Chapter One

I pretended to be asleep until Ank left the room. Florence was with Ank’s sister Viola in Kingstown, and the house was quiet. When I could hear Ank in the shop, I jumped from bed and dressed, stuffing two books, a penknife, a dress, a salami, a moth–eaten tartan cape, and Maddie’s letters into a cardboard suitcase. The letters are two years old, but I have read them so many times, I know every word by heart. She says there is work to be had in the West, not just saloon–girl work like in the penny weeklies, but work you wouldn’t be ashamed to do. I wonder if she will be surprised to see me. Surprised to see I am alone. She never believed I would do it. I counted the money I’d saved, which came to forty–two dollars. I kept thirty dollars for myself, and wrapped the rest in a piece of butcher’s paper, sealed it in an envelope, and addressed it.

When I heard Mr. Lombardi in the alley, I invited him into the kitchen for coffee. He delivers a supply of colored glass stones to the shop on the last Monday of the month and I was expecting him. I told him I needed to get to Boston, where my sister was ill. I have no sister, but he did not know that. If he would take me to the Fox Point station when he left, I could catch the afternoon train to Boston. When he agreed, I asked him not to tell Ank. I said I had been forbidden to see my sister as she lived in sin with another woman. It was the worst lie I could devise.

My wrist is bandaged where my husband burned me with the soldering flame, and I saw Mr. Lombardi glance at it, but he said nothing. He knew Ank did it. Everyone in our street knows Ank likes to hurt me. Viola knows. My mother knew, although she never did anything to stop it. “It is only what you deserve,” she said. “Anyone with the name Aniketos cannot be a proper Christian, and has to be a foreigner, maybe even a Greek. Or worse, a Turk.” How she determined that Greeks are not Christians is a mystery, but there is a long list of mysteries where my mother is concerned. Who, for instance, is my father? She refused to tell me. Maybe he, too, is Greek, which would account for my black eyes and hair, and the faint line of hair above my lip. She believed that during conception, the partner who had the strongest orgasm determined the looks of the child, which suggests that my father is Greek, after all. Or a Turk. And that she was is as cold as ice, but I knew that.

I met Mr. Lombardi on Eddy Street as we had planned. It was raining and we didn’t talk much, perhaps because we had nothing to say, and we were soon wet through, despite the tarp he threw over us. He had a pint of whiskey in his pocket and now and then took a drink, but he did not offer me any. He dropped me at the Fox Point station and I again reminded him that he was not to tell anyone he had seen me. When he handed down my bag, he slipped a half–dollar into my hand, which caused me to wonder if he believed my story, after all. As I watched him turn the corner, I told myself that everything that happened from then on would be a sign. Even the rain was a sign. It would erase my footprints.

I mailed the envelope and ran into the station. I arrived too late to catch the train to Albany, and spent the night in the waiting room. I thought the porters who wandered in and out might not like it if I sat on one of their benches in wet clothes, so I walked in circles to keep warm, eating the salami and shaking with cold. Every time a man came through the door, I was certain it was Ank and hid my face in my sleeve, but no one bothered me, except for one man who asked if I was free for the evening.

I read Maddie’s instructions for the hundredth time. Once I reach Boston, I am to take a train to Albany, where I will board an Erie Canal packet boat which will get me as far as Buffalo. In Buffalo, I am to board a lake steamer to Chicago. The fare in steerage will be three dollars. In Chicago, I am to find a place on a wagon traveling to a port on the Mississippi River called Galena. Then another steamboat from Galena to St. Paul, Minnesota, where I am to find a stagecoach that will carry me to the town of Shakopee, where Maddie will be waiting for me.

***

I must have fallen asleep on the train to Albany, as I don’t remember leaving Boston. I was nudged awake four hours later by the conductor, surprised to see wheat fields and cows and barns. I asked him if he knew how I might find the Erie Canal Navigation Company in Albany, which turned out to be a fifteen minute walk from the station.

I bought a ticket on what is called a line boat, departing in an hour. It is sixty feet long and ten feet wide, and used mainly for freight which, the clerk warned me, meant not as select a company as I would find on a packet boat. As it is drawn by mules rather than horses, it is slower, but it is also cheaper. I am paying one cent a mile, which comes to three dollars and ninety cents. It will take five days to reach Buffalo.

