There have been many tragic periods in history. As the melancholy story that follows suggests, though, there are few of those periods that couldn’t also have been made a little worse. . . .
SOLDIERS OF THE G.A.R. stand alongside the tracks. They are General Dodge’s soldiers, keeping the tracks maintained for the Lincoln Train. If I stand right, the edges of my bonnet are like blinders and I can’t see the soldiers at all. It is a spring evening. At the house the lilacs are blooming. My mother wears a sprig pinned to her dress under her cameo. I can smell it, even in the crush of these people all waiting for the train. I can smell the lilac, and the smell of too many people crowded together, and a faint taste of cinders on the air. I want to go home but that house is not ours anymore. I smooth my black dress. On the train platform we are all in mourning.
The train will take us to St. Louis, from whence we will leave for the Oklahoma territories. They say we will walk, but I don’t know how my mother will do that. She has been poorly since the winter of ’62. I check my bag with our water and provisions.
“Julia Adelaide,” my mother says, “I think we should go home.”
“We’ve come to catch the train,” I say, very sharp.
I’m Clara, my sister Julia is eleven years older than me. Julia is married and living in Tennessee. My mother blinks and touches her sprig of lilac uncertainly. If I am not sharp with her, she will keep on it.
I wait. When I was younger I used to try to school my unruly self in Christian charity. God sends us nothing we cannot bear. Now I only try to keep it from my face, try to keep my outer self disciplined. There is a feeling inside me, an anger, that I can’t even speak. Something is being bent, like a bow, bending and bending and bending –
“When are we going home?” my mother says.
“Soon,” I say because it is easy.
But she won’t remember and in a moment she’ll ask again. And again and again, through this long long train ride to St. Louis. I am trying to be a Christian daughter, and I remind myself that it is not her fault that the war turned her into an old woman, or that her mind is full of holes and everything new drains out. But it’s not my fault either. I don’t even try to curb my feelings and I know that they rise up to my face. The only way to be true is to be true from the inside and I am not. I am full of unchristian feelings. My mother’s infirmity is her trial, and it is also mine.
I wish I were someone else.
The train comes down the track, chuffing, coming slow. It is an old, badly used thing, but I can see that once it was a model of chaste and beautiful workmanship. Under the dust it is a dark claret in color. It is said that the engine was built to be used by President Lincoln, but since the assassination attempt he is too infirm to travel. People begin to push to the edge of the platform, hauling their bags and worldly goods. I don’t know how I will get our valise on. If Zeke could have come I could have at least insured that it was loaded on, but the Negroes are free now and they are not to help. The notice said no family Negroes could come to the station, although I see their faces here and there through the crowd.
The train stops outside the station to take on water.
“Is it your father?” my mother says diffidently. “Do you see him on the train?”
“No, Mother,” I say. “We are taking the train.”
“Are we going to see your father?” she asks.
It doesn’t matter what I say to her, she’ll forget it in a few minutes, but I cannot say yes to her. I cannot say that we will see my father even to give her a few moments of joy.
“Are we going to see your father?” she asks again.
“No,” I say.
“Where are we going?”
I have carefully explained it all to her and she cried, every time I did. People are pushing down the platform toward the train, and I am trying to decide if I should move my valise toward the front of the platform. Why are they in such a hurry to get on the train? It is taking us all away.
“Where are we going? Julia Adelaide, you will answer me this moment,” my mother says, her voice too full of quaver to quite sound like her own.
“I’m Clara,” I say. “We’re going to St. Louis.”
“St. Louis,” she says. “We don’t need to go to St. Louis. We can’t get through the lines, Julia, and I . . . I am quite indisposed. Let’s go back home now, this is foolish.”
We cannot go back home. General Dodge has made it clear that if we did not show up at the train platform this morning and get our names checked off the list, he would arrest every man in town, and then he would shoot every tenth man. The town knows to believe him, General Dodge was put in charge of the trains into Washington, and he did the same thing then. He arrested men and held them and every time the train was fired upon he hanged a man.
There is a shout and I can only see the crowd moving like a wave, pouring off the edge of the platform. Everyone is afraid there will not be room. I grab the valise and I grab my mother’s arm and pull them both. The valise is so heavy that my fingers hurt, and the weight of our water and food is heavy on my arm. My mother is small and when I put her in bed at night she is all tiny like a child, but now she refuses to move, pulling against me and opening her mouth wide, her mouth pink inside and wet and open in a wail I can just barely hear over the shouting crowd. I don’t know if I should let go of the valise to pull her, or for a moment I think of letting go of her, letting someone else get her on the train and finding her later.
A man in the crowd shoves her hard from behind. His face is twisted in wrath. What is he so angry at? My mother falls into me, and the crowd pushes us. I am trying to hold on to the valise, but my gloves are slippery, and I can only hold with my right hand, with my left I am trying to hold up my mother. The crowd is pushing all around us, trying to push us toward the edge of the platform.
