The Train of Small Mercies

by David Rowell

  “I told Mama to just tell them that they want to keep her overnight, just to watch her, and that I’d bring them over if she’s still here after the morning. So that’s what I’ll do.”

  Across the hall, they could hear two nurses complaining about a doctor’s handwriting.

  “Her doll is still in our car,” Delores said. “I wish she had it with her.”

  “We’ll get it,” Arch said.

  “She pretended that the doll had gotten hurt, and she was taking care of her.”

  “I’ll pick it up.”

  Delores gripped Rebecca’s hand and got to her feet, hovering just a few inches from Rebecca’s face. One of the nurses across the hall was telling someone that visiting hours were almost over.

  “We’re right here, Rebecca,” Delores said, and then she heard the nurse knock on the door in the next room over.

  “His color looks so much better than it did this morning,” they could hear the nurse saying. “I think the doctor is going to be surprised that you’ve been on your feet like that. You’re already ready to leave us, aren’t you, Mr. Miller?” Mr. Miller, in a fatigued hum, said that he was.

  Arch stood up and reached over to put his hand against Rebecca’s cheek. He began to speak but stopped himself; his face caved in all at once.

  The nurse had shuffled over in her sensible shoes. She knocked lightly on the door. “Visiting hours are just about over, I’m afraid.” Arch’s body stilled immediately, as if he’d been caught at something.

  Arch and Delores looked at each other, each searching for some response they could offer. “But we’re her parents,” Arch said at last.

  “I know it’s hard,” said the nurse, who had found in her sixteen years as a nurse that there was no reply more effective. “And we’re going to take good care of her.”

  The bell of the elevator down the hall rang through. It was the only pleasant sound produced in the entire building.

  The three of them stood there, not moving, until the nurse stepped out; she’d be back in a few minutes to lead them out.

  Arch reached across the bed and put his hand on Delores’s shoulder, patting, squeezing some more. Delores nodded, as if he had said something neither of them had thought of, something wise and reassuring.

  In the hallway, one of the nurses said to another, “I still have to get trained in that,” which reminded Delores of Ethel and the train for the first time in hours. That morning, Delores had asked, “How in the world is she supposed to get through this?” Angela had replied, “She’s a Kennedy,” and in that she was communicating some truth that only women could understand.

  Despite everything Arch had said and done from the minute he had arrived, she had never felt so alone. The thought of stepping into the house with Arch and the boys, without Rebecca, made her feel nauseated, and she leaned back into the chair. That was when she caught sight of the wheels on the bed. She couldn’t block out the image of Rebecca being pushed quickly from hallway to hallway, a sheet pulled over her face, and the multitudes of nurses and visitors stepping out of the way, their backs pushed against the white walls, their eyes cast downward at the speckled tile floor as a tribute to the dead in the only way they could offer.

  “You okay?” Arch asked, but Delores couldn’t answer. She knew without looking that the nurse was standing in the doorway, but not yet ready to speak. She was waiting. They were all waiting.

  New York

  When the train pulled into Union Station, it was separated into two. The tangled mass of restless mourners watched this with some puzzlement; a deep-boned fatigue had settled in by now, and despite the arrival of the train, they couldn’t yet set aside their crankiness that the train’s journey had taken twice the estimated time.

  The passengers, who during the long ride had seemed to recover from their early shock and begun to find themselves again, now braced for the equally difficult experience of the burial. As the train came to a stop, the men straightened their ties, and the women checked their compacts only to find that the heat inside the cars had drained away all traces of makeup. The food and drinks had long ago run out, but before the passengers shuffled onto the platform, they still stuffed single bills into the tip jar, and Big Brass had to empty it out again and again in the time it took for the car to empty. They thanked the two porters and shook their hands. Big Brass kept saying “God bless you” to them, and Lionel found he could think of no other line to offer and said nothing. Then the train became unbearably still and quiet, and an exhale from the engine trembled through the cars.

