“You’re not … Lottie?” he said.
She shook her head, smiling slightly, but her eyes on Jim now, as if to inquire what story he’d been handing his friend.
“Why no … she’s Emily.” Lottie had just swallowed, and now she laughed comfortably. “I’m …” A few crumbs clung to her small, freshwater-pearl teeth. And it was Lottie, the behindhand one, who moved over easily and made room between her and her sister for the two men. The two men looked at each other; for the space of a breath perhaps they gave each other the once-over. Then Jim, the behindhand one, slipped in front of the mate and sat down beside Emily, and the mate slipped in docilely after, next to Lottie—after all, he was only wanting a wife. Her dress wasn’t lowcut, but that bust of hers made any dress seem so, and the mate, being the shorter man, would have the closer view of it. On his other side, Jim was floundering in that worst of doubletalk, when a woman isn’t saying anything at all. He had a feeling that whatever he said would set the tone for everything ahead of him—maybe they all did; the feeling itself was acknowledgment that a moment of choice had passed forever by. When his remark came it was another of those nothings. “You got to town,” he said.
At first, the picnic in itself wasn’t too much for personality over and above what a hundred years of lemon tea, and chocolate cake for the ants to eat, has trodden into memory’s communal ground. Even eating in a trolley car—or auto, or aeroplane; just plane, you boys say—doesn’t much change the reflections common to eaters of the hard-boiled egg. But here, once everybody relaxed into the riding, which happens in any vehicle, then they had the novelty of an outing in one in which they had ridden unthinking on daily errand and jaunt; it was the way it would be if the New York subway should stop forever, and the populace have a day of picnic there. There were stops for comfort along the way, with much hopping on and off of children and one almost-left-behind nursing mother who ran out to flag the lead car just in time; at each stop everybody remarked how well the committee had done its work, in even going ahead yesterday to Otselica, to set up facilities there. Everybody also reminded everybody else that the route was now being observed for the last, the very last, time, since when traversed again, it would be dark.
So far, there hadn’t been any wonders of the world, only the two bordering townlets where they had stopped off, separated by a country road; for most, this was as far out on the Batavia line as any had ever been. But as soon as they had left behind these two hamlets, the leafage and the gradual wildness began; soon they were running along handily through a lovely vale, between arching trees which now and then met and tangled high above. It was a tingling pleasure to feel lost this way, probing a limited unknown, with the car grinding and swaying along its high wire, between one’s legs that secret teasing of the motion, and all around one the caravan’s sense of good provisions hard by one, and homely friends. There were no houses here to hold the span wires between them as in Germany; this was unoccupied land. The little boys aboard made a game of counting the poles.
The air grew cooler, delicious with vines, and those who had brought sweaters were wondering whether they should be the first to fuss themselves into them, when—the lead car stopped, with a lurch that sent people and packages against one another, but nothing broken, just one little boy down in the aisle. The news came relayed back, after an ominous quiet of precisely two and a half minutes; there was a jam in the overhead wires due to overgrowth not having been pruned—nothing was wrong with the current however, all would duly be well. And in a few minutes, with a crackle from above, and a sizzle of the sparks the children complained were so hard to see in the daytime, they were off—a picnic scare, a picnic adventure, precisely to scale.
This happened untold times before the morning was over. It was impossible not to feel better acquainted all-round, characters emerging ever stronger, naming themselves from the settled corners of the car: the lady and children in seat Left Two, the couple up ahead with the big basket, the little Quaker hen forever nodding, the motorman up ahead, whom all were shy of speaking to, because he was to lose his job. The sagest heads of all nodded over the line’s demise; clearly it had been the costly upkeep which had done it; no, said others, not with patronage it wouldn’t have; it was because the line didn’t go anywhere. “Twenty-nine miles to nowhere!” somebody said. “Unfinished, if it had been finished—” said another. Whose fault was that? Nobody was heard to mention Riefel by name in any connection, but several spoke of the buses to come, most with contempt; where cars as handsome as the one they were on had failed because people simply wouldn’t, didn’t, how would buses—and on a roadbed as wild and unpopulated as this? They were drawing along now, for once uninterruptedly, through the last few miles before the terminus; some wag had put up a sign which said “Shin Hollow,” and a little farther on “Great Bear Mountain,” which was in fact the name of the hill. Now the car swayed and ground on through darkest woodland; the committee had had a man on the tracks clearing for a week before the excursion—buses here? Nobody could visualize it. Then the motorman spoke up, nasally proud; indeed he had been promised a job with the new buses, which however were going another route, and everybody was relieved for him yet irritated, since if he had been listening why couldn’t he have volunteered this information earlier? Conversation on this point all but stopped; appetites had started. A few voices persisted, halfhearted, on the subject of progress; consider how their own town had grown; since when had so many people in it barely known each other’s names, as some here? Since the war. The children meanwhile, hearing all this above their heads, looked wise without knowing it; something new was going to be added to the life ahead of them; they were on the voyage they had all along known they were, the original voyage, out. Box-lunches opened everywhere, decided on quicker than sweaters, and with food, the talk swung round again to character; there were those two boys down in back to be kidded, the ones without lunch. But they’re provided for—“Watch it, you boys.” Livery stable, a voice remembered. Boys? They’re men, those two boys. “Veterans,” whispered someone, and character sank again before this most remembering word. “It’s the last time,” mothers said to children who already had the look of those who had been kissed by governors of the state, and would grow up to shake the hand of some President. Remember it. It’ll be different, it’ll be dark—going back.
