by Neil Enock
“Get your ugly gob out of my keester, Flyboy.” That stings. I used to be Clark Gable handsome, until that flash fire in my Wellington cockpit.
We are the has-been debris of the Hitler War. I suppose we should be grateful for this clerk job on the Railway Post Office. But this is the longest, darkest, most hellishly cold night of the year, and the frigging Christmas rush is off the charts. To make matters even worse, a wicked flu just one notch down from the Spanish influenza has this trip reduced to a skeleton crew of two.
“All aboard,” shouts the conductor in a practiced Town Cryer voice. “All aboard the Ocean Limited, bound for Moncton, Sackville, Amherst, Springhill, Truro and Halifax.” The conductor impatiently stamps his rubber galoshes on the platform and dolefully studies fat, mushy snowflakes parachuting to earth. It’s the wee hours at a hick New Brunswick station with zero traffic, so plainly the passenger train is waiting on us. I get jazzed and pass up a slew of parcels too small for freight. Mostly filled with shortbread cookies and fruitcakes for sailors at the Halifax naval base, I guess. My stomach rumbles.
In short order, we are squared away, and the Ocean Limited heavily lurches into motion. The 4-8-4 Confederation Locomotive is a real beast, power to spare. Salty and I curse our way into the Railway Post Office, or RPO for short. Normally she is a marvel of organizational efficiency and a vital keystone of Canadian civilization. Here, amid rows of canvas mail bags hung on metal racks and towering maple wood cabinets with hundreds of labeled letter slots, we sort and collate mail even as the Ocean Limited steams its way from Montreal to the Atlantic. But tonight, woefully shorthanded, the Halifax mail keeps piling up as we barely stay ahead of each impending whistle stop.
Our solution? Ignore the growing mountain and then work like Trojans once we’re deep into Nova Scotia.
The RPO is a harum-scarum jumble that smells of ink pads, rubber bands, wet canvas, salami and mustard from our midnight snack — who has time to eat! — and twine that confines parcels wrapped in snowflake splotched butcher paper. I check the RPO mailbox, and sure enough there are three Christmas cards, all Halifax bound. I postmark each with an officious bang of my stamp.
December 21, 1944. Maybe there will be peace on Earth next year, though the current Jerry offensive in Belgium doesn’t sound good.
The Ocean Limited rapidly accelerates into an endless wilderness of snowy spruce, fir and birch. For some reason, there is no caboose tonight. Just plain wrong, a grand old lady like the Ocean should not be shy her Tail Gun Charlie. Our RPO constitutes the rear, and I peer out hoar-frosted hind door windows into wintery blackness.
“God Almighty, it’s so cold my fingers are pink,” complains Salty. Did I mention that our tiny oil heater went kaput just as we cleared the St. Lawrence? This is the worst shift in my postal career. I think I would rather be skylarking over Germany.
“Carry on, Petty Officer,” I quip as I unlock mail bags and spill contents into a wooden bin centrally located between sorting cabinets. We divvy the bundles and start sorting letters and cards with Moncton mail getting the priority.
“Aye, aye, Fight Lieutenant,” he wisecracks. “Bombs away.” With that, all is silent except the thunk-thunk of letters flying into rectangular cubbyholes and the clack-clack of steel wheels on cold Canadian National track.
Twenty minutes later, deep in our work, we hear three sharp whistles. Toot-toot-toot.
“The Arthur Road mail crane,” cries an appalled Salty. Appalled, because bloody months can go by and never does a waiting mail sack appear on the crane stationed by this crossing, miles out in the sticks. However, three toots from the engineer means exactly that.
The Ocean Limited is a longish train. I have a few seconds but no more. Breathless, I leap like a white-tailed buck for the front door, bang through, and poise by the V-shaped catcher arm like a sprinter at the blocks. There are few mail cranes on the entire route, so I am terribly out of practice at this. However, my pilot reflexes come to play, and with lucky timing I swing out the hooked arm just right. It cleanly snags the sack off the crane, and, the train not slacking a beat, I triumphantly reenter the RPO with my prize.
Except, it isn’t a sack. Well, it is, but not an official gray canvas Post Office sack closed by a metal padlock. It’s a sack made out of moose hide, if I were to guess, and snugged at the top with yellow rawhide.
“What the hell?” exclaims Salty, swiveling in his chair for a look. “That Rural Route driver on the Arthur Road must be the Mad Trapper of Rat River. He’s sending us mail in a woodsy sea bag.”
