by Billy Coffey
My momma (you never met her either) used to always go to the bingo in town. Every week she went. She’d play and play and come home with nothing but clothes stinking of cigarettes, and what Daddy would say is it’s no use to ever go at all. He said our family always had bad luck. That’s true because we never won ahead on anything. Momma always had fun though. And I think that’s what we all have to do, enjoy things anyway because we won’t win. Nobody ever wins in this life. It’s all 34 and rain.
I don’t want to end this letter with something so sad (even though it’s true) so I’ll just say I hope you’re doing well. I hope you’re good.
Love,
Dad
-8-
She whispers the words to the wind and the darkening sky beyond, to the small town they pass, unknown to Abel and Dumb Willie but known to Dorothy, because even now she is in a small house not far from where the train passes, taking an elderly man onto the path that leads to a place far fairer than that which he leaves behind. She says those words again, soft so Abel won’t hear:
“Thirty-four and rain.”
Abel’s daddy had said much more in his letter, which Dorothy asked Abel to read aloud not once but twice, making him promise nothing had been left out. She holds that letter now in her hand. The words themselves mean little to her, being nothing more than a collection of squiggly marks and dots. It is the page itself Dorothy wishes to touch, if only to gauge the man who touched it before her.
Because there is something here. Something more. Hidden.
She looks from the paper to where Abel sits, guarding Dumb Willie not from her or the monsters Dumb Willie believes lurk here but from the nightmare that stirred him.
Thirty-four and rain. Why had Abel’s father used such words as that? More, why had those words struck Dorothy such? So much, in fact, that she had Abel read those parts over yet again.
She remembers a day such as that, one long past and near to where the train is leading them. Not a city or a town, but a single, forgotten place. How the wind had blown that cold day and the rain had fallen, Death being called. Dorothy being seen.
The page trembles in her hand, shaken not by the train cutting through these lands but by Dorothy’s own memories. She looks back to where Abel sits, shining and still. He stares down at a yellow cast that covers an arm no longer broken, rubbing a soothing hand upon a behemoth’s chest. Dumb Willie will have to go somewhere safe. They all must, Dorothy decides, else their journey will end and she will have to take Abel on.
The boy said he didn’t know how things had gotten so bad. That is a sentiment Dorothy knows well. She has gone against what is meant by keeping Abel in this world, Death so pained that it could no longer bear to take another child from this world, even to paradise, knowing what that child would do once he took Death’s hand. That act of rebellion will bring punishment. Dorothy is powerful, and yet there is One who stands over even her, and that One rules all. Even if Abel is delivered on after he finds his father, judgment must come.
But it is to Dorothy’s grief that she now finds herself struggling even to fulfill this, Death’s very purpose. Dumb Willie has promised not to tell Abel of his end. Dorothy herself would do that, she’d said, after Abel’s father was found. Yet now she knows she could not bear to give Abel this message, no matter the comfort and joy he would find once freed of this world. Not because that comfort and joy would mean the end of Abel’s dream of a life with both father and mother. Not because Abel would leave Dumb Willie behind to sit alone at a table of consequences.
Because Abel loves her pure and whole with a noble heart filled with innocence, and that is a thing Death has never been told.
She looks at the page again and settles her eyes upon the marks that Abel said were the ones he had to repeat:
Thirty-four and rain.
They cannot stay on this path. It is too dangerous for Dumb Willie and so too dangerous for Abel. The wilds beyond would not keep them. It must be her, then. The woman on the farm.
There is nowhere else for them to hide.
-9-
It is not sleep that takes Abel this night, nor can he say he remains awake. He is rather caught in a dark place between the two, where memories whisper and pictures flash—his momma and his bedroom, fishing with Dumb Willie, walking among the tall grass and hidden rocks of the field behind his house as a distant whistle blows.
They are comforting scenes that come without the sharp lines and bright dyes of the near past. These are dulled and sepia-colored snapshots of pictures taken long ago and left to fade inside boxes stuffed in moldering attics or scrapbooks shoved into the nether regions of an old hope chest.
