THE DAY THEY LEFT WAS SUNNY AND CLEAR. MR. W. GREENBERRY McCain drove out from Crittenden’s Inn in a hired carriage to fetch the Wheelers. Christie thought James appeared distinguished in the new suit they had ordered from Sears, Roebuck & Co., although she knew he felt awkward in it. They had spent forty dollars to equip themselves for the trip with carpetbags, a large imitation-leather case, and traveling clothes. Christie had on a new navy suit trimmed with black braid. She had never bought a ready-made suit of clothes before, and she had to let out the hem a little and take some tucks in the jacket.
Samuel Mullins was waiting for them in the front parlor of his funeral home, his small, limp hands pawing the air nervously. Christie held herself back, behind the men, fearing the sight of her babies. She was determined to feel nothing, no more than if they were a set of porcelain figurines. But she was spared the sight. The glass case had already been fastened into the oak chest and locked inside a large trunk, which was resting in a corner as if it were an innocent feature of the furnishings.
“Now I must entrust you to take good care of the precious cargo,” Mr. Mullins said to Greenberry McCain in his thin, jittery voice. “I know it means everything to these good Wheelers, and it means considerable to me, with so much work invested in them.”
“You can count on me, Mullins,” said Greenberry confidently. “I have a good deal invested as well. I’ve just been assuring James and Christie that I’ll do everything in my power to take care of what rightfully belongs to them.”
“This is going to be worth so much to the people of America,” Mr. Mullins said, almost whispering. “I can’t express my appreciation deeply enough.”
“Don’t even try,” said Greenberry. “I take heart at your attempt.”
“You must relay back to me what people are saying,” Mr. Mullins said, touching Greenberry’s sleeve anxiously. “Not many people around here are used to these new techniques. So I really want very much to know what impression my work makes and if they have any quarrels with it. And of course you must let me know if the work doesn’t hold up.”
Christie and James stared at the brass-trimmed trunk, buckled with leather straps. The top was rounded, so nothing could be set on it. It seemed hard and sturdy, built for rough handling.
“I’ve got the glass casket packed with pillows inside the chest,” explained Mr. Mullins. “If you pack it back the same way, those little lambs will still be resting on their eternal bed just like they were.”
“Won’t they jar loose?” James asked.
Mr. Mullins smiled and caressed the trunk. “They’re held in by straps around their little middles beneath their clothes, so even if the trunk gets turned upsy-daisy they won’t move. Don’t you worry about your precious angels. And there’s more pillows holding the chest into the trunk.”
The room was dim, with the morning light peeping from behind the heavy damask curtains. A strangely dark painting of the Resurrection, with Jesus flying above the mouth of the cave where he had been entombed, hung over the mantel. He was reaching upward into a small, brilliant shaft of light in the sky, his hands extended so that each finger was splayed out like a spider leg. The picture foretold her journey, Christie thought.
Mr. Mullins smiled at her and said something in farewell. Then he squeezed her arm and said, “It would please me so much to have these precious babies returned here, so that we can show them indefinitely.”
At the station, Greenberry McCain handled the baggage, personally locating a safe place in the baggage car for the trunk. Then he paid a porter a quarter to ride with it and keep watch over it. On board, Christie and James hunted chairs on the left side of the train, so they could get a good view when they passed by their home. They sat near a starved-looking couple with four children, a woman with a squalling baby and two little boys, and several jovial men who loudly made it known that they were going to Nashville to a grain-company seminar about improved seed strains. Almost as soon as they were seated, the train began to move out, with a flourish of steam and an accelerating hum of wheels. Within a few minutes, they were approaching the farm. Christie was accustomed to the whistle and roar of the train, but now she was on the train and not at the house. First the barn came into view, floating toward them, and then she could see her house clearly—the view all those travelers had had, all those visitors who stopped back in the spring. She gasped.
“The chillern!” she cried, punching James’s leg, then immediately felt embarrassed that she had touched her husband so familiarly in public.