  The pallbearers had moved to the last car, with the senator’s casket, and at some silent signal they gripped the brass handles and lifted until they had it off the chairs. They had to navigate it with great delicacy out of a window that was removed once the train came to a stop, and more than one shuddered at the idea of hitting a corner and jostling the body of their close friend inside. A slow dirge from the navy band finished its last notes as they stepped onto the platform.

  At the sight of the coffin and the morose faces of the men carrying it, the noisy station was reduced to the hush of a museum. The mourners had gotten themselves through the day with conversations about the riots and Nixon and Ethel and the war, and also the shameful job manager Jim Lemon was doing with the Washington Senators and the countdown to the week at Ocean City or Virginia Beach and the challenges of finding a reliable babysitter and Burt Lancaster’s performance in The Swimmer and the musings of what the Beatles would come up with next. Now they were all jolted back to their gloom, and only the sound of low sobs competed with the still-hissing engine of the train.

  President Johnson and Vice President Humphrey were there to meet the train, along with their wives, and were swarmed by a team of Secret Service agents locked together at the shoulder. Police officers helped the crowd slowly open up a path for the pallbearers, a few feet at a time, and though everyone close enough to touch the casket would have remembered doing so all their lives, they knew to refrain. Lenny Carol, forty-seven, an electrician from Arlington, studied the fabric of the flag draped across and wondered if Kennedy could have truly ended the war in Vietnam and whether his son, Lenny Jr., would also arrive in Washington in a coffin covered with the American flag. Ike Benson, twenty-nine, who drove a tow truck in Southeast, thought back to watching his cousin’s black-and-white Zenith as Robert Kennedy announced the death of Martin Luther King in Indianapolis, then went on to say, “But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together . . .” And Ike Benson was still wondering just how true that really was. Evelyn D’Amato, whom Robert McNamara brushed against as he moved past, was a sixty-eight-year-old retired schoolteacher from Adrian, West Virginia. She liked to picture Heaven as a place of picturesque, serene landscapes and imagined Robert Kennedy and his brother John together again, walking along an ocean shore—maybe on their beloved Cape Cod—both men shaking their heads not in sorrow or self-pity, but in concern for what would happen next to their America.

  The pallbearers moved off the platform and onto the waiting hearse, parked in the station concourse. Some in the crowd roped off across the street gasped at the sight of the car as it pulled onto the street, then lamented that they had made any sound at all. The hearse motored past the Senate Office Building, where on Robert Kennedy’s door a typewritten note read: “Due to the death of our Senator, our offices are today closed to the public. Thank you.” The people of Washington lined the route, some of them dotting the tops of buildings, some with candles, and while other parts of the city carried on as they did any other Saturday night, the streets that led to Arlington were as silent as outer space.

  Out of all the hundreds of thousands of mourners who had turned out that day, the ones in Washington had most fully imagined some version of this, understanding more than anyone the true cost of politics. Senator Kennedy, it was now clear, had simply asked too much of his country.

  There were some who took the
smallest comfort in the fact that this time the assassin had not come from within, that he was not someone who looked like their mechanic or their son’s football coach or the chatty neighbor down the hall. But for most, none of this mattered. Dead was dead.

  The car drove down Constitution Avenue, past the Justice Department, where Kennedy had once worked, then took a brief pause by the Lincoln Memorial, where tourists and residents alike had turned up all day and night, studying Lincoln’s troubled gaze for any guidance about how to endure such violence. The hearse continued across Memorial Bridge, and there some young black mourners raised their fists in salute. Seeing this, some young white mourners affected the same gesture, unaware of their mistake.

