by Ninie Hammon
“Lloyd, yore crazy.” The train whistle sings out again. Probably isn’t more than a couple of minutes away. “Now com’on. We gotta get outta here.”
Lloyd turns to face him. Will has never seen such a challenge in anyone’s eyes. “You chicken?”
“I ain’t stupid!”
Lloyd drops to his knees, shoves a couple of pieces of coal off the cross ties between the rails and Will hears them plunk into the creek below. Then Lloyd lies down on his back with his head facing the oncoming train.
Will’s heart bangs away so hard he’s certain you can see his shirt bounce with every beat. His knees feel weak; his mouth has a strange taste in it—like pennies.
Lloyd calls out, “Scaredy-cat! Scaredy-cat!” and starts to yell—a wild, primitive cry—almost a howl.
Will turns to bolt off the trestle just as the train rounds the corner of the mountain and comes into view, a roaring black monstrosity bearing down on him.
At that moment, two things happen at once, but time elongates, so he seems able to consider each individually, ponder them carefully.
Will stumbles, trips over his feet and goes down hard on one knee. Rocks and pieces of coal rip open his pant leg and tear into his skin, both palms are scraped raw. He staggers to his feet, wobbly and off-balance, and realizes he has run out of time. He can’t make it to the short end of the trestle ahead of the oncoming train and he can’t outrun the train in a race to the far end.
But the second thing is so odd that even in that desperate moment it registers as a totally unexpected phenomenon. All of a sudden, he is no longer in control of his own movements. His brain is screaming, “Run! Run!” but his body does the opposite. He throws himself down between the tracks instead, and rolls over onto his back between the rails. His feet almost touch Lloyd’s feet; he can see the train coming.
He feels the shock wave of vibration as the train hits the near side of the trestle and he lifts his head for a second to look. The gigantic black engine roars at him like a charging bull. He hears the cry of the whistle as the engineer spots the two bodies on the track and the piercing shriek of metal against metal as he locks up the brakes in a futile attempt to stop the train. Will slams his head back down into the rocks, feels them cut into the back of his scalp, has a heartbeat’s view of blue sky and white clouds and then the world is eaten up in a wild roar.
Shrieking, rumbling, rattling and convulsing, the train roars over him inches from his face.
The train’s journey across his body lasts for hours, for a lifetime.
Sound and vibration are one; they envelop him, consume him, relentlessly bludgeon his senses, blast him with hot air, pelt him with rocks and inexorably pull at him, tug him upward, suck his body toward an instant, mangled, mutilated death. He tries to close his eyes, but he is incapable of any movement, however small, except to dig his fingers into the splintered wood of the cross ties in a frantic, desperate effort to hold on! His vision is filled with the blurry underbelly of the convulsing, beast above him. He tries to shrink away from it, from the hurling death inches from his nose, but it is all around him, under him, beside him, over him. It squeezes tighter and tighter, smashes him, crushes him, roars…
It is gone!
The trestle still vibrates but Will feels cool air and sees blue sky and clouds. He hears his own voice—a moaning, inarticulate mewl. Lloyd is screaming, the wild cry of exaltation now mingled with relief in a voice that is at once human and feral. That yell, not the roar of the train, is the sound Will would remember for the rest of his life.
Tears stream down Will’s cheeks. He looks around fearfully, like the train might come back for him. He sits up; his whole body is trembling violently. That’s when he realizes he has wet himself.
Lloyd has leapt up, eyes wild as a madman, a deep, bloody scratch on his cheek that he got who knows how. He jumps up and down, whoops, pulses energy—a maniacal smile on his face.
Will staggers to his feet, stares at Lloyd for a moment, then leans over and throws up, splashes his lunch on the cross ties and rails.
“Who-hoo!” Lloyd squeals, oblivious to everything except the adrenaline high that pulses through every nerve in his body. “Wasn’t that—?”
Will turns from his vomit and lunges at Lloyd, catches him in the chest and bowls him over. The two of them tumble to the trestle floor dangerously close to the edge. Then Will starts to pummel Lloyd, crying at the same time. Lloyd covers his face with his arms and Will’s blows land ineffectually, but Will continues to swing and swing until his muscles are lead and he no longer has the strength to move his arms.