Lined up against the fence were the children—Amanda’s and Alma’s and her own. There were eight of them, all the children but Thurman, who thought he was too big to do anything with the younger ones. Christie thrust her arm out the window and waved.
“Look at Nannie. She’s got her sunbonnet on.”
“Look at Jewell wave,” said James. “I think he sees us.”
Greenberry McCain sat across the aisle reading a St. Louis newspaper he had bought from the conductor. He seemed to think it very ordinary to be reading a morning paper brought all the way from St. Louis. He hardly looked up, but James and Christie waved to their family until the receding figures were out of sight.
Christie felt she had to have a steady mind during this trip. She was much more excited by the prospect of the journey than she had let James know. A rumble of expectation had been growing inside her. She badly needed to get away from the place that had held her a prisoner. If she could go to new places, she had been thinking, she might get over her grief. But the sight of Nannie waving and waving stayed with her. Nannie had been up in the night with a sore throat, and Christie gave her a teaspoon of coal oil and sugar. By morning her throat seemed all right, and she sucked on a piece of Boone’s horehound. Amanda declared that it was impossible for the Lord to take another one of Christie’s children from her.
Early that morning, Amanda had cornered Christie in the bedroom, where she was looking for her hairbrush. Amanda’s wispy hair was falling into her face and her eyes were red. She said, “Now, Christie, I may be clumsy and I can’t cook perfect, but one thing I can do, and you know I can—I can take care of little boys and girls. Alma may not like the way I do it, but I’ll give the littluns a lot of loving, and Lena and Dulcie will help, so don’t you worry none.”
“I wish you could go.” Christie found the brush in a pile of sewing.
“I don’t have to go, I reckon. You’ll tell me everything.” Amanda began pulling the sheets from the bed. “I’ll wash these today.”
“I hope people don’t look down on us.”
“Don’t you be ashamed of who you are, Christie.”
“Will they think we’re hicks and live like animals, dropping a litter?” Christie had not dwelled on that thought in some time, but now her nervousness seemed to flutter around for something to alight on.
“Don’t think such a thing, Christie! You’re just as good as anybody out there, and there’ll be thousands of people who will admire you. Remember nobody’s done what you have.”
It was true that she still felt the glow of her fame. It lingered, like mist in the morning. But she had an urgent purpose—to get out there and face the public, to show them her pain. She wanted to get revenge on them, on people she didn’t even know. She thought her love for her babies would carry her through the coming weeks. She wasn’t going to let people forget them easily.
As the train moved beyond the familiar landscapes, Christie drank in every detail she could see, imagining how she would report it all back to Amanda. The trees were still green, but the fields were gold and empty like cleaned-out rooms. Now and then they passed farmers gathering corn or Negroes hauling wagonloads of tobacco covered with old quilts. At crossings, people waiting in buggies and wagons waved at the train. Christie thought back to her journey from Dundee to Hopewell four years before, when she had been so optimistic and high-spirited. That journey had been cold, with clouds threatening rain. She had felt homesick briefly, but as they ventured into unfamiliar country, her excitement overcame her, and she felt like one of those early explorers she had read about in history. Clint and Jewell couldn’t sit still, and James, busy driving the team, spoke little. Christie held on to the big bundle of a baby in her lap and sang song after song.
My sugar lump, and won’t give her up,
My sugar lump, and won’t give her up,
My sugar lump, and won’t give her up,
Oh, turn, cinnamon, turn.
Nannie smiled, and the wagon bumped a rock, startling hiccups out of her.
Later that day, Christie remembered, a muddy road slowed them down, and the horses struggled to keep the wagon from miring up. She taught Clint his letters from a little cloth book she had sewed together from remnants; A for Ant, B for Bee, C for Cat, D for Dog. She and James sang “The Brown Girl” and “A Woman Lived in a Far Country.” The wagon jounced through a thick forest, and Nannie cried. Christie sang and rocked.
