by Tony Earley
“Well, I guess we need to be getting on back across the river,” said Dennis Deane, a little loudly, near Pete’s ear.
“Don’t hurry. The train’ll be here in a minute,” Jim said.
“Oh, forget I asked you to do that,” said Pete. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I bet I could find a book somewhere with pictures in it. I was just curious about what they looked like.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Jim said.
Uncle Zeno tugged at his sleeve. “Excuse me, Jim, sorry to interrupt, but I think you need to step into the waiting room for a minute,” he said.
Jim scanned the platform until he found Mama. She looked okay. “Right now?” he asked.
“I think you probably better.”
Jim stepped inside and closed the door. The shadows cast by his family and friends milled about indistinctly on the floor around his feet, and the voices on the platform withdrew to a great distance and ceased having anything to do with him. Bright dust floated upward in the light. No one was sitting on the single row of seats facing the doorway, and the door to Pete’s office was closed. He thought he might be alone.
“Hello?” he called.
“Hello,” said a small voice from the far corner.
Chrissie sat on the short bench atop the shoeshine stand. Jim didn’t immediately recognize her because she had cut her hair. Now it fell just short of her shoulders, and she wore it parted on the side, held back by a single barrette. As Jim crossed the room toward her, she stood and looked down at him. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot and the tip of her nose was bright red. He wanted to wrap his arms around her hips and hold his face against her belly.
“You cut your hair,” he said.
Chrissie reached up and hesitantly touched the barrette.
“But I liked it the way it was.”
She covered her face with her hands and sat back down.
“That’s not what I meant to say,” Jim said.
“It was, too.”
“I don’t know what I meant to say, but that wasn’t it. I think your hair looks nice like that.”
“You go to hell.”
“But I do. It does.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Chrissie cried. “I don’t think I even like you.”
Inside Jim’s head two scraps of truth clapped into place simultaneously: one, she loved him — she wasn’t happy about it, but she did — and she had come to tell him before he went off and got himself killed just the way Bucky had; two, he had made her life harder than it had to be from the day he had first noticed her getting off the school bus. Now it would be a long time before he could even start to make amends, if that day ever came.
“Can I sit down?” he asked.
Chrissie slid over and made room but she didn’t look at him. Jim climbed up and eased onto the bench while she sobbed quietly into her hands. He placed his feet on the iron footrests and looked around the waiting room — at the empty chairs, the dented spittoons, the black stove, the green, soot-blackened walls, the print of Pikes Peak covered in snow, cut from some ancient calendar before he was even born. It wasn’t, he realized, much of a place to leave from or, for that matter, come back to. In the whole world only a handful of people even knew about his going, and once his train left Aliceville, the strangers who heard it passing in the distance or waited on it at a crossing or glanced up as it shook their houses would not know that he was on it. And if that same train later carried his body by in the opposite direction, they would not know that, either.
“I don’t even know what this old thing is doing in here,” Jim said. “I don’t think Aliceville has ever had a shoeshine man.”
Chrissie didn’t say anything.
“Back when I was a little kid, on rainy days I used to come in here and make believe that it was a stagecoach, and I would sit up here and pretend that I was driving it until Pete would run me off. I used to go all over the country.”
“Could you take me somewhere?” Chrissie asked. She still hadn’t looked at him.
“You would actually go somewhere with me?” he asked.
Chrissie drew a deep breath and nodded slowly.
Jim turned toward her and studied the back of her neck. He didn’t think he had ever seen it before. It was lovely. He raised his hands, grabbing a set of reins. “Hold on, then,” he said. “Yah! Get up!” He bounced up and down a few times and the bench creaked beneath him.
Chrissie lowered her hands and dabbed at her nose with the back of her wrist. Jim would have offered her his handkerchief, but it was already damp. She turned and looked at him seriously.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“How about our place? Up Painter Creek. I think there’s going to be a big stand of walnuts this year.”
“I don’t want to go back there.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re going to leave me in that old house all by myself.”
“But I would never do that.”
“You’re already about to.”
That was true enough. He looked around quickly, a small panic flapping in his chest. “Then, how about that mountain over there?”
They gazed at Pikes Peak on the wall across the room.
“It looks cold,” Chrissie said.
