by Howard Bahr
Outside, the cold sleet came down. There did not seem to be anyplace under the gray sky where it did not fall, slanting with the wind, cold as crystal. The rails and slag and the tops of cars were dusted with white. Steam billowed from the maroon flanks of the A&V passenger train. Travelers and car inspectors and trainmen moved through the scene, obscured one moment, revealed the next, like figures in a great battle.
Charlie Granger came in, brushing the cold damp from the sleeves of his overcoat. He nodded to Smith and climbed on the stool next to him. The counterman set a cup of coffee before the chief. Granger laid out a pipe and a tobacco pouch on the white marble countertop and cradled the coffee in his hands. The presence of the chief special agent made Smith uneasy. He liked Charlie Granger well enough, but Granger was police, and in Frank Smith’s view, police never made polite conversation.
Granger took a sip of his coffee. Without looking up, he said, “I hear you been camping out in the shack. What’s that like?”
Ah, shit, thought Smith. He picked up his fork, examined it, then laid it down again. “It ain’t so bad,” he said. “It’s just temporary.”
Granger nodded and took another sip. “You going south with A.P. this morning?”
Smith made no reply, aware that Granger already knew the answer.
The chief sipped his coffee. “Old A.P.,” he said after a moment. “I hear he might be a little nervous now days.”
“You seem to hear a lot, Charlie,” said the conductor. He swiveled on his stool to face the other man. “I don’t know how much of it is anybody’s business,” he said.
Granger slid his coffee away. “Let me tell you something, Frank,” he said. “For two months you been living on company property in violation of about a hundred rules. But you know what? I don’t care. I’ll let that be your business. But a engineer piles ’em up in the trees, that’s my business. You understand what I’m saying?”
“A.P.’s all right,” said Smith, staring at the counter. “He wasn’t, I wouldn’t ride with him. When he can’t do the job, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Well, I appreciate that, Frank,” said the chief. A plate of steaming eggs and bacon and grits was laid before the chief special agent. He took up the salt shaker and examined it. “Don’t confuse your loyalties,” he said. “It’s dangerous for everybody.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” said Smith.
Granger nodded. “Yeah, you been around a long time,” he said. “That’s why I trust you.” He picked up his fork and prodded his eggs. “You ever notice how ain’t nothing like it used to be?” he said.
“All the time,” said Smith. He looked at the chief’s plate, then at his own, cold and congealed now. He pushed the plate away and counted out thirty-eight cents in nickels and pennies on the counter and rose to leave.
“Long day ahead,” said Granger. “You not gonna eat?”
“I ain’t hungry,” said Smith. “I’ll see you, Charlie.”
Granger caught his arm. “Hold on,” he said. He picked up the coins one by one, weighed them in his palm, then dropped them back in Smith’s overall pocket. “It’s on me,” said the chief. “Come by the house when you all get back tomorrow. It’ll be Christmas. Maybe we can find you a good supper.”
* * *
Mister A.P. Dunn had no idea where he was. He seemed to have traveled a long way from somewhere, through a kaleidoscope of lights and music in an alien city crowded with buildings. Along the way, men he recognized had appeared, and that was good. Old, familiar voices were welcome in a strange place, and old remembered faces. Bruce D. Herrington. T.L. Jacobs. Tom Utroska and Ralph Little and John Marquette. They stepped out of doorways or passed right through the glass of store windows and traveled a little with him, one giving place to the next, talking about the old times in such a way that it was easy to believe no time had passed at all. In fact, they each made it a point to insist that time had fooled Mister Dunn and that nothing lay between what he was now and what they had been once.
Mister Dunn wondered why they brought up such a thing. The old men who had lived out their years might have something useful to say on the subject, but Bruce Herrington was not yet twenty when his foot slipped through the stirrup of a tank car and he was dragged a quarter mile while the ties beat him to death. What did a boy know about time who never had any himself?
