All My Tomorrows Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY AL LACY

  Angel of Mercy series:

  A Promise for Breanna (Book One)

  Faithful Heart (Book Two)

  Captive Set Free (Book Three)

  A Dream Fulfilled (Book Four)

  Suffer the Little Children (Book Five)

  Whither Thou Goest (Book Six)

  Final Justice (Book Seven)

  Not by Might (Book Eight)

  Things Not Seen (Book Nine)

  Far Above Rubies (Book Ten)

  Journeys of the Stranger series:

  Legacy (Book One)

  Silent Abduction (Book Two)

  Blizzard (Book Three)

  Tears of the Sun (Book Four)

  Circle of Fire (Book Five)

  Quiet Thunder (Book Six)

  Snow Ghost (Book Seven)

  Battles of Destiny (Civil War series):

  Beloved Enemy (Battle of First Bull Run)

  A Heart Divided (Battle of Mobile Bay)

  A Promise Unbroken (Battle of Rich Mountain)

  Shadowed Memories (Battle of Shiloh)

  Joy from Ashes (Battle of Fredericksburg)

  Season of Valor (Battle of Gettysburg)

  Wings of the Wind (Battle of Antietam)

  Turn of Glory (Battle of Chancellorsville)

  Hannah of Fort Bridger series (coauthored with JoAnna Lacy):

  Under the Distant Sky (Book One)

  Consider the Lilies (Book Two)

  No Place for Fear (Book Three)

  Pillow of Stone (Book Four)

  The Perfect Gift (Book Five)

  Touch of Compassion (Book Six)

  Beyond the Valley (Book Seven)

  Damascus Journey (Book Eight)

  Mail Order Bride series (coauthored with JoAnna Lacy):

  Secrets of the Heart (Book One)

  A Time to Love (Book Two)

  Tender Flame (Book Three)

  Blessed Are the Merciful (Book Four)

  Ransom of Love (Book Five)

  Until the Daybreak (Book Six)

  Sincerely Yours (Book Seven)

  A Measure of Grace (Book Eight)

  So Little Time (Book Nine)

  Let There Be Light (Book Ten)

  This book is a work of fiction. With the exception of recognized historical figures, the characters in this novel are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ALL MY TOMORROWS

  © 2003 by ALJO PRODUCTIONS, INC.

  published by Multnomah Books

  Published in the United States by WaterBrook Multnomah, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc., New York.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission.

  For information:

  Multnomah Books

  12265 Oracle Boulevard, Suite 200

  Colorado Springs, CO 80921

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lacy, Al.

  All my tomorrows / by Al and JoAnna Lacy.

  p. cm. – (The orphan trains trilogy; bk. 2)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-56439-9

  1. Homeless children–Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y.)–Fiction. 3. Orphan trains–Fiction. 4. Orphans–Fiction. I. Lacy, Joanna. II. Title.

  PS3562.A256A78 2003

  813’.54–dc21

  2003001336

  v3.1

  This book is lovingly dedicated to

  our faithful friends, neighbors, and fans,

  Nick and Donna Bieber.

  God bless you. We love you!

  EPHESIANS 1:2

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by These Authors

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Discussion Guide

  Prologue

  In mid-nineteenth-century New York City, which had grown by leaps and bounds with immigrants from all over Europe coming by the thousands into the city, the streets were filled with destitute, vagrant children. They were anywhere from two years of age up to fifteen or sixteen.

  The city’s politicians termed them “orphans,” though a great number had living parents, or at least one living parent. The city’s newspapers called them orphans, half-orphans, foundlings, street Arabs, waifs, and street urchins.

  Many of these children resorted to begging or stealing while a few found jobs selling newspapers; sweeping stores, restaurants, and sidewalks; and peddling apples, oranges, and flowers on the street corners. Others sold matches and toothpicks. Still others shined shoes. A few rummaged through trash cans for rags, boxes, or refuse paper to sell.

  In 1852, New York City’s mayor was quoted as saying there were some 30,000 of these orphans on the city’s streets. Most of those thousands who wandered the streets were ill-clad, unwashed, and half-starved. Some actually died of starvation. They slept in boxes and trash bins in the alleys, and many froze to death during the winter. In warm weather, some slept on park benches or on the grass in Central Park.

  Some of the children still had both parents, but were merely turned loose by the parents because the family had grown too large and they could not care for all their children. Many of the street waifs were runaways from parental abuse, parental immorality, and parental drunkenness.

  In 1848, a young man named Charles Loring Brace, a native of Hartford, Connecticut, and graduate of Yale University, had come to New York to study for the ministry at Union Theological Seminary. He was also an author, and spent a great deal of time working on his books, which slowed his work at the seminary. He still had not graduated by the spring of 1852, but something else was beginning to occupy his mind. He was horrified both by the hordes of vagrant children he saw on the streets daily and by the way the civil authorities treated them. The city’s solution for years had been to sweep the wayfaring children into jails or rundown almshouses.

