Lunch-Box Dream

by Tony Abbott

  Jacob? It was all he could do not to laugh out from his nose when I told him that. Sunday was a good day.

  Eight

  Bobby

  Just before sunset and still not out of Ohio, they passed through the town of Mount Gilead. It sounded old, like Ricky’s battleground names, from a far-gone century, and not at all like Cleveland, which was clearly a city of airplanes and electricity and freeways. To Bobby, Mount Gilead was like all the other dim, stifling places they had passed since leaving home and was soon to be forgotten, until Ricky sat up in his seat.

  “Gilead,” he said, reading the road sign. “Mount Gilead.”

  “So?” said Bobby. He had seen signs for it for miles. “What about it?”

  Holding one of his books up to the window, Ricky flipped page after page until he pressed his hand flat across a large map whose main feature was a long heavy line wandering from east to west. Making a sound in his mouth, he pushed his glasses up on his forehead and held the book close, squinting at it, until he pressed his finger on the map.

  “Mount Gilead,” he breathed out.

  Reaching over the front seat between his mother and grandmother, Ricky fumbled for the TripTik, brought it into the back, and laid it open alongside the map. He glanced past the front seat through the windshield and Bobby saw him start to smile.

  “Mount Gilead,” he said again. “And Cardington and Ashley. We’re passing through them all.”

  “So?” Bobby repeated. “They’re crummy and little.”

  “So?” Ricky said without turning. “I’ll tell you what so. The Lincoln train passed through every one of these towns. The train that carried his body after he was assassinated.”

  “Vhat?” said Grandma.

  Bobby had heard of the Lincoln train.

  “Listen to this,” Ricky said, “from Euclid Station in Cleveland—you remember, Mom”—she turned her head sideways and nodded—“down to Columbus and then to Springfield, Illinois. It went through all these towns, into and out of all the train stations without stopping. It rolled really slow. Sometimes no more than five miles an hour. It left Cleveland at midnight and came through here during the night. The train rode down the tracks through every single one of these towns. Mom, it came right here!”

  He searched out the side window now. “Can we stop at the train station? Can you find the tracks? I have to see them—”

  “Oh, Richie,” said their grandmother. “It’s getting late.”

  “Mom, can you stop the car?”

  “We’re on the road…we kind of have to keep going.”

  “Mom?” he pleaded.

  She shook her head slowly, then raised a finger instinctively at a round yellow street sign marked with a black X and two Rs. “There…” she said, slowing slightly and tapping on the inside of the windshield. “That looks like the railroad coming up. Maybe it’s not too far…”

  “Switch seats,” Ricky said, and had practically done it before Bobby knew what was happening, then stuck his whole head out the right window like a dog. “Turn, Mom. Turn here. Go slower. Oh, cool!” He held his glasses to his face.

  They took a slow right turn off the route and crawled east from the town center for a block, then two blocks, then several, for what seemed miles, and their mother started making sounds under her breath, until there was another road sign, and she slowed.

  Ricky gasped. “There they are! The tracks. I see them. Drive across.” And she drove the car forward on the flat road, nearly stopping where the dark rails sliced it, then rolled over them without power, until horns started honking behind them and they had to speed up again. After they had driven over the twin bands of scraped iron, laid out north and south along endless dry fields and trees, as inevitable and straight as lines drawn by a pencil and ruler, and they had turned back to the main route and finally left Mount Gilead, Bobby glanced at the book on the seat next to him.

  Light was fading now from his side, but he could make out below the map a photograph of the Lincoln funeral car, and he imagined the train crawling like a dying person down the tracks mile after mile through the long night until it reached its rest.

  That was April, too, he remembered. Just like Fort Sumter.

  Had people crowded the tracks the whole way, in towns like that one, even in the lonely stretches of land between one station and the next—for certainly the villages and towns were not built up as now, but must have had far fewer buildings, more plains, more farmland, more…nothing?

  The people must have numbered in the thousands, tens of thousands, just ordinary folks, lining the tracks in the depths of the night. Bobby could imagine them coming out hours before, in ones and twos and more, families gathering—No, no, Joey, you can sleep late tomorrow. No planting (or woodchopping or praying or whatever boys did back then). This is important—and neighborhoods, communities trickling out, sleepily at first, then streaming through the streets like a flood, talking to begin with, hailing one another, recognizing this or that neighbor, surprised perhaps at seeing so-and-so there, then growing silent as they all approached the iron tracks, taking their places side by side, sound draining away from them as they slowly lit torches and candles in the long wait, their hearts full and heavy and hurt.

  And when it came through!

  But before it came through, before that, they would have heard its gradual rumbling beneath their feet. Bobby knew they felt it, the ground moaning before they caught sight of the dark engine. He knew that feeling from waiting for the Rapid Transit that brought them downtown, and he imagined how out of the quiet they heard the slow ticking, then rocking, then clattering of iron wheels on iron rails, the breathing rhythm coming down the line before any sight of it. The muffled silence of thousands in mourning, taking the sound of that train into themselves, crushing their hearts flat.

  And then it came!

