Waiting for Augusta

by Jessica Lawson

  “One way to find out,” Daddy answered.

  “We can’t,” I told him. “We shouldn’t.”

  He sighed, and the disappointment hit me right in the gut, just like it always did. One sigh was all it took. I wondered if Daddy knew how much power was in his sighs, even his dead ones.

  “Look.” Noni’s eyes flashed back and forth over the train as the engine car passed us. “There. We just run alongside and haul ourselves onto a ladder. There’s enough space to hunker down and ride between cars on the platform, or climb on top and sit there. It’ll be an adventure.” She yanked me up.

  I shook my head. “No, we’ll just wait. We already paid for the bus.”

  But she stepped toward the train anyway. “We’re getting on this train, Benjamin Putter.”

  “I’m starting to like her. Let’s get on the train, Ben,” said Daddy.

  “You don’t even know for sure where it’s going. No,” I said to both of them. “We’ll wait for the next bus.”

  “Listen to me, Benjamin Putter,” Noni said, ripping the backpack from my arms.

  “Hey! Give that back!” I lunged toward her, but she spun and I lost my balance and fell, pieces of track gravel digging into my palms, breaking my fall.

  Her hair whipped back with the force of the passing cars, a few pieces clinging to her face. “No!” she shouted. “My daddy watched all kinds of trains, but none made him sing the way a passing coal train would. This is a sign. I have to—”

  She turned while I got to my feet again, and the rest of her words faded with the sound of the train shrieking past. Looking back over her shoulder at me, she started jogging alongside the train. “You have to trust me!” she called out. “It’s better for both of us this way.”

  I caught up and tried to snatch the backpack, but I was afraid I’d knock her the wrong way and she’d get run over. “Give him back!”

  She took the bag off her shoulder, swinging it like she was ready to throw.

  I ran after her. “Hey, stop! The bag’ll fall and get run over! The rest of your precious pork is in there, not to mention my daddy’s ASHES!”

  She lowered her arm, even as she kept jogging, and I thought I had her. The train was starting to speed up as the front of it left town and she’d miss her chance. But instead of giving it back to me, she put both backpack straps on and ran faster. She looked back, her voice slipping in and out of the air around me. “You . . . not about me . . . about helping him . . .”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. All I knew was that she wanted to take my daddy on a train ride to God knows where. And then I’d be left behind, watching him go off somewhere without me, like all those times he’d spent playing golf. Like a ball and grass and a set of metal rods were better than me. Like golf was so great, he could barely tear himself away to come home.

  “Noni, please stop!”

  She turned again and smiled a strange, sad, hopeful smile, then caught a train rung. Hauling herself up the ladder, she heaved the pack over the side of the car. The bag bounced once, twice, then lodged itself in a corner. Without pausing, she scooted back down the rungs and let go, tumbling to the side of the tracks while I slowed to a shocked stop. Ten cars passed me before my head fully processed that Noni’d actually let go of the pack.

  Daddy was gone.

  So was my paint box.

  So was the rest of our pork.

  I had the strangest feeling that most all of me was gone along with those things, and the part of me left standing on the side of the tracks was nothing more than an empty plate full of gnawed-on bones.

  Then Noni scrambled over, grabbed my hand, and looked me in the eye. “Sorry I had to do that. Get running.”

  I’d never been a fast runner, and it’d take a miracle to catch up and not get killed trying to climb on. “We’ll never make it.”

  She yanked me. “That doesn’t mean you don’t try anyway. This trip is gonna get old real quick if I have to keep telling you what to do. Now, run.”

  Metal scraped against the train tracks, chugging and shrieking and creaking and rushing to haul its load far away. Daddy was leaving me again along with it, that was certain, but this time was different. This time I had the chance to run after him.

  I took it.

  HOLE 14

  Coal Dust

  Pumping my legs after Noni, I watched her hand reach for a metal side ladder rung and miss every time another full car passed us. Three times she did that before catching hold and swinging up to another rung, then climbing over to the narrow platform that jutted out at the end of each car. She turned to extend her hand again, this time to me. She was yelling something.

