The Train of Small Mercies

by David Rowell

  New Jersey

  Michael Colvert was lying on his bed, the rubber soles of his shoes pressed delicately against the wall, and he pulled back the leather pouch of his slingshot once more. He had sent nearly a hundred imaginary stones through the air.

  He was glad to feel the smooth wood handle in his hand once more. He had tried to explain what a good shot he had become to his father, but his father hadn’t seemed much impressed. Michael wondered if his father thought he was a little old for slingshots and was, instead, ready to have his own gun—for hunting, though his father hadn’t said anything like that. To his friends’ bewilderment, Michael wouldn’t shoot at birds or squirrels, and used the slingshot only for target practice—soda bottles, old gasoline cans, school crossing and speed limit signs by the road—and now he could hit small targets from fifteen yards away. None of his other friends could make such a claim.

  In the kitchen, he could hear the soft drone of his mother’s voice. In the last week, since he had returned home, she had spoken in hushed, halting tones every time someone called to see how the boy was doing.

  “Well, we’re just taking it slow and easy,” she would say.

  “We’re not really talking about that very much right now, to be honest.”

  “A little quiet, but that’s to be expected, considering all that he’s been through.”

  In these moments she was quick to turn to see if he was listening, which caused him to direct his attention out the window at the neighbor across the street, who was forever mowing the yard, or if he had a copy of Boys’ Life in his hand, he would read the headline “A Sailor’s Knot Saved This Scout’s Life!”—letting his lips move for effect—for the tenth time without reading any further.

  James Colvert and his wife had separated nearly a year ago; he then moved to Michigan, where an old college friend had offered him a partnership in a shipping business. Michael had spoken to him a few times on the telephone since then—on Michael’s birthday, at Christmas, and when the Knicks made the playoffs. He promised to have Michael come visit him once he got settled into his new home, his new job, but mostly Michael’s mother had done what she could to erase him from their lives. Their marriage had been marked by long stretches of silence in between too many cruel arguments, and in a relatively brief spate of years they arrived at a general state of shock that they could have ever loved each other at all. There were no pictures of his father in the house, except for a snapshot Michael kept in his drawer of the two of them on a Ferris wheel at the state fair, with Michael holding a candy apple nub and his father flashing his crooked grin as the bright lights beneath them swam like colored fish.

  Three weeks earlier Michael’s father had pressed his face against the narrow pane of glass inside the thick oak door, his eyes scanning the classroom, and Michael watched him for several seconds before recognizing him. Before Michael could say anything, the man gently opened the door, and Mrs. McCauley, the sixth-grade math teacher, walked over to him, her powdered face squeezed into an expression of concern, as he whispered into her ear. She nodded once and said, “Michael, your father needs to see you.” Whether any of this seemed unusual to Mrs. McCauley, Michael could not tell. He nodded and bounded out into the hallway, his heart racing.

  “Well, here he is in the flesh,” James Colvert said. “Let me look at this fine-looking young man.” He put his warm, heavy hand on Michael’s shoulder, and at that moment Michael thought he might collapse from the weight of it.

  “Now that’s what you call growing,” he said. “How tall are you now?”

  “Fifty-seven inches, exactly,” Michael said quickly.

  “I’ll bet you’re a hundred pounds, too,” James Colvert said.

  “Almost,” Michael said.

  His father nodded, and then turned to look over his shoulder.

  “Well, let me explain the plan we’ve got going here, and then we can skedaddle. I’ve got a carload of fishing equipment out there in the car waiting for us, and all we have to do is hop in and take off.”

  “Where are we going?” Michael said. He was aware of his voice bouncing off the lockers in the empty hallway.

  “The Great Lakes State, where else?” James Colvert said. “Fishing, hunting, camping, whatever we like. But we have to go now is the thing. I talked to your principal all about it, so we’re all square there.”

  “What about Mom?” Michael asked. He looked back in the window to see Mrs. McCauley drawing a pie chart on the blackboard.