  The black engine, moving soberly toward them on tracks laid straight across the land with such horrible certainty, and they themselves shocked speechless, as if they had never thought of it before: that something so irrevocable and heavy and iron could tame this mess of rolling land and life and forest. The somber bunting draped on the sides of the one car (out of how many cars?) that bore and carried the weight of the dark casket. The heavy fabric moving slowly in the slow air on both sides of the train. The coming of the train in the night, the train passing, the leaving of the train, vanishing slowly into the night, changing the world entirely. The weight of the great man’s passing in the wheeled iron coffin, the lost, best president.

  And did chocolates watch with their families? Were they right there next to the white ones? Lincoln was about them, too, wasn’t he? Bobby couldn’t quite remember their story. Were chocolate boys and girls there, too, up late like white children? Time to see him, honeybunch. Wake up now. Time to see him one last time.

  Bobby felt his heart sink and sink as the sun sank and sank, his insides drowning in sharp hot tears.

  Certain it was not the same and could not be the same and was utterly different, yet Bobby knew that they now drove the gathering darkness of the Ohio roads in their very own—finned, chromed, and plushly carpeted—death car.

  Nine

  Cora

  “This is important,” I heard Olivia say from where I was in my room.

  She was talking in the kitchen to Jacob as he finished his milk. “You and Cora must find Uncle Frank. I can’t go there right now. He’s at the market. Or was supposed to be, but I think Cora knows where he is.”

  I came into the kitchen then. “I think I do,” I said.

  “Will you do that for me?” Olivia said to Jacob and me together. “Will you bring Uncle Frank home? With whatever bags he might have?”

  “Sure we will,” Jacob said, looking at me, so I nodded at him.

  “And don’t laugh if he jokes with you,” Olivia said.

  “Okay,” I said. I knew what she meant.

  So we two left together. We were as quick as we could be, but it was some walk down
town past the tracks, and we had to pace it. Jacob told me about fishing Sunday afternoon and how since it was not going to rain anymore he and Uncle Frank were going to go to the creek every morning till the end of his stay here. He said it was good Uncle Frank wasn’t working at the rug factory anymore so they could go to the creek early every day. I said yes that the fishing might be good, but it wasn’t so good that Frank was not making rugs now, and he shouldn’t forget to call Aunt Weeza. He said of course not, he always remembered to do that.

  I worry about Jacob sometimes. He looks older than his years and he whistles at fancy cars that we see. Two of them so far on the Dixie Road, and I don’t know who was driving them.

  “You can’t whistle like that,” I told him the second time.

  “Sure, I can,” he said. “I just showed you I could. Poppa taught me. I’m even louder than he is, and better.” And he whistled again.

  “I know that,” I said. “I mean you shouldn’t whistle like that when you are not at home with us. It’s okay when you’re home with us.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “I know you don’t,” I said. I told him just listen to me, I knew what I meant. He said okay and didn’t whistle after that, at least not when he was with me.

  My sister Olivia was right. Her husband Frank was at the tavern as she guessed he was. I know why. He just lost his job and his friends were there. Olivia probably thinks if Frank sees Jacob when he comes out of the tavern it will shame him. I’m not so sure, but that’s why she wanted us to go together. And also for me not to walk alone. Being tall, Jacob helps like that. I do like him lots. He can be so funny. Frank came out snorting and laughing and had three bags with him. “I was on my way to church. Honest!” But he wasn’t funny, and I hushed Jacob’s laughing as we walked him home.

  Ten

  Bobby

  So death was all around him.

  From the moment he glimpsed those rusty iron rails weaving off into the trees, Bobby couldn’t turn his mind from the ghastly railroad hearse of the assassinated president—how it wound its way from state to state, station to station, every mile from Washington to his faraway home, on rails like those.

  In school he had seen photographs his teacher had tacked on the bulletin board, clippings from newspapers, all part of the lesson on Ohio history, because the Lincoln train had passed through Cleveland on its way to the burial in Illinois.

  The terrible circumstances of the president’s death! The evening dresses, satin and ruffled, the black suits unutterably stained, the unspeakable spatter on the box’s tufted velvet chairs. That so-familiar face so distorted. And didn’t she say there was a smell? By the time he—it, the body—reached Cleveland, they said the odor was awful, even outside in the park, where crowds passed by the open casket. Not only that, after two weeks the dead president’s features had twisted and turned purple. Why had his teacher told them this?

  “The better to love our greatest president,” she had said, pinching her lips together, the classroom utterly silent.

  But sitting in the car now, speeding away from the weedy rails, it came to him in a flash of remembrance what his mother had told him once: that Grandpa’s body had traveled by train, too. From Florida all the way back to Ohio, his coffin had weaved its own way to burial, station by station, town by town, in a reverse journey to the one they were traveling right now.

  But really? A casket on a train?

  A casket draped with black shrouds, crape, and bunting? It was beyond terrifying. Squirreling up in the seat and closing his eyes, Bobby realized he didn’t want to be anywhere but his own room. No one had died there. But as much as he tried to think of his bed and the wall it faced, he thought only of the long box.

  Where exactly had they put Grandpa’s coffin?

