She said, "You have 53 minutes." He stood there on the platform with his hat in his hands and tried to do what he had driven 14 miles to do, which was choose. One child, a boy who could work the land, would be the practical choice. Edmund was 12 and strong and had said the right things. Joseph was quiet and nine, which meant five or six good working years before the boy would leave.
Thomas was six and sick and small. The girls were a different question. Ada could cook and sew, and the kitchen had been dead since Caleb's mother passed in October. Pearl could read, which meant she could keep books if she learned figures. Lucille and Bess were too young to work, which meant they would cost more than they earned for years.
He knew what his father would have said. His father would have said, "Take the oldest boy and put him behind a plow and stop thinking about it." But Caleb Dunn was not his father. And what he had seen on that platform was not a line of workers. It was seven children who had been loaded onto a train in New York City and shipped across the country like seedstock, and every one of them had practiced their answers the way Edmund had, flat and rehearsed and stripped of anything that might scare off the buyer.
He turned back toward the line. He had not noticed it the first time, but now he saw that Bess, the youngest, had opened her canvas sack and taken something out of it. It was a tin cup, a small one dented along the rim with a faded letter scratched into the side that might have been a bee. The child was holding it in both hands the way a person holds something that is the only thing they own. And Lucille was standing next to her with her arm around the smaller girl's shoulder.
And the look on her face was not the look of a child waiting to be chosen. It was the look of a person who had already decided that whatever happened next, she was not letting go. Caleb walked back to Ruth Ames. He said, "What happens to the ones who do not get picked?" Ruth Ames looked at him for a moment and then said, "They go on to the next town.
If no family takes them in the next town, they go on to the one after that. Eventually, most are placed. The ones who are not placed return to the home in New York. He said, "And what happens there?" She said, "They stay until they age out or until another train runs west."
He said, "How many trains are running west this year?" She said, "This is the last one." Caleb stood there for a long time. The wind came off the flats and carried grit across the platform. And the children stood in their line and waited.