Thrust: A Novel

The makeshift school behind the door of Room 8 in my building had desks made from the finest cherrywood to be found in the city. The chairs were equally exquisite, with velvet cushions and backs so that each small body might feel held in a way that had eluded them in life. Prosthetics were abundant throughout the room — some of the newest inventions, their works clicking surely into position, some even humming mechanically. All of it the bequest of a former client upon his death: his work impeccable, my secret safe.

People give up on children all the time. They hurt them, abuse them, abduct them, extract their labor to the point of exhaustion, then throw them out like trash. One weekend in 1874, a Philadelphia dry-goods purveyor named Christian Ross looked up to see his five-year-old son, Walter, approaching him with an object in his hand.

“Open your hand, my boy. What have you got there?” he asked in a fatherly way.

The boy opened his hand. The object held in the cup of his small pink skin was a candy. The father asked the boy where the candy had come from.

“From a man in a wagon,” the boy explained. “He gave one to Charley too.” Charley was the boy’s four-year-old brother.

Three days later, while washing dishes, a local woman looked through her kitchen window and saw a wagon pull up to the curb near the home. The driver and another man talked to the two boys; then the wagon drove away with the boys.

On his way to the police station, filled with terror, the father saw his son Walter coming back to him, in the company of a man who had found him lost and crying. The story his son told him cracked his heart. The man they’d met earlier in the week, the man who had given Walter and his brother candy, had drawn up to them in a wagon with another man. They asked the boys if they wanted to buy fireworks for the upcoming Fourth of July. What boy could say no to fireworks? The boys went with the men. Charley sat between the men and Walter sat on the second man’s knee. When they arrived at a cigar store, the men gave Walter twenty-five cents to go inside and purchase firecrackers.

When Walter came out of the cigar store, the wagon — with the men, with his brother — was gone.

The abduction became a sensation, of course. But what made its infamy linger was that the kidnapping of Charley Ross was the first recorded case in which a ransom was demanded. The four-year-old boy was never found. Two years later, the father wrote a book about the disappearance of his son. Soon, however, it was all forgotten.

So, you see, I do not believe that anyone is searching for these children in my care. My goal, in gathering them together, was to give them a chance to exist without violence or fear.

You may wonder about teachers.

You will question my judgment.

But I was certain of my methods.

In Room 8, the children were the teachers. Each was tasked with gathering a piece of information, of truth, and sharing it with the rest. I was present at times, but not often.

You see, their hunger to be full people in the world drives children to gather knowledge voraciously, to study, to share what they’ve found. What I could grant them was to see that they were fed and clothed and cared for in a beautiful house, where a child was free and safe to be a child. In place of a maternal embrace, I gave them the space to exist as full humans. Also: Books. Maps. Information. Drawings. Photographs. Paper and pencils and drawing pads and paints and canvas. All manner of small machines, including candy-making machinery — to study the mechanics. The new invention of sound reproduction — Mr. Edison’s phonograph, Mr. Bell’s graphophone — will soon give children the chance to capture their own voice. I wanted to give them the chance to invent their own world.

For years, the Raids had constantly replenished the workforce, a sinister kind of labor trafficking machine. Nightly roundups, perpetrated by unscrupulous men with clubs and ropes and nets. At first, they trained their sights on black children and Native American children and Asian and Mexican children, who rarely received pay, since their debt tethered them to their owners. Then, as demand increased, they expanded their reach to all children, to the endless supply that arrived in the city from the farmlands, from overseas, from anywhere. Debt bondage was common. The men who worked the Raid force may well have been victims of debt bondage themselves, or criminals seeking something besides a life behind bars or the poorhouse. Some, of course, were simply evil.