  “Mom knows all about it,” he said. This was a lie, and James Colvert was surprised at how much he enjoyed saying it. “She’s just kept it a secret, like I asked her. She’s good at keeping secrets, your mother. Case in point. But like I said, we have a whole heck of a lot of driving ahead of us, so we should get started.”

  “What about school?”

  “Yeah, your teacher’s in on it, too,” James Colvert whispered, but this wasn’t true, either. “It’s all right for you to miss the last few weeks, since you’re doing so well.” Earlier in the spring, he had called the school’s secretary for the date of the last day of classes, but by the time he booked their cabin, the available dates didn’t mesh with Michael’s school dates. That morning, after he watched Michael head off to school from his car parked down the street, then saw Michael’s mother drive off to work, he left a postcard in the mailbox explaining that he was taking Michael camping and that he would have him back by the end of June. He left no telephone number, and didn’t say where they would be—omissions he particularly relished.

  James Colvert began walking down the hall, and Michael noticed the scuffed boots under his father’s khaki pants, which were severely worn, with a hole in one of the back pockets. Michael looked once more to his classroom, but Mrs. McCauley was out of view, and then someone said something to cause the class to laugh before she could quiet them down. Michael raced to catch up.

  “Wait, my books,” he called out.

  “You won’t need them,” his father said. “Your teacher will take care of them.”

  There was a sparkling red Mercury Monterey out front, where the school buses would start to line up in the afternoon. Michael watched the bald spot on the back of his father’s head and tried to remember if it had been there before.

  “Now was I lying about the fishing gear?” his father said, his arms held out like an eager salesman. There were at least four fishing rods that Michael could make out, and a large metal tackle box that sat on the vinyl seat. There was a net and a pair of adult-size waders lying on the floor.

  Michael smiled—for the first time, he realized. “That’s a lot,” he said. “You could catch a whole lake with that.”

  James Colvert snorted. “The car’s brand-new, too. I flew in a few days ago and picked it up for the trip.”

  Michael felt light-headed; it was as if he had stepped inside one of his Richie Rich comics.

  Traffic on the Garden State Parkway was light, and the stubby pines that had been planted just a few years earlier were towering over the roadside signs. When a truck carrying fruit out of the state and, some miles later, a truck carrying steel pipes passed, Michael was sure that the drivers were craning their heads to admire the beautiful car.

  Later, when they were about to cross the New Jersey state line, Michael thought of giving a small cheer. He thought his father might appreciate that, but then it came and went, and no other sound he could think of over the low moan of the motor seemed particularly right.

  Maryland

  Jamie took a bath these days, though he still referred to it as a shower, and everyone had made silent note of this. Joe had become tired of trying to catalog all the things that were different now for his son, but at the end of every day Ellie and Miriam talked about how Jamie seemed to be, what daily tasks he seemed to be getting more comfortable with, which tasks he seemed to avoid altogether, what he did and did not like to talk about. They saw themselves as caseworkers, and when Joe was not listening, they filled each other in
on any new observations or insights.

  When the water shut off, rattling for a moment the thin walls of the kitchen, Ellie looked out the back window toward the train tracks. The grass already had suffered from a hot stretch in May, and the blooms of the azaleas—lining the edges of the yard—had been spectacular this year, but now they were withering. The funeral was over, and on the radio the announcer was talking about Robert Kennedy and his publicized skirmishes with union organizer Jimmy Hoffa. Ellie tried to imagine if a train carrying Robert Kennedy’s coffin would look any different from the ones on the C&O line that passed by twice a day usually—a forty-to-fifty-car train carrying lumber or coal or sometimes automobiles. How long would the Kennedy train be? Would his children be on board? she wondered. What would they think of all the people who would be lining up to stare at them as they passed? What sense could they make of any of it?

