HIS MOTHER WORRIED about him riding on a train.
There were train wrecks every day, she had said in a woeful voice. People killed by the thousands. Always something in the newspapers about it.
“Remember what I’ve told you about your great-uncle Abner?” his mother had asked.
Yes, he remembered. His mother had told the story often, with such dramatic intensity it left the impression that she had been on the scene, and the sight of it was seared permanently into her memory. “The most horrible death imaginable,” she would say at the conclusion of each telling. “Just horrible.” And she would bow her head and close her eyes and sigh like a stage actress. Sometimes she would whisper, “Horrible,” a final time.
Abner Phelps had been killed in Pennsylvania in a train wreck in January of 1878, when a brushfire burned into cross ties and shifted the rails and the train tumbled down an embankment into a creek. A coal-burning stove in Abner Phelps’s passenger car had broken apart, spewing fire, and all the passengers had died in the blaze.
Trains were not safe, his mother had declared.
“I’ll be fine, Mama,” Ben had said. “It’s nineteen ten. They don’t have coal-burning stoves on the trains I’ll be taking. Anyhow, it’s July, not January.”
“I won’t sleep until you’re home,” his mother had vowed.
He was dressed in a dark brown, well-tailored three-button suit cuffed at the sleeves and pants. He wore a matching vest over a high-collar shirt and a stylish tie. A new chocolate-colored felt hat with a narrow brim rested at a tilt on his head. His shoes were polish-bright. He had the look of a garment salesman setting off to invade a new territory, or of a politician on the speech circuit.
Inside the suitcase on the seat beside him were three additional shirts, two older pairs of trousers, another pair of shoes—broken-in and comfortable—underwear, socks, handkerchiefs, toothbrush, shaving needs, writing materials, Lottie’s letter, an assortment of sandwiches his mother had prepared, and, in an envelope, money he had secretly put away, week by week, in a clothes trunk. He had no specific reason for saving it, other than habit, but now was glad for the habit.
In another envelope, kept in the inside pocket of his suit coat with his travel schedule, he had a letter from Sally, a letter written late at night and riskily delivered to the front door of his home. His mother had discovered the letter when she opened the door. The message was simple:
Ben, I love you. I’m sorry about how Daddy acted. I don’t want you to go away, but if you do, I want you to come home to me. I already miss you. I already hurt so much I can hardly breathe.
The letter had made him ache, made him want to stay. He loved Sally Ledford. Knew that he did. Sally dazzled him, made him feel awkward, out of control, the same emotions he had heard others describe when they talked of being in love. He had lingered on the platform of the train depot, believing she would appear to tell him goodbye, to embrace him in public. Perhaps kiss him.
She did not appear.
He licked his lips over the thought of the kiss, imagined the sweet, peppermint heat of her mouth. A single glad heartstroke drummed in his chest and throat, and he swallowed it and swallowed also the imagined heat of Sally’s mouth.
He sat near a window, resting comfortably, gazing at the scenery that seemed to move dizzily past the window. He knew that he, not the scenery, was moving, but he liked the thought of sitting still and having the countryside zip past the train window. It was like being on a merry-go-round at some carnival, riding to the thundering sound of the engine and the rhythmic clicking of wheels over rails, and, occasionally, the high, shrill scream of the steam whistle. Once his father had told him in secret that he had always wanted to be a railroad man, but knew better than to suggest it publicly. Uncle Abner’s death, his father had lamented, had chilled any fancy he might have had for riding trains for a living. “Your mother would never have put up with it,” his father had said in a voice that fathers used with sons when the story being told was mixed with humor or with cloudy instruction.
He leaned his head against the headrest of the seat and thought of his mother. She had marched off to Ledford’s Dry Goods with so much righteous anger it steamed from her, and she had returned home as a one-woman parade, with the gladness of music and song curling from her voice, and with the promise of Ben’s job when he returned from Boston.
Later, when the euphoria of her bravery had subsided, she had begun her anguish over Ben’s long train ride.
“I just know I’m going to dream about Uncle Abner,” she had said woefully.
It was Ben who had dreamed of Uncle Abner. A dream of fire and screams. A dream so vivid it might have been a premonition.
He took his written-out travel schedule from his coat pocket and studied it. Athens and Atlanta in Georgia, Chattanooga and Nashville in Tennessee, Beimer in Kentucky. And between them, so many stops at so many small places. He had sketched out a crude map from the atlas, and he touched the names with his fingertip, following the pen line of his drawing. He would travel through late afternoon and night before reaching Beimer in midmorning.
Across the aisle, he saw a man and a woman and a girl, perhaps thirteen or fourteen. Farm people, Ben thought. They wore washed-thin Sunday clothing, with an after-rain scent of lye soap that was suspended faintly in the train car. The man and woman sat statue-erect, motionless, a glazed expression in their unblinking eyes. Ben knew it was the first time they had been on a train. Could tell by the way they sat, by the way they did not seem to breathe, as though the great speed of the train had siphoned the air from their lungs. The girl was not afraid. She wiggled restlessly in her seat and gazed in wonder at the illusion of the moving countryside.