  “What?”

  “Close your eyes! Just run!”

  I did. Once again it was like Noni had woven a spell, her magic making me do things that Benjamin Putter knew were wrong and were completely outside the laws of life besides. Things like don’t open your backpack for strangers, and don’t let people make out like you don’t speak, and don’t run beside a moving train with your eyes shut. But somehow, it worked. With my eyes closed and my legs pumping, I became some kind of superhero—The Incredible Flying Ben “Bobby Jones” Putter. I became someone my Daddy would be proud to clink a glass to.

  By the time I grazed Noni’s fingers with my own, opened my eyes, and grabbed the side ladder, my legs were moving so fast that I practically flew through the air and landed on the bottom rung. Reaching out one foot and getting a tight hold on the end of the train car, I swung around and squeezed in beside her on the platform. We crouched there and caught our breath, laughing in shock and relief, two runaways from Alabama on a train that went steadily about its business, not knowing or caring we were there.

  Blurred tracks flew by in the open space between cars. A bar of thick metal and a heavy latch connected us to the next box of coal. Noni crossed over the bar and latch, and I followed, hugging the next car’s end ladder like it was my mama. When she started up the ladder, I followed again.

  We piled onto a sea of black stones and let the wind cool us for a brief moment. I’d never seen Alabama from a coal train, and it looked different from the landscape I’d passed in the bus. It felt different, too, watching growing fields of corn on one side and budding tobacco and farmhouses on the other, me sitting beside a girl and not talking, just looking. The colors were everywhere and everywhere and everywhere. I opened my eyes wider, trying to take in the whole picture at once.

  Bluewhitelightskygreenbrowndarkfieldyellowpurplebluepinkflowergreenbrowngold.

  It was a wonder like I’d never seen, and if I hadn’t been hunting my dead daddy’s ashes, and if my paint box wasn’t in the backpack alongside him, I believe I would’ve liked to take out my watercolors and make an abstract painting of the view for May Talbot and see what kind of story words she picked for it.

  Sounds nice, said the view. But you are hunting your dead daddy’s ashes.

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Over the coal piles, down the end ladder to the small platform, across connecting bars and latches, up the next car’s ladder. Repeat and repeat and repeat. Though I looked ahead for Daddy, I couldn’t make him out in the line of black boxes in front of us.

  “What if he fell?”

  “He didn’t.”

  She might have been lying, but it can get tiring on your heart to go around thinking maybe people were always lying to you. I’ll be back by supper, Daddy would say before staying out after hitting balls, playing guitar with friends instead of coming home to me and Mama. Your daddy’ll be home to take you fishing, don’t you worry, Mama would say before shaking her head and gritting her teeth. More painting time, she’d say, like it was what I wanted to hear. You know your daddy loves you anyway. That last one wasn’t a lie, because maybe she thought that was something she knew. But love isn’t a fact, it’s a feeling, and the feeling that my daddy loved me was like catching fog. It was there, but I couldn’t get a solid hold on it. I think maybe
it was that extra word that made it all seem slippery. It was the anyway that made it feel like a lie.

  “Okay,” I told Noni.

  We went up and down eighteen coal cars before we found Daddy. Noni and I were both filthy-exhausted by then, covered in coal dust from head to toe. It was well worth the time and effort when I saw the backpack tucked into the corner where Noni’d tossed it. The sight of the urn nearly made me cry, and my neck lump moved a little, rotating a slow dance of relief.

  “Benjamin?” Daddy coughed himself awake from whatever blank space he’d been in. “Where the heck am I now?”

  “You’re on a coal train, Daddy. Heading east.”

  “You jumped the train?”

  “Yep.”

  There was a pause while my father considered me. “Good boy,” he said.

  With a smile that stretched right through the lump in my throat and into the pool of lumps surrounding me, I felt my insides get filled up until I swelled with that good boy. That good boy was like a long drink of cool water. That good boy made me wonder if I couldn’t keep my daddy around if only I could keep finding pigs to butcher and trains to jump on. Maybe I could become who Daddy needed me to be and maybe he could do the same for me and maybe he wouldn’t have to go anywhere because he would realize that he’d belonged with me all along.

