The Train of Small Mercies
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Maryland
Delaware
Maryland
New York
Washington
Delaware
Washington
New York
Washington
Pennsylvania
New Jersey
Maryland
New York
New Jersey
Maryland
Pennsylvania
New Jersey
Delaware
New Jersey
Delaware
Washington
Pennsylvania
Delaware
Maryland
New Jersey
New York
Maryland
Pennsylvania
New York
New Jersey
Pennsylvania
Washington
New Jersey
Pennsylvania
New Jersey
Delaware
Pennsylvania
Maryland
Pennsylvania
Maryland
Delaware
Pennsylvania
New York
Washington
Maryland
Washington
Maryland
Washington
New Jersey
Washington
Pennsylvania
New York
Maryland
New York
Washington
New York
Washington
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Acknowledgements
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) •
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale,
North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books
(South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2011 by David Rowell
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rowell, David.
The train of small mercies / David Rowell.
p. cm.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54794-6
1. Kennedy, Robert F., 1925–1968—Death and burial—Fiction. 2. Funeral rites and ceremonies—United States—Fiction. 3. Nineteen sixty-eight, A.D.—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3618.O8738T
813’.6—dc22
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Katherine
“Is everybody all right?”
—Senator Robert F. Kennedy, moments after being shot, in the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel, June 5, 1968
Maryland
Every morning Ellie West listened to her son get out of bed. With her husband, Joe, not yet awake, she tuned in so intently to the sounds two rooms down that she could feel some part of her leaving their bed and drifting down the hall. First she heard Jamie push his covers off and turn his body to the edge of his mattress. Then she followed as he reached for his crutches, which were propped against his wall, and she could even make out the pff sound of the foam padding coming off the surface. She heard the rubbery thud of his crutches push into the wooden floor; then she heard the same thud three times until there was a pause, so that he could stop, lean over, and turn the doorknob. When he moved down the hall to the bathroom, Ellie listened to the crutches creak under the weight of him. With one crutch he pushed the bathroom door until it swung lightly against the doorjamb, and then he let one crutch rest against the wall while he stood over the toilet to pee. When he was done, she could hear him linger in front of the bathroom sink—sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for a minute or more—but he was not washing his hands or brushing his teeth or anything else she could think of. And then most mornings he bounded back down the hallway to his room and closed the door. The crutches connected with the floor three more times before he was back on the bed; there would be no other sound from his room for at least an hour or more.
Jamie’s two years of being in the army had erased any ability to sleep late, which had taken Ellie by surprise; she had imagined the strict structure and routine of his days would have had the opposite effect.
“Won’t it be good for him to just catch up on all the sleep he’s missed,” she said to Joe two days before they met him at the airport, just outside of Baltimore. “He’s still just a boy. He can sleep all he wants to. I want him to do whatever he wants for as long as he wants.”
Four months earlier, east of the village Than Khe, the morning mist was just beginning to evaporate. For several days Jamie and Alpha Company had waited for orders while falling into soggy boredom, and now the slate sky was a kaleidoscope of mortar fire. The air hissed all around, and Jamie, with one arm thrown over his helmet, scrambled toward the foxhole he and “Bulb” Landreaux had dug the previous night when he caught sight of Landreaux covered in flames—still on his feet, but wavering like a tower of blocks. As Jamie barreled toward him, a missile landed a few meters away, knocking Jamie so high into the air that he had time to wonder how he would land—and sending shards of shrapnel as big as bottles into his leg. Two days later, he woke up on a cot in a nearby aid station.
When he opened his eyes there was an army nurse standing over him with thick curls as soft-looking as anything he had ever seen; she smiled at him in wild surprise, as if he were very mischievous for waking up only after the doctor had left. He understood then that nothing about his life would be the same.