Now, on the train, James stared straight ahead, looking stiff and hot in his new clothes. His large, thick hands were unaccustomed to resting idly there on his knees. They resembled worn tools.
“We’re in Tennessee,” Greenberry sang out a while later. “Tennessee used to be part of North Carolina.”
“You learn something new ever day,” said James, in a listless tone.
“I used to be quite a scholar of history,” said Greenberry, folding his newspaper carefully. “I contemplated going to the seminary but knew I couldn’t stick to that much study.”
He took out his plug of tobacco and carved off a small piece with an ivory-handled pocketknife. He offered the piece to James, but James said, “No, I don’t believe I care for a chaw of tobaccer.”
“I’m giving up chewing after I get done with this plug,” Greenberry said. “Cigarettes are so much more satisfying.”
The train passed cleared tobacco fields, faded green pastures, flat bottomland. Then it entered wilderness, where the trees were close enough to touch through the window. Branches slapped the side of the car. It was warm, and Christie fanned herself with a fan Mr. Mullins had given her. The fan had his advertisement and a picture of Jesus with a halo on it. The halo was a little off center, like a lopsided daisy-chain crown.
By the time Greenberry McCain got his tobacco chewed up well, the train was on a trestle bridge. Christie glimpsed the brown liquid in his mouth. Below her window, she could see nothing but water. After crossing the river, the train plunged into thick woods. Christie’s great-aunt on her mother’s side, Hatt Rhodes, had traveled across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains, looking for gold. The wagon party lost several oxen and were forced to leave their furniture and other possessions along the trail. Christie always imagined a nice whatnot or a chifforobe sitting out in the desert. Aunt Hatt gave birth while on the trail. Her diary, which Aunt Sophie had, stated the event in a simple sentence. Woke up yesterday with a fine baby girl, whose breath soon stopped, had to leave her under a pile of rocks. Aunt Hatt’s husband disappeared a year after they reached California, and Hatt took in washing in the mining camps. After a while no one heard from her anymore, but somehow Aunt Sophie got the diary. Christie wondered if she should keep a diary, now that she was leaving home.
“Your fore-parents came up this river to Hopewell, James,” Christie said.
“What good are fore-parents?” said James. “They’re all dead.”
“They’ll say that about you one of these days,” said Greenberry, removing a little silver spittoon from his coat pocket. He spat into it and snapped the lid to.
“I’ve got to take care of who’s coming after,” said James. “I ain’t got time to worry about who went before.” He cracked his knuckles.
“Well, I always thought history was instructive,” said Greenberry.
“James means we can’t take time to worry about our ancestors, since we don’t have to sew for them or feed them,” said Christie, as she reached into her sewing bag. “But I think it’s interesting to know about your ancestors.” She decided not to say anything more, knowing James would feel jealous if she sided with Greenberry McCain.
She worked some buttonholes for a while, but she couldn’t keep her eyes off the scenery. It was getting hillier—pretty, rolling land, with clusters of harvesters here and there. Seen from this distance, the landscape was like a picture, as if the people in it were only decorations.
The train stopped several times, letting people off and on. A quiet, hatless man reminded Christie of her Uncle Willis—his broad forehead and drooping mustache. A woman’s round, sad eyes and straight, fine hair evoked her Aunt Dora on her father’s side. She counted eight redheads in the car.
At noon, Christie and James ate the dinner Alma had fixed for them—fried chicken, ham, cold slaw, potatoes in their jackets, green beans, biscuits, fried pies. Greenberry McCain had brought his dinner from Mrs. Crittenden’s—ham, cornbread, potato cakes, corn, and sweet-potato pie.
“We’ll be eating high on the hog everywhere we go,” Greenberry said. “But I’m sure going to miss Mrs. Crittenden’s fare. This morning she made me her special corn pone with damson preserves.”
