Pelican Road

by Howard Bahr

  Even so, Artemus thought the conductor should have delivered the verbal order to Mister Payne himself. It was part of the job, nothing more. Now Payne would be insulted, and Oliver Bomar was put in an awkward position.

  “We been late before,” said Stanfield. “It’s something else today.”

  “It’s Christmas Eve,” said Artemus.

  “No disrespect,” said Stanfield, “but that don’t mean anything to his people.”

  “It does to him, Vernon,” said Artemus, and tapped his sleeve.

  Stanfield looked puzzled by the gesture until its meaning dawned on him. “The mourning band,” he said. “Christ, I never even…I mean, I never even noticed it.”

  “It’s all right, Vernon,” said Artemus. “We can’t notice everything.”

  “It’s not all right,” said Stanfield. “We got to look out for him.”

  “I will speak to him,” said Artemus.

  He left Stanfield then, and moved along the train. He felt it pull at him with its restlessness. It wanted to be gone. They all wanted to be gone, as if the simple act of passing were the most important thing in the world. The next minute, the next hour, was not soon enough. Artemus knew that was a foolish notion; passing on was their business, and time was the medium, always time. Then he arrived at the place where Mister Nussbaum was standing. The conductor was no longer pacing, but staring straight ahead at the brick wall of the depot. His watch lay forgotten in his palm. Artemus said, “Captain, let me fix this.”

  The conductor stiffened as Artemus unpinned the band around his uniform sleeve, but he said no word. Artemus straightened the band, smoothed it, fastened it so that the safety pin was hidden.

  “Now, then,” said Artemus. “It’s hard to do it right by yourself.”

  For a moment, the conductor gave no sign that he had heard. After a moment, he shook himself, glanced at his watch, and returned it. Then he smiled, a little. “You are worse than my mother,” he said.

  “Aw!” said Artemus. “You mean you had a mother?”

  “Get back to your station, my boy,” said Mister Nussbaum. “We are forty-five minutes late, and we need to get underway.”

  * * *

  On the head end of the Silver Star, Mister Rufus Payne fidgeted with anger. He wore his customary soft felt hat, a white shirt buttoned at the neck, starched white overalls, and leather gauntlets with a white mule on the cuff. He was a round, sharp-eyed, florid, immaculate man whose blood rose to his face when he was mad. When that happened, as it was happening now, his hair seemed even whiter, and his eyebrows arched like white tomato worms.

  Payne, like many old-time enginemen, felt a whiff of contempt toward the trainmen whose lives, by comparison, were comfortable and easy. The engine crews, after all, were on the sharp end, always vigilant, peering ahead into storm and darkness, expecting every moment a catastrophe, not only possible but inevitable, that they would be the first to see and therefore have long seconds to fear. Plenty of time to contemplate their deaths while the conductors and brakemen and flagmen, unawares, played cards and drank coffee and read lurid magazines in the caboose. Even the head-end brakemen on freight trains were not exempt from Mister Payne’s scorn: Sonny Leeke, for example, who sat behind the fireman and gabbed about baseball and worked crossword puzzles.

  Payne had been out on all manner of jobs with Ira Nussbaum, and in all those years they had never had a conversation. What little discussion they did have—beyond the mandatory comparing of watches and orders—always tilted toward the conductor’s will and expectations. Now, Mister Nussbaum had not even bothered to consult with Rufus Payne, but sent his decree by the hand of a functionary. Payne had no chance to argue his firm belief that the southbound 4512 would be in the hole at Purvis. As evidence, he had the dispatcher’s typed message and the order giving the Silver Star rights over everything all the way to Meridian. He saw no need to delay his train any further.

  Across the broad, spotless cabin, Jean Chauvin studied his chief and recognized the signs of trouble. Chauvin had worked stoker engines for years; it had been ages since he had bent to an actual coal scoop. Nevertheless, his gaunt face, pale as rice paper, was always smeared with grease and soot, and it glistened with sweat in all weathers. No force of nature—not the heat of the boiler backhead, not the hot sun of July streaming through his window—relieved his ghostly pallor. Every trip, he wore black overalls, a black welder’s cap backward on his head, and a black neckerchief over a black clip-on bow tie. He was one of the few operating men who wore glasses, and these spectacles slipped down the slope of his long nose every few minutes. Now Chauvin pushed his glasses up with a gloved finger. He said, “C’mon, Rufus. Tell me the last time Mister Ira was wrong.”

