by Ron Rash
Rachel picked up the tickets but left the quarters.
“That fellow I told you about. If he comes around asking…”
The man lifted the silver from the counter and placed it in his vest pocket.
“I’ve not sold any tickets to a woman and a child,” he said.
She paused at the depot’s doorway, looking back toward town before crossing the tracks and entering the house. Mrs. Sloan sat at the kitchen table peeling apples, Jacob in the back room napping.
“That man the sheriff told me to watch for,” Rachel said. “I seen him uptown.”
Rachel hurried on to the back room. She took the money and bowie knife from under the pillow and stuffed them in the carpetbag with what items she thought most needed. Mrs. Sloan came into the room.
“What can I do to help you?”
“Get yourself over to your sister-in-law’s and stay there,” Rachel said, and lifted Jacob from the bed. “Call the sheriff and tell him Galloway’s here.”
The older woman came to her, the toy train engine and sock of marbles in her veiny hands.
“Don’t forget these,” Mrs. Sloan said, stuffing the toy train engine in the sock as well and knotting it. “He’d be put out something awful if you left them.”
Rachel placed the sock in her dress pocket, and she and Jacob were quickly out of the house and crossing the tracks to the boxcar, the best place to wait because she could see both the house and the depot. See but not be seen, Rachel told herself. She crossed the last rail and looked over her shoulder toward town and saw no one. Jacob whimpered.
“Hush now,” she said.
Rachel stepped quickly through the blackberry bushes, not pausing when briars clutched her dress. She lifted Jacob and the carpetbag into the boxcar before getting in herself.
At first there was only gloaming. As her eyes slowly adjusted, Rachel saw a mattress made from corn shucks stuffed between two rotting quilts, beside it yellowing newspapers and an empty sardine can. Whoever he is, he’ll not come back till it cools off some, Rachel thought. She set Jacob and the carpetbag down, then stepped to the back of the boxcar and pinched the quilts between her thumbs and forefingers to slide the makeshift mattress closer to the doorway. A gray blur shot out of the pallet, its body and long tail brushing an ankle as it passed between her legs and then on through the doorway. A rustling in the briars and then nothing.
Rachel prodded the pallet with her shoe. Nothing else emerged and she slid the pallet the rest of the way. She sat down, the shucks rasping as she leaned and lifted Jacob onto her lap. The boxcar rattled as a freight train passed, moving so slow Rachel could read the words and numbers on each car as it passed wide and high before her. Several of the freight cars’ sliding metal doors were open. From one of them a hobo peered out.
After the caboose glided by, Rachel fixed her gaze on the house. Soon Mrs. Sloan came out, a suitcase in her hand. The old woman walked with a steadfast stride toward town. A few minutes later a man went inside the depot, came out and walked toward town as well. The day had been warm for early fall, and the boxcar had stored the day’s heat like a kiln. Beads of sweat formed on Rachel’s brow, the dress cloth beginning to stick between her shoulder blades.
Jacob leaned forward and pointed at a lizard clinging to the doorway. The lizard’s back and legs were as bright green as a cinnamon fern. On its throat a red bubble of flesh expanded and contracted, but otherwise the creature lay completely still.
“Pretty ain’t it,” Rachel told Jacob.
After a few moments, the lizard crawled farther up the rusty metal and paused again. The lizard’s green dulled to a light brown, and it soon blended so perfectly with the rusty metal as to be invisible. There’s a trick we could sure use, Rachel thought.
Jacob settled deeper into her lap, sleepy enough not to fret about the boxcar’s heat. His breath took on the cadence of sleep, and not long after that twilight settled in. A pale swollen moon appeared in the sky, crowding out the lesser stars as it pressed closer to earth. A thin whiteness spread over the ground like hoarfrost. Another freight train passed. Less than an hour, Rachel told herself, eyes shifting from the house to the depot.
The boxcar finally began to cool, the day’s heat leaking away with the light. A man and woman stepped into the depot, came out and sat on the wooden bench to await the train. Soon several other travelers joined the couple. Lights flickered on and cast the depot in a yellow light. No one approached Mrs. Sloan’s house. Something rustled near the boxcar door, and Rachel saw a rat’s snout tentatively emerge.