“What are we going to do with Alma’s dishes?” James asked Christie.
“We’ll use them to get dinners put up for us to carry on the train,” said Christie impatiently. Alma had also sent along jars of plum butter and peach pickles and kraut, even though she knew James hated kraut.
Christie thought she could ride this train indefinitely, savoring each town and field and mule they passed, as long as she never had to look inside that trunk. Dread began gnawing at her, like a mouse somewhere in the walls of her house. When a child in a chair up ahead tried to play peep-eye with her, she turned her face away.
In Milan, Tennessee, they waited at the depot three hours for the Louisville & Nashville to Nashville. The train was late, and Greenberry was afraid they would not get to Nashville in time for their program that evening. Christie sat on a bench and sewed, feeling a reprieve in the delay. James, restless, walked up and down the street, now and then checking with the baggage room to make sure the trunk was still there. Greenberry paced along the platform and smoked. He had bought a package of factory-rolled cigarettes.
“Thank heaven,” he said when the whistle sounded.
On the Nashville train, Christie couldn’t concentrate. She put away her sewing, thrusting her workbox down into her carry-bag. Her chair was unsteady, with soiled upholstery. She stared out the window. All summer, she had tried not to think about the babies. The promise of being with them away from the painful reminders at home had seemed good—something saved for a special occasion. But now that she would actually see them again, she dreaded it even more than she had dreaded their funeral. A knot gathered in the pit of her stomach as Nashville drew near. The train slowed down, inching past long warehouses and grain companies and stockyards.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” Greenberry said when the train stopped. “James, let’s run to the baggage car.”
The station was crowded. As they rushed across an expansive waiting room, Christie glimpsed oak and rich gold and a deep green like the dark-tobacco leaf. Above her, several enormous depictions of women in loose robes hovered over the high arches that anchored the high ceiling. The women seemed to be emerging from the walls, with vegetables in their hands, but there was no opportunity for her to study them. The passengers plunged into the stream of moving humanity—like cattle at a stockyard, Christie thought. The rush was unsettling, and she felt unable to grasp all that was happening around her in the moments it took to get through the station. They couldn’t tarry, Greenberry McCain said. There was no time to go to their hotel first. They had to go straight to the exhibition hall. He ordered the baggage to a carriage and hustled them along. All of this occurred in just minutes. She saw James stumble as they rushed to the street. Inside the carriage, she was conscious of the brassbound trunk in the compartment at the rear. It was like a caboose, following them.
“This is the worst day of my life,” James said, staring at his lap.
“No, it’s not,” said Christie, clutching her carry-bag to her knees. She wished he weren’t so ill at ease in strange places, but she didn’t want him to know of her own fear.
The horses wove through streets jammed with nightlife. Throngs of people were out walking by the light of gas lamps. The streets were lined with brick structures, some with white columns and cornices. Soon the carriage halted in front of a tall, yellow-trimmed building. A blue-striped awning stretched over the entrance.
“Is this it?” James said. “It sure is big.”
“The Nashville Opera House,” said Christie, reading the name engraved above the double doors. A cluster of people obstructed the entrance.
“The finest,” said Greenberry, bounding down from the carriage. He directed the driver to unload the trunk and one of the bags and to deliver the rest of the baggage to their hotel. The driver was to return for them at nine o’clock. Christie saw Greenberry give him a dollar.
“Come on,” Greenberry said to Christie and James. “We’re right on time. Let’s get going.”
She paused to read the large bill out front. It was set in a black frame.
The Greatest Wonder of Nature in the Last 500 Yrs.