  “He okay?” Noni asked.

  I nodded. “Noni? About you taking my daddy . . .”

  “Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know what else to do. But we’re a team, okay? I’m going to help you, and you’ll help me. So far I’ve been carrying more than my load of the helping part, but you’ll get there.” She put her hand on my shoulder and leaned close. “I’ve got faith in you, Benjamin Putter.”

  “I butchered a whole hog,” I reminded her. “And I just drew a picture that got us a lighter and a spoon.”

  “Which you wouldn’t have had to do if you hadn’t picked the wrong bus. But I won’t hold a grudge.”

  “Wrong bus? If you’d brought any money from wherever you came wandering from, maybe you could have taken your own bus.”

  She frowned. “But I like having company.”

  That caught me off guard. I searched her face, but she didn’t seem to be joking. “You’ve got a funny way of showing it. Don’t take the urn again. Okay?”

  “Fine.” A remnant of the stink eye she’d had when I met her flared up, along with her nostrils. “And don’t you go trying to stick your nose too much in my business.”

  Has to get the last word, doesn’t she? the coal beneath me pointed out.

  Don’t let her, suggested a Marlboro patch.

  “Fine,” I told her. “And next time you decide one of us can’t talk, pick yourself.”

  She nodded. “I just might do that.”

  I wasn’t expecting her to agree. “Oh. Well, okay.”

  The sun was starting to head toward setting. It was maybe five o’clock. With the train’s movement, the Alabama heat felt cooler and it was downright pleasant, other than a line of dark clouds following behind us at a distance. There wasn’t a thing in the world to do but dig out a little sitting spot for all of us and eat the last of the pork and wash it down with the last of the water from my bottle.

  Noni and I threw pieces of coal off the train, trying to hit things, and had a gentle Hell’s snowball fight with the smaller scraps. She took off her shoelaces and tied knots, showing me a bowline, a clove hitch, a fisherman’s knot, and a few others. I told her about Daddy’s favorite golfers, the Big Five, letting Daddy interrupt to test me on quotes, and decided my next fake name would be Walter Hagen, Bobby Jones’s biggest rival of the day.

  She said she’d be Wendy Hagen and told me that if you pressed coal hard enough it turned to diamonds. She made coins disappear from her hands and wouldn’t show me how to do it and then plucked the coins from hidden spots. I swear her hands were empty, sleeves pushed back, when she plunged her hand deep down in the coal and came up with a nickel. I begged to know the secret, but she only winked and said if she told me everything, it wouldn’t be magic.

  Eventually we quieted down and just stared at the landscape. We passed through a town and Noni waved at a confused driver who was stopped at the safety gates, waiting for the train to go by so he could cross the tracks. Behind him, I saw a general store and a short line of buildings and a large sign that said:

  WELCOME, YA’LL, TO GRINK

  YOU’LL MISS US IF YOU BLINK

  Population 324 187 99

  Pulling the road atlas from Daddy’s backpack, I opened it to the Alabama page and searched east of where we’d crashed. Nothing.

  “Try Georgia,” Noni said, flipping through the atlas.

  It took less than a minute to find the smallest of dots. “There it is.” I traced the space between Grink and Augusta. “We’ve got a ways to go,” I said, shifting around to get comfortable.

  We spoke in quieter voices then, and I told Noni about Miss Stone, my art teacher who’d left my school one month ago because the school decided there wasn’t enough money for art or music now that they’d lost so many students to the white-only school. Her job had gotten butchered away, like the school was a pig and art class was hacked off and thrown in the no-good pile. I told her how Miss Stone was the nicest person I knew. Noni told me that my mama was the nicest lady she’d ever known because she’d fed her for free and had given her an extra-big piece of pie and hadn’t asked questions.

  I hoped Mama was doing all right without me and that she wasn’t too worried. I hoped she’d agree that I was doing the right thing for Daddy.

