Pelican Road

by Howard Bahr

  “He got it!” cried Eddie.

  Mister Dunn never brought his train to a stop, but ran down the long passing track while the yellow reefers roared and rattled past them on the main. The fruit train’s caboose was a blur; no shouted greetings nor waves this time, although somebody lifted his hand from the cupola window. By the time the 4512 neared the south end, the switch was clear. They could stop now, if they wanted to, but Mister Dunn thought, Let’s see what happens. Sure enough, Necaise dropped off the pilot and ran ahead once more to line them out. He turned the switch, again at the last possible moment, then caught the gangway steps and climbed aboard, grinning, his face flushed. “Man, oh man,” he said.

  “Wasn’t even close,” said Eddie Cox.

  The train curved out onto the main, and as it straightened out, Sonny Leeke closed the north switch and locked it behind them and ran for the caboose yelling, “Don’t leave me, you sons of bitches!” so loud they could hear him on the head end. Mister Dunn, looking back, saw Frank Smith’s highball from the cupola and knew that Leeke was safely aboard. Mister Dunn answered with the whistle and drew back on the throttle, and in a moment they were rolling fast again down the main line.

  Necaise was pulling off his gloves, trying hard to act like nothing had happened. Cox was working the stoker. Mister Dunn got the train settled down, then sat back in his seat and took off his goggles. If they had been thirty seconds later, if Leeke or Necaise had stumbled on the icy ground, if the locks or switch points had been frozen… But these things were not what you thought of, Mister Dunn told himself. He turned to his companions. “Well, boys,” he said, “that was some first-class railroading.”

  * * *

  In the caboose, Frank Smith sat at his desk, making note of the meet at Belle Roman in his trip book, in the same dry, cryptic language he had used to record the derailment at Pachuta:

  BRmn 945AM met No. 65 no signals.

  That was all. That was sufficient. This time, however, since this was his own personal record in his own personal notebook, he added,

  A close thing, damned well done.

  Smith understood that when Mister Dunn argued for the meet, he was not asking for a chance to prove himself; he was asking for a chance to prove them all. Neither time nor loss could erase what they had done at Belle Roman, though nobody would ever know it but themselves. It was like so many things the men did out of courage and decency, in the process of lives that must vanish one day and leave no trace behind.

  The train rolled smoothly now, for a freight train. They were between places, suspended in distance and time, and the rails and the snow-dusted roadbed spooled out mile after mile behind them. Sonny and Dutch were in the cupola, each man wrapped in silence, watching ahead. The smoke of their cigarettes drifted down and mingled with the gray odor of the coal stove. Again, Smith felt strangely without purpose. He lit a cigar off the top of the lamp chimney and tapped his pencil on the scarred slope of the desk. The pigeon feather lay there, shivering a little in the moving air as if it remembered flight.

  * * *

  Frank Smith is nine years old on the cold, yellow January day when his mother whips him soundly with a willow branch for breaking the only ruby-glass vase she had ever owned, or was likely to. Banished aloft, Frank broods a while among the brothers’ close-packed beds, then slips out the window and down the drainpipe. He has a blanket, a wedge of cheese, a tin of sardines—rations the older boys keep on hand for their nocturnal excursions—a box of Lucifer matches, and a Barlow knife. He believes this to be all a man needs to get over to Pelican Road, then out to the Territories where vases have no relevance. His assumptions are right enough, for many a person has made the trip with less.

  He walks a hundred yards or so through the pine barrens to a bend in Black Creek, to a familiar sandbar littered of driftwood, where, wearied of travel, he decides to make his first camp. Of the driftwood, and of rich lighter knots, he makes a fire. He gathers a pallet of pine straw and sits down cross-legged, the blanket wrapped around him. They would all be sorry, he thinks, when they read about his exploits in the Hattiesburg paper, how he is made a chief of the Cheyenne and leads them to his death against the cavalry.