Then he gets up, his eyes wet, his nose running, and staggers away down the long side of the trestle. Lloyd calls to him, but he doesn’t answer. When he gets to the end, he sees two men far down the track racing toward him. It must have taken more than a mile to stop the train. Then he steps off into the dirt and stumbles away, gains speed with each stride until he is running wildly, madly, recklessly through the woods. Trailing a strange keening cry like a kite on a string behind him, he frantically tries to outdistance the terror. But he has brought it along with him in his heart, where it will take up residence, put down roots, and grow entangling tendrils into his soul for the rest of his life.
The next day, Lloyd shows up while Will and Ricky Dan are in the garden hammering posts into the ground for Ma Sparrow’s pole beans. Their glances connect only once—Will’s eyes issue a fiery, challenging warning; Lloyd’s are confused. And that’s it. They never speak of it, never mention the day again. It is as if it never happened. But no matter how hard Will tries, he is never again able to embrace the innocent friendship he’d had with Lloyd before that day.
And he never trusted Lloyd again.
CHAPTER 18
WILL AND JAMEY came down the road out of the woods and found Granny sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch. Her hands worked crochet needles, pulled thread through and hooked it over and over.
“Find any ’sang?” she called out when she saw them.
“No, but we almost got shot,” Jamey replied. Minutes after the bullets whizzed by him, Jamey had completely forgotten his fear. Storm clouds never lingered long in the blue sky of Jamey’s world.
Granny dropped the crochet needles into her lap. “Got shot?”
“Aw, it was nothing,” Will said. “Some poacher wasn’t looking where he was shooting, that’s all.”
Will didn’t believe that for a minute, but any other explanation begged all sorts of questions he couldn’t begin to answer.
He and Jamey had reached the bottom of the porch steps. “What are you making?” he asked.
Granny studied Will for a moment and he had the uncomfortable feeling she knew there was more to the story than he had told. Then she picked up the crochet needles and went back to work.
“You ’member Cora Talbot? The least of her girls—Jackie—this here’s a blanket for her baby.” She gestured toward the ball of blue yarn. “That girl ain’t far enough ’long to be hardly showing and they already know the baby’s gonna be a boy. Already got a name picked out ’n everything.” Granny shook her head. “The older I get the more there is in this world that don’t make no sense to me. They’s gonna know that child’s a boy his whole life—ain’t it no fun no more to wonder for just a little while?”
As she spoke, her big hands continued to maneuver the hooks in delicate movements that should have looked clumsy but didn’t, working so fast it was almost impossible to follow the hooks’ progress.
“Your grandmother has probably crocheted a thousand miles of yarn in her lifetime,” Will said to Jamey. “Doesn’t even have to think about it—her hands do it automatically.” He turned back to Granny with a big smile. “Remember what Ricky Dan said about you crocheting?” He looked at Jamey. “Your daddy said one time…” Will did his best imitation of Ricky Dan’s voice. “I figure if they’s to put needles and yarn in yore coffin during visitation, you’d likely make up a right nice sweater
’fore they started shovelin’ in the dirt.”
Jamey laughed; Granny smiled a gentle smile. You could tell the memory was poignant, but no longer painful.
Jamey held up the burlap sack with the potato digger inside. “I’ll put these with the dryin’ rack,” he said. “Then I’m gonna do me some more work on my arts.” His sunny grin went flat line. “It’s a sad one, Granny. I hope it ain’t another one’s gonna make you cry.”
He turned and headed up the hill to his shed in the woods.
“He’s carved statues that made you cry?”
“Just he’s so good ’n all, makes things so lifelike. Sometimes they’s hard to look at.”
Clearly, Granny didn’t want to talk about that any more than Will wanted to discuss the poacher. So he sat down on the bottom step of the porch and patted the smooth wood next to him.
