The Train of Small Mercies

by David Rowell

“I’m just saying, you don’t always know what someone wants to say about the war. I know Jamie didn’t do anything like that—God! Of course I know that. Don’t even look at me like that. I just want to protect Jamie. How do we know what this reporter wants to ask? How do we know, is all.”

  Ellie kept her mouth open, but it was unclear when a reply might come out of it.

  “That’s enough of that kind of talk,” Joe said. “The Gazette’s not that kind of paper, and Jamie shouldn’t have to hear that garbage in his own house. From his own family.”

  There was a hint of enjoyment in Jamie’s face then—not for the scolding that his sister received, but for how quickly such upset could befall them all. He knew better than anyone how on edge his family had been since his return, and he was grateful when the hushed reverie and manners could be so easily pierced. He only wished that it happened more often.

  Miriam studied Jamie’s face, wondering if she needed to apologize. She could see that she didn’t.

  Ellie was content for once that her husband had more or less expressed the appropriate message in a reasonably appropriate manner. Still, she cocked her head toward Miriam out of habit.

  “I’ve got to get this house in order is what I need to do,” she said to all of them and to no one. “I can just see the first sentence of that article now. ‘Jamie West lived in cleaner quarters while serving in Vietnam than he does in his own home.’”

  “I’m going to go listen in my room,” Miriam said, feeling confident once more, “where I can actually hear it.” She put her hand on Jamie’s shoulder and squeezed as she moved past. “Do you want to come?” she asked him.

  Jamie shook his head. He could see that his parents were interested in his answer either way. Generally they seemed to worry that he was spending too much time alone—alone on the front porch, alone in his bedroom, alone in the backyard, where Joe had set up two round targets at the yard’s end for Jamie to practice archery. As a soldier, Jamie was an expert marksman, the best in his company with the M-16, the M-60, and M-79, and Joe had encouraged him not to let those skills recede just because he had lost a leg. In junior high school Jamie had placed third in the state’s national target archery finals for his age division, and the summer before he was drafted, he briefly considered trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for most consecutive bull’s-eyes from forty meters. Now, seated on an overturned wooden barrel, he spent a couple of hours most days shooting with his longbow; Joe had bought him thirty arrows and a backpack so that he wouldn’t have to keep getting up and retrieving them; Ellie was only too eager to sit out there with him, sorting through the wet laundry and hanging it on the lines and pulling the arrows out every few minutes to hand him, and in the evenings Joe liked to do the same, though he didn’t busy himself with anything but watching Jamie shoot. Or often Jamie’s friend Sutton came over and held a small tin of chewing tobacco out for himself, watching Jamie shoot into the two small yellow circles. Sutton walked with a limp because of a football injury in high school. A tackler had crushed his left femur as Sutton tried to take the ball into the end zone, and it was poorly reset. Jamie was one of the team’s wide receivers, and when he watched Sutton’s leg bend left when the rest of his body was knocked right, he knew that Sutton would never play football again. Now Sutton worked as a driver for Pepsi. He didn’t have to worry about the draft.

  “Do you know how long this reporter will take?” Jamie asked. “Sutton was coming over later to watch the train pass by. Since the shooting, Sutton thinks he’s Walter Cronkite. Last night all he could talk about was Sirhan Sirhan and Arab nationalists.”

  “I keep wondering if there is going to be a Jack Ruby in all of this,” Joe said. “I keep thinking Mr. Sirhan is going to meet the same fate as Oswald.”

  “Then more killing and more killing,” Ellie said, untying her apron strings. “More violent chaos. I hope they don’t shoot that man. Or when is it ever going to end?”

  She stopped to look at Joe and Jamie. Jamie’s thin face looked like Joe’s when they first married, like the picture from their honeymoon in Ocean City they had gotten a stranger to take, with Joe’s arm around Ellie on the boardwalk, the ocean breeze lifting a lock of his hair and sending it across his broad forehead, his expression almost stunned. Had he really just met this girl Ellie two months prior?