Now Mister Dunn was alone in the shadow of a great dingy building he did not recognize, on a brick sidewalk that bounced with sleet. He paused, thinking about Bruce Herrington. In heaven, ye shall know all things, he thought. Up there, even the least would possess the wisdom of the ages. Still, it was hard to think of young Herrington being so wise. Mister Dunn remembered how the boy used to have fun, how he never gave a thought to any moment but the one he was living in. It didn’t seem right he should be weighed down with so much wisdom now, heaven or not.
It’s all a mystery, thought Mister Dunn, and took a step on the icy walk. A moment later, he was flat on his back, staring up at the tall flank of the building. His head hurt, and he knew he had struck it in his fall, but it didn’t seem to matter much. Mister Dunn lay content on the brick sidewalk, growing warm and comfortable, until a man leaving for home found him. As the man helped him to his feet, Mister Dunn protested. “I’m all right,” he said. “It ain’t nothin’.” He stood on the sidewalk, his head bent, and watched the dark nickel-sized drops of blood splat on the bricks. He was astonished at how quickly they froze. He looked up at the brick building looming before him. What is this place? he thought. He didn’t remember until the man took him inside.
* * *
Roy Jack Lucas stood at the freight office window, smoking, with a cup of red-hot coffee in his hand. The coffee was steaming up the pane, and Lucas had to keep rubbing it clear, not that he was looking at anything in particular. He had been standing at this window for thirty years, and the scene below had little about it to engage his interest.
Lucas was alone in the office. When the chief went off to breakfast, Hido Schreiber had snuck away to the bootlegger’s to get some more whiskey, in violation of Rule G which forbid employees to partake of alcohol on duty. Lucas thought this was a good rule for everybody but himself and Hido Schreiber.
A gust of wind rattled the glass, and the detective tried hard not to think of June Watson’s face last night. When the couplers opened, at the moment he died, the man’s face grew peaceful, no fear in it anywhere, and his eyes lit up as though in recognition. Roy Jack Lucas refused to be inspired by that transition. He did not care to be deceived by hope. He did not want anything or anybody to be waiting for him on the other side.
God damned mockingbirds, thought the detective. What was that all about?
Lucas’s head was hurting, but the coffee helped. The window steamed up again, and he wiped it away with the sleeve of his overcoat. Down below, a car inspector, oil can in one hand, pulling hook in the other, moved along a cut of Railway Express cars, checking the journal boxes. Through the window, Lucas heard the box lids creak as the man pulled them open, and clank as he kicked them shut. Creak-clank. Creak-clank. A baggage wagon rumbled down the platform below. A switch engine backed through the yard on an outside track, bell ringing, with a cluster of switchmen on the footboards. In another ten years, maybe Lucas would be able to retire. He wondered where he could go so that he never had to see or hear a railroad again.
God damned mockingbirds, he thought again, and all at once stepped back from the window as if he had seen some awful thing. He turned, his eyes searching the air around, then stumbled away among the desks, hurrying, trying to remember where they had left the car. He slammed the glass-paned door behind him and nearly fell going down the long steps.
* * *
In Jumpertown, Eddie Cox pulled his cap down against the sleet. The streets were empty, the mud glazed with ice. The houses he passed were paintless, gray as the sky. No flowers bloomed on the galleries, and no children played in the yards, and the trees were bare. Th
at was the worst trial of winter, Cox thought. In winter, you saw how everything really was.
“Two more days,” he said aloud. “Two more trips, all you got left.” He repeated the words to himself, waiting for them to make him feel good, but they floated away without meaning. Two days, and he could walk out here and not have to go anywhere he didn’t want to. He tried to think of where such a place might be, but he couldn’t, because Jumpertown was all he knew. Three days, and the houses would still be poor, the yards muddy, the window cracks stopped with rags. Eddie Cox would still be himself—only somehow different. He could not fathom how he would still be himself, but not himself. Well, that was for later. For now, he had to go fire an engine for Mister A.P. Dunn, something nobody else in the world could say. For now, the cold was real enough, and the icy water that trickled down his collar.
Cox passed the funeral parlor. The lights were burning inside, and he wondered who was dead this early in the morning. A man he knew was smoking on the porch, and Eddie asked him. The man, dressed in a black suit, his hair shiny with pomade, came down the steps and told him. After that, Eddie Cox felt colder still.