  New York

  Lionel had come with his mother plenty of times to Penn Station—to say good-bye to his father and then go off in the city together, or sometimes to meet him after his train had come in and take the subway back home together. As a child, Penn Station had felt overwhelming, and he clung to his mother’s or father’s hand so tightly that they had to laugh.

  “What’s the matter?” Maurice said, after a twenty-hour ride to Savannah, Georgia, and back. “You afraid you’re going to lose us and end up on a train to Bangor, Maine? Or Richmond?”

  “No,” Lionel said.

  “Or Chicago?”

  “No.”

  “Ending up on a train to Chicago wouldn’t be so bad, now,” Maurice said. “Be a little hard you navigating the South Side by yourself, but a man could do worse than to end up in Chicago.”

  “I’m not a man,” Lionel said.

  “’Course you’re not,” Vera said, rubbing a gloved hand over the back of his head.

  “Chicago. Philadelphia. St. Louis. Boston. Detroit. The trains have taken me just about every place I want to see in this country. And some I don’t ever need to see again.”

  Lionel and his father had always strolled through the original Penn Station with dizzy wonderment—the intricate patterns of the iron-and-glass ceiling like metallic spiderwebs, the marble columns thicker than redwoods—before most of it was demolished in 1963 and reconstruction began. He remembered the way his father shook his head when they first stepped into the new station together, after construction was complete. The new ceiling seemed as low as the one in their apartment, and the grand columns had been replaced with stumps that held the dull glimmer of tinfoil. The fluorescent lights looked like they had been lifted from a cafeteria.

  “If this is modern,” Maurice said—to his son and anyone else who was listening—“then I don’t want nothing to do with the future.”

  Lionel checked in at the Penn Central office, where he was directed to the Kennedy train. Stepping outside toward the rail yards, he had his head down, trying to fix the zipper on his bag, and when he looked up again and saw the immense crowd on the opposite track, he was startled. They were packed in together like gumballs. There were men in light business suits and straw hats, and young women in brightly colored slacks cradling cardboard signs that read: “We’ll Miss You Bobby” and “Rest in Peace” and “God Bless You RFK.” Several young mothers had children on their hips, and some of the women’s faces looked swollen from crying. There were a dozen young white men in their plaid shorts and button-down Oxford shirts, their faces pink from the body heat all around, and elderly black men and women hunched over, trying to will their knees to hold firm.

  Just below the crowd, on the tracks, was a flank of stony-faced police officers positioned twenty feet apart, soaking up the blinding sunlight and sweating through their blue short-sleeved shirts, the handles of their pistols pinned against their ribs. Their arms were crossed, when they weren’t wiping the sweat off their cheeks, and they stared straight ahead, not talking to one another or to the crowd above. Lionel couldn’t remember when he had seen so many black police officers at once.

  Several Secret Service agents were talking with crew members in front of the train, and when they broke up, Lionel approached, flashing his new badge to them for inspection, as he had been instructed to do inside the station. One of the agents removed his sunglasses and studied Lionel’s photograph. “First day on the job,” he said. “How about that?” He then indicated with a turn of his jaw that Lionel could keep walking.

  “I’m looking for Buster Hayes,” he said to the porter whose shoulders were as broad as a linebacker’s. “I’m assigned to his crew.”

  Buster Hayes was counting something on his clipboard. He let a little time pass before he looked up and took Lionel in. “Well, you’re in luck,” he said. Lionel nodded and jutted out his hand. Buster Hayes considered the hand first and could see that Lionel had done little manual labor in his life. Hayes nodded once and took Lionel’s hand in his, showing him the strength of his grip. “What do you say, young buck?”

  “Fine, thank you.”

  “No, my question was, What do you say?”

  “Excuse me?” Lionel said, his hand still being crushed by the older man.