I bought some peanuts and a ham sandwich and cider with Mr. Lombardi’s half–dollar, reckoning it an unexpected treat, and ate the peanuts while I waited on the landing. Alongside me was an elderly woman holding a small gilded cage with a rabbit in it. Also a minister who asked if he might preach to us from the Bible. I didn’t know how I could refuse and said nothing, but the woman with the rabbit said, “I’d prefer not. I’m given to seizures.”

***

It is my third day on the line boat. I sit on a three–legged stool on the roof of the main cabin, although there are two spindly chairs in the bow, occupied by the old lady and her rabbit. A row of barrels and narrow crates line the sides of the boat, beginning at the bow. I sleep below deck in a wooden frame with a sacking bottom. The others sleep in cots packed into the main cabin, the men separated from the women by a serge curtain, strung each night on a sagging wire.

I feel unaccountably pleased with myself. I haven’t felt this way in a long time, maybe never. I am on my way to Buffalo. No one has clapped his hands around my neck or burned me. Except for Mr. Lombardi, I haven’t told a lie in five days. Now and then, I am frightened by my freedom, wondering what I am meant to do with it. In the past, that is a week ago, it was a relief when things remained merely themselves.

One of the boatmen, a slight Irish boy, high-shouldered and bony with a chipped front tooth, saw that I had no dinner last night and told me that I could eat each evening in the main cabin provided I pay for it. “It will cost you twenty cents,” he said, taking a certain pride in what seemed to him an exorbitance. Tonight I sat at a long communal table with the boatmen and one other woman and ate baked beans and pork and green tomatoes. No one spoke, which was fine with me.

My penknife was stolen from my suitcase last night.

***

The boy’s name is Dennis. He told me was an orphan with a sister in a convent in Ottawa, which did not surprise me as I learned at Dexter Asylum to spot an orphan a mile away. He has a tin whistle, a Doolin whistle, he says, and when the teasing by his fellow hands goes too far (the outline of a large crucifix is clearly visible beneath his shirt), he plays his whistle until they settle down. When he saw a book in my lap, he said he was teaching himself to read and asked if he could borrow it from me. I gave him Ivanhoe as I had finished it that morning and did not want to carry it. He returned half an hour later, having noticed it was a library book, to ask if he was breaking the law as the book was long overdue, but I assured him it would be all right. When my hat blew away, he gave me his neckerchief to wear around my head. I have no mirror, but I could see myself in the canal. I look like my mother.

Last night, I dreamed that Florence and I lived in Nova Scotia, and this morning, I almost jumped from the boat to find my way home even though I know Ank would kill me.

***

I neglected to bring certain necessities in my haste, not only food, but the means to wash myself. When I began to bleed, I had nothing to put between my legs. Dennis must have seen the blood on my skirt, but he said nothing, handing me a few dirty dishcloths with the tips of his fingers, as if I had already soiled them. He sits on the deck beside my chair when the packet stops for the night to practice his letters on the endpapers of Ivanhoe. I suspect that he would like to visit me later, but I do not fancy him. Besides, although I am not what you would call fat, I would flatten him.

It is his job to shout “Bridge!” when we are about to pass under one, as there is often scant headroom. Those of us sitting on the flat roof, usually only myself and a man in a red wig, throw ourselves onto the deck until it is safe to regain our seats. Dennis was severely reprimanded yesterday when his warning came too late and a drunk drummer and his blind dog were knocked into the canal. Today I left the boat at one of its many stops to walk along the tow path, avoiding the mud and dung as best I could. At each landing stop, a new boy appears with a broom to sweep the dung into the canal.

Men jump on and off the boat all day, mainly quarreling and laughing in a loud way as they load and unload goods, or to hitch a ride to the next landing. As we slowly move west, there are more languages, people speaking what I think is Swedish, and German, and there is more noise, as if people’s voices have to cover longer distances. There are more oxen and mules. More guns. More men than women. Ladies wear simple cloth sunbonnets, their skirts cut short to keep them from the sewage. A number of people are missing some part of themselves, eyes and whole rows of teeth and fingers and legs, and have added things too, like glass eyes, and hooks for hands. I saw a bargeman with shiny red streaks on his bald head, and I heard someone say he’d been scalped by Apaches in the Mexican War. That is the other thing. There are Indians.