The Little Otselica. The creek and the hill. At about two o’clock in the afternoon they reached it, that perfected moment on trolleybed, roadbed or airstrip—the stop. There, broadside of the road, was the big bear of a hill which had provided the bygone stockholders an excuse to desert and curtail (though in Riefel’s home system it was tunneled through), against Riefel’s professional counsel that a transportation system cannot curtail, none of them can, being wars against nature; like wars, they must grow or fail. But now, the central carbarn, from whose peaked weathercock a flag had been lifted, and all the other outbuildings, all built of good stone, trellised and guttered in that homelike style in which small provincial railroad stations and their ilk used to be, stood out against the hillside like a village whose inhabitants, piped away by some pied spell and now released, were thronging back. The committee went first, in their black garb rather like a funeral it was true, but right behind them the women came marveling, gingering up everybody’s spirits, including their own, with their polkadots and kangaroo-pockets full of children; the spirit of picnics, and cemetery visits, is always feminine. Certainly there was reason to marvel; from comfort stations to water fountains, to stalls, tables and even a dais in the “main hall” of the carbarn, the whole effect was that of a village built for one day. Even the creek had come up to snatch, with a three-and-a-half-foot depth of water, just enough for a child’s scream to convince its mother it was drowning. Only the stationmaster’s dried garden, lacking a resident these two years past could not be revived. In the office behind it, the committeemen retired at once to huddle over their speeches, thus at once creating a government and a populace—ev
erybody else could go free.
The two buddies and the two sisters could now devote themselves seriously, in a circle on the grass, to the eating which had begun, at Lottie’s insistent offers, in the car, and now advanced from mere sandwiches to a spread that required damask napkins and got them; where other women reached the heights via cold chickenlegs, the Pardees’ hamper, an affair which ran to real cutlery and continuous magic disclosure, opened on a capon still warm in its juices, and a creamy oyster pie. Thanks to Lottie’s provenance—for though she quoted no recipes, gave no sign other than the loving way she patted the cloth like bedlinen and cradled the food in its napery, surely the feast was her doing—there was enough for everyone, except perhaps Lottie herself. But on this one afternoon perhaps she didn’t mind; what she clearly asked of any hour was to be able to nibble it away in company under the perfect excuse of such an occasion; if the two bachelors had had any early squeamishness about “accepting” it was eased, in watching oysters go down Lottie’s throat as if to their duty, and that posy mouth redden, as if with rouge. She was a dainty eater always, and also—if the flow of food and the prospect was constant—could acquire a kind of conversation. Articles were often read by her, as she ate alone sometimes, at home; did they chance to know that some cows in Japan were kept in stalls, fed beer, even massaged, to make the most succulent beef in the world? She didn’t know but that she’d almost be willing to be a cow, in Japan.
“Wouldn’t mind eating you,” said the mate, lowering his eyes, but if Lottie heard him, as she dabbed after a crumb lost just where his glance was, his gruffness was so solemn that it couldn’t be rude. The mate, who in the car had once or twice studied Emily, perhaps to make certain whether or not those dark brows did meet or could, never glanced at her now.
And what of Emily, stuffing herself like the rest, who looked anywhere she liked—at the day, the crowd, the mate and Jim almost impartially, though perhaps not much at Lottie—occasionally raising a lazy, drugged arm from where she was lying full-length on the grass in a dress that matched it, and who now, her brows knitting once and then smooth again, leaped to her feet in one movement, as if clasping a trestle let down from the sky, and said in that caroling voice of hers—“I shall swim!”? Disappearing, she returned in the same heavy blue bathing dress, sleeved and bloomered, darkening to black in the water, that others already in were wearing, but she carried no boudoir-cap of the kind that were here and there ruffling the Otselica, nor the canvas shoes which laced most ankles—her feet were bare. She swam face down, with a boy’s stroke, her piled hair sailing the water. Jim and the mate, having brought no suits, watched her from the shore. Though the stream was only a few yards wide, when she rose, billowing in that blue-black drapery, and started for shore, she seemed to be walking toward them from a distance, and when she called out something they didn’t catch it; even when Emily spoke normally, it was always the silence Emily spoke from which one heard. A few feet away from them she stopped, the water draining down her legs, and tossed her head at them. If they could have eaten her, the taste would have been like venison.