“Come sit with me, Granny.” The old woman spoke so softly, you needed to be near her to carry on a conversation. And the rocker she sat in had a flat, slat seat and no cushion; the porch step would be just as comfortable.
Will looked up the hollow to the bare spot where the old house once stood. “We used to sit out on the porch at night and watch the fireflies. Remember?” When he turned back to face her there was a look of consternation on her face.
“I’ll go in and get a chair out the kitchen so’s you can sit up here with me,” she said and began to rise. “I made some fresh lemonade if you—”
“Something’s wrong, Granny. What is it?”
It hadn’t escaped his notice that Granny had the rocker jammed up against the wall of the trailer so tight there was hardly any room to rock, or that she had not left the house in the three days he had been there, had not gone out to the mailbox on the road or into the garden in the backyard. He’d seen several ripe pumpkins in the garden when he and Jamey went sangin’. Why hadn’t she picked them?
“I cain’t.” Her voice wasn’t just quiet, it was small, almost like a child. He’d never heard her speak that way before.
“Can’t what?”
“I…got me a phobia, that’s what JoJo says.” She immediately became very interested in the yarn and hooks that danced in her lap, wouldn’t look at him. “She went out and learnt all ’bout it. It’s got a name, but I disremember what it is.”
She stopped, gathered herself and looked at him. “Anyway, I got to stay here. I don’t go nowhere no more.”
Will got up, climbed the steps and crossed to her rocker, then sat down Indian style on the porch in front of her. “Tell me about it.”
In a whisper-soft voice, Granny told the story. She explained that she only felt safe in the mountains. They were like a fence, a protective wall. But then the fence had begun to close in on her.
She put down her crochet needles, leaned over, and stroked Will’s hair. “I ain’t never had to tie words to all them thoughts and feelings before. Sayin’ a hard truth like that, it ain’t some’m you can spit out simple to just anybody.” She paused, considered it, then continued resolutely. “And it…” she made a sweeping gesture all around “the whole of it…scares me some.”
Will said nothing, merely reached up and took her big, gnarled hand in his.
“I know how it’s gonna end.” Her voice was level, but Will could feel her hand begin to tremble. “I done seen it comin’ a long way off. The circle’s gonna get smaller and smaller until it squeezes the life outta…until they carry me out this house in a pine box.”
She seemed to take off in an entirely different direction then, but Will sensed there was a connection somewhere, that it fit together somehow.
“That mural of Bow and me gettin’ married. Bowman standing all stiff and tall in that suit he borrowed with the collar too tight. Me a-standin’ next by him, wearin’ the white dress made out of Irish lace my own granny’d wore when she got married—brought it in a trunk from the old country. We got married in the morning and Bow went back to work in the mine on the night shift at three o’clock.” She sighed. “My Bow ain’t here, now. It’s jest me. We all end up jest us.”
Will realized that the years had healed her wounds, but nothing had relieved her solitude. No matter how many children, grandchildren, or friends she kept close around her, Granny remained set apart by the emptiness of the space beside her. And none of them, however well-intentioned could bridge that gulf; nobody would ever be able to quite get to her again.
“Have you tried to do anything about your fear? There are ways to deal with—”
“Ain’t nobody can do your livin’ for you. Or your dyin’. That’s yore job.”
“But you can’t let your grief make you a prisoner, lock you away from the world.”
Granny cocked her head to one side. “Yore a fine one to talk about lettin’ grief make you a prisoner. You been a prisoner for all these many years. Only difference ’tween me ’n you is my grief locked me in and yore grief locked you out.”
“It was more than grief kept me away.”
“Where did you go, Will? Where you been all this time?”
He released her hand, leaned back against the railing post and stared up at the wind chime that dangled by a string from the porch ceiling, silver pipes that made a haunting sound a little like an old church organ.
“Well, I thumbed a ride on a coal truck all the way to Somerset,” he said, as memories dragged him back into a reality he didn’t want to revisit. “I was on my way to the bus station. Had no idea where I was going to, just wanted to put space between me and where I was coming from. I figured I’d buy as much distance as the money I had would pay for.”
He stopped and looked up at her sheepishly.