THE WHEELER QUINTUPLETS
Five Babies
Born of One Mother in One Night
SEE the Babies the Whole World Is Talking About
SEE the Mother and Father in the Flesh
HEAR the Renowned Educator and Lecturer,
Mr. W. Greenberry McCain,
Discourse on the Phenomenon of the Quintuplets
7 P.M. sharp September 20, 1900
Christie remembered the Amazing Frog-Girl from a carnival back in Dundee when she was a child. She had expected to see a little girl with skin like a frog and webbed feet. Instead, inside the sideshow tent, she saw something preserved in liquid in a jar. It was very small, with a curious resemblance to a fish, like a large tadpole that had begun to turn to a frog. It was possibly a frog whose development had gone awry. The liquid gave it a pale, bleached appearance. Christie had been relieved that it wasn’t an actual girl, but what stuck vividly in her memory was what she had imagined—an ugly little girl with frog feet.
“You don’t need to read it out to me,” said James when Christie began to read the bill aloud. “I can read that.”
Greenberry McCain ushered them into a side door. He and the carriage driver had set the trunk inside. “What a crowd!” he said. “Nashville is a coming place. I knew they’d want to see.”
“I don’t want to see,” said Christie.
James snapped, “We agreed to come on this thing.”
“I won’t look.”
“Well, don’t then.”
Greenberry McCain didn’t seem to notice what they said. They were walking briskly down a dark, narrow corridor, and he was pulling the trunk along on wheels by a leather strap knotted on its handle. Christie hadn’t realized the trunk had wheels. That did not seem possible. She thought of her boys pulling Nannie across the yard in the little wagon that James had made.
A hefty man with a broad face appeared from a dark doorway and greeted Greenberry with relief. “We were afraid you weren’t going to get here, Mr. McCain,” he said.
“This here’s the manager, Mr. Rankin,” Greenberry said to James and Christie.
Hastily, Mr. Rankin shook James’s hand and showed them into a small room next to the stage, where they could wait until time for the program. From the doorway of the room, they could see two Negroes going through a door marked STAGE DOOR. One of them propped the door open. The stage was arranged with two tables, a lectern, and three wicker armchairs. The curtain was closed, its thick folds fluttering slightly.
“Y’all just wait right here till we get everything set up,” Mr. Rankin said to James.
He helped Greenberry pull the trunk to the stage. The trunk was sitting on a rolling wooden platform that Greenberry had strapped to it when he checked it onto the train, Christie learned. She and James stood in the little room, their eyes on the stage.
James dug out his pocket watch. “Wonder if Thurman got the cows milked,” he said.
The room was dingy and dim, with oily rags piled on a table and a broom and mop standing together in a corner like shy sweethearts. The wood floor had just been oiled. Some men deep in conversation walked by the door, and a little boy sped past, wailing after a woman who warned him that he would fall on the oily floor.
“I’m hungry,” James said glumly.
Christie gave him some cold chicken left in their dinner bucket. She wasn’t hungry. James got cranky when he couldn’t eat on time, and she had always prided herself on having his meals ready. Now his appetite made her angry.
“Do you want this jar of kraut?” she said, pulling Alma’s jar out of her bag.
“No. Who ever heard of eating kraut right out of the jar, without no pork?” He sucked on a chicken bone and dropped it in the dinner bucket.
She saw Greenberry McCain on the stage. The trunk lid had been flung back, and she could see white pillows. She watched him lift out the oak chest. It was covered with carvings of lambs, birds, vines, fruit, and berries—the Garden of Eden, she realized. She turned her head. In a few moments one of the Negroes on the stage brought the trunk into the room with them and set it down, its lid still yawning. Christie and James stared at it. The insides were papered with a pink floral design.
“We’re ready for you,” Greenberry said, popping into the room. “Don’t worry, I’ll do all the talking.” His hand patted the air; then he rushed away with a little skip.
A sheet covered the glass case containing the babies. The table supporting it was set to the left of the lectern. The other table held Mrs. Blankenship’s album, the little glass box of feather crowns, and some smaller objects: the five nursing bottles with black nipples, some pieces of cloth that Christie recognized as diapers and outing blankets, a set of baby dresses, and some of the gifts they had received from the public. She recalled the silver feeding spoons and cups. She hadn’t realized that so many souvenirs of their babies’ short lives had been assembled. She couldn’t remember how Greenberry McCain had obtained them. She watched him drape a sheet over that table too.