And so all that day, as in the night to come, events dispensed themselves in the mists of natural action. In front of the hill, as twilight came on, the rounded carbarn, grouped with its flat-roofed outbuildings, glimmered like a natural farm. But then, when it came time for supper, and with the others the four entered the huge “hall” which only the committee’s helpers had glimpsed, the two men stood back, in rank silence. Stalls had been set up all along the great length of the pounded dirt floor, and among these they caught sight of the girls’ stove—but that wasn’t why. Instinctively, both men looked up, expecting to see a few chinks of sky, but here in this place the overarching girders were securely roofed. And unlike that other place where the two had met, there were rails here, domestic to the ground, of the same kind that in the center of town made a bicycle skid on its way down the avenue. If the trolley cars themselves hadn’t been removed from here, any resemblance might never—the mate spoke first.
“Is the hangar, our Jim, isna it?” he said. “Is the hangar, for fair.”
One could smell the oily rags; for certain there was that smell here; the crowd’s hubba-bubba dwindled to the sound of men—mechanics, pilots, ground-crews. There was missing only the latticed sky, dirty or shining like a mussel-shell, beneath which he and the mate had worked their rags and told each other of barges and blue glare at the top of mine-holes; all that was missing was the down-whanging whine that sent them for the ditch and the brave, incoming putt-putt that stood them up to squint—planes didn’t sound like artillery shells in those days. As if all the shell shock had been waiting there, Jim’s ears filled with these now.
They all saw how white he was, the mate said later.
Emily spoke quick, reaching out her hand. She was back in her sailordress with its middy-tie, her hair damp-dry. “Come along, Jim, and help me.” She took his limp hand in hers. “Come along and help.”
He went along, but as it came out to the mate in bits later, for some hours it was to Jim as if the war had come down and in upon him like a plane itself—“like a plane landing through the roof onto the dining-room table, mate”—it was the war-thrust, at last becoming real to him, through no longer being so. Which was the realer then, was it daily life, for all except the dead on plaques? Could it be? Nobody in the hubba-bubba here in the hall, even the lamed or the bereaved, was thinking of the war in the overmastering way it ought to be thought of—held like a major wound in the mind. For some hours, he must have tried. Of all the remaining hours, through the din of supper, until he found himself with the others being loaded into cars for the ride back—he remembers nothing else.
“But it would take a Christ to do it,” he told the mate later, and they both recall that they even solemnly discussed whether this was a reason for them to take harder to religion or give it up altogether. For you must understand that many of these bits being pieced together for you here and now, came out during a lifetime of friendship, and relationship too; half the time even you young fry don’t stop to think which of the two Jims’ grandchildren you really are. What if the main and most of what happened that day didn’t come out in words between those two until a cold winter’s day forty years later, when one said to the other, “Want to drive along and look at something; got something to show you, Jim,” and two old men sat talking together, nonstop except to ease themselves once or twice, against a hill? The trip back, the ride back; that’s when things really happen, even in memory. Though—even if nothing so secret had ever come out in such plain words before—all those forty years, both of them knew.
“Emily sat you down in a chair next to the fritter-stall,” the mate said—that much later. “She managed you. You were cashier. Can’t believe you don’t remember, even now? And I was the barker, why I yelled myself purple, we must have sold more of those things that evening than the girls had sold in a year. Funny how, though I’m not much any more for even the best bread and cake—always begging your and Emily’s pardon, and knowing what you’ve done with them—I can taste those crazy little snippets now.”
“Recipe’s lost,” said Jim. “She always said.”
“Sure is,” said the mate.
And after a while and some further conversation, the two old men got up, brushed the loam from their trousers, got in the mate’s Cadillac, and drove off.
But back to that day much earlier, when, after the commissary car had been reloaded, the two men and two girls left all that gear to the old hens who preferred to stay with it in the rear car, and made for the front one. As they climbed into the best seat of all, the last ones of each row, next to the back platform—where they could sit two by two and across the aisle from each other, the mate clapped Jim’s shoulder hard.
“She bowl you over?” he whispered. “Or was it the heat?”
(Have I said it was getting sultrier and sultrier?)
Jim didn’t answer, except with his shoulder, whic
h took the blow unmoving.
“He’s all right,” said the mate out loud to all and sundry. “We knew you were O.K., Jim. Once you started making change.”
And so he, was O.K., for forty years, but still, those forty years later, going back in the Cadillac, and still being of the sort he is, and not too much shakier, he asked the old mate, “—and do you remember what you came up close over my shoulder and said to me while I was making change? Now I remember. About Lottie?”
“Yes, I remember it,” answered the old mate, his voice final. And neither of them said another word about it, all the rest of the way home. Some things even memory is too late for, once they come out all of a piece. But we both remember it now. The crowd was full of faces; the body-heat in the carbarn, and the storm coloring the air sullen, made them appear mazy and on fire all at the same time. Behind in the stall the girls were busy but not forgotten, the one sister who was heard loudest in her silences and the other who was only something to see, but so much of it. The mate’s hand was hard on the shoulder, the shoulder steady. “She’s as solid a woman as anybody would want to stand by him. She’s a dream.”
The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride Page 13