  Before long, he has eaten all his cheese and all the sardines. The fire is warm, and he is comfortable, except that the wind keeps soughing through the pine tops, a mournful sound, and a flock of crows has followed him. These have set up a camp of their own in a dead oak tree, from which they offer doleful warnings. Frank understands the language of crows, and he wishes they would go away and find someone else to torment. Finally, he falls asleep, wrapped in his blanket, with the muttering of the dark birds interfering in his dreams.

  When he wakes, the fire is only a pile of coals, and the early night has settled among the trees. A remnant of day remains trapped in the waters of the creek; beyond that, the Piney Woods are thick with darkness. His mother is there, still a girl, slight and black-haired, draped in a shawl, sitting on her own pallet of pine straw with her dress arranged around her.

  Some wild injun, she says. I could of run a drove of cows through here, you wouldn’t even notice.

  The boy sits up and draws the blanket over his head. It smells of wood smoke, and through the opening, he can see the new moon over the trees.

  I think you dropped this on the way, says his mother, and puts out her hand. The boy cannot see what she holds, but he puts out his own hand and closes his fingers on hers. There he finds a bird feather, not a crow’s, but a blue jay’s. Up close, it seems to be lit from inside, like the blue lanterns the car-knockers use sometimes on the lumber company railroad.

  They sit a long time and watch the moon rise. His mother tells him that when a full moon walks across the woods, the trees turn up the underside of their leaves in greeting. Later, on the way home, she tells him that feathers are signs, dropped in a person’s path for a reason. It was not necessary to know the reason; all that was required was to pay attention.

  * * *

  Over Smith’s desk, in a gilded frame, hung a picture of his mother when she was a girl, yet unmarried, no record yet on her smooth, smiling face of all she would come to know and do, of the children she would bear, of the wisdom she would earn in the hardship and grace of her long life. In her summer frock and straw hat, she poses in the yard of her father’s house in Hattiesburg, her hand draped languidly over the chair arm. The trees are heavy with leaves; the frame house, windows open, drowses through the hot, long-forgotten afternoon. In the background, across the dusty road, lie the rails of the Southern Railway.

  So many summers and winters gone, and his mother was dust, as they would all be dust one day. Smith settled back in his chair in the X-630. He held his feather to the light and listened, and in a moment it came to him what the feather had to tell.

  The pigeon had been waddling along, minding its own business in a world of gray and white. It pecked at the snow, remembering some spilled corn that was around here yesterday. Up above, a little rustle, the wind passing over outstretched wings, a dim shadow. The pigeon did not know what death was until it came for him, and even then it was nothing, no trouble really, not even pain.

  HOW THINGS VANISH INTO SILENCE

  Donny Luttrell finished breakfast by eight o’clock, and at eight fifteen he took an order for train 171, southbound:

  NO. 171 WAIT AT TALOWAH FOR NO. 22 UNTIL 9:15 AM.

  Number 171 would ordinarily wait for Number 22, a passenger train, at Lumberton, but the southbound freight was running late and would be stuck in the hole at Talowah instead. Donny filled out the clearance card and, with the lever at his desk, lowered the order board just as 171 whistled for signals. He jumped at the sound, for he had not expected the train so soon; in fact, he dropped the semaphore arm in the engineer’s face, and brakes began to squeal as Donny shot back his chair and reached for the order hoops. This was too close, and Donny cursed the dispatcher as he moved, and cursed the engineer who should have known he would have an order at Talowa
h. Donny stumbled out the door and down the steps to the cinders. The engine was on him, but he kept running. The head brakeman stood in the gangway with his arm out, and Donny pressed close to the big turning wheels and held up the hoop just in time for the man to catch it. The brakeman shouted at him. The clamor of the engine’s passage swept his words away, but Donny could tell from the man’s face that he was greatly annoyed at such a near thing. They would blame him, of course, until they looked at the time on the clearance card.

  As the long train rambled by, Donny had leisure to fix the second hoop for the conductor. Finally, the caboose came swaying past with the conductor standing on the bottom step, smoking a cigarette. Donny held up the hoop and shouted “It ain’t me, Cap’n!” and the conductor caught the order and laughed and waved, and Donny knew it was all right then.