He thought of Lottie.
So long ago.
So long ago.
The girl in the aisle across from him laughed sharply, suddenly, her face glowing. Her head turned against the motion of the train, and she watched wide-eyed as something remarkable, or humorous, disappeared from sight. Her parents did not move.
There would be a thirty-minute stop at the Athens depot for adding freight, the conductor announced. It was all right to get off the train, he conceded, but anybody wandering too far away would be left if he didn’t pay attention to the time.
Ben saw the man and woman across from him glance at one another in confusion.
“Let’s get off,” the girl said.
“We’re not there yet,” the man said gruffly. “Best to stay put to we get there.”
“Where you headed?” Ben asked.
The man looked at him suspiciously.
“I’m going up into Kentucky,” Ben said.
“We going as far as Chattanooga,” the man answered. Ben recognized the faint trace of an accent—German, he thought.
“That’s a pretty long way to go,” Ben replied. “Where’d you get on?”
“Down to Augusta,” the man said. “We come from down near there.”
Ben stood. “Well, I think I’ll stretch my legs a minute. Don’t like getting too cramped on one of these things. Makes it feel a little funny trying to walk on the ground again, after you been on a train a long time. A little like having sea legs.” He tipped his fingers to his hat and left the train.
There were many people in the Athens depot. Passengers and well-wishers, businessmen, train workers. The noise of voices rode over the hiss of steam. A small commissary sold coffee and cakes, and Ben pressed himself in the line of buyers, bought a coffee and a cake, and found an out-of-the-way place to have his refreshments and still be close to the train.
The talk around him was lively.
Spirited debate over the vote to ratify a federal income tax.
Men in awe of Barney Oldfield driving a Blitzen Benz more than one hundred and thirty miles an hour at Daytona Beach.
Matching stories about seeing the rooster tail of Halley’s Comet.
Declarations of surprise over the recent parade in Athens by the Colored Knights of Pythias, a spectacle unlike anything ever witnessed by the city’s citizenry.
Laughs spewing up from a knot of men talking in whispers, and Ben knowing that a traveling salesman’s joke had been told.
It was talk that Ben never heard in Jericho. In Jericho—especially in Ledford’s Dry Goods—conversations were guarded, and as repetitious as a parrot’s jabbering.
He saw the man and woman and young girl exit the train. The man stepped tentatively onto the platform, stood for a moment, tested the weight of his body on the wood flooring, then took a careful, comical step, his face furrowed in worry. Ben smiled. He knew he had frightened the man into believing it would be impossible to walk on firm ground after riding in a train. He turned his face. He did not want the man to see him, to see the smile. It would be embarrassing to the man.
On the wall of the depot, Ben saw a poster promoting the reelection of Martin Wade to the state senate. The pen-and-ink drawing of Martin Wade showed the face of a darkly serious man, a brooding man. His mother had said to Ben, “If the train stops long enough in Athens, you should try to see Martin and Christine Wade, or call them on their telephone. Maybe they could tell you how to get in touch with Milo in Boston.”
Ben did not want to see the Wades, or to talk with them.
The Wades were like occasional memories—distant and vague. Ben had always been uncomfortable in their presence, and from the pieced-together gossip that had wandered into Ledford’s Dry Goods over the past six years, Martin Wade had changed since being elected a state senator. “I could have told you,” the people said as they accused Martin Wade of an arrogance that many people in Jericho had always suspected. Or said they had. Ben had learned from working in Ledford’s that many people had the gift of knowing when the knowing was obvious and safe enough to say aloud.
He heard the call for the train.
The man and the woman and the young girl rushed back across the platform of the depot, the man pushing the woman and the girl in front of him like someone guiding a cart or a wheelbarrow.
Ben smiled again. He liked the man and the woman and the girl. They were not arrogant. They were merely going to Chattanooga, Tennessee, probably on a mission that involved family. A simple trip, yet it would be one of the most unforgettable experiences of their lives.
It was like the trip he had taken from Augusta, on the night that he met Lottie Barton.
Ben stepped into the train, found his seat, nodded to the man. The man returned the nod, then set himself rigid, waiting for the train to move.
Between Athens and Atlanta, Ben wrote two letters—one to his mother, one to Sally. Both warned that, once in Boston, he might find himself too busy to write. In the letter to his mother, he told of the man and the woman and the young girl. In the letter to Sally, he confessed that he missed her and that he believed they needed to do some serious planning for the future when he returned to Jericho.
I’m almost tempted to get off in Atlanta and catch the next train home, he wrote. He added, But I’ve come this far and I guess I need to go the rest of the way, so I’ll just mail this letter instead.
He did not tell her the rest of the way was no farther than ten miles across the state line dividing Tennessee and Kentucky.