“All you have to do is set here,” he said, indicating two wicker chairs, one on each side of the table that held the babies. Christie could hear voices from the audience, on the other side of the curtain. The stage floor was polished oak.
“Wonder how many people are out there,” said James. He belched.
“I feel sick,” Christie whispered to James. “Let’s ask him if we can wait in that room. I didn’t expect all this—”
“It was your idea to come,” he said, his voice hard as a stone. “You wanted to be with the babies. So now you are. And you’ll have to go through with it.”
As they took their chairs, Christie resolved not to reveal her feelings again to James throughout the rest of the trip. She didn’t care if they never spoke again. The stage was hot and dark. When the curtain parted, a flood of light hit her face. Dimly, she could make out the audience, shrouded in darkness. Electric lights flickered along the side walls and above the stage. It felt so strange, to be in a windowless room, full of people, at night, with false lights beaming all over her. James was sitting far away from her, the babies a barrier between them.
Christie could make out the first few rows of people. Surprisingly, many in the audience were dressed up, as if for church.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Greenberry McCain began in a somber tone. “I’m part of a lecture-tour company that sends out representatives to speak to the public about educational matters. Every season brings a new subject. In the past, the Fair Day Company has sponsored the Funkhouser lectures and lantern-slide programs on the Nation’s Capital, the Natives of Africa (with two missionaries lecturing with me), and the wonders of science—electricity, the telephone, and the talking graphophone, with demonstrations.
“Today we have for you one of the most wondrous occurrences in the history of mankind. A year ago, a young woman called Christianna Wheeler, mother of three small children, was living simply on a tobacco farm in the region of the Jackson Purchase in Kentucky, with her hard-working husband, James. Today Mrs. James Wheeler is one of the most notable and most admired women in the United States. What has she done? Let me tell you.”
Greenberry went on and on, in a low, even voice, quietly presenting their story, dragging it out for savored detail and suspense. His manner was more compelling than Christie would have imagined. The talk was entertaining but restrained—not exaggerated like a medicine man hawking Indian oil from the back of a buggy. Christie heard James’s stomach growl. Her own stomach clenched. For all the grief she felt for her babies, petrified under that sheet, her overwhelming sorrow suddenly was for her husband, dragged away from his work and made to sit on display like a prize turnip at the fair. She regretted snapping at him. She could feel his loathing of the situation and his fear of strangers. He was still sucking chicken out of his teeth.
After going on for some time, his pitch rising and falling like a preacher’s, Greenberry McCain turned his attention to the stage displays. “We want to show you this admirable collection,” he said, removing the sheet from the table of mementos. “Here we have the five little nursing bottles used to feed the babies milk from cows, a sized-down diaper cloth to show how small they were, a chart of statistics recorded by their doctor, who devoted the energies of his practice to caring for the little mites, miscellaneous likenesses of the precious babies, and a display of cuttings and letters of good wishes from all over the world—even from the Queen of England and the President of our United States.”
Greenberry spun on his heel suddenly to face Christie directly. He said, “And last but not least—and most important—are the real live flesh-and-blood parents, Christianna and James Wheeler, here as proof that this really happened. You’ll see their likenesses in some of the photographs with the babies.”
Finally, Greenberry invited the audience to come forward and view the quintuplets, restored to a lifelike appearance for the enlightenment of the general public.
“There’s much to see, ladies and gentlemen, but please form a line and take time-about.”
He lifted the sheet covering the babies. The crowd, on its feet, applauded spontaneously and began to form a line. An usher stood at the end of each row while the people filed forward expectantly, as if they were coming to the altar to be saved. Mr. Rankin, the manager, directed people along as they reached the stage.