* * *
Downtown, the sleet rattled on the mildewed canvas top of Sonny Leeke’s motorcar as he stopped at Ladner’s tiny bungalow, then at Necaise’s mama’s house. Miz Necaise waved at them from the porch. “You all look after my boy,” she called, as she did every time, and Necaise said, “Aw, Mama,” as he always did, and they all laughed.
The morning was so dark that it seemed no morning at all, and the three men, crammed in the ancient single-seat T-model with their grips and lunch pails and bulky clothing, speculated about the weather. Maybe it would lighten up soon, they said. Maybe it would be warmer down south.
Necaise said, “Hey, you all think I could ride the head end today?” He told them for the hundredth time how he was going to be a boilerman in the Navy. “I bet A.P. and Eddie could tell me about boilers,” he said. “I never thought to ask ’em before.”
Leeke said, “We’ll see what Frank says.”
“Well, I didn’t know if you’d want to swap,” said Necaise.
“Shee-it,” said Leeke, and ran the car up on the curb, as he did from time to time for no apparent reason.
* * *
The three comrades’ hope for warmer climes was in vain, of course. In New Orleans, the sleet and rain had dissolved the night fog. It was not sleeting now, but a sullen, dreary mist hung in the air, waiting to turn to rain again, and sleet after that.
Artemus Kane walked up Royal Street in a bad humor, hands deep in his pockets, overcoat collar turned up, shoulders hunched. For the space of a block, his mind was noisy with irritating thoughts. He envisioned the half-dozen umbrellas Anna Rose kept by her door, and how he could have taken one but for his own hard and fast principle that umbrellas were unmanly. Artemus worried about his uniform. He hoped his cap would not lose its shape. He had a rain cover for it, but never wore the thing, for it looked absurd, like a woman’s bathing cap—another matter of principle. He tried to keep his shined shoes out of the puddles. He thought about his motorcycle waiting outside the trainmen’s washroom in Meridian and worried if it would start when he got back. He wondered if the pipes in his house had frozen, if the Silver Star would be on time, if Anna Rose was mad at him, if his hair was turning gray, if he had cancer…
“Jesus H. Christ,” he said aloud to himself, and stopped under a gallery heavy-laden with bougainvillea. The red flowers still bloomed despite the frost, and in an apartment above, someone was playing a piano. The air was rich with the smell of new-baked bread. A trio of nuns hurried by, their long rosary beads swaying at their waists.
“Good day, sisters,” said Artemus, and lifted his cap, hoping they had not overheard his blasphemy. The women smiled in return as if it really were a good day. They were all three young and pretty, and Artemus thought What a waste of pretty girls, as they passed on. Then he crossed himself in contrition and remembered how people ought to be respected for their choices. What is it like, being married to God? No doubt they had a better chance than if they were married to Artemus Kane.
The iron storefronts shone with rain; the cobbled street was streaked with lights like the aurora borealis. Shopkeepers and waiters lounged in doorways or under their unrolled awnings and watched the morning come. A pair of aproned dishwashers, taking the air, argued in the patois of the West Indies. Citizens hurried on their way, drawn into themselves like sullen birds, the smoke of their cigarettes trailing behind.
Despite the winter dreariness, Artemus felt the energy of the city around him, quickening his heart. I am part of all this, he thought. I belong here. It was a feeling that seldom came when he was alone, away from Anna Rose and his comrades. Then he seemed a part of nothing, isolate, shut off from the world like an insect in a glass jar. When a man was alone too much, he had only himself to look into, and what he found there was all manner of darkness. Thus Gideon kept his salon, where people sought the company of others to redeem them. Thus, perhaps, Anna Rose embraced Artemus Kane so desperately in the long nights, who had been too much alone herself.
Being solitary was not the same as being lonesome. Solitude was a condition of circumstance that railroad men rarely entered for long, and when they did, it was often a blessing. Sometimes it was good to lie in your bed at night in some cheap hotel and let the silence and dark close around you, let the voices grow still, let movement cease. Artemus believed that was why so many of the men loved fishing, when they could go off by themselves in a pirogue on the brown waters.
