by Anne Tyler
“That Jackie, he become a pest afore we even got out of the station.”
“Brought him two bottles. Say no one bottle’d do him.”
“Need a wife to keep him still, that boy.”
“Hoo, Lord.”
Matilda smiled down at them and sat down slowly. “Going to make that Brandon come up here he don’t behave,” she said loudly to the window. “I mean it, now.”
Ben Joe tried smiling at the children across the aisle, stretching his mouth farther than it wanted to go, but the children stared soberly back at him with little worried frowns. Ahead of them, their mother opened a paper sack and handed back two pieces of fried chicken. The children accepted them automatically, their eyes still fixed on Ben Joe.
“When I get home,” their mother said to the woman beside her, “I going to have me a mess of collard greens.”
“You got you a good idea there,” Matilda called.
The woman turned back and nodded gravely. “They don’t feed you right in New York,” she said. “Don’t know how a person keep himself alive, in New York.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
They were quiet a minute, picturing home. For a minute Ben Joe pictured it with them, knowing almost for a certainty exactly what their homes were like. Who could be that definite about where he came from? A hundred years ago, maybe, you could look at a Carolina white man and know what he would have for supper that night, in what kind of house and with what sort of family sitting around him. But not any more—not in his case, at least. He felt suddenly pale and plain, going back to a big pale frame house that no one could tell was his. He looked at his reflection in the black windowpane and frowned, seeing only the flat planes of his cheeks and the worried hollows of his eyes.
“The way they does their chicken in New York,” called Matilda, “they puts it in the oven stark nekkid and let it lay awhile. I seen it done that way. With a cut-up frying chicken I seen it.”
“That’s so, I know. That’s so.”
“Ticket, please.”
Ben Joe looked up at the conductor, standing stolidly beside him and smiling down over a huge stomach. He handed him his ticket, already a little frayed, and the conductor tore off one section of it.
“Won’t have to change,” he said. He gave the rest of the ticket back and swayed on to the next passenger.
Someone sat down beside him, so suddenly that Ben Joe was almost frightened for a minute by the jounce in the springs. He turned from the window and found himself no more than three inches from the pointy nose of a curly-haired boy, who was leaning so closely toward him in order to see his face that he was practically lying on his side against Ben Joe.
“Pardon me,” the boy said. He sat up straight again, folded his coat in his lap, and stared ahead of him at Matilda’s baby.
Ben Joe settled back more firmly on his side of the seat and examined the boy’s face. He would judge him to be about fifteen, but a New York fifteen; he was very self-assured and his face, except for that one moment of inquisitiveness, was tightly closed and smooth. When he became aware of Ben Joe’s stare, he turned toward him again and said, explaining himself, “Just wanted to see what you looked like. See you didn’t talk a lot or weren’t drunk or nothing.”
“I don’t talk and I’m not drunk,” Ben Joe snapped.
“Okay, okay. But I was sitting with this old man, see, and he was talking all the time. Made me nervous. All these guys make me nervous.”
“That’s your problem,” Ben Joe said.
“The old man’s dying.”
Ben Joe looked around, alarmed. “Which one?” he asked.
“White fellow, sitting way back. Can’t see him from here.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before? What—”
“Relax. He’s only dying slowly, of old age.”
“But—”
“He’s okay, see.”
Ben Joe sat back and stared out the window. The rushing sound of the train and the deep blackness outside made everything seem dreamy and unreal. It was hard to believe that the train was going anywhere at all; it was only standing still and swaying slightly, against a moving screen of darkness and the occasional pinpoints of lights. He told himself that he was finally going home, after all that worrying about his family and wanting desperately to see them again. He told himself what was even more real than that: that when he got there he would immediately feel sad and confused again, the way he always did. But no, Joanne was back. Joanne could change things; just by smiling that smile of hers she could make everything seem safe and in its right place. He closed his eyes, picturing home. He pictured his house as another kind of train, lighted also, floating through darkness. But with the sound of his own train in his ears he couldn’t hear their voices; he stood outside his family’s windows and watched their movements without hearing a single sound.
