Mercy Train by Rae Meadows

drunken round of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
    â€œYou boys want magic oriental potion?” Li said to them. He jumped up to make a deal.
    â€œDon’t get yourself shanghaied, fellas!” Charlie yelled.
    â€œWoo-hoo!” Jimmy whooped. “Let’s really get drunk.”
    Outside of the Tiger Eye, they saw the police clubbing a man, an Italian Nino recognized from the slaughterhouse. The blows were wet thuds, the man already out. In the shadows, men watched, their eyes hungry and hot. Bloody sludge ran in the grooves between the cobblestones.
    â€œCome on,” Violet said to the others.
    As they moved in from the water, the carrion scent of the bone boiler grew stronger.
    â€œHey, Charlie, it’s starting to smell like you around here,” Jimmy said, kicking over a pile of rotten vegetables outside a shuttered market.
    The Dugan brothers sat on the stoop of their tenement, throwing rocks at passersby.
    â€œMother busy in there, Red?” Nino said.
    â€œFuck off,” he said. “At least she ain’t as poor as Job’s turkey.”
    They went to Willy’s, where they would get served as long as they sat out back in the alley. Violet had been drunk many nights since arriving in New York, and once even before she’d left Aberdeen. She’d sat in the outhouse with a jelly jar of her father’s homemade potato brew and choked down the firewater until her face flushed and her limbs felt loosey-goosey, and going back in that house, with its rough plank floor and tilted walls and parched woodsmoke air, which held on to the ghost of the dead baby boy her mother had given birth to, didn’t seem as bad as before.
    The alley was a rubble of passed-out men and garbage. It was late and cold, and Violet shivered.
    â€œI’m sleeping out tonight. If you’re wandering around,” Nino said to her.
    â€œShe got us a room. I wouldn’t want her to worry,” Violet said, too eagerly, embarrassed by the naked hope in her voice.
    Nino chuckled a little. “Okay,” he said.
    â€œHi-ho cheerio, lads and lady,” Jimmy said, clanking their tin cups so hard the rum sluiced over the sides.
    *   *   *
    Lilibeth did not return to the room that night. Violet lay in the bed that smelled of smoke and flowers and listened to the fighting in the room below, fists on flesh, broken glass, drunken sobs, until the crack of the early morning sun. She wondered what it would be like to know pure quiet, to sleep without the fits and starts of her heart catching, to hear her own breath.
    When she finally sat up, her head throbbed and her tongue felt like sandpaper. The room was marble cold. There were a few chunks of coal in the bin, which she tossed into the stove, struggling to get a flame to catch. Thankfully there was old coffee in the bottom of the kettle. She rooted around for a shawl in Lilibeth’s floral carpetbag, a gift from Bluford before they were married, to take on their honeymoon, a night in a hotel in Lexington that never happened. Sometimes Violet thought Lilibeth left Aberdeen just so she finally had a reason to use her bag.
    In the corner of the room there was a teetering stack of laundry Mrs. Baker had brought over: shirts, trousers, petticoats, and dresses. Violet ran her finger along the brocade trim around the collar of one of the dresses, a velvet ribbon tie at the neck. She held it up to her front and wondered how it would feel to wear it, to feel the skirt swishing about her legs, to feel like someone new. But her fingers fumbled on the complicated buttons and laces, and she got tired from holding up the unbearably heavy dress, her hands shaky with hunger. She draped the dress back on top of the pile. She poured coffee into a chipped little cup—it tasted bitter and burned—and set the iron on the stove.
    She had never actually ironed, but she figured it couldn’t be that hard. She spit on the iron and it