Hieroglyphics

by Jill McCorkle

  “Please don’t go stand on the tracks, Frank.” The tone in Lil’s voice, her worried frown, was so familiar to him. His own mother had said the same thing. “Please, Frank,” she had said, “don’t stand on the tracks,” and by then, he could drive a car, he could do any damn thing he wanted to, except he wasn’t yet legal age, so he couldn’t leave. He couldn’t join the service yet; he couldn’t go off to college. He was a sophomore in high school, dating a girl who had lived in that town her whole life, and so had her parents before her, in a house on Elm Street. He liked her. Truth is, he liked a lot of the people there, even though he didn’t always let on to his mother. It was easier, if unkind, to make her listen to him wondering about all the friends he had known in their other home, his real home, he said, his real life, and watch her turn away in sadness.

  “You’re the one who brought me here!” he finally told her, raising his voice in a way he had never done.

  His father had been a relatively soft-spoken man—there were never any arguments that he could recall—and his stepfather was silent much of the time, though when he did talk, it was often with a kind of humor Frank had never before witnessed. He was the sort of man who if nervous would do things like pull a quarter from behind your ear or pretend to steal your nose. Horace, ten years younger than Frank, had never known any other father but Preston, with his kind, dark eyes and solemn expression, clothes dusty from his tobacco fields. “Got your nose, son,” Preston would say, and Horace would laugh and laugh, their mother smiling that sweet, weak smile Frank had always associated with the way she looked at people with some infirmity that led her to express pity.

  “Here’s a nickel. Oops, no, there’s a nickel,” Preston had said, his beefy, tan hand rustling behind Horace’s dark, curly hair—their father’s hair.

  “Just give him the goddamned nickel,” Frank said, and he knew his mother wanted to slap him; he could see her jaw go tight before she turned and rushed forward in a loud, overly cheerful way to make something of that simple stupid magic trick.

  “Please don’t go stand on the tracks, Frank,” his mother would say, and he finally asked her why. Wasn’t that her reason for staying down here? He asked why she had made such an awful choice to leave their home, the only home they had ever known.

  “I stayed because I couldn’t leave,” she said. “And because your dad was here.”

  “He was dead!”

  Frank will never forget the look of shock on her face when he said this; it was if she was hearing the news for the first time.

  He was about to walk and meet Millie Rogers to go to the movies. It was 1949, and they were going to go see a movie called A Letter to Three Wives, which he wasn’t big on but his date was. Millie was the kind of girl everyone noticed, because she was pretty and smart, and her father owned a department store, and it felt good to be with a girl like that. It gave him clout without him having to do a thing, and it also left him there in the shadows while she glowed in the spotlight. Millie Rogers could twirl a fire baton, and when he put his hand on her thigh during the movie, she didn’t move it.

  He was thinking of all this but not breaking eye contact with his mother. “Dad was dead. We could have had a funeral at our church in our town, and we could be visiting that cemetery. That’s where we would be right now.”

  “We couldn’t find him,” she said. “I couldn’t find him.”

  She began to cry, and Frank lost all thoughts of Millie Rogers then. Part of him wanted to lash out at his mother, and the other part wanted to hug her. He was almost afraid to breathe, and so he did nothing.

  “And I was pregnant. I was pregnant and I was afraid I might lose the baby, and that was all we had left of him, and I had broken bones, a shoulder and an ankle. They said I was so lucky.” She wiped her eyes and looked at him until he had to look away, over at the mantel clock. Millie would be on her porch waiting; they would surely miss the cartoons if he didn’t hurry. “Lucky,” she said, “because the baby was okay, and because I still had you, Frank.”

  He doesn’t remember what else was said, just that when he got to Millie’s, she was out on the sidewalk, waiting, and silent through the whole brisk walk to the theater, though by the end of the movie she had leaned her shoulder in close to his, and all was forgiven. And, of course, he always thought of the unspoken, the way that he had wished himself onto that train, there between his parents, a wish that had it been granted, could have been his last wish.

  After the crash, the waiting period to get news had been unbearable. When his mother was finally able to call, she said that she had waited until she knew for certain. “No one could have survived where he was,” his grandmother told him in quiet, clipped words. She was at the kitchen table, and she stared at the cut glass saltshaker, moved it in a small circle, as she spoke. “Your mother isn’t able to travel,” she told him. “I’ll go and take you to her when the time is right.”

  It had all come back to him those first times he and Lil talked about it, and it was back now with full impact, given Lil’s obsession to document and remember. Perhaps that was part of his connection to Lil in the beginning; maybe he needed someone to make him think about it all. She was the only person he had told everything to, and she was solid and attentive, as strong-seeming as his grandmother had been, there at the kitchen table. He was grown before he was able to imagine what his grandmother had gone through. “Oh, that poor woman,” Lil had said, and shaken her head, both hands holding her cup of coffee. “How old was she?”

