by Howard Bahr
He found Mister Nussbaum leaning against a stanchion, head bent, arms crossed. As Artemus approached, it occurred to him that he had never seen his conductor lean against anything.
“We should have a good trip today,” said Artemus.
Mister Nussbaum looked up at the sound of his brakeman’s voice. “You still need a haircut,” he said.
“I forgot my promise,” said Artemus. “I went to church last night with Anna Rose, and then…I got distracted.”
“I can understand that,” said the conductor. He turned and pressed his back against the stanchion. The mourning band on his sleeve drooped awkwardly, and the safety pin showed. In the dim gray half-light of the terminal, Mister Nussbaum looked old and tired, and Artemus thought of his own image in Anna Rose’s mirror a little while before. Don’t leave me now, thought Artemus. Not yet.
“My ancestors used to blow rams’ horns in the mountains,” said Mister Nussbaum. “They would summon God and speak to him as I am speaking to you, and he answered in a voice terrible, like thunder, but a voice nevertheless. Then, all at once, he quit speaking. Do you believe that?”
“No, Captain,” said Artemus. “I don’t believe he quit, because I don’t believe he ever spoke at all.”
The conductor nodded. He said, “You were in the war, Kane—did you ever pray?”
“Yes, sir. All the time.”
“Any good come of it?”
“None that I could tell,” said Artemus.
Again, the conductor nodded. He said, “Millions of your kind pray every Sunday for peace. They are praying for it right now. They will pray for it tonight and tomorrow in great Christmas hosannas. Do you suppose any good will come of it?”
“No, Captain,” said Artemus. “It only gets worse over there.”
“You’re an educated man, Kane. What do you make of that?”
“Are you being…ironic, sir?”
“I am long past that,” said the conductor.
Artemus walked out to the edge of the platform. The Silver Star lay beyond three empty tracks and as many empty brick platforms. All the vestibule doors were open, waiting, and steam curled from her heating pipes. The windows and the steel cars gleamed in the terminal lights. On the head end, Mister Rufus Payne was walking around his engine with an oil can in his hand. The train was together, and time was already pulling at it. Time was hounding them all. Artemus said, “I noticed last summer no flowers in your yard. That was the first time in all these years—”
“She was the one who made the garden,” said Mister Nussbaum quickly. “I had no opportunity, gone all the time—”
“Yes sir,” said Artemus quickly. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
Mister Nussbaum looked across the terminal at the waiting train. “After she died,” he said, “I thought how, if I ever got my gold watch, I would take the time to make a garden again, put out all the things she loved, just like she had them all those years, and in that way I might keep some portion of her. Now I know that is folly.” He smiled. “I don’t even know the names of any flowers.”
“Maybe that’s what happened to God,” said Artemus. “He only planted one garden, and that was a long time ago. Maybe he forgot.”
“I wish he had not,” said Mister Nussbaum.
“Don’t we all,” said Artemus. He stepped down into the grease-stained gravel, where the smell of Pelican Road rose around him. In the high rafters, pigeons cooed and rattled their wings. He thought about Anna Rose, how she had asked him not to leave her alone. He thought about when he left this morning, how she stood in her bare feet on the cold floor and looked into his face and spoke his name. Now he said, “I would ask a delicate question, sir. I would not ask it if it were not important.”
“All right,” said the conductor.
Artemus paused a moment, collecting his words. At last he said, “All those years together, you and Miss Rebekah. Were they worth what you are feeling now?”
“Yes,” said the conductor.
“Thank you, sir,” said Artemus.
* * *
A half hour before boarding time, the trainmen strolled across the terminal rails in their blue overcoats, carrying their Gladstone bags, to the track where the Silver Star waited. While Mister Nussbaum went forward to compare his watch with the engineer’s, the trainmen climbed aboard the fresh coaches to stow their bags and speak to the porters. When everything was ready, they took their stations along the tall, riveted flank of the Silver Star. Artemus and Vernon Stanfield stood by the bumper post. Mister Nussbaum, with Oliver Bomar the flagman, waited on the platform midway down the train. The porters stood lordly by their cars.