  New York

  The first woman Lionel Chase passed that morning, a heavyset white woman in a sundress marked by giant sunflowers, took pleasure in the appearance of the new train porter’s suit and offered him a shy smile. Without thinking, he reached his fingers to the tip of his hat to acknowledge her. Already the uniform, with its six brass buttons and dark jacket with gold trim at the cuffs, was doing what it was supposed to do.

  When he picked up the suit at the Penn Central office the week before, the company tailor who fit him studied his shoulders without speaking. “You want them edges so sharp, someone bump into you, they get nicked,” the man said.

  Lionel offered the man a chuckle, but the man said, “You think I’m joking, son? You want everything goddamned right.”

  On the sidewalk his patent leather shoes squeaked terribly, but he was sure that inside the train they would be drowned out. Even at its quietest rumble you couldn’t outduel the power and crudeness of the locomotive engine. Lionel worried that by summer’s end the roar of the train would be difficult to get out of his head. Before retiring two years ago after a massive heart attack, his father, Maurice Chase, had worked as a Pullman porter for thirty-seven years. When Lionel was a boy he heard his father say that the train was always running around somewhere in his head. “Trying to make up the time,” he said.

  As Lionel walked toward the Queens Plaza subway, he checked his front jacket pocket to make sure the letter from Adanya was secure. He had read it a half-dozen times in the two days since it had arrived, but he wasn’t about to leave the house without it; his mother might happen upon it while delivering clean clothes to his room.

  In three pages, sprayed with a perfume called Lotus, Adanya had started out by saying how much she missed him already. On the second page, she wrote that she had gone to see a doctor. She was pregnant. The rest of the letter was skillfully vague. She was just shy of four weeks along, she wrote, and then added, “It’s a good time to find out, I guess. Not too late to give us plenty of time to think about what we should do.” She wrote that there was a joy she couldn’t deny about carrying Lionel’s child in her, and she followed that by saying, “We have our whole lives ahead of us, and I know this is sooner than either of us imagined being parents. We haven’t even started our sophomore year!” By the third page, Adanya steered back to where the letter had begun. “If you were drawing me in one of your comics right now, draw me with my arms wrapped around you so tight, and a caption bubble (is that the right word?) that says, ‘Never let go.’”

  It was still early, but his father had insisted on Lionel’s getting out the door well in advance. Maybe before reporting in he could step into a diner, order a Coke, and read the letter once more. If he did that, he thought, he could clear his head for the rest of the day and fully concentrate on the job. His father was going to want a report of his first shift in excruciating detail—there was no getting out of that—and when he asked Lionel how he thought he did, Lionel wanted to be able to say, “You’re asking the new star of the Penn Central how he did?” and be convincing.

  Down on the subway platform, the heat draped riders like a thick blanket until another train could sweep it away again. Lionel started to remove his hat when he felt the gaze of a little girl holding her mother’s hand. Lionel smiled at her, and the girl produced a little tremor of a wave. The mother watched her with some amusement and said, “She said you look nice in your uniform.”

  “Well, thank you,” Lionel said to the girl, who was working up the nerve to speak.

  “Do you work on the trains?” she asked in an elfin voice.

  “That’s right,” Lionel said.r />
  “Do you work on this train?”

  “No, not this one,” he said. “One that goes farther, that leaves New York.”

  The girl then whispered something to her mother, who didn’t catch it the first time and needed her to say it once more.

  “She says have a good trip.”

  The lights of the E train grew wide in the tunnel, and Lionel tipped his hat once more as the crowd shuffled a few steps back. When the train doors opened and Lionel stepped in, he stood next to three nuns who gripped the vertical pole as if the train were still moving. Their faces were as pale as onion skins, and one of them was crying softly, her tears flowing around a large mole on her cheek.

  “It’s all right, dear,” one of the nuns said to her. “It’s all right.”