  Sixty-four. Frank mouths the number now, way too young to have lost a husband and then a son. His grandmother, who seemed an ancient ruin at that point in his life, was more than twenty years younger than he is now.

  “I’ll take you to her,” his grandmother had said, as if for a visit, something temporary, which is what it was, since school was still in session.

  There were two other people recovering there in Preston’s house: an older woman from Connecticut, her pelvis crushed and her shoulder broken, who also lost her husband; and the woman’s niece, who, they whispered, would be lucky if she ever walked again. A nurse came and went daily, and so did Preston, bringing food and whatever they needed. He had given over his house and was staying down the road with his sister.

  Frank and his grandmother stayed in a nearby town at the Lorraine Hotel, a big brick building that looked out onto the small bus station and large tobacco warehouses. The railroad tracks were right there, running alongside the river, and the sound of the passing trains was a constant reminder. The crash was the reason so many were there, and had been for months, first to identify and claim bodies, and then to attend to those like his mother, too badly hurt to travel. The small two-story hospital in town was filled to capacity with those injured, and remained so for months.

  They believed, in those early days, that Frank’s mother would go home just as soon as the baby was born and she was able to travel. But by the end of the summer, when the tobacco warehouses were filled with the sweet-smelling leaves, and wagons and trucks rumbled past the Lorraine Hotel, and Frank’s little brother, Horace, was already sitting, his mother was still saying that she wasn’t quite ready to travel, she needed more time, and because it was summer, Frank stayed there with her, his life shifting in tiny increments. “You really need to attend school,” his mother had said, “and your work will all transfer when we go back.”

  By then, the women from Connecticut had left. There was the occasional letter with hopeful reports about the niece walking again, but as far as Frank knows, that never happened. They always asked when Frank’s mother would be returning to her home, and just the question being asked had felt encouraging, even though, months into the school year, he had begun to feel the dull edge of false hope. He and his mother and Horace lived tucked away in the back rooms of Preston’s modest house. The one bathroom was theirs, and Preston never went near it, as far as Frank knew; he said he bathed at his sister’s, and Frank suspected he did all else he had to do ther
e as well, except peeing into the darkness off the porch, which he did late at night, when he didn’t know Frank was looking.

  “We need to pay rent,” his mother had announced to Preston one night, also saying that she was happy to do all the cooking and cleaning and laundry. His mother and Preston had begun sitting on the porch together after Horace got quiet and when they thought Frank was asleep. Frank continued to ask—others did as well—when they would be returning to Massachusetts, and one of those times, he saw fear in Preston’s eyes, something he noticed every time that followed. It was not long after when his mother began talking about how much a baby needs a father, and how though no one would ever—could ever—replace Frank’s father, that Frank also needed a man in his life, someone who could teach him things.

  The first ten years of his life were encased back on Andover Street, as if in a museum, his own personal excavation: here is the good life, here is the ideal life, that once-in-a-blue-moon perfect life. But then he was in this place, and the strange, rare winter weather that occurred the night of the crash was long gone and replaced with the mild warmth that brought early springs and hot, humid summers. And even though his grandmother shipped boxes of things—linens and dishes and photographs—from Worcester, when she went to live with Frank’s aunt, he continued to picture her right where he had left her, in the house on Andover. Even after she died and they all went to the funeral—a long bus ride—he still pictured her there in that old kitchen.

  Most of the letters she sent mentioned the kitchen, probably because she was sitting there at that same white table, or because she was baking or she had just cooked or was about to cook. She once wrote that she was knitting a sweater to replace the one he loved, but if she ever finished it, he never knew. Even now, he pictures his grandmother that way, just as his strongest memories of his mother are in the kitchen of that house near here, the place he wants to visit—if only that frazzled-looking big-eyed young woman would let him in for a few minutes instead of saying that it’s not a good time, her face appearing there in the opening of the chain lock.

  The first time he ever stood at the site of the crash was in the spring after it happened. Most of the twisted metal and debris had been cleaned up by then, but the land still bore the scars. He had seen photographs of the wreck, read accounts and names of those dead. It had been on the front page of major newspapers: one of the worst train wrecks the country had seen, many of the fatalities soldiers who had survived the war on their way home for Christmas. Seventy-two dead, his father among them, and at least that many injured, his mother one of them, and the news so slow to reach anyone. There were people unaccounted for, and there were people who stepped from the wreckage unharmed.

  His father had been in one of those sections where they had to use acetylene torches to cut through the metal, and if his mother had not had to use the bathroom, she and his unborn brother would have been with him. Most of the deaths were in the second and third cars; the people who survived described the sounds there in the darkness: the screams and cries and moans on into daybreak. His mother was someone they were trying to get to the hospital in a town down the road, but she refused to leave, because she said she could hear his father screaming out that she not leave him. And that’s how she met Preston, one of many volunteers sent to carry people to safety.