I grunt agreement. The rawhide knot comes loose in a flick and I dump the contents. Content, I should amend. A single stone bottle bangs into the bin. No breakage, thank God, for that’s a mile-long form to fill out.
Salty scuttles over on his chair. I should add that he never walks lest he has to. In ‘42 he was three decks below the waterline on HMCS Kingsport when a torpedo took her. The shock shattered both his ankles. He compounded the injury by clambering up several ladders in a successful bid to escape Davy Jones’ Locker. Sheer terror lends wings to even broken feet. However, he never was the same in the hiking department. I expect it doesn’t help that he’s pudgy and rotund as Santa Claus, a squat 200 pounds at least.
More rawhide attaches a leathery envelope to the amphora-shaped, tawny bottle. On it is nothing but a single name written in bold flowing script.
Poseidon.
“No street address, no town, no postage. Undeliverable. It’s a relic for the dead letter bin.” Talk about strange.
“Open it up. Let’s read it, Flyboy.” His breath stands in the air; that’s how cold it is in here. I sullenly kick the broken heater.
“Yeah, and lose my job.”
“It’s a prank, no mailman hung that satchel. I’ll assume responsibility, like a good Petty Officer would.”
I’m shocked, yet I hand it over to him, making myself complicit to the crime.
“Why, it is a card, neatly penned I must say. No backwoods hick wrote this.” With ink stained fingers Salty adjusts owlish spectacles and reads.
Dearest Uncle, Lord of the Ocean Dominion,
Another turning of the year is upon us, and Olympians in exile from the cacophony of war in our homeland must make do in this New World. Hermes stubbornly remains about the Aegean, so I use mortal agency to deliver this solstice gift, this potent cordial, to soothe your troubled brow. Thunder and fire within your sacred depths: how dare the humans! This is a refreshing nectar, replete with subtle enchantments to quicken your godly blood. The ingredients were supplied by Circe; you know I am no vintner. This drink is much too fiery for the Nereids, your errant handmaidens, so do be careful in stowing the crock should you not partake in one sitting.
As for myself, I enjoy the hunt through these foreign snowy tracks, though the game be passingly strange. The ursine bruins are ebony and large, the wolves altogether savage, but these moose are fauna of an entirely different order. And this reprehensible rodent named a porcupine…
Your loving niece, Artemis, Huntress
“Huh,” grunts Salty, slipping the card back into the (vellum?) envelope. “Artemis sure sounds like a Frenchy name. Some skirt is sending her man a crock of Maritime dirt road moonshine.” He eyes the bottle thirstily.
“Or…” I’m nothing if not suspicious. “Or … Artemis and Poseidon are German code names, and you just read off a ream of Nazi gobbledygook code.”
Salty belly-laughs. “A Nazi message from Arthur Road, ten miles past the end of nowhere? Get serious.”
“Where better then, if you don’t want the RCMP Special Branch on your arse? We’d better set it aside for the authorities.”
That goes over like a lead balloon. “You kidding? It’ll go straight to Undeliverable. Then on Christmas Eve some P8 Medically Unfit paperweight supervisor will snitch it and get merrily blotto.” He stuffs cold fingers under his armp
its. “It’s 4:00am, and we need a medicinal if we’re going to survive this shift.”
“No way, Skipper. I aim to keep this position.” As a former officer with two years at McGill, I could go far in the peacetime Post Office. Small town postmaster easy. I confiscate the stone bottle and card and put them beside the form that records our shift activities. “Look, I know this bloody car is an icebox, I wish I had my old bomber jacket. After Moncton, the dining car will send up hot tea and eats. That’ll see us through.”
He accedes with ill grace, for there are immediate worries. Registered mail. CODs. Torn and damaged parcels that need to be tagged. Small carry-bins chock full of Moncton bound parcels have to be positioned by the door beside the bulging letter sacks. Always a race against time as the Ocean Limited, with increasing frequency, roars out of woods to thread snow blanketed fields owned by Acadian farmers. This suggests we are out of the wilderness, rushing toward Moncton. A small city with lots of important offshoot routes — Prince Edward Island and Saint John in particular — Moncton is a crazy-as-all-get-out stop.