So it was that, one hundred and ten miles from Talowah down storied Pelican Road, Artemus Kane made ready to depart the crowded rooftops, the neon, the rainy streets of the city he loved and the place where Anna Rose lived. This was always a surreal moment for Artemus. The overhead lights of the train shed and the lamps along the platform winked in the flanks of the coaches and gleamed off the rails in a strange, mechanical lumination that made Artemus think of dynamos and power plants, though, in fact, he had seen neither except in pictures. Visible beyond the arched opening of the train shed was the morning, the afternoon, the darkness, each in its season, but beneath the pigeon-haunted steel girders, the light partook of neither day nor night. The train itself seemed created anew, fresh as Eden, no trace of yesterday’s long travel anywhere in evidence. Not like a freight train, whose every inch was a record of months and years, of deserts and forests, green valleys and smoke-grimed cities. The train occupied space, profound in its stillness, solid and eternal and unmoving, yet, soon enough, there would be only emptiness here, and the train itself vanished down the stream of time.
At nine o’clock, the train caller’s voice echoed among the marble vaults of the station: “Southern Railway Train Number Six, the Silver Star, now boarding on track three for Hattiesburg…Meridian…Birmingham…Atlanta…and Wash-ing-ton. All aboard!”
Then the waiting room doors opened, and a flood of people emerged. Not one of them gave thought to how the handsome cars had come to be there, nor that his crossing depended on luck, nor that his safety, his well-being, his life itself, was now lifted out of the hands of God and placed squarely in those of the likes of Artemus Kane and Vernon Stanfield. The thought always made Artemus laugh, as he supposed God did Himself.
As Artemus had anticipated, a good many college students were riding today: boys in ties and letter sweaters, girls with bobbed hair in stylish coats that did nothing to conceal their slim legs and trim, coltish bodies. Artemus watched them and marveled. He understood well the cruel and fundamental mathematics of time, but never, he thought, had he been so young as these little ones, nor so comfortable with himself. Artemus loved all the girls. On the other hand, he viewed the young men as predators without redemption, and their confident manner, their awareness of themselves, nudged Artemus with jealousy and a vague sense of loss. God damned college boys, he thought. Of course, he had been a college boy himself after the war, but that was different.
Vernon Stanfield seemed to read his cousin’s thoughts. “I guess most of these boys’ll be fighting the Japs in a year or so,” he said.
“Ha,” said Artemus. “Not these swains. In my time, we had plenty of university men in the ranks, but you wait and see, cuz. These boys got too much money nowadays. They are too soft, and they don’t care about anything. Their daddies will get ’em off.”
A boy approached diffidently. He wore a Tulane football letter, the knot of a fraternity tie just visible over the V of his white pullover sweater. He was tall and handsome, his unblemished face quick with intelligence. “Beg your pardon, sir,” he said. “Which is the car for Atlanta?”
“Three cars ahead, sir,” Artemus said. “Merry Christmas.”
When the boy was gone, Stanfield laughed. “Hypocrite,” he said.
“Well, hell,” said Artemus.
The student’s name was Jeffrey Br
own. The trainmen did not know this, of course, nor suspect that they would ever know it, nor that the prim, well-dressed man in the straw boater, hurrying down the platform, had just embezzled a comfortable fortune from the Hibernia Bank. The girl in the black dress was going to her father’s funeral in Tuscaloosa. The couple clinging to one another were engaged against her father’s wishes. The little boy in knickers and miniature Norfolk jacket was taking his first trip alone, and the Redcap who carried his bags had twelve children at home. Businessmen on company errands. A nun traveling to a new parish, frightened by the change. A woman who had booked passage on a ship from New York. An opera singer. A gambler. A man who felt like weeping, and another glad to be free. The crowd swept by, each person more or less anxious, each trailing a complicated life, long or short, that had brought him to this moment. For them, the Silver Star had nothing to do with the process of their lives; a train was only a bridge over time to a place where life would be continued, the journey itself only a hiatus, a passage to some other morning, afternoon, darkness where love or decision or catastrophe awaited. The trainmen understood this, and they were aware of the secret lives that passed before them. Yet, with few exceptions, the passengers would remain faces only—pretty, handsome, frightful, studious or bored or fearful. There was little time to know them, and little inclination, a fact which Artemus, at least, regretted sometimes.