His mother would be moving rapidly around the house, pursing her lips tight and flouncing her hair because Ben Joe couldn’t come home, she wouldn’t have it, and then going off to put clean sheets on his bed. His grandmother would be standing on a counter in the kitchen to see what Ben Joe might like from her special private stock of food on the top shelf. And in the ruffly, perfumey closed circles of their worlds, his sisters would hear Ben Joe was returning and then forget again until his return was an actuality and they could get briefly excited over it. Joanne would laugh. She would look at her feet, propped bare on their father’s leather hassock, and laugh easily for no reason at all.
(Only would she? It was seven years now since he’d seen Joanne; why couldn’t he ever realize the happening of a thing? Surely she’d be different now—calmer and more even-tempered. Or did she wear a low-necked, swinging red dress when she took the baby for a stroll? And toss her hair and flash that teasing smile when she ironed her husband’s shirt for him?)
“Plate of okra!” Matilda shouted. “That’s what my mind fixed on!”
“Be right good. I declare if it wouldn’t be.”
Ben Joe reached into his shirt pocket. From behind a crumpled pack of cigarettes and an old lighter of his mother’s he pulled out this morning’s letter, already dingy at the creases. He held it up under the tiny bulb that was supposed to be a reading lamp and read, once more:
Dear Ben Joe:
We received yours of the 21st & are glad to hear you are well. It is too bad that the Asian flu shots gave you Asian flu. Also we are sorry to hear that you are cold.
The big news of course is that Joanne is home. She left her husband altho it’s not clear why and of course the first thing Mama asked was was he unfaithful, they all are, & Joanne just laughed at her. The baby is as cute as she can be & is going to be spoiled rotten.
Tessie is going to have to have braces, which will be quite an expense. Gram is going to knit you a sweater for the cold but has forgotten the measurement from the tip of your shoulder to your wrist & would like you to tell her. Also what is your favorite color & if it’s still purple forget it, because whenever she knits you a purple sweater she gets to seeing polka dots in front of her eyes before she goes to bed at night.
Ben Joe, you did not write telling Gram not to shop any more. Last night we had crabmeat and black olives in our Monday-night casserole. She also thinks I am not handling the money right & so yesterday she went over the bank books and decided the bank had credited us with $112 too much so she quick withdrew it and put it in another bank before they could find out. I had to go & change banks back again this noon.
Let us hear from you & don’t worry.
Sincerely,
Jennifer.
Ben Joe put the letter back in his shirt pocket. He pulled the lever under the arm of his chair and pushed against the back of the seat to make it slant more. There was no point in staying awake worrying about things.
Someone sat down in the curly-haired boy’s lap. The boy awoke with a start and said, “
Hey! What you—” and began fighting, flailing his arms out and heaving his body and hitting mainly Ben Joe. Whoever sat in the boy’s lap was big and solid and quiet, in a heavy tweed overcoat, calmly tipping a bottle to his mouth.
“Brandon!” Matilda shrieked. She stood up and, with one hand still holding the baby to her shoulder, reached out and grabbed a handful of Brandon’s hair and shook him by it, hard. “You no-count you, Brandon—”
“I’m just setting, Matilda,” said Brandon.
“You setting on somebody, Brandon.”
Brandon turned around and looked beneath him.
“Oh, hey,” he said.
“You are sitting on me,” said the boy. He was breathing hard, and looked as if he might start crying.
“I surely am sorry, sir. I didn’t see you atall, sir, I come to say hey to this yellow-haired gentleman—”
“Get yourself offen him, Brandon.”
Brandon rose, confused, and bent over Ben Joe’s rumpled seatmate. “I surely do hope I didn’t hurt you none,” he said. “I surely am sorry. I surely am.”
“Forget it,” the boy said. He straightened his jacket and then settled down further in his seat and closed his eyes, determinedly.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Brandon.”