  The train left behind a haze of coal smoke and a vast silence broken only by the keening of a pair of hawks. Donny looked up and saw them wheeling at a great height. In the summertime, a pair of kites had nested in a tall pine tree behind the depot. Donny liked to watch them hunt for bugs in the air, two graceful black arrows against the blue sky. The kites were gone now, though, following the weather southward, and the hawks had taken over.

  Donny wondered about the town that once lay here, and the people who had dwelt in it, and if any of them ever suspected, in their own deep winters, that all they had built would vanish into silence. Of course they did, he thought. They had no illusions, for the evidence lay not only in their own lives, but in the old wisdom of man that told them all their striving would come to this: a few bricks, an old safe, a burying ground hidden in the vines, and no one to look upon it but the high circling birds. The virtue, however, lay not in their knowing, but in their refusal to yield to what they knew. Men strove and strove, and it all came to naught, but no matter, for only in the striving could they prove themselves worthy of anything. This was a truth that had come to Donny Luttrell in his solitude. It was the single truth that allowed him to push himself into the passing trains, and the one that made the solitude bearable way out here among the pines. Not the loneliness, but the solitude. One could do worse, he thought, than the company of ghosts.

  It was Christmas Eve, and somewhere the world he knew was lighted and merry. All that seemed far away now, but again, no matter. Next Christmas, or the next, he would be in the world again. For now, he would learn from the silence. He would suffer it so that he would never forget it, and carry into all his life the memory of solitude, something to lay at the feet of the little Christ Child as proof that he had striven, too.

  Later, he thought, he might visit the lost cemetery and put some green boughs on the graves for Christmas. For now, he turned back into the boxcar depot. A family of wood rats lived under the floor, and by this time they would have stirred and come up through the crack by the stove. They would be sniffing around in there, wondering where their breakfast was.

  * * *

  During the night, while Artemus slept and Anna Rose dreamed, the fifteen heavyweight olive-green coaches of the Silver Star were moved to a service track and washed of road dust and grime. The aisles were vacuumed, linens changed, windows and brass polished, lightbulbs replaced, roller bearings oiled, generators and batteries tested, wheels inspected. The diner took on ice, clean linen, tea bags, coffee, French bread hot from the bakery, fresh trout and shrimp and crabs. Toilet paper came aboard, and hand towels and washrags, stationery, and a bundle of this morning’s Times-Picayune. Clean sheets and pillowcases. Clean neck cloths and towels for the barbershop. Typewriter ribbons, fresh-cut hothouse flowers, shoe polish, ashtrays. The bar in the club car was restocked and made ready—tomato juice and vodka and crisp stalks of celery for early-morning drinkers; whiskey, beer, gin, liquors from the Caribbean. Though the Silver Star traveled through dry states, the club car was never dry. The law aboard the Silver Star was the law of the State of Louisiana, and a white person could get a drink any hour of the day or night according to his choosing.

  When the cars were ready, a switch engine drew them out of the service yard and, with a switchman riding the rear end, backed them down against the bumper post of their appointed departure track. There the cars were connected to steam pipes and electric cables. There they rested through the long hours of darkness until the time when ceiling lights were lit and vestibules opened. The cooks arrived before dawn to light the stoves and start breakfast, the stewards to set the dining car tables, the porters to ensure that all the seats were turned the right way, that every headrest was clean, every ashtray in every armrest empty, and every roll of toilet paper brand-new, the ends folded in a little triangle and affixed with the stamp of the Southern Railway. Clerks armed with revolvers set to work in the RPO car and supervised the loading of mail sacks, a goodly number this Christmas Eve. The road engine, swirled with steam in the cold air, shiny and clean and polished, backed down from the roundhouse and coupled to the head end, while iron-wheeled carts piled high with trunks and suitcases began to grate across the bricks to the baggage car where Miles Duvall waited.

