Lucien’s hand was on the throttle once more. Cora clung to him, to the terror in him, the exhilaration, the risk. Every needle on every dial had peaked, then snapped, the glass restraining them had shattered. The firebox door throbbed like a fevered eye. The welding scars on the engine’s joints stiffened, brittle as ice. One more revolution and the whole contraption would fly apart in a welter of primal steam and lava. We’ll die together, was Cora’s thought as she heard the shriek of rending boiler-plate, the shudder of disconnecting wheels. She waited out the silence that preceded the impact, holding her breath and Lucien’s hand.
But there was no crash, no clatter of wheels on pigiron, no surge of piston in its chamber. No sound but the rushing of the wind behind the snow. They had left the track, the invisible meridian, the groove of all gravity. They were flying weightless and triumphant through the spaces between the snow that rose with them, lifting and blessing, till it turned itself into a constellation of planets, and they soared through its black immaculacy towards the Polar Star whose belly was the Milky Way, whose jasper eye would draw them safely beyond Newton or Darwin or any other calculus of the frozen heart.
Most of the population of the hamlet of Woodston heard the ghost train of ’eighty-six as its shadow hummed past the Grand Trunk passenger station. They heard the muted screech of its futile braking. They flinched as one at the abrupt, epimethean thud of cast-iron on drifted snow. In fact, despite the blizzard and dire storm warnings the good people of Woodston had come out in force to christen their brand-new depot, just completed mere days ago and ready to receive its first passengers on the morrow. The unscheduled arrival of the ceremonial train was more than a shock. Woodston’s reeve was in the midst of a passionate toast to the eternal glory of railways in general and the Grand Trunk in particular. The wine-goblets glistened beneath the gas-lamps. The room burbled with the good cheer that comes from unearned contentment and free booze. So concentrated was the assembly’s attention on the latter exigency that no one noticed, shortly after the meal began about six-thirty, the rumble and roar of a nearby avalanche. Not more than fifty yards from the station where the spur-line itself came to an end, there stood on one side of the tracks a mountain of stored coal, ready to be used as soon as the connecting spur to the northern trunk-line was completed in the spring. Opposite it was another mountain, this one of crushed stone to be likewise deployed in the expansion project. Over the preceding two days local squalls off the Lake had dumped acres of fresh snow onto these man-made peaks. Somewhere between the roast beef and the baked apple, a huge ledge of packed snow gave way and rolled unimpeded into the valley below. This fracture awakened the trolls in the mountain opposite and it too sent an avalanche bevelling down upon the first. The result was that the end-of-line was now defined by a trapezoid of snow thirty-feet high, twenty-feet across and a hundred-yards in length.
Into this welcome – decelerating at sixty-miles-per-hour – the purloined locomotive irrupted.
What the reeve and the anxious press in the doorway behind him saw as they peered speechless into the haze was this: the rear end of a caboose otherwise burrowed utterly in what appeared to be an improvised dune of snow –where the tracks used to be. The caboose door had been knocked silly by the plundering impact, and was giggling on one hinge. Nothing else moved. Nothing else was visible. The snow, between flurries, fluttered and hung. Further along, a thread of steam or frost began to uncoil from the mountain ridge. Something under there was breathing. Then like a blue whale blowing in some fairy-tale sea, a spume of spittle and geysering breath stunned the onlookers. In terror they heard the hiss of overheated, subterranean flesh.
Which noise seemed also to rouse whatever life lay cowering within the caboose, for on the same instant the reeve detected several shadows emerging from the ruptured doorway. Through a scrim of snow he could distinguish them only in silhouette, but it was clear that they were three men and that they occupied various stations of suffering. The forward shadow was taller, or more erect, striding so as to disguise a twisted knee and wrestling manfully with the impossible task of repositioning his crushed bowler. A yard behind him a second shadow essayed to keep pace with abrupt, paralytic steps. Further back: a hunched, crabbed figure was advancing with painful slowness, as if its thighs were glued together. On the platform, no one moved or spoke. The figures came silently towards them, close enough at last so that they were seen, despite the snow, to have human faces – but dazed, tentative, and slackened by incredulity as if they had just stepped onto the dark side of Pluto’s moon.
“Mr. Dilworth!” gasped the reeve.
“Where in hell’s this!”
“Woodston, sir. But what are you doin’ here this time of day?”
“Never mind that,” boomed the voice that made boardrooms tremble and second vice-presidents quake in their sweat. He swivelled and pointed at the crippled creature behind them. “Get the deputy-premier to a toilet.” The reeve leaped forward. “He’s shit his pants.” And leaped back.
“Then, round up your strongest men and dig that son-of-a-bitch out of there!” He aimed a gloved finger at the far end of the avalanche where the smoke-stack of a locomotive was materializing fantastically out of snow, steam and the night-air. “I want that renegade’s balls broiled for breakfast!”