These images swirl toward darkness inside Abel’s mind before flaring again to pictures of Chris’s face, twisted in rage with a runner of slobber oozing from the corner of his mouth. The feel of the hard ground of the field at Abel’s back. His cast flailing in shocks of yellow light as he tries to parry Chris’s blows. Dumb Willie’s voice—You leave. Him. Lone you. Stink—and Chris being flung upward as though yanked by the same force that had taken Reverend Johnny. Dumb Willie picking Abel up and racing toward the train. Abel being lifted high and thrown to where the boxcar rolls, that feeling of flight
(I’m flying, I’m flying for real)
toward that wide black mouth and now that wide mouth moving farther from reach. Abel tumbling to darkness, left to fall forever and never land, caught between two worlds—
What this is, this in-between place, shatters at the sound of scraping metal. He feels the boxcar shudder around him and lifts his head from Dumb Willie’s chest. Night has descended beyond the door where Dorothy stands. Her leather bag is slung over her shoulder.
“Abel,” she says, “time to get up. And wake Dumb Willie too. We have to go.”
“Go where?”
“We have to get off this train. Cars are being dropped. Now’s our time.”
“I don’t . . .”
He rubs his eyes and tries to wrangle his thoughts as to what is dream and what is real. Dumb Willie stirs beside him. He rises up like a mummy from a crypt and rubs his own eyes, says, “I’m. Hungry.”
Dorothy says, “We’ll get you some food soon enough, Dumb Willie. Right now it’s time we find somewhere safe for you. Not for long, only a few days.”
Abel looks beyond the door. “Where are we?”
“Just to this side of North Carolina. I know it don’t seem far, but it is. For a freight train, it is.”
“Carolina?” he says. “Are we there? Are we in Fairhope?”
“Not just yet. It’s a ways more.” She leans her head out the door. Checking, Abel supposes, to see if the conductor has gotten out of the engine.
“We gone wait for another train?”
“No, Abel. Trains aren’t safe just now. Nowhere’s safe, really.”
“ ’Cause I’m fay. Mus,” Dumb Willie says. He offers a smile of victory at Dorothy’s nod.
“I know a place,” she says. “At least, I think I do. We can hide there.”
“What about Fairhope?” Abel asks. “We got to get to my daddy.”
“Fairhope’s down the rails, Abel.” Her eyes are dark but soft and full of kindness and something Abel cannot reckon. Sadness, he thinks, or a feeling close to it. “Another train, and likely more. The more trains we have to jump on and off right now, the more apt Dumb Willie will get seen.”
Abel feels a lump sprout in his throat. He dips his head to nod and finds he cannot lift his chin. He feels Dumb Willie’s hand on him, hears, “Be oh. Kay A. Bull,” and spots the tops of Dorothy’s shoes when she walks to him. Her hands are on his shoulders. She bends down.
“Fairhope’s a ways yet, Abel. We’re here. Now, maybe here leads to there just like you say and like your Reverend Johnny foretold. But between the two’s a wide space even I can’t see through, and so what’s left for us is the only thing I know, and that’s to keep you and Dumb Willie safe. Things got off-balance. I’m trying to set them right
, but there’s not much time. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he whispers. And she’s right. “We have to keep Dumb Willie safe. But we can keep him safe while we go on. I went the wrong way when we left home. This feels like we’re going the wrong way again.”
“We’re not.”
But we are, he thinks. It feels like we are.
She lifts his chin with a finger. “What you told me last night, Abel. That was a brave thing. Telling the truth is always brave. And for that, I’m going to tell you the truth too. I saw what happened that night. Chris dying. I saw it. Then I pulled you and Dumb Willie up into the car, and that’s when the balance got lost. I shouldn’t have done that, Abel. It wasn’t meant. But I did because I wanted to and I’m glad it happened. Because I’m fond of Dumb Willie, and I’m very fond of you.”
Very fond does not sound like love to Abel, but it does sound close.
“I don’t know how it can be that I feel that way,” Dorothy says. “I’m a stranger to most, and most who see me are afraid of one thing or another. Those who pass my way do so for only a bit before they’re off to what’s next. Not you, though. Not Dumb Willie. You I saved, and I don’t want a bad thing to happen to you because of it.”
