On the Blue Comet
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2010 by Rosemary Wells
Illustrations copyright © 2010 by Bagram Ibatoulline
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2010
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Wells, Rosemary.
On the Blue Comet / Rosemary Wells ; illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline.
— 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When the Depression hits in Cairo, Illinois, and Oscar Ogilvie’s father must sell their home and vast model train set-up to look for work in California, eleven-year-old Oscar is left with his dour aunt, where he befriends a mysterious drifter, witnesses a stunning bank robbery, and is suddenly catapulted onto a train that takes him to a different time and place.
ISBN 978-0-7636-3722-4 (hardcover)
[1. Space and time — Fiction. 2. Railroad trains — Fiction.
3. Single-parent families — Fiction. 4. Depressions — 1929 — Fiction.
5. Adventure and adventurers — Fiction.
6. California — History — 1850–1950 — Fiction.
7. Illinois — History — 20th century — Fiction.]
I. Ibatoulline, Bagram, ill. II. Title.
PZ7.W46843Om 2010
[Fic] — dc22 2009051358
ISBN 978-0-7636-5419-1 (electronic)
Candlewick Press
99 Dover Street
Somerville, Massachusetts 02144
visit us at
www.candlewick.com
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;
If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings — nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it,
And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!
Rudyard Kipling
We lived at the end of Lucifer Street
, on the Mississippi River side of Cairo, Illinois. Black spruces lined our sandy road. My heart quickened as I watched my dad lope home over the fallen needles. Bouncing along on his shoulder was a red cardboard box labeled
L
IONEL
C
OMPANY
, R
OCHESTER
, N
EW
Y
ORK
.
In that box was my birthday present, the Blue Comet. The Blue Comet was the queen of all trains.
I waited for him under the porch light. The forty-watt yellow bulb made a Grand Central Station for flapping moths and zizzing june bugs above my head. In the kitchen, our dinner was warm and fragrant on the stove.
The house at the end of Lucifer Street had been my mama’s great joy. She fixed it up so pretty when I was just a baby, all yellow curtains and shiny white trim. We have a lone portrait, its edges curled, of me, Dad, and Mama. I was just a skinny, freckled little boy of three in that Brownie camera snapshot, with a cowlick pointing straight up out of the top of my head.
Mama was the bookkeeper in the Lucifer Fireworks plant until one day a bolt of walking lightning shot right through the shipping-room window, stopping the clock and sizzling into a box of Roman candles near her chair. Everyone would say afterward she had not known or felt a thing in that half-second explosion. All I remember seeing was a fire truck out the window of our kitchen and my aunt Carmen, who had appeared from nowhere, covering my eyes with her hands.
What was left of the Lucifer factory was declared unsafe and closed down soon after. You might think my dad would want to move away from Lucifer Street and the terrible reminders of the accident. But in the end he could not bear to leave the yellow curtains and white trim that Mama had painted herself. He certainly did not wish to move into the Chateaux Apartment Village as Aunt Carmen, his in-town sister, suggested. Aunt Carmen was always telling Dad what he ought to do.
“Get your life back on the tracks and find a good woman, Oscar,” Aunt Carmen whispered loudly to Dad every time she had the littlest chance. “The boy needs a mother, and you need a wife to keep your hair short and make you some casserole dinners.”
“That goes double, Carmen,” my dad always replied. Aunt Carmen lived alone in a little house full of bisque figurines. Squirrel silhouettes were cut into the house’s shutters. It was explained to me that Aunt Carmen had never married because the Great War had taken the lives of so many young men that there were not enough to go around.
“A good man is a darn sight harder to find than a good woman,” Aunt Carmen always answered my dad with a sniff.
Oftentimes a picture floated through my mind of the wife that Aunt Carmen had in mind for us. She looked like the lady on the Coca-Cola calendar, black hair parted on the side, dress with the stripes going across diamond-wise, big red lips showing off her white teeth.
“I will never be so lucky again as to find anyone like your mother,” Dad said. “A new wife would make trouble and get in the way.” What he meant was she would have gotten in the way of the trains in our basement.
Instead Dad and I lived a peaceful life, with me, Oscar Jr., in charge of cooking just as soon as I could reach the stove. In second grade, I was big enough, standing on a sturdy chair, to flip our Sunday pancakes and fry our breakfast sausage. Our weekly menu was casserole-free.
This is what it looked like:
Monday: Lamb chops and fried potatoes
Tuesday: Fried chicken, canned green beans, fried potatoes
Wednesday: Hamburger, fried potatoes, and tomatoes
Thursday: Hot dogs and beans
Friday: Beefsteak and carrots
Saturday: Pork chops and cabbage
Sunday: Ham and gravy with pineapple rings
The menu never changed from week to week because it satisfied. There was just enough variety to keep us from getting bored but nothing like liver or spinach to scare us away.
I bought all our groceries at Rubin’s Market after school, charging them to our account. Then I walked the groceries home, set them on the counter, and began to prepare our evening meal.
We did just fine on our own, Dad and me. Dad had a steady job with the John Deere Company, selling tractors to the farmers. He even had a telephone installed right in the front hall, much to the dismay of Aunt Carmen. For my part, I kept my shoes shined, and my homework was always finished. Dad and I agreed: we had no need whatever of a new wife. So that wife never did happen. It was just as well. A wife would have been putting on her lipstick all the time and giving me cod-liver oil.
In the beginning, Dad had set up our first layout to pull himself out of the widower doldrums. It was a simple one-looper. He made the station out of basswood, painted pumpkin yellow just like the real railway station in downtown Cairo. He cut eight little signs and painted them white with
CAIRO
in blue, just as it was on the real signs. I hung them off the eaves of the station’s shingled roof with chrome-beaded key chains. We laid eastward tracks and westward tracks. The track beds were made of carefully dribbled bird gravel on a layer of carpenter’s glue.