Stanfield was right, of course: the boy in the Tulane sweater was traveling toward a destiny he could not begin to imagine. He was an instrument of the world’s changing, and he might well pay for it with his life in some distant place that no one, on this winter morn, had ever heard of.
When Artemus went to the university, he had already been in a war and believed that he had taken all the chances he would ever have to. In fact, for all his adventures, he had found himself innocent of a world where life and death were not the only choices. In the end, being in a war hadn’t prepared Artemus Kane for a god damn thing. Maybe the Tulane boy, having done things in reverse—as Frank Smith had done—would be luckier. Maybe, in his extremity, he would understand something more about what was happening around him. Maybe he would see the terrible waste in it, and maybe he could redeem it all in a way that others could not. For an instant, Artemus thought of following the lad, of giving him some warning of what his responsibility might be. But it was too late. The boy was gone, the moment passed.
Artemus pulled his watch. Eight fifty. Oliver Bomar appeared on the observation platform where Artemus had stood last night by the light of his flare. Oliver hung out the two lighted marker lanterns and turned the switch to illuminate the drum sign. By this means, the abstractions of the timetable were made reality, and the Silver Star a train.
Mister Nussbaum paced nervously on the platform, something he rarely did. Finally, he walked over to a stanchion and snatched open a telephone box. The line connected him with the terminal yardmaster in his glass gallery over the waiting room doors. Mister Nussbaum listened a moment, then slammed the telephone into its cradle. He waved to his crew. They were cleared to depart on time.
In his years of train service, Artemus had known many vicissitudes. His past girlfriends had been a torment. The night his mother died, he was switching way down in Hattiesburg. He had missed every one of his wife’s birthdays, most Christmases and Easters and Sunday mornings at Mass. He had known times when his heart was leaden with sorrow for no reason, and times when the old war crowded out every other thought, when the dead were more real than the living. He had been hungover, exhausted, angry, frustrated. He had struggled in the shadow of mistakes and irrational behavior. Through every difficulty, however, he forced himself to pay attention. He made himself set aside whatever troubled him and planted himself firmly in the moment, knowing that was the only way he could survive. His reward for this diligence was an excitement that never failed him when a passenger train, no matter how humble, no matter if he belonged to it or not, was about to sail.
This morning, the departure of the Silver Star from Basin Street was heralded by Mister Nussbaum’s drawn-out cry—“All aboard!”—that set tardy passengers to running and made mothers pull their children close. Porters swung their yellow footstools aboard and pulled up the vestibule steps with a clang. Miles Duvall stood in his open door, the trainmen and porters and dining car waiters peered from the vestibules, Mister Nussbaum stood erect on the platform glaring at his watch as if it had insulted him somehow. At the appointed moment, the exact instant when the fine blue arrows of his watch indicated nine o’clock and one second, the conductor lifted his hand, and the engineer, Mister Rufus Payne, answered with the whistle, the shrill notes echoing in the vaulted shed. Then the train began to move, an almost imperceptible gliding without noise. Mister Nussbaum swung aboard, and a porter pulled the steps up behind him. Steam shrouded the watchers on the platform. Passengers waved from the windows. The trainmen waved to children and smirked at pretty girls. Only the aged, white-haired conductor remained aloof, peering intently up the length of his train like a ship’s captain in the shrouds. The Silver Star emptied the space it had occupied, and in a moment it was curving away through the switches, its headlight bright in the gray morning, shimmering on the rails. Smaller and smaller grew the drum sign, the awning and gilded rail of the club car, the red markers, until all that remained was a haze of coal smoke and an empty track where once the Silver Star had made ready, and those left behind began to drift toward the waiting room and the world beyond where their lives awaited them. If any were listening, they might have heard the shriek of the whistle one last time. After that, the train vanished into silence and was no more.