***

One more day until we reach Buffalo. An elderly woman in mourning holding by the neck a boy with a black eye boarded the boat this morning, and a young clergyman who looked to be drunk. I saw him again, leaning against the railing at the stern of the boat, and I bid him good morning. His collar was stained with mud and he smelled of piss. There was something false about him, not that priests do not drink or need a bath now and then. He seemed very pleased to be addressed. He said he was on his way to Niagara Falls, where he’d been appointed rector at a Methodist church. As I edged my way past him, he said, “Say, you couldn’t loan me a fiver, could you?” “No,” I said, and he put out his foot and tripped me.

***

Maddie wrote that when I reached Buffalo, I was to find my way to the Steamboat Authority, and that is what I did. As I could not spare the six dollars to book a cabin, I paid three dollars for a place in steerage, where I was given a soiled pallet and a wooden stool and a bucket without a handle. The clerk did not ask me my name. No one asked me my name.

It will take three days to reach Chicago. I bought a bag of peanuts, some pork rind, and a loaf of bread on the dock, but I finished them the second night. I’m hungry. I also smell bad. The boat is named The Queen of the West and at night I can hear piano music and the stomping of feet and shouting as the passengers dance in the saloon above me.

During the day, I read Villette by Miss Charlotte Bronte. It is one of Maddie’s favorite books and she recommended it, perhaps because I’d once told her I hoped to be a schoolteacher. I like it very much, especially as Lucy Snowe is plain like me, but it is hard to concentrate, and I am unable to read it as it deserves to be read. It is too dark below deck to read at night.

***

The streets of Chicago are deep in mud, sometimes reaching as high as the bed of a wagon. The river is full of sewage and dead cows. I made my way to the shipping agency, slipping and sliding in the mud as I stopped to ask directions. One man offered to take me there himself—it was only a few blocks away—if I would go with him to his room for five minutes. I didn’t imagine he had a quick hand of gin in mind, but five minutes!

The wagon train for Galena, Illinois was not set to leave until morning. It is one hundred-sixty-five miles from Chicago. One can take a stagecoach, the company providing food and overnight stays at posts along the way, but it costs twelve dollars. A ticket on the wagon train is half as much. I had already spent thirteen dollars, and it would be days if not weeks before I reached Shakopee. As I didn’t want to spend money on a room for the night, I asked the agent if I could sleep in one of the unhitched wagons. He looked at me as if it was not the first time he’d been asked such a thing, and to my relief said that as long as no one else knew about it and I had no visitors, it was fine with him, although it would cost me seventy–five cents. I gave him the money, wondering if he had his own night-time visit in mind, and what I would do about that, but he left me alone.

There were three unhitched wagons, their canvas roofs unfurled. The arched frames looked like the rib cages of dinosaurs. Next to the yard where the wagons were kept were two large pens, one with eight horses and the other holding four oxen. The smell was very strong. I made myself a bed in one of the wagons, using my cape as a pillow.

In the morning, I was awakened by the lurching of the wagon as it was pulled into the street. A Negro man climbed over the side, tying what looked like a canvas sail to the frame, all the while talking to himself. Boys led the horses into the street and hitched four of them to the wagon. The men paid me no mind, laughing and joking as they worked. One boy showed off to a girl in the street by punching a horse in its face.

By the time the other passengers began to arrive, I had claimed my seat. I soon found myself wedged between a husband and wife and their two sickly children, and a salesman who held tightly to a wicker sample case for the entire journey. I offered to help with their youngest child, a two-year-old girl, her face matted with dried snot, but the mother shook her head, holding the child out of reach as though I might snatch her away. I kept to myself then, only speaking when necessary, not in need of anyone’s companionship or aid. If questioned, I said I was from Philadelphia. Just in case. Ank has tracked me down before.

The wagons were packed with children and cats and dogs and cages of chickens and furniture and farm tools and oaken casks, as well as every possession thought necessary for a new life in the West, many of them unnecessary, at least to my mind. A waffle iron tied to a child’s coffin, and an album of pressed flowers. Perhaps I am unfair. Perhaps that is just what is needed.
Only the children and elderly remained in the wagons when the road led uphill or down, or when the road was too rough, or the horses were changed, the rest of us walking alongside. There were no springs in the wagons, and each rut and ditch in the road made the children cry and the old people bend double in pain. I had not expected the journey to be pleasurable, but I hadn’t imagined that it would be quite so bad.