  In the aisle? Did passengers have to squeeze by it on their way to their seats? Did they have to reposition the cloths they had disturbed on their way by?

  Or did trains have body cars? Maybe in front of the caboose? Or was the box wedged, unthinkably, in some sort of general baggage car, with trunks and suitcases, cartons of oranges, racks of hanging trousers and jackets, caged pets? Did they allow people to ride in such baggage cars, too? Were there guards of some kind? Railroad employees? Was the coffin in the train car where the conductors went for a smoke? Did they play cards on the casket? Did bums crouch in there among the baggage? Immigrants? Negroes?

  His mind flying now, Bobby recalled seeing news-reels of Indians from India hanging on the sides and roofs of railroad cars. It was how they traveled. Were people like that on his grandfather’s death train? Did they cling to the windows of the carriage with stalky arms, jabbering at the white man’s coffin within? Oh, Grandpa.

  Eleven

  Hershel

  I have been on trains.

  You know what I’m talking about. There was one car set aside for colored people. It was called the Jim Crow car.

  It was a hot noon on the day I’m remembering, and hotter in the car, with us jammed in like sardines. There were heaps of baggage at one end of the car, too, which made it more crowded. There wasn’t a casket this time. I’ve sometimes seen a casket in with the bags. They put them in with us, thinking we don’t mind.

  I had to go to Mobile because Weeza wanted me to talk to her mother, who was living there. That was six years ago. There was nothing I wanted to say to her, her cold eyes always staring me down. She never thought much of me, but I went because Weeza asked me to. I ate my lunch on the train. Weeza had packed it for me in my lunch-box. Now, that day the colored car was right up behind the engine, so I had to shield my sandwich from the cinders flying in the windows. Try that sometime. Even so, eating lunch in that hot car, crammed tight, with cinders in my eyes, was the last good thing that happened that day.

  Another time a man stole my jacket in the train station. I saw him slide it off the back of the bench when he went past. It was brand-new. It was hot in the colored room and I had hung it over the back of the bench when I went to the restroom one last time. When I came out I saw a man swipe it off the seat and run off outside. He was a white man but he was a bum and he had come into the colored side and taken my new jacket. A woman on the bench yelled at him but she didn’t get up, she was old. I wanted to chase that man and pull my jacket off him and kick and hit him, but the train came and I couldn’t miss it. Negroes didn’t want to be in that town at nighttime. This was when Weeza and I were first married and little Jacob was sleeping in our room. When I got home without my jacket and told her, Weeza took my hands into her lap and pulled my head down on her breast and held it there while I cried. I was mad as a hornet or a bomb. I wanted to hurt someone, but she didn’t let me go until the sun left the yard and we were in the dark room crying together. She told me I was right not to chase that bum. I do some things right and some things that don’t seem it.

  Tuesday, June 16

  Twelve

  Bobby

  They hadn’t reached Columbus after all, but stopped to pass the first night at a motel called El Siesta in the town of Delaware, still deep in Ohio. Bobby hardly remembered the drab walls of the room when they got on the road early the next morning, but he couldn’t shake the smell of mothballs and dusty crawl spaces like the one in the ceiling over his room at home.

  The engine droned hour after hour the first full day, into the hilly country just before the border at Ripley, where the Ohio River wavered between Ohio and Kentucky.

  “Ripley was a huge Underground Railroad stop,” Ricky said, flinging his arm toward Bobby’s window. “There’s a house here where it stopped. They still have it. You can go inside it.”

  Trains stopping at houses. Bobby didn’t ask. The moment they neared the end of the bridge over the brown river, Ricky added, “And…we’re in the South. Kentucky started as a border state, you know. See these yellow states.” He pointed to a page from a book. “Then it went Confederate and got bloody. It’s a slave state. They had slaves even when they were in
the Union.”

  Trains. Slaves. Bobby felt heavy and breathless. He cranked down his window and tried to fill his lungs with air.

  Soon they were heading down through horse farms toward Lexington for lunch and the promised first battlefield site in a town called Perryville he had never heard of, even from Ricky.

  But that was still hours away. The engine ground on, and so did the relentless boredom of the highway, past columned homes and meadows dotted with horses as unmoving as if they were stuffed. So they played car games.

  “Highvay Touring Games,” his grandmother called them, reading from the TripTik, and she helped the boys start playing them when they got restless in the backseat and didn’t want to sleep or read or stare aimlessly outside anymore. Later Bobby saw what the TripTik said about the games: “Keeps Children Quiet and Occupied (For a While).” He thought it was funny for a printed thing to put in a little joke like that—(For a While). “For a Vhile.”

  There was “Highvay Bingo,” where the first one to see five of anything shouted “Bingo” and won. Five cows. Five barns. Five blue station vagons. Five bums. Five hearses. Another was “I Am Tinking…” where someone says he is thinking of an object and names the letter it begins with. The person who guesses it gets to think of the next object. That lasted until Ricky started using words he knew that Bobby didn’t—“Gatling” (machine gun), “ordnance” (artillery), and the absurd “chevaux-de-frise” (barricades made of spiked logs), and Bobby started yelling at him.