“Yes’m.”
“He ain’t never like this,” she said to Ben Joe. “It’s that Jackie egg him on. Brandon has always been a real pillar to me, a real—Come up here and set, Brandon.”
“Yes’m, just a minute. I want to speak some with this yellow-haired—”
He sat down heavily on the arm of Ben Joe’s seat, but taking care not to touch the boy, and leaned across to look at Ben Joe.
“Believe you Ben Joe Hawkes,” he said. He switched the bottle to his left hand and shook Ben Joe’s hand several times, up and down. His breath smelled of gin, but other than his first mistake he didn’t act like a drunken man. His face was sharp and alert, and although he seemed very young there were the beginnings of lines at each corner of his mouth, downward-pulling lines that made him look as if he were in pain. “I’m Brandon Hayes. This here my wife, Matilda. Matilda, this Dr. Hawkes’s boy. Dr. Phillip Hawkes—him.”
“That so?” Matilda said. She turned to Ben Joe, still uncertain, and when Ben Joe nodded, she look relieved. “Looks like you know a little, Brandon, I will say. I remember about him having a boy, though I ain’t met you ever.” She switched the baby to her other shoulder and sat down again, sideways, so that she could see them over the back of the seat. “Your daddy fixed Brandon here’s leg,” she said. “Was broke in two places, back when he a boy and me just a girl in the same Sunday school class with him. I remember.”
“It’s true,” Brandon said. He settled down more comfortably on the arm of the chair. “Way I saw you, you were in the office with him, wanting him to come home for supper. You mustn’t of been but twelve or so but I remembered. I good at faces, yes sir. Been eight years since I even seen Sandhill, but there’s many I remember though they mightn’t remember me. How your daddy now?”
“Well …” Ben Joe said, startled. “He, uh, he’s dead. Died some six years back.”
Brandon looked down at his knees and shook his head, silently. His wife made a sad little cooing sound.
“I do say,” Brandon said finally. “Well, I do say. I surely am sorry to hear it. We been gone so long, they don’t write the news like they should … I surely am sorry.”
“How he go?” Matilda asked.
“Heart attack.”
“Law, law.” She shook her head too, echoing Brandon. “Well, I know it was a dignified passing. Wan’t it?”
Ben Joe, taken off guard, didn’t answer.
“Oh, I sure it was very dignified, Matilda,” Brandon said soothingly.
In the cramped space between the wall and the curly-haired boy, Ben Joe carefully crossed his foot over his knee and twisted one shoelace, staring down at it.
“Well, now,” said Matilda, suddenly becoming very brisk. “How about your mama?”
“Oh, she’s fine.”
“And there more of you, ain’t there? A passle of sisters? I recollect that. How they?”
“Oh, they’re fine, too. The oldest one’s got a baby of her own now.”
“Well, glory. She marry a Sandhill boy?”
“No. She left Sandhill a little before Dad died, and got a job, and then a few years back she called to say she was married to this boy from Georgia. Haven’t seen her since, or the boy, either. They live in Kansas. But she’s at home now.”
“Well, I know you be glad to see her. I bet your mama went to Kansas when the baby come, hey?”
“No.”
“That daddy of yours a fine man,” Brandon said. “Fine man.”
“Well,” said Madida, “your mama had enough to do with chirren of her own, I reckon. Maybe just couldn’t make it all the way to Kansas.”
“That’s a nice-looking baby you got,” said Ben Joe.
“Well, thank you. Name’s Clara Sue. I knew it’d be a girl. I got fatter and fatter in the behind all the time I carrying her.”
“Now, Matilda, he don’t want to hear about that.”
“Well, I just mentioning. You want to sleep, Mr. Ben Joe, and I know Brandon he wild to get back to that gin.”
“It was good seeing you,” Ben Joe said. He and Brandon stood up and shook hands, and then Brandon left and Matilda turned around to face forward again.