Most people ran out of food before we reached the Mississippi. I’d bought a bag of Michigan cherries, a punnet of green plums, half a loaf of rye bread, and some rotten cheese which was meant to last me five days, but I’d eaten it all by the third day. An elderly Norwegian woman who was traveling to meet her son in Wisconsin offered to share what was left of her provisions, hard biscuits and a bag of dried apples, but it was not enough for both of us, and I ate only a handful now and then, pretending that I was full. At night, I spread my cape under the wagon, having seen lice on the children, and wanting to leave room for the old woman, but it was difficult to sleep with the groans and sobs of my fellow travelers.

We at last reached Galena, bad-tempered and dirty. The old woman was so rattled, so stiff from the journey I had to ask the help of another passenger, a stout man with a cork leg, to lift her from the wagon. I lost her in the crowd and I am ashamed to say I did not try to find her.
At the steamboat office, I bought a ticket to Shakopee, Minnesota on a riverboat named The Greek Slave. The trip upriver will take six days. I spent a half dollar for two bags of pears and some cider and a honey cake on the dock, and washed my face and hands in a pump in the street.

***

The Galena River is more a wide stream than a river, emptying into the Mississippi thirteen miles southwest of the town. The boat is meant for stock rather than passengers, and freight rather than stock. I sleep in a slatted chair in the bow, the hem of my dress stiff with dried mud, which has the advantage of keeping my legs warm at night. My cape covers the rest of me, including my head. Even so, my face and hands are swollen with mosquito bites. There are rats, too, and I keep my feet tucked under me. The cattle, trapped in their sodden pens, moan through the night.

I was told by one of the deckhands, a Negro named Joseph who takes the soundings with lengths of twine, that I am fortunate it was such a mild winter. The ice on the river broke up sooner than is customary. The boats, he said, are drawn off when the water falls low in late summer. I asked him what he did when the boats were not running and he said he works at the sawmill in St. Anthony when they will have him. There are falls there, twenty feet high, and famous around the world. He was surprised I had not heard of them. He said I would do myself a favor by visiting them. He also said he has an Indian wife. When he saw me eating the last of my pears, he told me that dinner was included in the fare. I pretended that I knew that, but preferred to eat alone. In truth, I was too embarrassed by my appearance, my shabby clothes and dirty hair and the way that I smelled to eat with other travelers, even if it was included in my passage.

Near the settlement of Red Wing, three thousand otter pelts were loaded onto the boat by trappers who themselves looked like otters, decked in skins and fur hats, despite the heat. Some men came on board to discuss the state of the river, each with a different view. Some warn about snags, or sandbars, or the danger of the water dropping suddenly. Others find the current a bit strong given the time of year. Stokers disembarking to load wood chased away a grizzly eating the carcass of what might have been a cow, and what some said was a man. One night, strong winds caused us to anchor in the middle of the river, the boat shuddering in the stream until the wind shifted and fell away.

I haven’t taken in anything new in so long, I don’t know where to fix my attention, or even how to see. I have never been more than eight miles from the center of Providence. I am adrift on a great river and adrift in my mind. I feel many things at once. Excited and exhausted, calm and distressed. I don’t know what to do with so much feeling. I saw that my life would now be one of improvisation, forgetting for a moment that my life has always been one of improvisation. I hadn’t known how easily a new life can be made. It seems everyone around me is doing the same, gambling that he has chosen the right new life. There are real gamblers on the riverboat, men in striped trousers and doeskin gloves, but you can tell that they, at least, know what they are doing.

***

We reached Shakopee in Minnesota Territory this afternoon. On the far bank, I could see Indian men standing at the edge of the bluff and women washing clothes in the river.

The bandage on my wrist was black with soot, and I unwound it and threw it in the river. The burn is almost healed, but there will be a scar to join my other scars. You must remember this, I said to myself, cleaning the burn with my spit. It is the summer of 1854, and you are free. You are twenty-five years old, and you are a thousand miles from home. What once was home.

Shakopee has a dusty main street with stores and houses on each side, most of them made of unseasoned wood. There are a few brick houses with tin roofs, an Episcopal church with a listing spire, and what appears to be a windowless schoolhouse. There is the smell of cut wood and manure, and the sound of boat horns and the sawing of lumber and the cries of animals as they are prodded from the steamers.
           