“You saw?” he asks. “Then why’d you make me tell it?”
Her words sound strange and spoken not by her lips but from that thing in her eyes Abel cannot say, that sadness: “Because I don’t want you looking back. I couldn’t bear it if you did that, Abel. And keeping close a thing like that, something so horrible. You would look back, just like all the others have.”
“What others?”
“Don’t you mind that just now, and don’t you worry. Do you have your letters?”
“Yes.”
“Keep them close. Those letters are special, Abel. I don’t know how or why, but I think they’re pointing the way. Not just to Fairhope, but through. The first one said go into Greenville. The second one said go on. So we’re going on. It’s a hidden place, a safe place. For you,” Dorothy says, “and hopefully for me too. But we have to follow. It’s meant.”
“We have to go to Fairhope,” he says.
“Hope,” Dumb Willie adds.
Dorothy shakes her head. “It’s not meant yet.”
“You’re saying we don’t even have a choice, Dorothy,” Abel says. “We do. Nothing’s meant.” He holds out his cast. “Is this meant? Is me being a cripple all my life meant? Having nobody wanting to see me because I’m too frail and ugly? Poor Dumb Willie having to get chained up in his garden to work and get thought of by everybody as special in a way special don’t mean? Please don’t tell me any of that’s meant, Dorothy.”
Far away, a whistle calls. Abel lifts his eyes toward the sound but finds Dorothy does not. Her gaze is settled on him alone.
“You got will, Abel Shifflett. Outside you may be small, but inside you’re a giant wrapped in brittle bones that stretch to bursting. Folk can get far on will. I’ve seen it. They’ll put themselves in chains of their own choosing for just about anything, but the only way they can do that is because they start out free.
“You’re right. There is choice. But behind all that choosing is a design that not even freedom can reach, and those are the things meant. There’s no turning away from it that doesn’t end in despair, and that’s why we have to go. Your daddy’ll still be where he is. The road is ever long, but we’ll get there. I won’t let it be otherwise.”
Abel’s voice is soft and breaking. “It’s my choice what I do, Dorothy. I don’t care what’s meant. I don’t want to hide nowhere. I’m scared and I miss my momma and I got to find my daddy. I got to keep Dumb Willie safe, and I’m scared I won’t. So we got to keep going. Please? Maybe we can change what you think’s meant. How you know we can’t if we don’t even try?”
“Because I have tried, Abel. I have, and now we’re all in trouble. So will you trust me? I will keep you safe, and Dumb Willie. I will bear anything to keep you well.”
She leans in now, tilting her head, and all of Abel’s fear and worry is cast aside at the touch of Dorothy’s lips soft upon his cheek. He feels that cheek blush and his stomach warm, hears Dumb Willie’s “Oooh” from behind. Abel keeps his eyes wide, refusing to shut them for fear that will lessen the memory of it. Whether that kiss is given so that he will do as Dorothy asks is never entertained. Abel has heard tales of a woman’s wiles, mostly spoken in the corners of the school playground where no teachers can hear. But he senses no wiles with Dorothy, because she’s very fond of him and that might mean something like love.
-10-
They ease from the car in the darkness of early morning. Dorothy leaves first, followed by Dumb Willie, Abel in his arms.
“This track isn’t a long one,” she says, “and this part is a storage line. There’s like to be cars waiting here when we get back. That’s good, because it means won’t be any police nosing around to check things. We’ll just have to hope when the engine comes, it’s pointing southway.”
All of this is true; not a word Dorothy has spoken since they fled Greenville has been a false one. Colored, maybe, but no lies. She had no idea the train would switch tracks hours back to drop cars on this short line. The fact that it had only convinced her further that the letters Abel carried were more than words from his father. They were directions. Yet while that should bring her some comfort, she finds that is not the case. Not given where they are to go next.
They cross the rails under night’s cover, taking care not to stumble as they travel the steep slope downward that leads to a mass of overgrown bushes and weeds. With one more look back to the engine about to depart, Dorothy leads them on. The land ahead is mountainous, thick with trees but thin of civilization.