  The engineer knew that Ira Nussbaum, the cranky old Jew, had made an informed decision. The 4512 was piloted by A.P. Dunn, a man near the end of his tether, who had worked too long and needed to be watched closely. Rufus Payne accepted that. But he was tired and bilious, and he no longer wished to argue, not with his spectral fireman, not with his conductor, not even with death itself. He wanted only to be home in Meridian on Christmas Eve with the assembled generations of his enormous, annoying, long-lived family, most of whom, especially the children, he despised. He had promised his tired, bilious wife, whom he despised most of all, that he would retire in two years when he was seventy. Then he would die, he told her. Do you promise that, too? she asked. He promised her that, too, and she had gone straight downtown and taken out a big insurance policy with Jacob Luttrell the bank president.

  “He is wrong this time,” said Payne.

  * * *

  Artemus went back to his place near the end of the train. In Picayune, as in Slidell, the colored waiting room was overflowed with families dressed for travel, each group gathered around its scarved and hatted matriarch. Their luggage was pasteboard, mostly, and their lunches in baskets and in cardboard boxes tied with string. No diner, coaches only, on the “Ol’ Zip Coon.” Artemus knew from the steamed-up windows that the stove was roaring in there. He could see the women’s fans batting like moths through the glaze. He knew the heavy perfume and damp wool suits and boxes of fried chicken made for a rich atmosphere, and he wondered how the people bore it.

  Not all of them did, apparently. A half-dozen black children, in frilly dresses and miniature suits, were lined up on an empty baggage wagon, watching the snow. Artemus waved at them, and they grinned and hugged themselves and waved back with their stubby fingers. A tall, thin, light-skinned man in a homburg hat, supporting himself on a brass-knobbed cane, was with them. At Artemus’s gesture, the man spoke sharply to the children, and they fell silent and still. Then the man moved away from them and limped across the platform. The man stopped a few paces distant and removed his hat. He said, “Sir, are you from Meridian?” His voice was smooth and musical, but not a Southern Negro’s voice. Maybe once, but not now.

  “That’s right, uncle,” said Artemus.

  The man smiled at the term, a little ironically, thought Artemus, who was not used to overt irony in Negroes, though they were good at the subtle kind, which Artemus admired. The man wore a good dark suit with a watch chain looped across the waistcoat. From the chain dangled the key of a scholastic fraternity. Here, apparently, was a black man well educated at the North. Artemus was familiar with the type and found them disagreeable, for they seemed dissatisfied with most people and superior to all. In this, Artemus thought, they differed little from their white counterparts.

  The man said, “I have learned, over the years, that it is useless to ask a Negro directions to anywhere. Has that been your experience, sir?”

  “Yes, it has,” said Artemus. “I always figured it’s because I’m white. Or maybe they’re just stupid.”

  “Well, your being white probably has more to do with it,” said the man. He paused a moment, waiting for a response perhaps. Finally, he replaced his hat and leaned forward on his cane. “But, you know, it’s true even among our own kind. We be
lieve that if you name a thing, you take its power away.”

  Aw, bullshit, thought Artemus, annoyed by the man’s tone.

  “Can I ask you something, sir? Some reliable directions from a white gentleman?”

  “Ask away,” said Artemus.

  The man settled back on his heels. He said, “We get off at Meridian. When we walk out the depot, how do we find the colored funeral home in…Jumpertown? Is that what you all call the Negro district?”

  “That’s what we call it,” said Artemus. “You walk out the depot, turn right down Front Street, go three blocks, turn right again, and there you are. It’s a house with columns on the porch, right by the railroad. Used to be a mill owner’s place, a white man’s. There’s a colored taxi will take you, if you want—and your family.”

  “Thank you so much,” said the man. Artemus expected him to tip his hat ironically and move on, but he didn’t. Instead, he plucked from his waistcoat pocket a wrinkled telegram and smoothed it out. “Now, I know you are surely busy,” said the man, “but just let me ask you one more thing.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Artemus.