As it was late, I stopped at the first hotel I saw, The Hooper House, where I asked for a room. The clerk sat in a rocking chair with a woman on his lap. He pointed to the stairs, singing, “A bed for a grunt, a bed for a grunt.”

I climbed to the second floor, where I found a large open room, crowded with men. The room was full of smoke. There were many beds, most of them occupied. I noticed a rag doll on one of the beds and a man said, “That’s my little sweetheart.” There was an empty bed in one corner, separated from the others by a thin cotton sheet nailed to the low ceiling, and I slid my suitcase under the bed. There was a croker sack stuffed with husks for a pillow, and a stained blanket. I was so worn by my journey that I didn't care if the men watched me through the sheet, describing me with great guffaws to those whose view was impeded, disappointed that I did not remove my clothes. They, too, I noticed, slept in their clothes, but I removed my shoes.

***

The room was empty when I awoke this morning. A reeking kerosene lantern sat on a table near the door, which did little to dispel the stench from a number of chamber pots overflowing with piss and shit. There is a window high on a water-stained wall, but it is nailed shut.

I changed into the dress I’d kept unworn in my bag and went downstairs. The clerk from last night was playing euchre with two men in a dimly lit bar next to the lobby. It was bright outside, no trees or overhanging eaves to deflect the light and the heat, and I regretted that I’d lost my hat. I crossed the street to a small drugstore, reasoning that the pharmacist may have met Maddie, but he had no knowledge of her. He suggested I go to the nearby steamboat office where they kept copies of boat manifests.

I waited in the anteroom of the steamship office for some time before an unruly looking  man asked what it was that I wanted. I said that I was looking for a friend named Maddie Murphy who I was supposed to meet me in Shakopee. He sighed heavily and opened a large ledger, running a tobacco-stained finger down columns of names before turning the page with a wetted thumb. His bent head was close to mine and the pomade on his stringy hair smelled of almond oil and fat. He at last stopped, and looked at me over the top of his spectacles. He held out his hand and when I realized he wanted money, I gave him a dollar. He said that nine months ago, a Madeline Murphy had died of cholera on board a boat from Davenport called The Humboldt. Her body had been carried ashore and buried in a sandbank at the river’s edge.

“My dear Maddie,” I said. “My dear Maddie.”

“Long gone,” he said, closing the book with a loud clap. “You won’t want the river to drop too low this summer.”

***

I don’t remember leaving the steamboat office, or returning to the hotel. Or how I found my way up the stairs and into my bed.

I could not stop crying. Now and then, someone yelled at me to shut up. During the day, when the men were gone, the room was quiet and no longer full of smoke. I fell in and out of sleep, unsure if I was dreaming or if I was awake. I had no food. No water. I no longer knew what day it was, or how long I had been there. Perhaps three or four days, but I was not sure.

I thought about the asylum and I thought about my mother. Mostly I thought about Maddie.
           
When I was fifteen, my mother and I were sent to the Dexter Asylum for the Insane and Indigent, where we worked at the asylum’s farm for our room and board. We were not separated from those deprived of their reason, most of them Irishwomen dying of heartache, although many of us had surprising and for the most part pleasant moments of sanity.

For dinner, we were given white bread and cold tea, even though the storehouses were full of the vegetables we had grown, and the cheese and butter we had made, and we were starving. My mother, who was recovering from a bad burn, was given the job of topping carrots and beets, and I was put in the dairy. I soon made friends with a girl my own age named Maddie. She worked in the vegetable garden and stole whatever she could hide in her bodice, parsley and scallions for us to share at night after lights out. We said that we would give what we did not eat to the other women, but we always ate everything, even the roots. I ate butter straight from the churn when no one was looking, and licked the cream from the top of the jugs.

Once my mother was caught with a sack of parsnips and put in the bridewell for three days. She said she didn’t mind her punishment as she did not have to work. My mother was not fond of work. Before we were sent to Dexter, she was a chambermaid at the Andersen Hotel in Federal Hill, best known for its oyster bar, often coming home late and sometimes not at all. She was a saucy woman, small and thin, and I was afraid of her. When she was enraged, which was often, her protuberant blue eyes seemed to swell, and her nostrils dilate with each rasping breath. We lived in two rooms in a doss house in East Providence. I went to the Little Sisters of Mercy for a few hours each day, before running home to cook our dinner of cabbage and potatoes. I slept in the kitchen, as the bedroom was for my mother and her guests. It was difficult to sleep because of the noise they made, drinking and carousing in bed, and I preferred it when she did not come home until late. One of her regular customers was a man who had grown rich making tooth powder and I knew whenever he came to call because he would leave a tin of tooth powder on the stairs for me.