“Shoo,” she said and pulled a shuck from the pallet to throw if the rodent ventured closer, but at the sound of her voice it disappeared back into the undergrowth.
Jacob woke and began to fuss. Rachel checked his swaddlings but they were dry. Hungry then, she told herself, and set the child on the pallet. She took one of the graham crackers from the carpetbag and gave it to him. The moonlight continued to thicken, the train tracks gleaming as if gilded in silver. Not a wisp of cloud passed overhead. Rachel looked up at the sky and saw the moon was no longer white but deepening into an orange hue.
A smudge of light came on in the back room of Mrs. Sloan’s house. The light disappeared and Rachel hoped it might be her imagining, but then it was in the kitchen, moving around like foxfire before briefly reappearing in the back room. Rachel squinted her eyes and watched for the glow of a flashlight crossing Mrs. Sloan’s yard, if not that for some denser shadow.
But she saw nothing. Galloway had vanished as completely as the light held in his hand. Could be walking straight toward town or the depot or straight toward us, Rachel thought, and moved Jacob and herself deeper into the boxcar. Minutes passed though she’d not have believed so except she heard the passenger train coming. Rachel gathered up the carpetbag and Jacob. Briars grabbed her legs, and each time there was an instant she thought Galloway had her.
Rachel finally felt cinders beneath her feet. She did not step onto the glimmering tracks but walked the edge. The train whistle blew and she took a few more steps. A big oak rose near the depot, and its limbs snared some of the moonlight. Rachel stood beneath where the dark pooled, a few yards outside the depot light’s glow. She studied the travelers gathered on the platform, looked through one of the depot’s wide windows but saw no one. The train pulled into the station and shuddered to a stop.
Two men got off but that was all, and soon the train began to load its new passengers. Rachel took the tickets from her pocket and moved closer, almost ready to step onto the depot’s porch when something stopped her. It was not something seen but something sensed, like the time as a child when she’d started to lift the spring guard and stopped, a black widow spider big as a quarter where her fingers would have gone. The last passengers boarded, but still Rachel did not move. Then she saw him, in the shadows on the depot’s far side. The last ticket holder boarded and the train pulled away, the flagman’s brass lantern sweeping back and forth in farewell.
Rachel turned from the depot’s glow and could not see her feet in the oak’s thick shade. If I trip and fall and this young one starts squalling, we’ll be goners for sure, Rachel thought. Imaginings began to get the best of her, thinking how one wrong step to the left or right and there could be a ditch or a rusty stob that would trip her. You’ve got to follow the same path you come here on, she told herself. She took a step into the darkness because there was no choice. Rachel took another step, the foot set tentatively before her. Like crossing a pond on thin ice, she thought, and it seemed a part of her listened for that first crackle. Seven steps and she was out of the tree’s shade.
Rachel walked on toward the boxcar, quicker now, hunched low so that she was little taller than the briars and weeds. The only thing she could think to do was try to get to town and find the town’s lawman, but Sheriff McDowell had warned her to trust no one but his cousin, even if that someone wore a badge. The moonlight was so stark and intense now she could see Mrs. Sloan’s house clearly. Sh
e remembered then that it was October, remembered how her father called this a hunter’s moon and claimed blood on the moon meant blood on the land. Rachel walked faster and got herself and Jacob into the boxcar as quickly as she could, unable to shake the feeling that Mrs. Pemberton and Galloway held sway over even the moon and stars and clouds. That they’d waited for this night and this night alone to find her and Jacob. Don’t look up and see it, she told herself. Rachel pushed farther into the boxcar, clutched Jacob more tightly in her arms.