“It’s a ways,” she says. “A day’s walk, but we’ll be fine. Dumb Willie, bet I can get you another rabbit. Or some possum.”
Not far on they trade an open sky of early morning for one shrouded by Appalachian forest. The three of them alone together now, Abel keeping his hand in Dorothy’s and Dumb Willie following close, growing tired in his steps yet buoyed by the promise of food and the black hat leaning upon his head.
Too far into this unsettled land to be famous, Dumb Willie’s voice breaks into stilted song. The woods fill with the sound of old hymns recounting despair turned to hope and faith in spite of the world’s heavy yoke. Dorothy adds her voice, bringing balance to Dumb Willie’s clipped syllables and half words. Abel looks on in a strange way as though the verses are foreign. Dorothy coaches him until he is muttering in tune, rolling a familiar word or repeated phrase as though sampling a strange yet fragrant meal.
Memories of Greenville are still fresh in Dorothy’s mind, though they look to have faded in the boys’. Dumb Willie carries Abel over the rough patches in the woods as Abel uses his sleeve to wipe the sweat from his friend’s brow. Dorothy remains at a close distance, held there by a burden for the place waiting on. She listens as Abel and Dumb Willie recount stories of their lives in Mattingly, each filled with that peculiar mix of regret and longing common to any place called home. It is true, she thinks, that neither boy can go back. Even regardless of Abel’s death, what would wait for them should he and Dumb Willie return to stay in Mattingly would only be a life of toil and wear for Abel, the joys he would find with his momma bent by Dumb Willie suffering the consequences of the Jones boy’s death. It is meant that neither of them go back, though not in the determined and freedom-robbing way in which Abel sees it. That is a small comfort, though on this morning Dorothy finds even a small comfort well enough.
The sky eases from black to gray and then blues that burst to alpenglow along the distant ridges. Deer and possum crunch unseen over carpets of browning leaves. Birds call for the sun. The trees themselves seem to groan and stretch as a mist heavy with pine and honeysuckle rises through the branches. Far from alone, Dorothy tells them they make their long way under the watchful gaze of a world set apart, one older than the one to which they are acc
ustomed, and more real.
*
They rest along an old logging road high in the hills as morning creeps to afternoon. Dumb Willie feasts on a salad of greens and berries, all washed down with gulps of mountain water that gushes from a small creek nearby. He moves off to wash in the creek, nodding in his sweet way when Dorothy asks that he keep his clothes on this time. Abel watches him with eyes that now shine as stars, then looks down at his cast.
“Dumb Willie’s always hungry,” he says.
“So I’ve noticed.”
“I haven’t eaten. Have you noticed that? I haven’t eaten since supper the night I left.”
The words are given as an innocent statement, nothing more than curiosity, though to Dorothy they ring like a klaxon. Abel is looking at her now, wanting some sort of answer as to the reason he no longer seems to be in need of food at all, which is an answer she refuses to offer.
“Am I sick, you think?” he asks.
“ ’Course not. You’re changing, Abel. That’s all.”
True again. Abel is changing, though in ways he does not yet know. Not just with eyes that now glow against a soul as strong as any Dorothy has known seeking to crack the thin shell around it, but in other ways as well. Should someone be back at the railcars now and stumble upon the strange tracks made into the bushes and meadows beyond, their eyes would see only two sets—one large, the tracks of a man both strong and tall, and another pair of footprints, these smaller and narrower, as though made by a young woman.
It is indeed meant that they find the woman at the farm. Dorothy is as sure of this as she is uneasy of the prospect, but Abel is right as well. They need to strike for Fairhope soon, and Dorothy must find a way to tell Abel that Fairhope is their journey’s end. She must take him on, as has always been Death’s purpose. If not, judgment will surely come. And that judgment, however holy it will be and however fearful Dorothy imagines it, pales against the greater judgment she will levy upon herself should the thin veneer Abel wears give out and his essence be released. She does not know what will happen then, and can only guess Abel’s soul will be left to wander alone in the dim mists between worlds.