“And I got distance that day, more than I ever bargained for. Across the street from the bus station in Somerset is a Navy Recruiting Center. I walked in and listened to the guy’s spiel. I needed a job and a one-way ticket out of the mountains. So that day I became a sailor.”
“The Navy?”
Will shook his head. “Granny, if I’d sat down and plotted out the single worst possible decision I could have made that day, joining the Navy was it.”
“How come?”
“I was running away from a coal mine! From everything that even remotely resembled a coal mine…small and tight, the walls closing in and…” He shivered. Then smiled a little at the absolute absurdity of it all. “Granny, do you have any idea how narrow the passageways are on a destroyer? And the berth space.” He saw the confused look on Granny’s face. “A berth is a bunk…a bed. They’re stacked so tight you have to get out to turn over!”
“Them fellas you’s in the Navy with, did you get rid of your accent so’s you’d sound like them, fit in?”
“That was part of it. But it would have taken a whole lot more than an accent change for me to fit in with men who actually wanted to be sailors, who’d dreamed their whole lives of going to sea.”
He barked out a little laugh. “I’d been in boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Station outside Chicago for almost a week before it dawned on me I’d actually have to physically get on a ship. That I’d have to sail out into an ocean on a ship, live on a ship.”
He stopped, shook his head in wonder.
“I was horrified, but I didn’t let on. I wasn’t about to confirm everybody’s stereotype of a dumb hillbilly. I sucked it up and…drank a lot. And started fights.”
Thick with cigarette smoke and the stink of beer and sweat, the air almost resists Will as he passes through it, like it’s water. He’s drunk, his natural state. He plops back down into his chair as the deck is passed to him.
“Deal the cards, hillbilly,” says the sailor with a big nose and a pronounced New Jersey accent who is seated across from him. “That’s five each. You can count that high, can’t you?”
“Aw, come on,” sighs Cowboy, the guy from Texas on Will’s left. They’re all tired of listening to the New Jersey guy give Will a hard time. “Don’t start. Let’s just play cards.”
Will picks up the deck and
begins to shuffle. He has to concentrate hard because he’s had way more to drink than the other sailors. He spends every shore leave plastered. Usually has to be carried back on board, because if he had to walk up that gangplank under his own power…
“You hollered in your sleep again last night, hillbilly.” The New Jersey guy keeps at it. “Yelling all crazy. You been hitting the moonshine? Or is it that your feet hurt because you’re not used to wearing shoes?”
Will sets the deck of cards carefully on the table in front of him.
“Dealer calls the game, right?” he says. The other three sailors groan and nod. “Okay…” Then Will turns his Kentucky accent up full throttle on the name of a silly childhood game he used to play: There’s a Bear.
“I call Thar’s a Bahr.”
“What?” says the black sailor from Detroit. The others roll their eyes and grumble.
“S’real simple,” Will says. “I say, ‘Thar’s a Bahr.’ ” Will points off to the right like he’s seen something and the others glance that direction in confusion. “And you say, ‘Whar?’ ”
Cowboy reaches for the deck of cards. “Com’on, Will, we—”
“And then I say, ‘The bahr’s right…’ ” Without warning, Will dives across the table and grabs the front of the New Jersey sailor’s shirt. “ ‘…thar!’ ” And he slams his fist into the man’s face, hears his big nose snap.
“I finally got hauled in front of my commanding officer for assaulting another sailor, broke his nose,” Will said. “I thought I’d finally done it, that he was going to throw me in the brig.” His voice was hollow. “I’d have lost it in there. Little cell with no windows. I couldn’t have…”
Granny reached out and stroked his hair again but kept silent.
Will took a deep breath. “His name was Burkhead. Commander Leonard C. Burkhead. And he could cuss almost as creatively as Ri…” Will caught himself. “…anybody I ever heard.”
Will stands at rigid attention, a steel rod down his spine, as Commander Burkhead yells at him. Will is certain he’ll be looking at the four walls of a cell in the brig before the commander’s through with him. He is equally certain he will never see daylight again if they lock him up.