  Brace believed the children should not be punished for their predicament, but should be given a positive environment in which to live and grow up. In January 1853, after finishing the manuscript for a new book and submitting it to his New York publisher, Brace dropped out of seminary and met with a group of pastors, bankers, businessmen, and lawyers—all who professed to be born-again Christians—and began the groundwork to establish an organization that would do something in a positive way to help New York City’s poor, homeless children.

  Because Brace was clearly a dedicated young man—all of twenty-seven—and because he was a rising literary figure on the New York scene, these men backed him in his desire, and by March 1853, the Children’s Aid Society was established. Brace was its leader, and the men who backed him helped raise funds from many kinds of businesses and people of wealth who believed in what they were doing. Brace took over the former Italian Opera House at the cor
ner of Astor Place and Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan.

  From the beginning, Brace and his colleagues attempted to find homes for individual children, but it was soon evident that the growing numbers of street waifs would have to be placed elsewhere. Brace came upon the idea of taking groups of these orphans in wagons to the rural areas in upstate New York and allowing farmers to simply pick out the ones they wanted for themselves and become their foster parents.

  This plan indeed provided some homes for the street waifs, but not enough to meet the demand. By June 1854, Brace came to the conclusion that the children would have to be taken westward where there were larger rural areas. One of his colleagues in the Children’s Aid Society had friends in Dowagiac, Michigan, who had learned of the Society’s work and wrote to tell him they thought people of their area would be interested in taking some of the children into their homes under the foster plan.

  Thus came the first orphan train. In mid-September 1854, under Charles Brace’s instructions, Dowagiac’s local newspaper carried an ad every day for two weeks, announcing that forty-five homeless boys and girls from the streets of New York City would arrive by train on October 1. The morning of October 2 they could be seen at the town’s meetinghouse. Bills were posted at the general store, cafés, restaurants, and the railroad station, asking families to provide foster homes for these orphans.

  One of Brace’s paid associates, E. P. Smith, was assigned to take the children on the train to Dowagiac. Smith’s wife accompanied him, to chaperone the girls.

  The meetinghouse was fairly packed as the children stood behind Smith on the platform while he spoke to the crowd. He explained the program, saying these unfortunate children were Christ’s little ones, who needed a chance in life. He told the crowd that kind men and women who opened their homes to one or more of this ragged regiment would be expected to raise them as they would their own children, providing them with decent food and clothing, and a good education.

  There would be no loss in their charity, Smith assured his audience. The boys would do whatever farmwork or other kind that was expected of them, and the girls would do all types of housework.

  As the children stood in line to be inspected, the applicants moved past them slowly, looking them over with care and engaging them in conversation. At the same time, E. P. Smith and his wife looked at the quality and cleanness of the prospective foster parents and asked them about their financial condition, property, vocation, and church attendance. If they were satisfied with what they heard, they let them choose the child or children they desired.

  When the applicants had chosen the children, thirty-seven had homes. The remaining eight were taken back to New York and placed in already overcrowded orphanages. Charles Brace was so encouraged by the high percentage of the children who had been taken into the homes, that he soon launched into a campaign to take children both from off the streets and from the orphanages, put them on trains, and take them west where there were farms and ranches aplenty.

  When the railroad companies saw what Brace’s Children’s Aid Society was doing, they contacted him and offered generous discounts on tickets, and each railroad company offered special coaches, which would carry only the orphans and their chaperones.

  For the next seventy-five years—until the last orphan train carried the waifs to Texas in 1929—the Children’s Aid Society had placed some 250,000 children in homes in every western state and territory except Arizona. Upon Brace’s death in 1890, his son, Charles Loring Brace Jr. took over the Society.

  In 1910, a survey concluded that eighty-seven percent of the children shipped to the West on the orphan trains up to that time had grown into credible members of western society. Eight percent had been returned to New York City, and five percent had either disappeared, were imprisoned for crimes committed, or had died.

  It is to the credit of Charles Loring Brace’s dream, labor, and leadership in the orphan train system that two of the orphans grew up to become state governors, several became mayors, one became a Supreme Court justice, two became congressmen, thirty-five became lawyers, and nineteen became physicians. Others became successful gospel preachers, lawmen, farmers, ranchers, businessmen, wives, and mothers—those who made up a great part of society in the West.

  Until well into the twentieth century, Brace’s influence was felt by virtually every program established to help homeless and needy children. Even today, the philosophical foundations he forged have left him—in the minds of many—the preeminent figure in American child welfare history.