The train toots as if it were moving. There is shouting all around us. My mother is fallen against me, her face pressed against my bosom, turned up toward me. She is so frightened. Her face is pressed against me in improper intimacy, as if she were my child. My mother as my child. I am filled with revulsion and horror. The pressure against us begins to lessen. I still have a hold of the valise. We’ll be all right. Let the others push around, I’ll wait and get the valise on somehow. They won’t leave us travel without anything.
My mother’s eyes close. Her wrinkled face looks up, the skin under her eyes making little pouches, as if it were a second blind eyelid. Everything is so grotesque. I am having a spell. I wish I could be somewhere where I could get away and close the windows. I have had these spells since they told us that my father was dead, where everything is full of horror and strangeness.
The person behind me is crowding into my back and I want to tell them to give way, but I cannot. People around us are crying out. I cannot see anything but the people pushed against me. People are still pushing, but now they are not pushing toward the side of the platform but toward the front, where the train will be when we are allowed to board.
Wait, I call out but there’s no way for me to tell if I’ve really called out or not. I can’t hear anything until the train whistles. The train has moved? They brought the train into the station? I can’t tell, not without letting go of my mother and the valise. My mother is being pulled down into this mass. I feel her sliding against me. Her eyes are closed. She is a huge doll, limp in my arms. She is not even trying to hold herself up. She has given up to this moment.
I can’t hold on to my mother and the valise. So I let go of the valise.
Oh merciful god.
I do not know how I will get through this moment.
The crowd around me is a thing that presses me and pushes me up, pulls me down. I cannot breathe for the pressure. I see specks in front of my eyes, white sparks, too bright, like metal and like light. My feet aren’t under me. I am buoyed by the crowd and my feet are behind me. I am unable to stand, unable to fall. I think my mother is against me, but I can’t tell, and in this mass I do
n’t know how she can breathe.
I think I am going to die.
All the noise around me does not seem like noise anymore. It is something else, some element, like water or something, surrounding me and overpowering me.
It is like that for a long time, until finally I have my feet under me, and I’m leaning against people. I feel myself sink, but I can’t stop myself. The platform is solid. My whole body feels bruised and roughly used.
My mother is not with me. My mother is a bundle of black on the ground, and I crawl to her. I wish I could say that as I crawl to her I feel concern for her condition, but at this moment I am no more than base animal nature and I crawl to her because she is mine and there is nothing else in the world I can identify as mine. Her skirt is rucked up so that her ankles and calves are showing. Her face is black. At first I think it something about her clothes, but it is her face, so full of blood that it is black.
People are still getting on the train, but there are people on the platform around us, left behind. And other things. A surprising number of shoes, all badly used. Wraps, too. Bags. Bundles and people.
I try raising her arms above her head, to force breath into her lungs. Her arms are thin, but they don’t go the way I want them to. I read in the newspaper that when President Lincoln was shot, he stopped breathing, and his personal physician started him breathing again. But maybe the newspaper was wrong, or maybe it is more complicated than I understand, or maybe it doesn’t always work. She doesn’t breathe.
I sit on the platform and try to think of what to do next. My head is empty of useful thoughts. Empty of prayers.
“Ma’am?”
It’s a soldier of the G.A.R.
“Yes sir?” I say. It is difficult to look up at him, to look up into the sun.
He hunkers down but does not touch her. At least he doesn’t touch her. “Do you have anyone staying behind?”
Like cousins or something? Someone who is not “recalcitrant” in their handling of their Negroes? “Not in town,” I say.
“Did she worship?” he asks, in his northern way.
“Yes sir,” I say, “she did. She was a Methodist, and you should contact the preacher. The Reverend Robert Ewald, sir.”
“I’ll see to it, ma’am. Now you’ll have to get on the train.”
“And leave her?” I say.
“Yes ma’am, the train will be leaving. I’m sorry ma’am.”
“But I can’t,” I say.
He takes my elbow and helps me stand. And I let him.
“We are not really recalcitrant,” I say. “Where were Zeke and Rachel supposed to go? Were we supposed to throw them out?”
He helps me climb onto the train. People stare at me as I get on, and I realize I must be all in disarray. I stand under all their gazes, trying to get my bonnet on straight and smoothing my dress. I do not know what to do with my eyes or hands.
There are no seats. Will I have to stand until St. Louis? I grab a seat back to hold myself up. It is suddenly warm and everything is distant and I think I am about to faint. My stomach turns. I breathe through my mouth, not even sure that I am holding on to the seat back.
But I don’t fall, thank Jesus.
“It’s not Lincoln,” someone is saying, a man’s voice, rich and baritone, and I fasten on the words as a lifeline, drawing myself back to the train car, to the world. “It’s Seward. Lincoln no longer has the capacity to govern.”
