Little Orphant Annie

A lone kerosene lamp flickers in the Hoosier twilight while the children of Indianapolis press their knees into the wide-plank floorboards and listen to the hoarse, honeyed timbre of James Whitcomb Riley. His words conjure Annie, a waif spun from frost and lullabies, whose mother dies beneath a quilt of January snow. The orphanage’s iron gates clang shut behind her like the jaws of a mechanical wolf; yet Annie survives by trading cautionary tales of goblins that snatch naughty tongues and elves who stitch stars into the hems of obedient dresses. Her uncle—grease under his nails, brimstone in his breath—arrives with a cart that smells of hog-killing time, hauling her to a farmhouse where chores outnumber heartbeats. Aunt and uncle flay her spirit with every splintered broom handle, until Big Dave—shoulders broad as a threshing machine—carries her off like a bundled sheaf of wheat into the warm lantern-glow of Squire Goode’s parlor. There, Annie blooms like bittersweet nightshade along a rail fence. Dave enlists, promising silk-stockings-by-the-fire letters that never come; telegrams instead bring the rumor of his death in a shell-blasted trench. Annie collapses into a fever dream where grief is a goblin with brass buttons and a Pickelhaube. She awakens to find the world still intact, the war over, Dave’s shadow lengthening across the yard—alive after all—and the children still listening, wide-eyed, as Riley closes the book on yet another tale that may or may not have happened.