Lonesomeness, on the other hand, did not depend on circumstance. It was bolted in the heart and seized on a man’s weakness, a vise that squeezed all possibility out of time, that crushed hope and rendered meaningless anything tomorrow could offer. A man had to be careful around it. On the job, he had to shuck it off and make himself pay attention. Men had died because their eyes were turned inward toward some yearning memory.
He caught a streetcar on Canal. The car was crowded with people going to work. The wheels ground and rang on the thin rails, and the catenary wire crackled and filled the varnished interior with the smell of electricity. Artemus had a window seat beside a large woman bundled and scarved like one of the refugees they had met along the road to Soissons. The woman grunted from time to time, and jabbed Artemus with her elbow, but he ignored her and watched the lights.
Artemus wished that Anna Rose might be sitting by him now instead of the refugee woman. He would let Anna Rose have the window seat; she would put her gloved hand against the glass and talk about the streaming lights and the people she saw across the dark morning.
Hell and damnation, thought Artemus, cursing the lost chance.
The large woman glared at him. “Tut-tut, m’sieur,” she said. “It is Christmas Eve, the nativity of Our Lord.”
Again, Artemus was surprised that he had spoken aloud. “Je vous demande pardon,” said Artemus. “Pardonnez moi…I don’t know the word for sin.”
“Peche,” said the woman, and smiled a little. “You should perhaps light a candle,” she said, and turned back in her seat.
* * *
Cold sleet fell on the woods of South Mississippi that lay between Artemus and his home in Meridian. These were the old Piney Woods that gave the district its name, that were being harvested by thousand-acre plats for flooring and framing and paper. The cut-over land was a tangle of fallen saplings and stumps and dead vines; among these, the sleet pattered and froze, driving the rabbits and squirrels and deer that still clung to the land, and the men who had ravaged it, into deep cover.
The sleet sometimes gathered in the top of a pine and bowed it over until it broke in two with a crack like an artillery round in the winter silence. Such a sound, the death of a tall yellow pine, woke Donny Luttrell from his sleep in the telegraph station at Talowah, Mississippi. He had been the operator here for six months now, so passing trains no longer stirred him, nor the voice of birds, nor the scuttli
ng of a rat in the pantry. But he would start awake if his call sign came over the wire, or if some unusual noise intruded itself. Now he groaned and sat on the edge of his cot, shivering in his long woolen underwear. He pulled his blanket over his head like a penitent monk and dreaded the cold passage he must make to build up the fire in the stove.
The station, which operated from six in the morning to midnight, was one hundred and ten miles from Basin Street. It was not a building, but an antique link-and-pin boxcar covered with tar paper and set up on cedar bolts. Between the boxcar and the rails of the main line lay an apron of cinders that in summer was strewn with weeds. A single drooping wire linked the station to the broad world through the company telegraph poles marching past. Inside was a scattering of chairs, a file cabinet, and a desk for the telegraph key. In one corner was the Army cot where Donny was shivering, in another, the woodstove he had to get to before he could warm up or make his breakfast. The station had no waiting room nor baggage room, for no passenger trains ever stopped here. It had no running water, but it did have a privy on the lee side—another destination that Donny dreaded every cold morning, and worse in the pitch-black nights.
For a while after the Civil War, a sawmill village thrived here. Exploring in the scrub pines along the railroad, Donny had discovered brick pilings, a mound of rotted sawdust, some rusted machinery, a bank safe discarded in a gully. Early in the winter, he found a burying ground with a few slanted markers beside an old sunken road. Now, the sole purpose of this lonely outpost was to provide an interchange with the narrow-gauge Richfield Lumber Company line that wandered for miles through the woods. At Talowah, the logs brought out behind wheezing Shay locomotives were transferred to standard-gauge cars of the Southern Railway. The station also controlled a passing track a mile to the south. For this reason, the station was fitted with a creosoted pole and a semaphore signal arm that would drop and show red if a main-line train had orders for the passing track. The semaphore had red and green glass lenses illuminated at night by an oil-burning lamp that was forever blowing out, which the operator had to rectify by climbing the ladder in all weathers with a box of kitchen matches.