  A little wind caught a plume of steam and sent it swirling around the figure of the Negro man, and the snow, grayish-white like his hair, drifted down beyond the shed. “A trifling inquiry,” he said, “just to satisfy an old man’s curiosity.”

  “Get on with it,” said Artemus.

  “Ah!” cried the man suddenly, and thrust his cane angrily at the Silver Star as he might at a poisonous snake, and his voice was all at once high and tremulous. “Tell me how it is possible—” he began, and paused, as if the words he needed were overwhelmed by sheer amazement. He set his cane against the bricks and bowed his head.

  “You can ask it,” said Artemus.

  When the man tried to speak again, Artemus barely heard him. “What sin does a man have to commit—” the old man began, but his voice broke once more. “My God,” he said in disgust. He shook himself and tapped his stick. He lifted the telegram and held it out to Artemus, his eyes clear, his voice steady now. “For a man to be caught in the couplers of a train car,” he said. “What would he have to do to deserve that? Can you tell me, sir?”

  * * *

  Far behind the lines, Artemus and Gideon and a French corporal are strolling in an ancient wood under a high, leafless canopy. The sun is hidden, yet the trees make dim, lacy shadows over the earth. Their great muscular limbs creak, and the tops sough and rattle in the wind. The air is cool, drifted of smoke, smelling of mold and decay.

  The corporal has but one eye. The other was lost at Verdun, yet still he serves, for Frenchmen are scarce after so many years of war. He is short and stout like a barrel, with a carefully trimmed beard. He wears the sky-blue overcoat of the French poilu, its skirts pinned back, and a red kepi that seems silly and useless to the Americans. He was born here, in a cottage at the edge of the wood, and he entertains his companions with tales of robber bands and knights and wraiths who had passed this way. He tells of a certain lost maiden—how her soldier lover died in the wars in Holland, and how, when she heard the news, she shed all her fine brocaded clothes and all her sparkling jewels and walked alone into the wood and was never seen again. When the tale is done, and the Americans are pondering whether they could ever inspire such a reaction in a girl, a pair of black ravens glides silkily overhead. Let us follow them, says the corporal. Then, after a little way, the three men hear the voices of other birds in a low muttering, punctuated by shrill cries as if in anger or argument.

  Aha, says the Frenchman. Come closer, and I will show you something of interest.

  They creep silently over the leaf mold until they find a deep rectangular depression surrounded by younger trees and hedges grown wild. The limbs of tree and hedge are black with birds. The Frenchman says in a whisper that this was the foundation of a great house sacked by the Hessians in a vanished war, and it is here, since then, that the ravens gather to hold their court.

  Their court? says Artemus.

  My uncle showed me once, says the Frenchman. He moves forward to a low stone wall. We stood in this very place, he says. I was a child then, but I remember it still.

  Christ, says Gideon, pointing. There’s a skeleton yonder.

  Sure enough, the bones of a man, draped in rags leached of color, are propped against the far wall of the old cellar. The legs are covered in leaves, the cracked skull tilted, jaw agape.

  Allemande, says the corporal. He spits, then crosses himself. They were through here in ’15, he says. But, he says, l’ossature is not the birds’ object now. Observe.

  Down in the pit, within the dead man’s reach, a bird huddles motionless, feathers in disarray, beak pressed to the ground. The ravens are bigger than crows, but this one seems to have been diminished as if he were slowly growing invisible. Presently, five birds glide down and make a circle around the one, solemn and still. All the birds are silent now. The air ceases to move, and the trees seem to lean inward, listening.

  A single bird, bigger than the rest, clearly an elder of ravens, drifts down to a chimney stone. Even in the dim light, his feathers gleam with blue iridescence like no other among them. He adjusts himself on the perch, then tilts his eye toward the gathered host. A cawing, a terrible croaking, rises to the canopy and the gray sky beyond.

  So he is condemned, whispers the Frenchman.