When he was settled back in his seat, Ben Joe leaned his head against the windowpane and closed his eyes, trying to ignore the vibration of the pane against his skin. He wished he knew what state they were passing through. The last of New Jersey, maybe. He felt unsure of his age; in New York he was small and free and too young, and in Sandhill he was old and tied down and enormous, but what age was he here?
With his eyes closed, the division between sleeping and waking became blurred and airy. He saw the sunlit front porch of his house in Sandhill floating up toward him through the darkness behind his eyelids. His father came out of the house, humming a tune beneath his breath, and began crossing the yard to the front gate.
“You come pick me up when it’s suppertime, Ben Joe,” he said, speaking to the empty air. “I’ll be in my office.”
The sun shone on his lined face, and on the top of his white hair. From somewhere far off, Ben Joe shouted, “But I’m not there! I’m over here!”
His father made a shoulder-patting motion in space. “We’ll walk home together,” he said.
Ben Joe began running, trying to be beside his father before he reached the gate, but he was too late. When he got there his father was gone, and his mother had come out on the porch holding a glass of lemonade that flashed piercingly in the sun.
“You’ve been dreaming about your father,” she said.
But Ben Joe said, “No. No, I didn’t. I never did.”
He awoke, and found that the sill of the train window had pressed a wide deep line into his cheekbone.
3
It was still very early in the morning when Ben Joe reached Sandhill. The wooden station house seemed deserted and the parking lot behind it was white and empty, with the pale sunlight glinting on the flecks of mica in the gravel. Beyond that was a thin row of trees and then, after that, Main Street, running parallel to the railroad tracks and lined with the little stores that made up the downtown section of Sandhill. From where Ben Joe was standing, beside the tracks, all he could see of Sandhill was smoking chimneys and white steeples. The town looked small and clean and perfect, as if it were one of those miniature plastic towns sitting beside a child’s electric railroad.
The only other passengers to get off at Sandhill were Brandon’s family and a tiny old snuff-chewing white man whom Ben Joe had not seen before. They all stood by the tracks in a group, motionless, soaking in the early morning sunshine and listening to the train fading
away behind them. When the air was completely silent again Brandon said, “Sure do feel different from New York.”
“Sure do,” the old man said.
They turned to look at him.
“Softer, I guess,” he said. “I don’t know.”
They nodded and turned away again. Ben Joe felt as if they might almost be a family, the five of them, standing so close together and so watchful. The sleepiness and the sudden silence seemed to have left an odd gentleness, in himself and in the others, that made him reluctant to leave the station.
“Can’t see much of a change from here,” Brandon said. “See they ain’t fixed the clock on the Sand-Bottom Baptists’ steeple tower yet.”
He was holding the baby now, and in his other hand was a large striped cardboard suitcase. Beside him his wife clutched a diaper bag to her stomach. In the sunlight they both looked much younger; Brandon was bundled into a woolly-collared maroon windbreaker that a little boy might wear, and his wife had a thin brown topper on, girlishly awkward and too short-sleeved, and a simple blue dress that had faded a little. Beside them stood the little old man, also faded but still very clean and polished-looking, as if some brisk daughter-in-law had scrubbed him like an apple with a clean white cloth before she packed him on the train. He had a funny way of breathing—short and fast, with a tiny kitten’s mew at the end of each intake. Ben Joe wondered if he were the one that the curly-haired boy had said was dying.
“Anyone know where Setdown Street is?” the old man was asking.
“I do,” said Ben Joe.
“I want to find it. Be mighty obliged.”
“I’ll show you.”
A dusty black Chevrolet pulled into the parking lot. It seemed stuffed with laughing brown faces, piled three deep, and even before it had come to a complete stop, the doors had popped open and a whole wealth of brightly dressed Negroes had begun pouring out. Brandon gave a joyous hoot of laughter that was almost a shout and said, “Hey, man, hey, Matilda, look who here!” and the baby woke up and blinked her round berry eyes at Ben Joe.
“You waking Clara Sue,” Matilda said.