Ellie was frying bacon when she remembered to reach over and turn the radio on. The funeral service for Bobby Kennedy would be on in a few hours, but she wanted to listen to the commentary beforehand. The radio was next to the toaster, and she moved the dial past “Stranger on the Shore,” which she would have otherwise liked to have listened to, to the one station that ordinarily broadcast classical music. Then she heard the announcer say, “As we said at the top of the broadcast, Senator Kennedy’s body is scheduled to be taken to New York’s Penn Station and put on a train around eleve
n thirty, and from there it will begin its historic journey down through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and on to Arlington National Cemetery, where the senator will be buried next to his brother, President John F. Kennedy. And I remind listeners—”
She could smell the bacon burning and moved to lift the pan off the stove. “Are they talking about the funeral?” asked Miriam, who lately had stopped saying good morning in favor of asking a question right off or making some bold proclamation. Miriam had turned seventeen the week before, and she had been following every development since the senator was shot in the early minutes of Wednesday morning in Los Angeles. The train would follow tracks used by the C&O system, the newspaper had reported, and those tracks were just forty yards from the Wests’ back door. Ellie knew Miriam planned to watch the service on TV, and didn’t know about Joe or Jamie, but all of them planned to watch the train pass by.
Miriam considered a long thread hanging from the arm of her pajama sleeve and said, “And that reporter is still coming today to interview Jamie?”
“They haven’t said otherwise,” Ellie said, and she could hear the fatigue in her voice. She hadn’t slept well that week and wondered if Miriam had noticed the puffiness in her face. While working her shift as a highway tollbooth operator a few days earlier, she had dozed off in a rare lull between cars, until the owner of an aquamarine Chrysler honked his horn. “They still have a newspaper to put out. I’m sure not all of the reporters are going to be covering Bobby Kennedy.”
A week ago, the editor of The Gazette, Avery Tate, had called the Wests, whom he knew, like most everyone else in town, from PTA meetings and being at the Friday night football games in the fall, from waiting in line at the Piggly Wiggly and seeing most everyone in town at church at least on Easter Sunday and the Christmas Eve service. He asked Joe and Ellie about the paper possibly doing a piece on Jamie—what he had gone through in Vietnam, the challenges he faced now, after losing his leg. He told them they wanted to do a profile of Jamie and make it “a portrait in courage.” That phrase rang in Ellie’s head off and on all hours of the day. When she first asked Jamie about the idea, he was sitting on the edge of his bed, his long foot sweeping over a stack of Hot Rod magazines that had been saved for him. He took a full minute before he shrugged his shoulders.
“They must be short on story ideas these days,” he said.
Avery Tate had planned to send his best features writer to do the piece, but when Senator Kennedy was shot, he wanted her covering the funeral train. In fact, three City reporters would be following the Kennedy funeral or be camped out with a group of mourners who were standing by the tracks for a glimpse of the senator’s coffin. But having made the arrangements with Ellie, he was concerned that rescheduling might send the wrong message to the young man, who was already struggling. That was what he had heard, anyhow, or rather, what his wife had heard. Instead, he assigned the story to Roy Murphy, who had just completed his junior year at the University of Maryland and was, as a journalism major, interning with the paper.
What Avery Tate had forgotten to ask—and in the last year, he had been forgetting more than usual—was whether Roy knew Jamie, since they had gone to the same high school. Roy wouldn’t be studying ethics in journalism until the fall semester, and in the days before beginning his reporting and interviewing, it never occurred to him that he was the wrong man for the job.
The Wests knew to look for the reporter at one that Saturday. Beyond that, not having ever been interviewed before, they didn’t much know what to expect.
Delaware
When Edwin Rupp woke up that morning, he turned on the radio beside the bed and searched for a weather report, despite having followed the forecast for Saturday all week long. His wife, Lolly, rolled over, annoyed and not ready to open her eyes.
“Just go outside and look,” she said in a raspy voice. “That’s your forecast.”
Instead, Edwin opened the blinds of the bedroom window. The sun poured in. “Blue skies,” he said, and exhaled deeply.
The radio was playing the Doors’ “People Are Strange.” For a few minutes Lolly tried to sort through her dream about their new pool brimming with fish, then, understanding it no better now that she was awake, she pushed her way through deep morning fog and thought about Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, in New York, and how many people must already be lining around the block. She lifted the top sheet and reached over to find a station broadcasting any news about the service.
“Hey, you’re turning Jim,” Edwin said.
“I want to see if they’re saying anything about the funeral. Jim won’t mind.” She went around the dial but couldn’t find anything.
“We’re going to have fun today, right?” Edwin asked. “We’ll see the train, but I really don’t want that to just hang over the whole day, with the party.”