“We’ll live on the sunny side,” Jim said. “I’ll build you a good house and I’ll keep the woodpile tall and I’ll buy you a new coat and I won’t let you get cold ever again.”
“Is that a promise?”
“It’s a solemn promise.”
“Do you think it will take us a long time to get there?”
“A while, I’m afraid. We might wear these horses out.”
He could feel her staring at him, but he didn’t dare look at her.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Okay.” She leaned toward Jim and rested her forehead on his shoulder. “Drive slow.”
Jim slowly turned his face until his nose brushed her hair. He could smell the perfume he had given her for graduation. He closed his eyes.
“Then everything’s settled?” he asked.
“Yes. Everything’s settled.”
“You’ll wait for me?”
Chrissie sat upright, mashing Jim’s nose in the process. “You should know that if I ever decide to love somebody again, I’m going to love them hard, and I’m going to love them for a long time.”
“I could make do with that.”
“Is that how you would love somebody if you decided you were going to love them?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “That’s exactly how I would love them.”
“You’re really sure?”
“I’m really sure.”
“Then, I’ve got something for you.”
Chrissie reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out a tobacco tin, which she presented to Jim. He opened it and looked inside and shook out a long, thin braid of black hair, tied tightly on each end with red thread. Jim noticed that his hands were shaking, and he noticed that he had started to cry, but for the first time he also felt blooming inside his chest the certainty that he would make it home from the war. He would somehow make it back to Aliceville, and Chrissie would be waiting. Wherever he went after that, she would go with him. He reached up and took off his hat. He closed his eyes and leaned toward her, knowing as he did so that she would be leaning toward him.
The sound of the door jerking open startled him. “Jim!” Uncle Zeno cried. “Are you coming or not? The train’s going to leave without you!”
“Oh, God,” Jim said. “The train’s going to leave.” He hadn’t even heard it arrive.
He clapped his hat on his head and leapt off the shoeshine stand and helped Chrissie down. He pulled her across the waiting room and out the door into an indecipherable swirl of shouting and crying and the dangerous, breathing proximity of the train. Somehow he lost Chrissie’s hand and found himself clutching instead the handle of his suitcase. People he couldn’t even see were pushin
g him toward the edge of the platform, and he had the awful feeling that if he got any closer to it, the train was going to eat him. He looked around wildly because he had so much to say to everyone that he should have said long before now, but he didn’t recognize a soul. Someone was shouting his name in his ear and it was Mama and he grabbed her and she weighed next to nothing. She might have disappeared right then if he hadn’t held on to her. She kissed his face and both of his eyes over and over and whispered in his ear, “Oh, Jim, I think I’m going to die,” and he squeezed her until he felt her breath catch and whispered to her, “Nobody’s going to die, Mama. I promise you. We’re all going to live for a long, long time.” Then the uncles surrounded him and kissed him unashamedly and he kissed them back. Their beards were scratchy the way they had been when he was little and their breaths smelled of buttermilk and onions and he couldn’t remember the last time he had kissed them and he wished that he had kissed them every single day of his life. One of them said, “May the Lord bless and keep thee. May His face shine upon thee,” but he wasn’t sure which one it was. He had to tell them something important, but Uncle Zeno said, “Don’t worry. We’ll see about her while you’re gone,” before he even opened his mouth. The conductor yelled, “All aboard!” from just a few feet away and up the track a bell clanged evenly and the engine snorted an impatient blast of steam. “Chrissie,” he said, and suddenly her face was inches from his own and he kissed her and thought, This is what my life tastes like, and the knowledge was brand-new and it was the secret to everything and it thrilled him and he kissed her again and tried to remember it, but it wasn’t enough. He would need to kiss her for years and years, and that wouldn’t be enough, either. Behind him the conductor said, “Son, we gotta go. You’ve got to get on this train,” and the engine chuffed, and chuffed again, and the drive wheels screeched against the rails and the couplings clanked and the car lurched behind him and he said, “I love you, I love you,” and let go and turned away and stepped off the platform onto the moving train.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tony Earley is the author of Jim the Boy, Here We Are in Paradise, and Somehow Form a Family. He lives with his family in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Samuel Milton Fleming Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.