3
While there are many ways in which a conspiracy may be accidentally disclosed, no more public or more indecent exposure could be imagined than that which occurred when the railway executive, the privy councillor and the ambitious reeve staggered into the Woodston station under the scrutiny of two hundred well-dressed guests of every political stripe – dazed, enraged, malodorous, trembling with the aftershock of an hour’s journey into terror. Nor was it convenient to keep from popular view the speculation the presence of a runaway train embedded spectacularly in an impromptu ski-slope. Indeed, the celebratory dinner had attracted several gentlemen of the press and one keen photographer, who between them managed to immortalize the train of events on bold-face and daguerreotype. Nonetheless, both governments and railroads are wont to survive such momentary embarrassments, as they did in this instance. The tunnel was eventually built where God had ordained it, and the ruling clique clung to power for still one more term, though the railway lost a faithful servant and the federal Senate was fleshed out with yet another retiring member of cabinet. The most evident victim of these unfortunate and unpredicted violations of the natural order, however, was Stanley R. Dowling. Two weeks after the catastrophe, with eighteen months left in his term, he resigned as reeve of Point Edward, a position he had held by acclamation since the birth of the village itself. In total disgrace, he faded from the printed page of local history.
Cora remembered the soft surreality of the crash, the sensation of falling into a cushion of cloud, then being pitched forward. That was all. When she woke up, she was in the infirmary of the Woodston doctor. It was noon. The sun shone in a blue sky. Where was Lucien? she asked. The railroad police had already taken him away to London, to jail. It was assumed, since she was a woman, that she had been abducted and was therefore as much a victim as the wretched trio who had bounced about in the lampless caboose. Much solicitude was thus shown her. She said as little as possible, mostly because she could do nothing but think of Lucien. She wanted to go immediately to London, but two days later, when her head stopped spinning, she was taken to the train (the inaugural one having arrived a bit late) and accompanied by an official back to Sarnia. She was left, alone at last, in Lucien’s rooms.
The next train for London left at five-thirty. She started to pack, her hands shaking uncontrollably. One image above all others floated in front of her: a badger in a wire cage swallowing its own fury.
When the knock came at the door, she jumped straight up. It was young O’Boyle, his face ashen. He had a telegram in his hand.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Burgher,” he said.
“He’s dead,” she said, as if telling him the news he already knew.
&
nbsp; “Yes, ma’am. Word come along the railroad ‘vine’ about noon. It’s all over town.”
“How?”
“Hung himself, ma’am. In his cell.”
Ten minutes later Mr. Mulligan opened the door a notch, paused, then came in. Cora was seated on the chesterfield, holding a book bigger than a Bible. When she finally looked up, at his third cough, he said: “I want you outta this place by noon tomorrow, bag an’ baggage.”
There was little commiseration in his Irish grin.
45
The arrangements were now complete. In the morning they would come and move her things across the street into the cottage they had built for her. Sunny had asked her to come and have a gander at it before the trauma of moving day, but she had refused. I’ll see it when I get there, she thought. At my age I may not wake up in the morning, and then I won’t get there anyway, so what’s the point of seeing something first and getting all stirred up for nothing? I fussed about the future many times, in the nine lives I’ve had before this one, and where did it get me? All the way to Grief Street, that’s where. For Sunny’s sake she had feigned some interest in choosing wallpaper from the assorted bundles he lugged over, though none of the ghostly roses, dumpling flags or haplessly cheerful urchins he unrolled for her held any appeal. In the end she selected the plainest and least offensive. What did it matter? She was not really interested in a house which she herself had been tempted to help confect. Houses ought to grow, she had always thought. They should express the lives lived there. They should be surprised, dreamed, mercurial, beautiful to the beholder. I guess that’s why I loved the Lane, and why I never could explain it, certainly not to Cap and not even to Arthur, who tried very hard and whose own handiwork was, despite his good-natured disclaimers, done in the same spirit. ‘Only the temptations of the church saved you from bein’ a Laner,’ she used to tease him. ‘And only you saved me from the church,’ he’d laugh back.
I’ll ask them to move your trunk last, Arthur, she promised. I’ll walk beside it. That way we’ll keep the ghosties inside. You realize they aren’t going to be too happy with the sudden transfer. Being theatrical ghosts, though, they ought to be used to being on the move. They told me you were almost fifty before you settled in one pew. She wished now that she could have seen Arthur in his prime, treading the boards of the great stages of the West, warbling away like his own favourite – the bluebird – with not a touch of winter in his song, with no thought of wings wearied with migration or the unalterable swing of the seasons.