  The world was soaked in the prettiest kind of light, and as the sun got lower in the sky, I told Noni how Daddy’d died of lung cancer. “What happened to your dad?” I asked her.

  She picked up a piece of coal and rubbed it between her hands. “I’m not ready to talk about it. Okay?”

  It was okay, but it wasn’t what I wanted to hear and I felt stupid for being so open with someone who refused to tell me as much as I’d told her. She’d said back in Hilltop that she’d be my partner. My friend. But I got the idea that Noni, though we were traveling together, didn’t want or need a friend. Not a close one, anyway.

  Did you think this girl was gonna turn into a replacement for May Talbot? asked an extra-big piece of coal. Nobody can replace May.

  I threw the coal piece hard, banishing it for speaking the truth, watching it fly into a field and wondering if it was too late for me to fix things between me and May.

  “Don’t be mad at me for not being able to tell you the whole truth.” Noni reached her right hand around her front, letting her fingers circle her bruised elbow. “I know you’ve got questions, but I’ve got to follow my wandering rules.” She met my stare, her chin shaking a little, maybe from the cars rattling along the rails. “They’re all I’ve got to guide me, okay? That and finding the right sign. Those things are all I’ve got. Maybe I can tell you more later. Just not now.”

  “All right.”

  • • •

  We’d been on the train maybe an hour past Grink. Sunset oranges and reds and pinks weren’t too far off, and the wind from the train’s movement began giving me the shivers.

  “How long do we have before dark?” Noni asked with a yawn. “I’m a little tuckered.”

  “I don’t know. About an hour, based on the sky. Maybe two,” I said, pleased that I knew something she didn’t seem to.

  I wondered if Noni and I would be sleeping on the train. Then I started thinking about nights I’d gone to bed late, after waiting up for Daddy. I thought about how I’d shuffle my legs under the sheets, rotating them in and out, in and out, to keep the cloth cool during the summertime night heat.

  I thought about hearing Daddy come in and how I’d always wondered whether I should jump out of bed to go see him.

  I thought of what a strange feeling it always was, to be right in my house and not know where I belonged: in bed asleep or saying goodnight to my father. I n
ever knew what to do and nearly always ended up sitting on the edge of my bed, waiting. I wondered if that’s what Daddy felt like now, stuck in purgatory. Like a boy at the edge of his bed.

  And then I thought that Dr. Bartelle at church was probably right. I thought too much and did too little. But I could change. This trip could change me if I let it. It was as I was absentmindedly shuffling my legs in the coal, moving instead of thinking, that I accidentally kicked my father off the train.

  HOLE 15

  Georgia Peaches

  I didn’t see where he landed. All I saw was his gray-silver urn fading away, disappearing like brush paint fading into a creek. All I heard was the train and my voice screaming one word, not slow and beautiful and perfect like Daddy had said Augusta, but fast and panicked and messy.

  Noni jerked out of some spell beside me, her head darting back and forth. “ ‘Wait?’ Wait for what? What’s wrong?”

  The coal was too busy forcing me to a standing position to answer. I scrambled up and it shifted under me, saying Jump now, jump now, jump now. My fingers pointed over the side. “The urn,” I managed to whisper. “Noni, how fast are we going?”

  Her expression was partly shadowed, but I saw the moment when Noni’s horror turned to resolve. Instead of telling me I was crazy, she spread her arms wide and closed her eyes. Then she blinked them open and peered over the side. “Too fast for comfort. Make sure not to hit a tree and jump far enough to clear the tracks.”

  Swallowing, I scanned the landscape and saw lights in the distance, spread far apart. We were in farm country of some sort. I didn’t even know for absolute sure what state we were in. I’d be jumping into nowhere-land. “Fear of jumping,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “Sam Snead said ‘A player should correct one fault at a time. Concentrate on the one fault you want to overcome.’ Right now fear of jumping is the fault I want to work on.” I didn’t tell her that Sam Snead also said “Of all the hazards, fear is the worst.” “He won eighty-two professional golf championships and—”