One night, I heard my mother scream, not a playful taunting scream as I sometimes heard, but a real scream, and I ran into her room. There was a man in the bed. My mother had thrown an oil lamp at him and the bedclothes were on fire. The man jumped from the bed and ran into the street, barefoot and without his trousers, as my mother and I smothered the flames with a blanket.

We were already two months behind on the rent, and the landlord was relieved to be quit of us. That is when we were sent to Dexter, and I was grateful for it. We lived there for three years, although the usual time of service was meant to be six months. Some of the men and women had been there for thirty years, and would be there until they left in a box. Maddie was brought to Dexter when she was seven years old and had grown up there. Her mother and father had died in one of the coffin ships from Sligo, and she’d been found, starving and sick, hiding in a warehouse at India Point. Because she would not speak, could not speak, she was taken to Dexter by the city’s dogcatcher. One of the older girls taught her to speak English in exchange for an occasional kiss or two, but she had taught herself to read and write, sneaking into the usually deserted schoolroom to memorize the unused primers.

I made myself indispensable by keeping the dairy’s ledgers and receipts. I was proud of my work. One of the feeders liked to pull my hair, but after he told me that cows only dream when they are lying down, I stayed away from him. The men never seemed to bother with Maddie. It was as if her beauty frightened them.

We were given an hour of schooling each morning, taught by two dissolute young men, one of them hairless. Every Thursday, ladies from the town dropped off a box of books as well as old copies of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine for the edification of the inmates. Books that were full of words and images unknown to Maddie and me, as well as to everyone else in the asylum, including the schoolteachers. Stories as well as picture books like Scottish Chiefs and Bronze Age Crete and The Gothic Cathedrals of Lorraine. Lives of the Governors of New York and one of my favorites, a three volume illustrated book of North American trees.
          
Maddie worried that the ladies would forget to bring the books each week, as she needed to be distracted, needed to be learning something new, which was a way not to be sad. We liked to imagine how some of the books had fallen into the hands of the ladies of College Hill. Perhaps their fathers and husbands were professors, or world–wide travelers. Many of the books had never been opened, their pages uncut and unseen. That is when I discovered Sir Walter Scott and the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. I also liked reading about famous women of the past, Cleopatra and Mary, Queen of Scots and Anne Boleyn, although not Joan of Arc. I still don’t know why she was left out, but she was. Maddie said it was because she had no sense of humor, but I don’t imagine the women I favored were particularly funny, either. Maddie preferred ghost stories like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and The Fall of the House of Usher. We were allowed an hour of free time after dinner and that is when Maddie and I would read. I stole a cheese spreader from the dairy to cut the pages, but it did not do a very neat job. I wished I could steal the books, but we had no place to hide them. When we were through with them, we took them to the schoolroom where they were thrown into a closet until the closet became too full and they were throw into the farm’s waste pit. It was Maddie who taught me that books weren’t just for learning, but that you could read because you liked to, and to find out things you would never have known otherwise. All my love then went to books. And to Maddie, of course.

Although men and women lived in separate wings of the building and were punished should they meet anyplace other than at work on the farm or in the dairy, my mother found a way to meet men and sometimes women in an empty basement storeroom. She was caught when one of the women, whose husband was a favorite of my mother’s as he paid in tomatoes, reported her to the matron. We were left at the front gate with five dollars, new shoes two sizes too big, and a warning not to return. It was 1848. My mother was thirty-two years old. I was eighteen.

It took us an hour to walk to Elm Street where my mother’s cousin Peggy worked as cook in the rectory of St. Anne’s. She said we could sleep in a shed in the yard, but only for a few nights, as the priest would not like it. I found some old newspapers in the shed, padded my new shoes, and began to look for work. To my surprise, as I had neither looks nor education, and no experience in the world other than counting cows, I found a place within days, working as a sweeper for a jeweler on Dyer Street who allowed me to sleep on a horsehair mattress in the attic of his shop. My mother disappeared.

Excerpted from THE LOST WIFE by Susanna Moore. Copyright © 2023 by Susanna Moore. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.