* * *
Artemus stood on the back platform, watching the arch of the train shed pass away. The heavy cars thumped on the rail joints and rattled through crossovers and switches. Dwarf signals and lighted switch targets glided past, and trackmen in their greasy overalls, and carmen with their oil cans, and switchmen waiting by their fat, stubby-wheeled yard engines—all lifting their gloved hands in farewell, acknowledged in return by Artemus Kane, a brakeman on the Silver Star, anointed and privileged, but their brother just the same.
The train moved slowly through the east end, following a freight train that was itself following another freight. Artemus and Oliver Bomar and Stanfield joined their conductor in the vestibule of the forward coach, each man in turn peering impatiently up the train. They could see the caboose of the drag ahead. The lighted fusees dropped by its flagman passed beside.
“This is unusual,” said Mister Nussbaum. “Highly irregular.”
Artemus thought this a splendid understatement. The dispatcher in Meridian was fucking up: nobody but God delayed the Silver Star. Still, there was nothing they could do.
At X Tower, a station that controlled access to the Ponchartrain bridge, they got some bad news: emergency repairs were underway on the long trestle, and the yellow slow-order flags were out. Artemus returned to the platform while they crossed the lake. At the far end, he found a bridge gang huddled around their handcar on the safety platform. This was cold work for them, out here in the wind amid the lashing spray from the gray, troubled waters below. As the men waved, and Artemus raised his hand in return, he felt once more a brush of guilt for his dashing uniform and the warmth of the coaches.
Thus the Silver Star passed from that place, too. The bridge gang admired her going, and watched her lights grow smaller and smaller. They watched the lanky brakeman’s figure diminish until it was like a little blue doll. A flock of pelicans drifted overhead in elegant formation, and before they were gone, all that beautiful train had vanished into the mist of the far and distant shore.
THE CORBIES
Almost two hours out of Basin Street, and forty-five minutes late, the Silver Star, still following closely on the heels of the northbound freight, paused at Slidell. Artemus and Mister Nussbaum stepped off the last coach in time to watch the porter and the baggage cart labor up the platform. No coffin this time; only the piled
trunks and luggage of citizens who wanted to be someplace else. The colored waiting room was crowded with black people waiting for a train everyone called “Ol’ Zip Coon” that ran in at least three sections every Christmas. This was good revenue: a Jim Crow day-coach special carrying Southern blacks to visit kinfolk in Detroit or Chicago or Milwaukee.
Jefferson Danly strolled behind the baggage cart as usual. He was dressed in a brown tweed suit with a red waistcoat and a green bow tie. “Hello, boys,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”
“Somebody needs to clear the road,” said Mister Nussbaum tightly.
“Just be patient,” said Danly, “we are putting that drag in the hole for you up at Gant’s store.”
“That’s real good, J.D.,” said Artemus.
The agent patted Artemus’s lapels. “I’m your Santy Clause,” he said. He turned to Mister Nussbaum. “Starting next year they are installing block signals on the main line to keep you fellows from running into each other. Not a minute too soon, if you ask me.”
“We have never made a practice of running into each other,” said Mister Nussbaum.
“Well, you can’t be too careful,” said Danly. “Never fear—someone’s watching over you.” He went on then, moving forward to the baggage car. On an outside track, invisible beyond a switching cut, a southbound freight slipped by like a child trying to leave the room before he is noticed.
The trainmen could not see the sky, only the underside of the passenger shed. Empty sparrow nests were tucked into all the braces, and the paint was peeling. Mister Nussbaum moved away a little and stood in silence, rubbing the stubs of his fingers. He had remarked to Artemus once that he could still feel them when it was cold, the ghosts of his fingers come to ache and accuse him as if they blamed him for their loss.
“Why don’t you go inside, Ira?” said Artemus. “I can—”
“Leave it alone,” snapped the conductor, and thrust his hands deep in his coat pockets, out of sight.
