosom not fit to carry guts to a bear. Old Jon had connections in Wilton Village and knew the family the wolves killed. In any case he never kept his mouth shut more than a few minutes unless aristocracy was present: then, being a Mister himself, the lowest grade of nobility, he’d hold it shut, his blue damp eyes studying their faces in his lifelong search for the best arses to kiss.