  There had never been a nighttime funeral at the cemetery, and floodlights had been set up. By the front gate were thousands who had waited for hours to see what they might. After the long procession of cars arrived and the vast crowd had taken its place, Ethel and her children filed delicately toward the gravesite, which was just south of President Kennedy’s grave. The Archbishop of Washington spoke quietly into the night air, and then the flag was removed from the coffin and folded into a triangle. First it was given to Ted Kennedy, who then handed it to Joe Kennedy, the eldest son, whose resemblance to his father was, on this day, too much for some to bear. Joe then gave it to his mother. The Harvard University band, whose members had flown in from all over the country to be here, held their instruments as steadily as they could and played “America the Beautiful,” which no one thought to question.

  Lionel could hear Buster Hayes’s loud voice from several cars away.

  “All right, all right,” he was saying, almost singing to himself. When he reached their car, he said, “Well, the young buck has survived his first day. Put’er there, young buck,” and stuck out his thick hand. “Mr. Trent, how did he get along?”

  “Very good, very good,” Big Brass said. “Did fine.” He began to close up the bar, his arms and hands swirling across the surfaces as if he were motorized. Lionel looked on, unsure how to assist, but Big Brass said, “I’m going to take care of this, son. We’ll teach you about cleanup on the ride back. I think what we all want to do is finish up the job right and move on. A train carrying a dead man’s body starts to wear on you after a while, and one wants to step out into the night air and still know that he is alive. Am I telling the truth, Mr. Hayes?”

  “Yes, sir,” Hayes said. “A train carrying the dead and causing more to die on the way—it’s going to take a while to shake that off. Young buck, you probably don’t even know where we’re bunked up when we’re in Washington. So we’ll take you into town and maybe even buy you a drink, if we can find a bartender that will serve that baby face of yours. They caught the man that killed Martin today, and that’s worth raising a glass to.”

  Lionel couldn’t imagine getting through the night without talking to Adanya—and Adanya’s parents wouldn’t like it if he called late. And he knew that no matter how his conversation went with her, it would be difficult to be around a group of strangers, listening to their stories into the night.

  “I appreciate that, Mr. Hayes,” Lionel said, “but if you just give me the street address, I’ll be along before too long. I feel like I need to get out and just do some walking.”

  He watched Hayes exchange glances with Big Brass. He didn’t want them to think that he was above socializing with them.

  “Look here,” Buster Hayes said. “You don’t know Washington, and right now a young Negro can have a very hard time of it here. Do you understand what I’m saying? Parts of this city look like they been bombed. And I know what I’m talking about, because I fought in World War Two, and some streets look worse than what I saw in France. You got buildings reduced to piles of rubble, buildings burned down to nothing. And it’s black boys that did all that. So a Negro has got to be careful. All right, look: stay well clear away from Seventh Street Northwest—it’s all been torn up to hell. And Fourteenth Street? You don’t have no business there right now. And maybe never. Other bad parts you’re not going anywhere near, unless you were looking for them. Just be smart, and be aware. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  “I’ll be careful,” Lionel said. Hayes wrote down the address for the sleeping quarters, and then Lionel picked up his bag and, after a couple of wrong turns inside the station, found his way out onto the street.

  Though the sun had gone down an hour ago, the sidewalk still carried some of the day’s heat, and as he took a few tentative steps Lionel wondered when he would ever get some relief. Packs of sailors, laughing and slapping one another on the back, stumbled through the street like circus clowns, and one of them bumped straight into a man trying to light his pipe. “Hey, watch it!” the man called out, which made the sailors howl like jackals.

  The first order of business was to find a pay phone and hear Adanya’s voice. Her parents would likely be home, so there wouldn’t be much she could say to him without them hearing, but just as they had on the first night they met, she could answer yes-or-no questions. Was she feeling okay? Did her parents know? Could they talk soon without the worry of them listening to her? Adanya was spending the summer giving piano lessons, and he would need to ask her about that as well. But it would be difficult to pretend anything else was half as important.

  Compared with the skyscrapers of New York, the buildings in Washington looked like they had been cut down at the root. Taxicabs spun around him, but they were quieter than the ones he knew and seemed to have no use for their horns. Eventually he spotted a phone booth, and after a man in a rumpled gray suit finished up his call and stumbled out, Lionel stepped in and fished out Adanya’s number. The mouthpiece reeked of beer. Lionel took out a pocketful of coins and pressed them in, and after each one fell, his heartbeat thundered. By the time the phone rang, he could barely breathe.