  Washington

  Even as a small child in Cahir, Ireland, Maeve McDerdon had always had a special gift with babies. She was the oldest of four girls, and at six, only she could soothe the piercing cry of Derry, the second child, even when Derry had an ear infection or diaper rash. Maeve wasn’t allowed to hold her sister while standing up, but she liked to cradle her in the softest chair in the house—her father’s chair—and lock eyes with her and say, “There, there,” in such a way that soon held Derry in a state of mysterious calm. “That’s right,” said Maeve as her parents looked on in equal parts admiration and bewilderment. “Listen to Maeve,” Maeve said, and she couldn’t help smiling a little with pride. “Sister has you. There, there.”

  She had this effect on all her sisters as babies—after Derry was Christine, then Fran—but it was to her father that she felt the most drawn. Larney McDerdon and his brother owned a small pub together, selling fish and chips, champ, and boxty, but Larney was mostly useless with the cooking. Instead, he played the role of regal host, making sure everyone’s glasses stayed filled with the bitter ale they served or whiskey, and mostly by telling stories.

  “Did I ever tell you about what my brother did to me when I was five years old?” he would say to a table after setting down their plate of soda bread.

  Or: “Did I ever tell you about the time my father’s bull got loose and made it to Dublin?”

  “Did I ever tell you about the time Old Man Dyer went and grabbed a hatchet after me?”

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I nearly drowned while sitting in a bucket?”

  Some of the stories he told his customers bore some scrap of truth, but he enjoyed the fuller freedoms of making up stories from whole cloth. His wife had long ago grown bored and irritated by his endless stories, and if he and his brother hadn’t opened up a pub so that he could tell them to someone else, she claimed she would have gone mad. But Maeve hung on to every word of every tale—even the ones she had heard countless times, even when the stories deviated dramatically from their last telling. Sometimes, that was for the better. At a young age she understood that when her father winked as he spoke, he had broken any obligation to stick to the facts, and she, too, found this possibility joyous.

  “Daddy, did you know that Jack Moan came into school with a balloon where his head was supposed to be?” she said to her father one night as he was putting her to bed.

  “You don’t say,” he said, and even in the darkness she could see his face lighting up.

  “It was a red balloon,” she said, “and since that’s my favorite color, I didn’t tease him the way other children did.”

  “They teased him, did they?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And one boy tried to pop his head with a pencil, but I took the pencil away and said to leave him be. It was a very red balloon, and I thought it looked nice, and for the rest of the day I had to protect him so nothing would happen to it.”

  “Oh, that makes me so proud,” he said. “Raised you right, I have—and your mother.”

  Maeve nodded that that was indeed true.

  Soon Maeve and her father found themselves trading stories at every turn, and he was so impressed with her imagination that one night, while attending to a dying fire in the stone fireplace, he said to his wife that their Maeve might have found her calling. “Maybe she’ll go on to write plays, or write stories same as Joyce,” he said. “I don’t see why not, with the mind she has. Why, just the other day she was telling me about—”

  “It’s all just foolishness,” said his wife. “And please for the love of God don’t be telling me that her fantastical stories are the thing that she should set her sights on—that that’s what to do with her life. She’s telling lies is what she’s doing, and lying is a sin. Or have you forgotten that? It’s one thing to have you telling her all the crazy tales of things that happened to you that never happened at all. That may work for your sodden customers at the pub, but do you have to encourage the girl to spend all her time thinking of the same kind of silly rubbish? Really, Larney, what are you thinking?”

  In the mornings Maeve was the first to wake up, tending to the littlest girl, and when she had diapered her she crept into her parents’ bedroom and looked to see if he was awake yet. If he wasn’t, she would tiptoe out again, but not before her mother, eyes wide open, could say, “So I’m of no interest at all to you, is that it?”