She heard a train, not the one that had departed but one coming out of the mountains into the valley, a freight train. The engine stopped beside the coal chute on the station’s opposite end. Rachel lifted Jacob and the carpetbag and made her way down the track to where she’d stood before. She studied the depot, the shadowy far corner where Galloway had been fifteen minutes earlier. He wasn’t there. The last of the coal clattered from the chute, and the train began moving. The engine passed in front of the depot, and when several cars had done the same Rachel gathered up the carpetbag and Jacob and walked rapidly toward the train, exposed now not just by the moon but the depot’s yellow glow. She stepped onto the closer track, the train passing slowly in front of her. The fifth car gaped open, but Rachel didn’t reach it in time. Six more cars creaked by before another was open. She set Jacob and the carpetbag inside, then jumped in herself. The train moved past the old boxcar and soon the darkened backs of buildings.
He was coming, beside the caboose but closing the distance between them one boxcar at a time, not even running but still gaining steadily. He stumbled, got up, and came on. He was smiling and his index finger waved in admonishment. She’d never known fear had a taste, but it did. It tasted like chalk and metal. Rachel pushed Jacob deeper into the car, so deep the child’s back pressed against the rattling steel. Rachel’s ribs tightened around her heart like a vise-grip.
The train sped up but not enough. Galloway’s face appeared beside the car. He trotted now, his hand outstretched. A lanyard made from a dingy piece of twine was around Galloway’s neck, dangling from it a dagger. Rachel thought of the bowie knife, but there wasn’t time to get it from the carpetbag. She pulled the sock from her dress pocket as Galloway reached out his hand and gripped the door, the dagger glinting as it swayed back and forth across his chest. He continued to trot beside them, gathering himself to leap inside. The train whistle screamed like a final warning.
Galloway shoved himself halfway into the car, his head and belly on the metal floor, legs yet dangling. Rachel raised the sock to ear level. She paused, willing the pound of glass and steel to be enough, then brought it down as hard as she could on Galloway’s leering face. His eyes went white. For a moment his body balanced half in and half out of the car. Then Rachel pressed her shoe heel against his forehead and shoved him earthward. Galloway tumbled into a gulley. Rachel leaned out and watched as the caboose passed where he’d fallen. She kept watching the tracks, but he did not rise. Jacob was squalling now and she gathered him into her arms.
“We’re all right now,” she told him. “We’re all right.”
There was hay on the boxcar’s floor, and Rachel heaped some of it into a corner. She and Jacob lay on it, her arms around him. They were out of Kingsport now, headed south through the Smokies. They passed an occasional farmhouse, what wan light its windows shed skiffing the metal floor a moment, then gone. The rocking heartbeat of the train soon lulled the child asleep, herself as well. Rachel dreamed that she and Jacob stood in a cornfield where only a single green stalk grew. She and Jacob pulled shucks off the stalk’s one ear and found not corn but a knife blade.
She woke in darkness, for a moment unsure where she was. Rachel spooned her body tighter around Jacob’s and tried to fall back asleep but sleep did not come. She listened to the train passing over the rails, listened to Jacob’s measured breaths. Rachel waited for the wheels to slow beneath her, and when they finally did she and Jacob got out and crossed rows of tracks, moving around stalled boxcars toward the depot. The sign above the front door said Knoxville. She went inside and checked the train schedule before asking to borrow the telephone mounted on the wall behind the counter. A collect call, she assured the depot master. She lifted the receiver to her ear and leaned toward the mouthpiece, Jacob clutching the black clothbound cord as Rachel spoke to the operator.
McDowell answered on the first ring.
“Where are you?” he asked, and as soon as she told him he asked when the next train left.
“The one we need don’t leave for four hours.”
“The next train,” he said again, “to anywhere.”
“There’s one headed to Chattanooga in thirty minutes.”
“Take it. Then when you get to Chattanooga buy the ticket to Seattle.”
“You think he’s already headed here, don’t you?” Rachel said.
“I’d say it’s likely.”
For a few moments only static crossed the miles of lines between them.
“Just get to Chattanooga,” McDowell said. “I’m going to end this tonight, end it for good.”
“How?”
“That’s not your concern. Go buy your tickets.”
She did what he said. Thinking she hadn’t offered enough money to the other depot master, Rachel handed this one a five-dollar bill. Then she described Galloway.
The depot master stared at the bill, a smile rising on his face that offered no comfort or sympathy.
“You must be in some serious trouble,” the depot master said, “and one thing I’ve learned is folks with trouble ain’t no different than folks with head lice or the shits. You get close enough to them and soon enough you’ll get it your ownself.”