  He let it ring for the length of time it took an elderly man to shuffle across the street and disappear around a corner, then set the phone back on the cradle. It was nearly nine thirty, and perhaps they had gone out, the three of them, to the movies, or maybe there was a potluck dinner at the church. Though his company-issued shoes were cutting into his feet, he decided to walk with no particular destination. He understood that the sleeping barracks were in the southeast part of town and that he would have to catch a taxi at some point, but he was hungry and set out to get a sandwich. He had already developed a strict summer budget for himself, and he would have been content to find a hot dog stand, but the vendors had already closed up and gone home for the night. He walked along Massachusetts Avenue for half a mile before he came across a black police officer on foot, and he asked the man to steer him in the right direction. The officer studied Lionel’s uniform for a moment in admiration and encouraged him to walk another two blocks until he came across a Nathan’s. The officer understood that Lionel didn’t know the city, and he added, “You shouldn’t have any problems there.”

  Lionel walked on, and once he found it, he took notice of two pretty young women waiting outside whose caramel-colored faces shone with makeup. “Ask him,” he heard one of the girls say.

  “Excuse me, baby,” the one in the blue jeans said. “Do you have the time?”

  Lionel told them that it was close to ten o’clock.

  “They’re not coming,” the other girl said, letting her shoulders drop. The air around them was heavy with an overly sweet fragrance, and the streetlight bounced off the glossy finish of their lipstick. “There’s no way. And I’m not waiting anymore.”

  Lionel reached for the door when the girl in blue jeans said, “You look like you just getting off work.”

  “That’s right,” Lionel said, his hand still on the door.

  “You work in a hotel or something?” the girl asked.

  Lionel laughed. “No. I work on a train.”

  “Oh, a train. That’s nice. Where you coming from?”

  “New York,” Lionel said.

  “Okay,” the girl said. “We’ve b
een to New York. We love New York. They know how to treat girls right up there. Here they’re a bunch of dogs.”

  The other girl moaned in agreement.

  “We were supposed to meet our dates here half an hour ago, but they stood us up. Or something. Had us standing out here as if we don’t have anything better to do.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lionel said. The other girl, who was wearing a red halter over a miniskirt and vinyl boots, eased over next to him. She studied Lionel’s uniform, smiling as a piece of chewing gum swam across her teeth.

  “Saturday night, too,” she said. “That ain’t right.”

  “That’s too bad,” Lionel said.

  “Well, we’re out now,” the girl in blue jeans said. “And it’s early. Forget them sorry fools.”

  “What’s your name?” the other girl asked.

  “Lionel.”

  “My brother’s name is Lionel,” she said.

  “He don’t look like him,” the girl in blue jeans said, then laughed.

  The girl in red was unsure if she could also laugh, then decided she could.

  “You should take us out instead,” the girl in blue jeans said. “We like you better than those two bums anyway.”

  “But you need a change of clothes,” the other one said. “You got a change of clothes in that bag, baby? You don’t want to go in looking like you’re going to be serving drinks.” She let out a throaty laugh.

  The bottoms of his feet burned, and his back felt like he had had a tire iron strapped to it. His head was spinning from all that he wanted to talk over with Adanya and also from the endless miles of grief he had seen: the sobbing mothers clutching flowers in one hand and their toddlers’ hands in the other; the softball team whose coach had just ordered her players to take off their hats; men on crutches who still hadn’t fully comprehended what had happened back in Than Khe and Quang Ngai and Chu Lai.

  Just then he saw two men approaching—clad in jeans and bright, silky shirts halfway buttoned, one with a purple comb in the side of his Afro. The other man flicked his friend’s shoulder at the sight of the two women and smiled. “I told you, man,” he said.