  “I’m just checking to see what kind of listener you are, young buck,” Hayes said. “I said, ‘What do you say?’—which was not my way of asking you how you were, and yet you told me anyway. A porter has to listen. At all times. I ask you to go get me a crate of Cokes, I need to know you’re not going to come back with a box of M&M’s. If a man says, ‘I’ll take my coffee with sugar,’ then you need to not come back to him with cream. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, then. Welcome aboard. This is a hell of a first shift for a young buck like yourself. Do you know everything about this train today, and the important trip we’re about to take?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Of course you don’t, young buck. I just asked if you knew everything about this train, and you just told me you did. You don’t know about the tender wheels or the poppet valve or how to locate the compressors, now do you?”

  “No, sir,” Lionel said.

  “You got me worried already, young buck,” Hayes said. He looked over at the crowd across the way.

  “No, you don’t know this train,” Hayes said. “And this ain’t a day for me to teach you anything about trains, neither. The best thing you can do on this day is to stay out of the way and watch and learn. You Maurice Chase’s son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s a long-timer right there,” Hayes said. “Pullman porter. Yes, sir. Men like your father made the brotherhood. Of course, the Pullman brotherhood has pretty well come to an end, and that’s a sad development. But that’s all I’m going to say on that today. Senator Kennedy’s coffin is scheduled to arrive in half an hour, but you don’t have anything to do with that, and that’s for a reason. First day on the job, you need to stay as far away as possible from that coffin. No telling what you’d do, you so green. I’m going to take you to the car you’re going to be serving today and get you situated.” But first Hayes stepped back and held out his hand in the direction of the train, as if it were a prize on some game show. “And welcome to the Pennsylvania Central. You see where it says Penn Central?”

  Lionel studied the glistening coaches and took a step back, not finding anything that helped him.

  “The reason you don’t is because it’s been blacked out by request of the Kennedy family,” Hayes said. “Maybe they wanted the train to resemble a hearse. Makes sense to me, though. We got twenty-one cars, and the last two are where the Kennedy family is going to be, so no one goes in there. Not me, not the conductor, nobody wearing this uniform. Unless they ask for somebody.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lionel said.

  Buster Hayes took another look at the new employee, crinkling his eyes for effect. “You ready to work, young buck?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, then, let’s get to it.” Buster Hayes led Lione
l down the narrow aisles of the train, letting his hands bounce softly over the tops of headrests, whistling a tune he surely whistled all the time. Here and there he slowed to lower his head so that he could survey the crowd out the window. “No, not like any ordinary day, and that’s true for every one of us on this train. This day is some history.”

  “FDR had a funeral train,” Lionel said. His father had ranked Roosevelt highest among all other presidents during his lifetime. “And Abraham Lincoln.”

  “Whoa, young buck knows something about the history of funeral trains,” Hayes said. “Young buck knows something after all.”

  The train smelled of vinyl and aftershave, and every surface had been scrubbed until the cleaning crew was satisfied that each car looked like it had just rolled off the assembly line. As they headed toward the rear they met a porter whose hair was the color of marshmallows.

  “Mr. Chalmers,” Hayes said, and they shook hands. “Mr. Chalmers, this here is Lionel Chase. First day on the job.”

  “They put a new man on the job on this train?” Mr. Chalmers said. He hadn’t looked over at Lionel, but he arranged his face in a show of utter dismay. “Lord Almighty.”

  “They must have confidence in him,” Hayes said. “He’s Maurice Chase’s boy. So maybe they know what they’re doing after all.”

  Mr. Chalmers offered his weak hand to Lionel. “How’s he getting along, son?”

  “Doing very well,” Lionel said.

  “Good, good. That’s a good man, Maurice Chase.”

  “I’m taking him to his car,” Hayes said. “Mr. Chalmers can assist you in any number of ways because he knows this train. Young buck tried to tell me he knew this train.”

  At this Mr. Chalmers shook his head, his face reset in amazement.

  They kept walking, and after Hayes stopped to straighten a doily on the back of a seat, they stepped into a car featuring a miniature bar on the far end. The passenger seats were replaced by long couches and four round, elevated tables for passengers to use while standing up.