We manage Moncton, but only just. Salty and I are military men, though discharged from different services. The military and Post Office are not much different in operation. Peons are told when to pee, when to stop peeing, and what pot to pee in. Regimentation equals disciple equals getting the job done, on time. Adversity is not an excuse. In fact, there are no excuses.
As the Ocean Limited starts her last New Brunswick leg, we’re both knackered. I’m a young buck, I can trudge through thick and thin, but Salty is nigh on sixty and not the dynamo he was on the good ol’ Kingsport. And, at the end of the shift from Hell, all he has to look forward to is a lonely bed-sitting room above a Gottingen Street tattoo parlor. If he has a woman, or kids, I’ve not heard a word of them. He can hear the navy ships leaving dock, maybe even glimpse them through the dingy clapboard houses of Halifax, but perhaps that is a curse, no solace at all, to a Jack who will never go to sea again.
We cross the ice-clad Tantramar Marshes, next stop Amherst, Nova Scotia. Preoccupied, I fail to note how often Salty’s squinty eyes are drawn to Poseidon’s dram. Consequently, an hour later, after Springhill, I do a foolish thing.
“Salty old man, the dining car Joes are likely run ragged too. They’re late with vitals. I’m going up ahead to the dining car to fetch our goodies.” Honestly? My ears are so cold they feel like icicles. The dining car is the warmest coach on the train.
“Good idea, Looney-tenant. A cup of scalding tea would straighten me right out. I’ll hold the fort.”
I head forward, negotiating the rollicking and bouncing steps between cars with practiced ease. Thankfully, the passenger cars are tolerably warm, though fitfully sleeping passengers hug into voluminous winter coats and wish for quilts. It is a typical wartime crowd, with a good number being servicemen on the way to various camps or mighty Halifax, HQ for the fleet and staging port for huge transatlantic convoys. Too, lots of young women cradling cranky toddlers are trusting the Ocean Limited to get them to families for Christmas. It guts me to think there are widows among them, taking kids to see grandparents who lost sons in this war.
I take my sweet time. The cars rock hypnotically, a rhythm broken periodically as the Ocean butts through snowdrifts. If this were summer there would be dawn in the east, but winter night still reigns in this the Wolf Hour.
I pass the conductor lightly snoring in a booth reserved for his ilk. That’s why our grub is way late. Some people have it soft.
“Heyya, Lieutenant,” greets the dining car cook, a hulking, bald black fellow from Halifax’s North End. “How goes the battle?”
“Tiggerty-boo and in the green,” I lie smoothly. My thawing earlobes tingle, not unpleasantly.
“We were gonna come back with your eats ‘n drinks, but there be an early few for breakfast.” True enough, several servicemen sit at tables, looking the worse for wear. Behind Cook, sizzling eggs and bacon are music to my ears. Mailmen generally get boiled eggs, toast and a few overcooked sausages for morning repast. Cook genially hands over our mess tin and thermos. “Careful. That tea is hot enough to melt the Iron Cross off Der Fuhrer’s chest.”
“Thanks ever so much,” I say, meaning it. These guys work wonders in their tiny galley. “The conductor is grabbing Z’s, that’s why he’s late.”
“Ha!” guffaws the cook. “More than one bottle o’ Christmas rum made the rounds last night.”
Rum. A sudden panic hits me. Salty is alone in the RPO with that weird special delivery to Poseidon, whoever the hell he is. Damnation, I bet my last dollar he’s into it like catnip. Why didn’t I see this coming? I mumble a hasty goodbye to Cook and rush aft with far more alacrity than I went forward.
I burst into the frigid RPO. Salty’s chair is empty. The peculiar stone bottle rocks gently on our cluttered clerical desk. Uncorked, so it is. Half full, it loudly sloshes.
“Johnny,” rasps Salty, who I discover prone on several empty mail sacks. He never uses my Christian name, testament to his seriousness. “Johnny, I’m poisoned.”
“You frigging idiot! That rotgut could be wood alcohol out of a rusty still. Lucky if you don’t go blind.” Even though Salty is heavily bearded, I can tell he is green about the gills. He holds his bloated tummy most tenderly.
“Sorry, John. I’m a raging boozehound, what sailor isn’t? By God, it tasted like cod liver oil spit outta a flame thrower.”
Lovely. What to do? “Look. Salty. Let me run through the cars, see if there is a doctor or nurse on board.”
“No. No, I ain’t that bad.” Yet, he scrunches his face like he just swallowed a spoonful of rancid butter. “Just give me twenty minutes. You get a start on Truro.”