The depot master looked past Rachel as he spoke, as if so pleased with his words he hoped a larger audience had heard them.
Rachel met the man’s eyes, held his gaze until the smirk left his face. She no longer felt anger or fear or even weariness. What remained was just a numb acceptance that she and Jacob would or wouldn’t survive. Something would happen or it wouldn’t happen, and that was the way of it. Almost as if she was outside of herself, watching her and the child from some distant vantage point. As Rachel spoke, the coldness of her inflection felt outside herself as well.
“You’ll help us or you won’t, mister. You can make light of our troubles and smile at your own smartass sayings. You can refuse to take my money or take it and tell where we went anyway. You’ll do what you want to do. But know one thing. If that man finds us he’ll rake a knife blade across this young one’s throat and bleed him dry like he was no more than a shoat in a hog pen. That blood will be on your hands, every bit as much as on him that does the killing. If you can handle knowing you done that, then go ahead and tell him.”
The depot master placed a hand on the five-dollar bill but did not slide it toward himself. He no longer looked at Rachel but at Jacob.
“I won’t tell him nor nobody else,” he said, then handed the bill back to Rachel.
Thirty-two
THAT NIGHT IT WAS NOT THE GLARE OF FLAMES or the smell of smoke that roused Pemberton but a sound, something heard but not registered until other senses lifted him from a restless sleep. When he opened his eyes, the bed was a raft adrift on a rising tide of smoke and fire. Serena had awakened as well, and for a few moments they only watched.
The front of the house disappeared in a wide rush of flame, as did the foyer leading to the back door. The bedroom’s window was five feet away but hidden by smoke. Each breath Pemberton took felt like a mouthful of ash singeing his throat and lungs. Waves of heat rolled over his bare skin. Smoke seemed to have clouded inside his mind as well as the room, and for a second he forgot why the window mattered. Serena held to his arm, coughing violently as well. They helped each other off the bed and Pemberton wrapped a blanket around them, its fringe catching aflame when it touched the floor.
Pemberton used his last clear thought to gauge where the window would be. With his arm around Serena and
hers around his waist, he led them stumbling and breathless toward the window. When Pemberton found it, he lowered his head and turned his shoulder and used what momentum they had to break the glass and wooden mullion. He and Serena plunged through the window clutching each other, the glass raining around them, twirling and refractive like a kaleidoscope. Their legs caught the sill a moment, slipped through. Then they were falling, so slowly it did not feel like falling but a suspension. Pemberton felt a moment of weightlessness as if they were submerged in water. Then the ground came rushing upward.
They hit and rolled free of the flaming blanket and pressed their naked flesh against each other’s. He and Serena stayed on the ground, holding each other though coughs racked their bodies like seizures. Fire had burned Pemberton’s forearm and a six-inch glass shard jagged deep into his thigh, but he did not break his and Serena’s embrace. As the roof collapsed, orange sparks spewed upward, hovered a moment and dimmed. Pemberton shifted to cover Serena, ash and cinders stinging his back before expiring.
A tumult of shouting came toward them as what workers remained in the camp gathered to contain the fire. Meeks appeared out of the smoke and leaned over them, asking if Pemberton and Serena were all right. Serena said yes, but neither she nor Pemberton unclenched. As the heat washed over him, Pemberton thought of their stumbling rush toward the window and how, at that one moment, the world had finally revealed itself to him, and in it there was nothing but himself and Serena, everything else burning away around them. A kind of annihilation. Yes, he thought, I understand now.
Pemberton finally let go of Serena to pull free the glass shard. Meeks helped Serena and Pemberton to their feet, placing a bedsheet around them as he did so.
“I’ll call a doctor,” Meeks said, and walked briskly back to the office.
Serena and Pemberton began slowly walking in the same direction, arm in arm. The flames cast the whole camp into a pulsing translucence, light gathering and dispersing like brightened shadows. Pemberton made a quick inventory of what had burned inside the house that could not be replaced. Nothing. A foreman came up to Serena, his face damasked with a sooty sweat.