Lolly yawned. “It’s just Ted and Georgia, so I hadn’t really thought of it as a big party. But sure, we’ll try to have fun. It’s just that it’s going to be kind of a heavy day. I mean, there’s some very sad shit going on right now.” Since growing her hair out, she had developed a habit of tugging on the ends when she was irritated, and now she held her auburn strands with two hands.
“I know,” Edwin said. “It’s heavy, I know.” Edwin glanced out the window again. He tried to offer Lolly a smile, but his mouth turned into a pucker, and then he gave up. “I’m going to go ahead and fill it up,” he said. “Chlorine needs to sit for a couple of hours before you can get in.” He changed T-shirts and stepped into his old madras shorts, which had become as thin as tracing paper over the years, then glanced over at Lolly before walking out of the room.
Lolly wrapped herself in the sheets again. The house began its quiet rumble when Edwin turned on the hose, and it was not a noise she could listen to for an hour or however long it would take. The water hit the bottom of the pool with a loud smacking sound, like a hailstorm. From the window she could see Edwin holding the hose, his face set gravely in concentration.
Maryland
You want to come to breakfast?” Ellie whispered outside of Jamie’s door. “Or do you want me to bring it in? I’m glad to.”
Joe was lying awake in bed, and his face was twisted as he listened. As Joe saw it, the more Ellie pampered Jamie, the more Jamie was going to see himself as an invalid. He tried to never look at what remained of Jamie’s leg.
“He’s not six years old,” Joe told Ellie one night, a week after Jamie had come home. “You’ve got that old singsong voice you used to use when the kids were little and sick. Jamie’s lost a leg, but that doesn’t mean he’s a little boy again. And you can’t treat him like one.”
Ellie, who had been quietly crying herself to sleep since Jamie had come home, bristled when Joe spoke to her that way.
“Don’t you tell me what my own son does and doesn’t need,” she said. “A mother knows what she should do. Don’t make it your business to start monitoring everything I say to him.”
Now, both Ellie and Joe waited for Jamie’s reply. A truck—probably Dilbert Ray’s tow truck—drove past, causing the house to shake like a subway car.
“All right,” Jamie said after a while. “I’m coming.”
Joe hoped Ellie would not respond with high-pitched enthusiasm, but she did.
“Breakfast for you, too,” she said to Joe, sticking her head in their bedroom. He could see that she had erased her grin, lest he see it. Lately they were constantly studying each other’s expressions.
“Coming,” Joe said.
Joe heard Jamie push himself off his mattress and onto his crutches. And because he had to stop himself from listening to Jamie negotiate his way from one room to the other, he got up and forced himself to cough.
In the kitchen Miriam had turned the radio up, and her grim expression told everyone not to try to talk over it. Jamie rested his crutches against the wall and took two hops over before working himself into a chair at the end of the table. Miriam reached over and ran a hand ov
er his hair.
“I want to hear, too, but it’s too loud,” Ellie said, and indicated with her fingers how minimally she was lowering it. “What a day for that family. My God.”
Joe wanted coffee but didn’t feel like making it, and he hesitated to ask Ellie. She had stopped drinking coffee much lately, and now that she was doing so much for Jamie, she didn’t want to spend any more energy on Joe than she had to. These days, he thought about coffee as much as he drank it.
“Jamie, do you still feel like talking to that reporter today?” Ellie asked. “This was the day he was going to come over. I still don’t understand what they want to write about, exactly.” Since Jamie had returned home, she had come to enjoy pretending to be uninformed.
“It’s all right with me,” Jamie said. “I don’t know what I have to say, though. I lost a leg. Charlie’s winning the war. And does anyone want to hire Captain Peg Leg for a job?”
They were used to his making comments like this, but even now it could still make them skip a breath. “Don’t say stuff like that,” Miriam finally said. She tried to scold him with her version of a glare, but he wouldn’t look over. “So how do you know exactly what he’s going to ask?” she said. “I mean, what if it’s one of those reporters who accuses soldiers of killing women and children?” Before the last words had come out, she felt a great tightness in her chest. This was not an altogether new sensation for her; Miriam frequently said the wrong thing, and her family hadn’t grown more tolerant over the years, but instead, seemed to, in ways only she could measure, move further and further away from her. She had been acutely aware of this in recent weeks as she watched her parents stare at Jamie. And when they did return their gazes to her, she was sure they remembered again their disappointment in her.
Before her mother or father could speak, she was going to beat them to it.