  * * *

  At Basin Street station, the trainmen’s shack was down among the REA and baggage rooms along one flank of the smoky train shed. Artemus Kane stood at his locker door, studying a photograph taped there: a book-jacket portrait of Anna Rose Dangerfield from her novel The Virtue of Indifference. Artemus had gone down to the Times-Picayune offices and bought the file copy, since Anna Rose would not give him one. In the picture, she wore a dark turtleneck and silver earrings shaped like dolphins. The photographer had turned her body slightly to the left, then tilted her fine, narrow face back to the camera so that she looked out from the corners of her eyes. Her hair was short, cut above the ears, combed so that strands of it fell across her forehead in a reckless way. Her cheekbone was defined by the same shadow that softened her broken nose; her eyebrows were arched, her lips parted in a smile that women must have envied.

  This morning, Artemus took little comfort in Anna Rose’s smile, but only a yearning for something far away and lost. He leaned against the bank of lockers, stricken with sadness. It had to be the cold of deep December, he decided. The cold and the sleet and the gray sky and the early darkness. It was about the lost woman in her casket and Miles Duvall. It was about Arabella, a woman whom Artemus no longer knew or even cared to know. All at once, Artemus wanted it to be spring. He wanted to take Anna Rose down to the Pearl River, to a sand bar he knew where they could make a picnic and she could wade in the water. He had wanted to do that for a long time, but never had, and now Artemus tried to imagine what it would look like. He closed his eyes. There was Anna Rose in a straw hat, there was the picnic basket, a sycamore tree, white butterflies—except he could not find himself anywhere in the scene, nor could he make the elements fit together in any kind of tomorrow, as if time had suddenly lowered a curtain beyond which he could not see.

  Yesterday, however, was a different matter. The past was always right there to hand, mostly when you didn’t want it, Artemus thought. In fact, he could see little use for it, for he rarely ever learned from it, and all it did was torment him, and there was not a god damned thing he could do to change it. Nevertheless, it was all his own.

  Artemus knew his sadness had no real focus, no reason, unless it was simple guilt. The past was full of reasons for that, as far back as memory could reach. Artemus looked one last time at the photograph. Grab a hand hold, he told himself. It is only the cold and the dark, and they can’t last forever. In testimony, he drove his fist into his locker door, adding another dent to the half-dozen already present. Then he gathered his overcoat and bag, slammed his locker door, and went off to find the others.

  * * *

  At eight thirty, the train crew entered the telegrapher’s office in the Basin Street station. From the radio, they learned that a storm was moving in from the northwest and that snow was likely. The operator laid their orders out on the scarred counter. Nothing unusual. The Silver Star would run by th
e time card, she had rights over everything movable or immovable, there were no flag stops.

  “Kane,” said the operator, “I have a message here for you and you alone.” He looked at the others and said, “Boys, it warms my innards when two young people just can’t bear to be apart.”

  “Damn,” said Oliver Bomar the flagman. “It ain’t been thirty minutes since he seen her last.”

  “Thank you, Mike, goddammit,” said Artemus, snatching the folded paper from the operator’s hand.

  “Let’s see what little Anna says,” said Stanfield, pressing close. “I know it’s poetical.”

  “Step away, rodents,” said Artemus, his heart beating fast. The image of Anna Rose on the sandbar returned to him. Suddenly the morning was not without hope, nor the clouds their silver linings. He opened the paper.

  Kane—Am being evicted from X-630.

  Will move in with you tomorrow. Don’t wait up.

  E.F. Smith

  “Aw, fuck me,” said Artemus, and crumpled the message into his coat pocket.

  “Well,” said Bomar, “that was not the response I expected.”

  Artemus ignored his comrades. He allowed himself a moment to let the disappointment fade and to get used to the idea of Frank Smith moving in. Then it was all right. It was a good thing, and he gave it no more thought.

  Mister Nussbaum took no part in this exchange. In fact, he had hardly spoken to his crew since they gathered outside the washroom, and he did not speak now. He read over his orders, looked at the men’s faces, and walked outside.

  Oliver Bomar said, “The captain is a mite peevish today.”

  “I will see about it,” said Artemus.