  As Maeve got older, her body remained as flat as a post, but she was pleased about this, since she had no interest in any of the boys she knew. Instead, she liked working at the pub, cleaning and drying glasses. She had become just as quick to say to a confounded patron, “Did you ever hear about the teacher I had that choked on a poem?” as her father looked on with enjoyment—and some sense of inadequacy, since she was producing new, remarkably detailed stories every day, and he was only recycling his, adding variations and side stories, yes, but he knew she had surpassed him as the better storyteller.

  “You should start writing them down—the best ones,” he told her one night while closing the pub.

  “Why would I go and do that?” she said. He had never mentioned such a thing to her before—out of fear of what her mother would say if Maeve ever brought it up.

  “That’s what the best storytellers do,” he said. “How can you be known as a great storyteller if you don’t get any of them down?”

  “Do you? Write them down, I mean?”

  “No,” he said. “But I run a bar, love. My telling stories is just part of the menu, if you see what I mean. I already have my livelihood. But there should be more to it for you. You’ve two gifts, Maeve: your way with babies and storytelling. And you can do both, of course. No one’s saying you can’t. But you’ve got a wonderful imagination that goes well beyond this pub or talking for fun back at the house. I’m just wanting you to know how grand you are, is all.”

  Two weeks later, as Maeve was drying the last of the shot glasses, a terrible clatter came from the kitchen. All night Larney had gotten the orders confused and said his head felt like it had been worked on by a potato masher. When Maeve and her uncle raced in, they found him doubled over on the rubber mat of the floor. He would only live for another couple of hours.

  With both her parents and now her husband dead, and her only sister having moved away to America, Maeve’s mother decided the only way to go forward was to start their lives anew and leave Ireland. By that point she had no interest in running her half of the pub, and her sister, Meg, had done fine opening up her own dress shop in a small town in Massachusetts. They packed up and moved just a few months after the burial.

  In that first year in America, no one could remember Maeve saying anything. She was fourteen and seemed to go about her life just waiting for it to be over. She was still attentive and good to her sisters, but at school she could barely look at anyone—not even the few boys who worked up the nerve to whistle at her in the hallways.

  Mostly Maeve found ways to avoid being around kids her own age, who bored her with their ridiculous fascination with “the Twist” and “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” and the Boston Celtics with all their championships, and she knew she could make money taking care of babies. The first time was for
a family that owned two car dealerships in the state, and after that baby became a toddler, she became the nanny for a captain in the army and his wife, who had twins. Somehow she was even better with two babies at a time, but in another couple of years she was ready to move on. It wasn’t that she didn’t love the children once they could walk or say her name, but babies turned into children who wanted to know why the sky was blue and why fire was hot, and as they got older, they wanted to know why you weren’t married and where were your mother and father?

  Maeve had never told another story after her father died, and keeping that so had become important to her, though she knew how disappointed he would have been. But not having him as an audience, or a reader, would have taken any pleasure out of the telling. Anyone could make up things, she reasoned. She wasn’t interested in impressing people she didn’t know or would never meet. And as he had said, there was another gift she had, and that had taken her far away, after all. In recent weeks she had even begun to wonder if it could take her as far as the White House.

  Delaware

  Edwin had wanted a pool in his backyard for as long as he could remember. He was only an average swimmer, quick to get breathless, and when he turned his head out of the water, it had a ruinous effect on his stroke; his legs began to sink, his arms went quickly outward, and yet he was able to regain himself when his face turned back in once more. Mostly he preferred soaking or floating on a raft. He wanted a pool not for the exercise but for the status of being a pool owner.

  In his richest fantasy, the pool resembled the Clampetts’ luxurious, statue-lined oasis in The Beverly Hillbillies. In his more modest visions, he pictured the kind Rock Hudson and Doris Day were always luxuriating beside in their movies: rectangular but generously sized, outfitted with a stiff diving board, with a small pool house for changing. But Edwin worked in the payroll department of the sanitation department, and Lolly worked as an X-ray technician at the local hospital. Their combined salaries allowed them a two-bedroom ranch house that was small by most measures, though it managed to suggest a particular, if shabby, charm.