  Chapter One

  It was early March 1876. It had been snowing off and on in New York City for four days, and several inches of snow had accumulated on the ground. At the 38th Street Cemetery on Manhattan Island, a small group had gathered at an open grave where a simple pine coffin rested on a cart. A polar breeze was coming down out of the north, and it was snowing lightly beneath a somber gray sky. All of them felt the ice of the breeze and turned their heads into their upturned collars while the minister spoke in a solemn tone.

  Ten-year-old Teddy Hansen stared through his tears at the crude wooden box that held his mother’s body. It had already been sealed shut by the undertaker, who stood nearby, blinking at the snowflakes that kept settling on his eyelashes.

  Teddy was standing between his Uncle George and Aunt Eva Pitts, and his Uncle Henry and Aunt Lois Eades. The stiff breeze was knifing its cold blades through his thin, tattered coat. He was quivering both from the cold and from the grief that was tearing at his heart.

  The boy had never seen the minister before, who was speaking in a dead monotone, and was paying little attention to what he was saying. He sniffed and absently wiped his tearstained cheeks and nose with the sleeve of his threadbare coat.

  While the minister droned on, Teddy looked up at his relatives, who were also staring at the coffin. Uncle George was his mother’s brother and Aunt Lois was his mother’s sister.

  Teddy’s mind ran to his father as he gazed once again on the coffin. Why did Mama have to die? It was bad enough when Papa left us. I was only eight then, and poor Mama had to find a way to provide for us.

  At that moment, Teddy relived the horror of the day his father told his mother he was leaving and would never be back. He stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him. He remembered how his mother wept as she held him in her arms and told him that they would make it somehow. Three days later, after walking the streets looking for a job, she was hired as a waitress at a café near the tenement where they lived. They had to move into a one-bedroom apartment in the tenement, and his mother had insisted that Teddy have the bedroom. She slept on the lumpy couch in the parlor.

  From the start, Claire Hansen had worked a double shift at the café, seven days a week. It was the only way she could earn enough money to provide for her son and her to live on. The pace she kept steadily wore her down, and after keeping it up for nearly two years, her health began to fail. She caught a severe cold this past January, and by mid-February, she came down with pneumonia and had to be hospitalized. After two weeks in the hospital, she died.

  The Pittses and the Eadeses had traded off keeping Teddy in their homes since his mother had first become ill. He was hoping that Uncle George and Aunt Eva would let him live with them, rather than having to switch back and forth between them and Uncle Henry and Aunt Lois every few days like they had been doing since his mother got sick.

  Teddy knew Uncle Henry and Aunt Lois really didn’t want him. And for that matter, neither did Uncle George. But Aunt Eva really loved him, and he was hoping she would be able to persuade Uncle George to let him live with them permanently.

  Teddy’s gaze was still fastened on the coffin. A shiver slid down his backbone. Oh, Mama, why did you go off and leave me?

  His mind was almost as numb as his cold feet as he lifted his eyes toward the dour gray sky as though his answer would come from there. The falling snowflakes quickly attached to his eyelashes. He wiped them away and brush
ed at the flakes that covered his knitted cap. Lowering his head, Teddy looked at the snow on his shoes. His heart was as cold as the ground where he stood.

  Oh, Mama, I miss you so much. You always made sure I knew I was loved and wanted. Even though you worked so many hours, you still had time for me. I was left alone a lot, but I always knew you would hurry home as soon as your shifts were over.

  Teddy thought about how it affected him when he first noticed that his mother was losing weight and her face was so pale. He was worried about her, and when he voiced it, she smiled and told him she would be fine. From that moment on, whenever she came home from work and opened the door, she had a smile on her wan face, and they enjoyed the moments they had with each other.

  The minister’s hollow voice was still riding the frigid air as a sob escaped Teddy’s tightly compressed lips. He quickly clasped a mittened hand to his mouth, looking up at his relatives. Aunt Eva was observing him with soft, sympathetic eyes. She laid a gloved hand on his shoulder, gave it an assuring squeeze, then let go.

  Teddy lowered his head and let the tears course down his reddened cheeks and drip off his quivering chin. He sleeved away the tears and focused on the coffin. I’ve been good while staying with my aunts and uncles, Mama. I didn’t make any noise or cause any trouble. And I didn’t eat too much. I hope Aunt Eva and Uncle George will take me.

  So lost in his thoughts and grief, Teddy was not aware that the minister was closing in prayer. He was unaware that the dreadful funeral was over until he felt a strong hand clamp down on his shoulder.

  “Time to go, Teddy,” said Uncle Henry.

  Teddy nodded. “I want to tell Mama good-bye.”

  “All right. We’ll give you a few seconds to do that.”

  The aunts and uncles watched as Teddy moved up to the coffin, patted it, and choked as he said, “I love you, Mama, and I will miss you always. Good-bye.”

  When they arrived at the Eades house where Teddy had stayed the last two nights, Henry said, “Teddy, you go on upstairs to your room. We adults need to talk. We’ll let you know when you can come down.”