Truro. Middling farm town with more cows than people, but a ton of mail goes east toward Cape Breton and overseas to Newfoundland. Thousands of Canadians garrison Newfoundland, service folk in wait of Season’s Greetings. That tips my judgment. As a former sober-sided officer, I’m all about responsibility.
“I’ll help with Halifax. Double promise. Super promise. On my mother’s grave.”
“Okay, partner. Take thirty, grab a nap. Then a bite. You’ll be right as rain.” I throw a few surplus sacks over him for meager warmth.
I dive into work meant for four, popping boiled eggs in my mouth and slurping strong, flavorful tea as opportunity affords. Postal work is mentally taxing, so with all my focus on this bag and that bin I nearly forget my wingman. But all seems well, for fleeting glances tell me he’s in deep hibernation, his mouth open wide enough to catch flies. Good, for there are few ills a solid nap won’t fix.
The Ocean Limited is really rocking now, and when she sprints across a trestle the staccato clatter is that of a rapid-fire machine gun. It’s like she can smell the Atlantic, and is hell bent for home. For just one night, I wish she would slow up.
I’m still at it as the train decelerates for Truro. I up the pace from feverish to manic. How many darned soldiers do we have in Newfoundland? A division? A lord liftin’ corps? The local mail cart pulls alongside, and I fling overstuffed bags to the spindly thin local mailman who catches them with increasingly annoyed grunts. Understandably, he tosses back three hefty sacks that hit me like Grand Slam bombs. Guess I deserve that.
Each sack is twenty minutes work, on top of the Halifax-bound mail that has been collecting all night long. My heart sinks to my belly button. This is an impossible situation, but the prissy bureaucrats will deliver a dressing-down and write me up, a tart reprimand for my personnel file. It’s enough to rot socks.
I cast a hopeful glance at Salty, and very suddenly rotten socks are the last thing in my mind. In fact, I stop breathing.
Salty’s stomach has ballooned twice its normal size and quivers like jelly. I … I think his beard has melted… all his visible hair has sloughed off. His eyes have rounded to the size of teacup saucers, and have grown farther
apart. In absolute horror, I note that both thumbs have retracted into spongy flesh, and all eight fingers are lengthening before my eyes. Translucent, filmy webbing grows between the digits.
The flaccid mass rears up, as if in a panic. Stifling a cry, I stagger to the hind end of the car and plant my back to the door. I consider bailing, but the Ocean Limited is accelerating like crazy. One does not jump from a train like robbers in a Hollywood cowboy serial. Maybe John Wayne can do it, I can’t.
My eyes flick to the stone bottle. The drink. The drink did this. It’s the only coherent thought my gibbering mind can manage.
The creature heaves again, and this time an entire cabinet falls across the RPO, blocking my view of it. However, I can still hear the creature flailing and heaving. Creature? It’s Salty, but he’s switching into a slimy monster and I have no notion what to do. Shell shock is but a joke compared to this.
However, once in a former life, I was a Flight Lieutenant. Once, I landed a burning bomber on treacherous mudflats in Lincolnshire, saving my crew and earning a Distinguished Flying Cross. I remember that and fight absolute panic. My flight instructor once said, “Panic, and you’re dead.” So, I knuckle down raw fear, get control of my breathing, and wait.
By and by the thrashing stops. Then, several fleshy cables curl about the fallen hardwood cabinet and, with Herculean strength, put it back in upright position. Before me is a two-hundred-pound octopus.
I think to bail out, then. I’m only human. But I catch a glimmer in the alien eyes of the octopus. They are knowing, aware, intelligent. They study me, then dart about the RPO, taking in the junk heap that is normally an ordered workplace. It strikes me that whatever this fish is, Salty is still inside. Better put, his mind is.
I calm down somewhat. As my heart slows, I can hear a phlegmy rattle. Salty is breathing, but not easily. He still has human lungs, but for how long? Will he suffocate before — what?
Occasionally, I can connect the dots, see through a brick wall better than most. “Salty, if you can still hear me, listen pal. Rockingham. Ten minutes outside Halifax, we stop there, hard by the Bedford Basin. Saltwater, three tracks away. If … if you need that, if you can hold on, I can drag you over to the shoreline.” He can’t answer, he has no mouth, but I think he tries to nod his wobbly, bulbous head.