Christie stared straight ahead at the crowd. She did not let her eyes fall on the glass case. She did not know if James was looking. The people came forward, their eyes aimed at the babies.
The people drifted past. Their casual utterances and their eagerness seemed so familiar. Christie was thrown back into the spring, when a multitude of strangers crowded around her bed, train passengers smothering her with their attention. She felt light-headed.
“They look like they’re about to cry.”
“They’re all just alike.”
“Why, they ain’t no bigger’n puppies.”
“Wonder how they fed all these.”
“They look so real.”
“I bet they sure made a racket when they commenced to cry all at once.”
“It’s too bad they couldn’t save ne’er a one of ’em.”
A man tipped his hat wordlessly to Christie and James. Some people shyly muttered to them, and Christie had an impulse to talk about her babies, as any proud mother would dote on her offspring. But, instead, her anger revived.
“Get your eyes full,” she said.
“Look at ’em,” she said to a man with large ears that stuck out like funguses from a log. “But you can’t touch ’em.”
Most of the people stood in awe, too dumbstruck to speak to the babies’ parents. Christie heard one man whisper to another, “Look at the pappy—bet he didn’t figure on five. He must have hit the bull’s-eye.”
A redheaded woman spoke to Christie. “I ’magine your heart is just broke to pieces.” The woman’s freckles were sprinkled across her cheeks like measles.
“My babies was wooled to death—pure and simple,” Christie said. “By people just like you. But now nobody can touch ’em.”
She lost track of time, and the people blurred together. She never glanced toward the babies. She sat at an angle, turned away from the display. She couldn’t see James. She couldn’t see the table of souvenirs. She saw Greenberry bustling around, talking to first one spectator, then another. She heard not a word from James.
Finally, it was over. The glass case was safely locked away. They were in the carriage again. The trunk was in the compartment behind them, with the wheels still strapped on.
“Well, I thought it was just splendid,” Greenberry murmured. Christie and James remained silent.
“Are you sure you need us along?” James asked Greenberry later, as they drove down a dark street. “All we done was set there.”
“Absolutely. They want to see you. You’re a big part of the whole attraction. You see, for them to believe those babies are real and not just dolls painted up pretty, they need to see the real flesh-and-blood live parents. You add drama. These folks want a story. Believe me, your service is indispensable.” Greenberry seemed to throb with good spirits.
“We have to be along,” Christie whispered to her husband, while Greenberry spoke with the carriage driver. “So we can get the payment and so the babies don’t get lost.”
“They’re liable to get away from us real easy,” James muttered.
“Did you look?” she asked him.
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t.”
“I couldn’t help it,” he said.
“Had they changed?”
“No. Not a bit.”
The hotel was a spacious brick building, with four stories and a large lobby with electric lights in a chandelier. People in the lobby were dressed fashionably, and there was a hush in the air, as if they were afraid to speak up. It was because of the soft carpets and the lights, Christie decided.
“I’ll go out and round us up some grub,” Greenberry said after he had made arrangements at the hotel desk. “The dining room’s closed—too bad, because they’re famous for their barbecued goat and their ambrosia.”
“I could eat a goat, I believe,” said James.
“I’ll see what I can locate,” said Greenberry, handing James a key. “Y’all go on up. Your room is number two-oh-three. They already sent your big case up, and that good man at the desk is going to take care of the trunk. He’s going to keep it in the storeroom. It’s like a bank vault.”
“I’m not sure about leaving it,” James said worriedly.
Greenberry laughed. “Let me show you the vault. I don’t think even Jesse James could break it open.”
James followed him to the storeroom behind the desk. Christie watched them talking with a man in a uniform. James, returning to Christie’s side, seemed to be satisfied.
Greenberry left. They could see him out on the sidewalk looking up and down and finally deciding on an easterly direction.
“Let’s go,” said James, picking up their carpetbags.
Christie followed, with her small carry-bag. Her foot hurt, and she was more tired than she had realized. She was hungry now.