“Oh, dear God,” moaned Alastair. “OK, I see, now the problem is on me? Impossible is right,” continued Alastair in a clumsy attempt to minimize what they’d witnessed and now felt. “Impossible for people on the street, and especially children on the street, as nothing in their lives even remotely appears or feels like permanence-especially bonds.”
Alastair knew from experience and reading police reports that a common rule among homeless parents was that everything a child owned must fit into a small brown grocery bag for fast packing. But during brief stays in shelters, children would meet and tell each other stories-often harrowing true stories. Somehow enough stories told and they became huge exaggerations woven into the fabric of a strange belief system that, while terrifyingly odd, resonated as real for these kids and, in many cases, had likely kept them alert to real dangers. This by way of embracing their fears, mistrust, and suspicions-an animal instinct that was the gift of nature.
Jane must be thinking the same, as she said, “Actually there’s no calculating the lives these cautionary tales may’ve saved, aside from simply getting a child through the harshest of nights.”
Ransom knew from his own heritage as the son of Celtic believers that folktales were usually an inheritance from family or homeland, and that the religions of others were considered cultural folklore by non-believers. But what of children enduring a continual, grueling, dangerous journey here amid the unforgiving streets of Chicago, where Christ himself would find no pity? No parent or adult in a uniform, or carrying an inspector’s shield, could possibly steel such a child against the outcast’s fate-the endless slurs and snubs, the threats, the terror.
So here in the silence reigning inside the moving carriage Jane said, “What these children do is remarkable.”
“How so, Mother?” Gabby wiped at her eyes with a hanky.
“Think of it. They snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, newspaper and dime novel accounts, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers and doomsayers-and like birds building a nest from scraps, they weave their own survival myths.”
Gabby quietly agreed, as she’d been disturbed to her core. “Yes, and we just got a glimpse into their secret stories and guarded knowledge.”
“Knowledge or ignorance?” asked Alastair.
“For them this is knowledge and knowledge is survival,” countered Jane. “They graced us with information they do not commonly share with adults, not their parents for certain, nor the shelter people, or the priests.”
Sniffling, Gabby added, “We were privileged, “thanks to Audra paving our way. They don’t share, for fear of being ridiculed-or beaten for blasphemy.”
Jane sighed heavily. “Heartbreaking, their account of an exiled God unable or unwilling to respond to human pleas even as His angels wage war with Hell.”
Alastair nodded. “Must be-to shelter children-a plausible explanation for having no safe place, no home.”
The carriage bumped along streets in serious need of repair, the landscape of urban distress the other side of the window sash.
“Their stories have the dual purpose of engaging them in something larger than themselves,” added Jane, “and in making their lives meaningful-the purpose of any religion. An astute phrenologist and student of the mind could do a lot with these children, but it would take an army of us.”
“An astute folklorist could do even more,” countered Gabby.
“How so?” asked Jane, holding back her tears.
“A folklorist…could see traces of old legends in the new ones spawned by Chicago’s shelter children.”
Alastair silently wondered what the hell a folklorist might be.
“For example, Yemana, a Santería ocean goddess, resembles the Blue Lady; she is compassionate and robed in blue, though she is portrayed with white or tan skin in her worshippers’s shrines. And for how many generations have we heard of a disease-carrying Bloody Mary going about humanity?”
“Every group has to have its revenants, spirits, and ghosts,” Jane said.
“Yes, of course, Celtic tales of revenants,” began Alastair, chewing on an unlit pipe, “vampiric zombies digging their bloodless bodies from graves, returning souls, visitors from the land of the dead sent to console or warn, harm, or help? Trust me, they all arrived in America centuries ago with the first Native American.”
Jane stared for a moment. “Mock all you like, but it makes perfect sense to these children. It’s all they have to hold onto. It perpetuates itself through their leaders.”
“It’s still all a matter of shoveling outrageous bullshit.”
“No it’s a pseudo-religion based on religious archetypes. And while you may disagree with their version of reality, Alastair, you have to remember our reality is an absolute three-hundred-sixty degrees from theirs.”
“Theirs born of pain and experiences we can’t conceive of,” agreed Gabby.
“True, born of a fear that is as deep a wound in the mind as any I have ever encountered,” Jane said, sighing. “So they make myths.”
“Yes, so they make myths out of earlier myths that influence this…this shelter folklore,” muttered Ransom.
“The frightful and bizarre stories of these homeless children are certainly unique and foreign to our ears, most assuredly,” Gabby continued, deeply moved. “But they also have a validity, and you’re right, Inspector. They resonate with the myths of African tribes, Asian tribes, Afghanistan tribes, hell…all the tribes.”
Jane hugged her daughter to her. “It’s the certainty and detail that gets to me.”
“What about the predator-Leather Apron-the one we’re after?” Alastair asked Jane point-blank. “How does he figure into this war of angels?”
“How do we know there is a connection, Alastair? What instinct are we drawing on? Ask yourself!”
“Just an old-fashioned cop’s hunch, Jane. Nothing supernatural about it, nothing extraordinary…just a gut feeling.”
“You and I acted on our belief system, given our experience, given our myths. Isn’t it the same as the popular mind immediately pointing a finger at the knacker and the butcher?”
The carriage pulled up before the sign outside Jane’s place, the sign that read Dr. James Phineas Tewes.
Staring at the sign as the ladies disembarked, Alastair replied, “I suppose we all create our own myths, just as Dr. Tewes has done.”
“Phrenology may strike you as a myth or pseudoscience, Alastair, but Dr. Tewes is able to get people into his practice on that mythology, and once in his chair, he can diagnose a real medical problem.”
“Too bad helping those homeless children can’t be as simple, heh?” As his carriage pulled away, Alastair waved mother and daughter off, going for Philo’s place on Kingsbury. He needed a safe place where he could just relax, listen to music, have a drink, and feel confident that he did not have to pay too close attention to reason or to entertain reality. This day had been filled, perhaps, with too much reality, despite the mythology.
“That man can be so infuriating at times,” Jane said of Ransom as she got on the phone.
“Who’re you calling, Mother?”
“Shhh…it’s ringing.”
Dr. Jane Francis put in a call to a very dear friend, the indefatigable Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House and the settlement movement in the city, a woman who’d devoted her life to helping overburdened women and children.
Jane related what she and Gabby had just gone through. Jane Addams listened attentively and took in every word with an occasional yes, an uh-uh, uh-huh here, a groan there.
“Can you give us any advice on how to help this girl, Audra?”
By this time, Gabby hung on her mother’s every word, craning to hear Addams’s reply. It came immediately.
“According to the city and county people I have fights with every day, Dr. Francis,” Jane Addams began in a calm, motherly tone, “the very people whose job it is to keep track of numbers of indigent and homeless families, nearly two thousand homeless children are currently bounced like rubber balls between the privately run, and publicly run, and the overrun shelters and welfare agencies and the streets. Your concern for one of these two thousand is touching, but I really must be getting back to my duties here. I have several hundred of those two thousand clamoring for another meal, and I have a ward filled with sick ones. So…I wish you luck with finding Audra again and perhaps adopting her.”