  The birds are silent now. The elder raven cocks his head as though waiting, but no more sound comes from the laden branches. The old bird thrusts out his great black wings. The five executioners move in with a rustling, a jostling of feathered backs, all silent. They do not take long, but long enough, perhaps, for the one under the stabbing beaks. When they are finished, they move away, turning their backs on the dying one in the pit. Then, as if on signal, all the birds around begin to lift from the earth, rising up past the canopy to the open sky where they swirl like smoke. In a moment they are gone.

  The men remain motionless behind the low stone wall. A light rain begins; they hear it first in the high branches, then feel it on their faces.

  Artemus picks up a black feather left behind. You were a child, he says after a moment.

  Yes, says the French corporal.

  Gideon goes down into the pit and lifts the bird’s black body in his palm. It quivers yet, just as dying men will do; then it is still, the yellow eyes gone dull.

  What do you suppose it did? asks Gideon, and he and the bird seem small and far away in the antique wood, in the gray afternoon.

  * * *

  The Silver Star, now fifty minutes late, pulled away from Picayune without its usual smooth start: so fast, in fact, that the passengers were jostled in the coaches. Black smoke and soot from the engine’s stack swirled under the platform shed in a poisonous cloud, and Artemus understood clearly that Mister Rufus Payne was angry and working the throttle hard. This was embarrassing. This was not the way a first-class train, late or not, made its farewell. However, the abrupt departure saved Artemus from the old Negro. Without a word, he ran for the steps and pulled them up. Watching behind, he saw the old man hobble forward past the yellow line on the platform, shouting now, though the words were lost. He shook his telegram at the Silver Star and struck the flanks of the coaches with his stick while they passed inches from his face. Artemus thought sure the old man would go under the wheels, and he considered pulling the air, but in a moment the train leaned around a curve and hid the man from view.

  Artemus closed the window, vaguely troubled by the encounter, by the power turned loose on the train by so much anger. The Negro’s anger seemed to pursue the Silver Star like a shade, like a curse, just as Rufus Payne’s anger pulled the train along. Artemus did not believe in curses, but he believed in the dark power of madness, and a fraternity key dangling from a gold watch chain was no sign that old knowledge had been forgotten. He tried to put the man and his infernal question out of his mind. Nevertheless, as people will do, and now that it was too late, he tried to think of things
he might have said. It’s not always a question of sin, he thought. Sometimes you don’t have to do anything.

  “Fuck,” he said aloud. He didn’t owe the man anything. He hadn’t invited the question, and he might have stood there a hundred years without giving an answer. After all, the French corporal in the wood had not answered Gideon’s question either.

  The coach door opened, and Oliver Bomar passed through. He stopped when he saw Artemus, and joined him at the window. “Well,” said the flagman, “I gave old Rufus the message, and he treated me like a redheaded stepchild.”

  “Well, fuck him,” said Artemus, pressing his fist hard against the window. “The old son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah,” said Oliver. “Anyway, I’ll be glad when this trip is over.” He clapped Artemus once on the shoulder and passed on up the train.

  The flagman’s remark lingered in Artemus’s mind. Oliver could not be blamed for thinking it, but it was bad luck to say it. “The old son of a bitch,” Artemus said of Rufus Payne to the empty vestibule, and suddenly his own anger, nameless and irrepressible, seemed to fill the space with a red glow like the companionway lights on the troop ships. They were red, he remembered, so a man going topside could see better in the dark.

  Artemus made himself think on Anna Rose. Usually, the thought of her made him see better in the dark. She had a way of cleansing things, of turning them back to what was real and true. He only had to know that she was out there in the spaces beyond what he could see.

  Now, once again, he had no confidence in the empty places. He had left her behind this morning, as he had a hundred mornings, framed in the crooked door, her hair mussed from sleeping, her eyes half-closed and wanting to sleep again. This is not the same as leaving, she had said, but in fact, he thought, all leaving was the same, an emptiness without guarantee that it would be filled again. Artemus wished he could say that to Anna Rose. He wanted to touch her face as he could the cold glass of the window before him, only her face would be living and warm, and he could trace the shape of it, and she would speak to him. But he couldn’t touch her, for he was way out on Pelican Road, and Anna Rose was sleeping, and he could tell her nothing about what leaving her meant.