  Preston told Frank much later how there were bits of gift wrap and ribbons, and scraps of clothing, in the pine trees on either side of the tracks. He said there were bodies everywhere, and he didn’t want Frank’s mother to see those things, he didn’t want to upset her anymore, because she was clearly in shock, and so he did his best to keep her safe and calm until the shot given to her made her sleep and they were able to take her over to the hospital. She had given him all of her information, begging that he find her husband and that he please get word to her mother-in-law and son that they were fine. “Tell them we are fine,” she said, “but we won’t be home in the morning like we said.” Preston never made that call; he continued to work through darkness and on into the next day, but then he was the one who finally, when there was no hope of finding Frank’s father alive, got her to a phone so she could call herself.

  Preston had also spent seven hours with a young soldier pinned from his hips down until the crew could get him released and sent on for the medical attention he needed. Frank had heard the story every Christmas, because each year the man would send a big box of oranges, giving Preston credit for saving his life. “All I did was talk,” Preston said, and he smiled at Frank’s mother, but she never participated in those conversations, finding something to do in the kitchen instead.

  Frank had looked it all up again not long before he and Lil moved back, the information published in newspapers spanning the East Coast:

  • Unidentified woman: unrecognizable

  • Middle-aged woman, appears Jewish

  • Woman: brown corduroy dress labeled Oppenheimer, NY, size 5 brown oxfords

  • Stout lady: brown hair, tan suit, laundry ticket 5-158

  • Wedding ring: K to LK 7-26-42

  • Lady between 20-30, 110 lbs.; has had Cesarean operation; suntan, so appears to be from Florida; plaid dress, large diamond ring

  • Baby, 18 months

  The lists went on and on and on.

  “Your parents were in the second car,” Preston had said, looking up from his feet only once before continuing. “The ninety-one train—it was snowing that night, so rare for these parts. There was ice. Most people were killed instantly, but your mother swears your dad’s voice was the one she heard calling from within the wreckage. I can’t swear to you one way or another, just that she believes it was him.”

  “What did he say?”

  There was a long pause, and Frank stopped swinging the tobacco tie he was holding, while he waited. They were taking a break under a large oak tree at the edge of the field.

  “He said, ‘Don’t leave me.’”

  “You heard him?”

  “I heard someone say, ‘Don’t leave me.’”

  Frank recalls the great clarity of Preston’s statement that second time—no hesitation, “Don’t leave me”—and he recalls the heavy, sweet smell of tobacco and the way his shirt was sticky and drenched in sweat.

  “But you never saw him.”

  “No. Those four cars were compressed into the size of one. There was no way to see those trapped.”

  “But he was calling.”

  “Someone was calling.” Preston looked up then and motioned in the direction of the field. By then, the hard work had grown on Frank, and it showed in the muscles of his arms and back; he liked the way he slept so hard at night, too, but he never would have admitted it.

  He had said someone was calling.

  Preston answered Frank’s questions during those breaks from the midday sun, his slow soft voice careful with the descriptions and information, as if worried he might give too much at once, the same concentrated look his mother had when measuring out castor oil or whatever was prescribed for Horace and his constant croup. “More is not better or faster,” Frank’s grandfather had always said. “The right amount is key. Measure.”

  Preston’s voice was measured just that way, doling out inoculations of facts and memories; he told how photographers and news reporters came from far away, cars parked all up and down along the highway, with a steady stream of onlookers, some there to help, others just curious to see the disaster for themselves. He said you could see where the train had plowed through the earth. There were people picking things up, sifting and searching.

  When Frank came that very first time with his grandmother, Horace newly born and his mother still unable to get around, he had combed through sticks and pine straw along the tracks and on into the woods, digging a little, as others had done, kicking and turning the dirt. He found what looked like a money clip with the initial B. He found some coins and brass buttons. He found the Captain Midnight decoder badge that he had been hearing about on the radio for y
ears, and it had felt like magic, like his father or God or something out in the universe had given him the very thing that he was supposed to have next in his life. Hey, kids, tell Mom and Dad to take you down to your local Skelly Oil Company and get your Secret Squadron badge. And, remember, tell Dad it is easier to prepare than repair.

  He was so shocked when he saw it that he quickly put it in his pocket, for fear someone would take it or that it would disappear. He wondered the whole ride back if it was really in his pocket, had that really happened? And yet there it was, cupped in his hand when he entered the kitchen, to find his mother cutting up vegetables for soup, Horace asleep in a little basket in the corner of the room.

  Dad, it is so much easier to prepare than to repair. That’s what he wished he could have said. But no one could repair this. No one could have prepared for this.

  Then, and in all the years since, he has tried to script the story behind that badge he found. Perhaps it was going to be a Christmas present, or maybe someone had mailed it in a letter to one of the servicemen. Captain Midnight’s Secret Squadron. Perhaps it was someone’s way of connecting to a husband or a brother or a friend.