The train smells of bodies and warm sweaty wool. It is a smell that threatens to undo me, so I must concentrate on breathing through my mouth. I breathe in little pants, like a dog. The heat lies against my skin. It is airless.
“Of course Lincoln can no longer govern, but that damned actor made him a saint when he shot him,” says a second voice, “And now no one dare oppose him. It doesn’t matter if his policies make sense or not.”
“You’re wrong,” says the first. “Seward is governing through him. Lincoln is an imbecile. He can’t govern, look at the way he handled the war.”
The second snorts. “He won.”
“No,” says the first, “we lost, there is a difference, sir. We lost even though the north never could find a competent general.” I know the type of the first one. He’s the one who thinks he is brilliant, who always knew what President Davis should have done. If they are looking for a recalcitrant southerner, they have found one.
“Grant was competent. Just not brilliant. Any military man who is not Alexander the Great is going to look inadequate in comparison with General Lee.”
“Grant was a drinker,” the first one says. “It was his subordinates. They’d been through years of war. They knew what to do.”
It is so hot on the train. I wonder how long until the train leaves.
I wonder if the Reverend will write my sister in Tennessee and tell her about our mother. I wish the train were going east toward Tennessee instead of north and west toward St. Louis.
My valise. All I have. It is on the platform. I turn and go to the door. It is closed and I try the handle, but it is too stiff for me. I look around for help.
“It’s locked,” says a woman in gray. She doesn’t look unkind.
“My things, I left them on the platform,” I say.
“Oh, honey,” she says, “they aren’t going to let you back out there. They don’t let anyone off the train.”
I look out the window but I can’t see the valise. I can see some of the soldiers, so I beat on the window. One of them glances up at me, frowning, but then he ignores me.
The train blows that it is going to leave, and I beat harder on the glass. If I could shatter that glass. They don’t understand, they would help me if they understood. The train lurches and I stagger. It is out there, somewhere, on that platform. Clothes for my mother and me, blankets, things we will need. Things I will need.
The train pulls out of the station and I feel so terrible I sit down on the floor in all the dirt from people’s feet and sob.
The train creeps slowly at first, but then picks up speed. The clack-clack clack-clack rocks me. It is improper, but I allow it to rock me. I am in others’ hands now and there is nothing to do but be patient. I am good at that. So it has been all my life. I have tried to be dutiful, but something in me has not bent right, and I have never been able to maintain a Christian frame of mind, but like a chicken in a yard, I have always kept my eyes on the small things. I have tended to what was in front of me, first the house, then my mother. When we could not get sugar, I learned to cook with molasses and honey. Now I sit and let my mind go empty and let the train rock me.
“Child,” someone says. “Child.”
The woman in gray has been trying to get my attention for awhile, but I have been sitting and letting myself be rocked.
“Child,” she says again, “would you like some water?”
Yes, I realize, I would. She has a jar and she gives it to me to sip out of. “Thank you,” I say. “We brought water, but we lost it in the crush on the platform.”
“You have someone with you?” she asks.
“My mother,” I say, and start crying again. “She is old, and there was such a press on the platform, and she fell and was trampled.”
“What’s your name?” the woman says.
“Clara Corbett,” I say.
“I’m Elizabeth Loudon,” the woman says. “And you are welcome to travel with me.” There is something about her, a simple pleasantness, that makes me trust her. She is a small woman, with a small nose and eyes as gray as her dress. She is younger than I first thought, maybe only in her thirties? “How old are you? Do you have family?” she asks.
“I am seventeen. I have a sister, Julia. But she doesn’t live in Mississippi anymore.”
“Where does she live?” the woman asks.
“In Beech Bluff, near Jackson, Tennessee.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know it. Is it good country?”
“I think so,” I say. “In her letters it sounds like good co
untry. But I haven’t seen her for seven years.” Of course no one could travel during the war. She has three children in Tennessee. My sister is twenty-eight, almost as old as this woman. It is hard to imagine.
“Were you close?” she asks.
I don’t know that we were close. But she is my sister. She is all I have, now. I hope that the reverend will write her about my mother, but I don’t know that he knows where she is. I will have to write her. She will think I should have taken better care.
“Are you traveling alone?”
“My companion is a few seats farther in front. He and I could not find seats together.”
Her companion is a man? Not her husband, maybe her brother? But she would say her brother if that’s who she meant. A woman traveling with a man. An adventuress, I think. There are stories of women traveling, hoping to find unattached girls like myself. They befriend the young girls and then deliver them to the brothels of New Orleans.
For a moment Elizabeth takes on a sinister cast. But this is a train full of recalcitrant southerners, there is no opportunity to kidnap anyone. Elizabeth is like me, a woman who has lost her home.
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