It was May now and unseasonably warm. Her crocuses had bloomed in their usual profusion. The tulips along the house bulged in the trapped sunlight. The vegetable beds lay spaded and expectant. “We’ll leave the border flowers an’ shrubs, for a while,” Sunny had assured her. “But the garden’ll be turned into grass. Eventually, the whole area will be landscaped in some manner suited to a cenotaph. It’ll be a kind of special ground. There’s a bit of land behind your new place. We may have to clear some trees, though, to get enough sun in there.”
Granny felt the need to get out for a while, out of Arthur’s house, out of the gardens they had planted together, out of the vegetable patch she would never tend again. As far as she could recall, she had not been off her own property since the terrible autumn of 1918. It was high time. I’m going out there and have a look at this town, all of it, one more time before I settle in somewhere to die. If these wobbly old legs will carry me. And if I happen to topple into the River, well, I’ll save the council the price of a ceremony.
She felt surprisingly sturdy. She walked north along her own street towards Michigan Ave. She recognized every house she passed, found perfectly familiar every gable, stoop, gate, half-finished dormer, or coppery window with one blank eye unpatched since the War. Each house sent its voices wafting out to her – shredded, grown faint with the years but still unappeased, still desperate for attention, the need for a story to be told in full, an ending to be got right at long last, and a hidden side to be revealed and understood. Too late, too late, she whispered as she hurried slowly past, too late for all that, now.
She passed the houses of the respectable, some fallen since to disrepute, and heard no apologies for the treatment received there by Cora the cleaning woman, or before that, ‘that washerwoman Lily from the Lane’; houses where she had been good enough to wash clothes, scrub floors, cook a meal, wipe up the children’s snot and shit but not to share a meal, carry a confidence, love them without premeditation. ‘But did you ever try to talk to them? See life from their point of view?’ Cap had asked her many times. ‘You kept yourself aloof. You expected the world to come to you. You were a loner by choice. It was your chosen philosophy.’ Perhaps there was more to Cap’s accusations than she had ever acknowledged during their long hours of reciprocal interrogation. But what did it matter now? They were all dead. Several of them she had walked with to the very edge, helping them across when the props of their respectability cracked asunder, when death dared them to enter his chamber unattended, and they couldn’t. ‘But you’ll be glad to know,’ she said to Cap now, ‘I felt no satisfaction.’
Some, of course, like Eliza Sanders, had been furtively kind, slipping her an extra dollar when a husband wasn’t looking, giving hand-me-downs she was too proud to take home to her boys but others along the Lane were happy to receive.
She passed Redmond’s Grocery, the Post Office, the new hotel, the Pool Room – feeling heads turn in shop windows – and crossed the street to the Lane where The Queen’s had stood for fifty years. It was a rooming house now, she had heard, but the spirits that poured out of its bowers, anterooms, closets, pantries and wine-cellars stopped her in her tracks, overwhelmed her with their babble. She felt dizzy. Don’t faint, you stupid old fool, she thought, not right here on the main street with the sun shining.
She didn’t, thought she couldn’t be certain because when she opened her eyes she was not in front of The Queen’s or any other building, nor was she on any of the village sidewalks. She was in some sort of field. In the summer it would be covered with sawgrass and sandburs, but at the moment it was soft and fern-like, and her legs were carrying her, not willy-nilly through it, but along a wide path that was, for a short time in this young half of spring, plainly visible. This had been a road once, a winding, sauntering one. On either side of her, she noticed clumps of concrete or the shell of what had been a porch or chicken-run, some of its wire rusted as thin as fish-nets in the drying sun. to her left a window, all of its glass intact, stood rooted to the ground where it had slumped and stuck while all else around it had inexplicably rotted away. She almost tripped over the frail skeleton of a child’s sled. An icy breeze from the Lake reminded her of more than she was prepared to remember.
The Alley. The Lane. She looked unbelieving to the north-east. She saw the back-yards, sheds, coops and rambling pitches of the houses built along the ‘official’ Lane, straightened by statute. I helped to do this, she thought, long ago, in another name. Now the air was filled with human sounds, voices skewed and thinned by the breeze. Her body was propelling itself towards them. She saw the crazed outline of chicken-wire, caught the thick stink of swine too long in their styes, heard the domestic sing-song of women’s conversation as they laboured. Her eyes strained ahead to see them, to know who these inheritors were, whether they knew what ground, what tradition, what spritely demons they had foolishly promised to possess. No one was in sight. She stumbled. The voices arrived, loud and clear: a foreign tongue. She listened, ignoring the burn in her knees: it was no language she knew, or had ever heard. Suddenly the syllables stabbed at her eyes, raced unconnected through her head like bat’s echoes in a belfry, spinning her around, deafening, she couldn’t hear the last beats of her heart nor the bounce of her kneecaps on the stiff earth.
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