Rush Home Road (38 page)

“I just got a flu.”

“Still.”

“No.” Addy sat up in the bed and collected herself. “Maybe you could make me a cup of tea, Hamond. I'd be grateful for a nice hot cup of tea.”

“Cup of tea ain't gonna bring you back, Addy. I think you better get it in your mind you ain't going east tomorrow.”

Addy ignored the comment and watched him make his way to the stove. She remembered, “I wanted to bring those photographs of Chick to show Mose's Mama. That one of her when she was two, sitting on Mose's shoulders. And them ones with the boys from the corn roast last year. And those photographs of our wedding day. Oh no, I best not bring those. Can't see nothing of a church in the background of any. You get them for me? Some's on the shelf right there but I been keeping most of them in the butter box with the boys' things. You move that old dresser so I can get at the attic, Hamond?”

Hamond wanted to tell Addy his back was aching worse than he could ever remember and it had been an effort for him just to climb the stairs to see her. He wanted to tell Addy she should just wait until her big strong husband came home and get him to move that old dresser. Instead he said, “I'll get the box. Just lay back down and wait for your tea. I'll get the box.”

Mose and Addy had inherited the big oak dresser from the old man who'd lived in the apartment before them. They were grateful for the man's generosity, though they suspected the fellow mostly just couldn't see how to get the hulking thing out the door and down the stairs to take it with him. The right leg had been broken and it wobbled a little when it got pushed clear of the attic door, but it was sturdy and large enough to hold Addy's, Mose's, and Chick's clothes. Each time Mose moved the thing to get Addy's safe-kept photographs, or to hide a present for Chick, he thought to get out his tool box and fix the leg, but he never did. Hamond had thought the same thing over the years. He thought it again this time when he moved the dresser and saw the leg was near broke clean off.

One moment Hamond was planning how he'd come over while they were gone to Nova Scotia, for he knew Addy'd go, sick or not, and fix the leg for them. The next moment he was screaming in pain as the dresser leg collapsed and the weight of the thing landed squarely in the middle of his left foot. Addy flung the covers off herself and staggered across the room. She tried, with what little strength she had, to lift the dresser off his foot but couldn't budge it. Martin Baldwin from downstairs appeared in no time, heaving and pushing too, but he was a tiny man in declining health and his bird-thin arms offered nothing but good intentions.

They would all thank the Lord later that Mose arrived when he did. He and Chick had heard the screaming
halfway down William Street and even with all their parcels had run home and bounded up the stairs, wearing that look of people afraid of what they'd find. Mose shoved Martin Baldwin out of the way, apologizing later if he'd been rough, hefted the massive dresser, and set poor Hamond's foot free.

They moved Hamond to the sofa and got a crate for his foot. They gently took off his old boot and everyone in the room wanted to weep for the state of his socks. Mose told Chick not to look when he pulled the cobweb of threads off Hamond's foot, so she buried her head in her Uncle's chest and wrapped her arms around his neck. Hamond was grateful Chick was there, for he had something sweet to cling to as the pain dug a groove from his foot to his brain.

Addy nearly vomited when Hamond's sock was removed. Martin Baldwin escaped downstairs to his apartment and put his music on loud. Mose stared at Hamond's foot in surprise, for there was no blood at all but a two-inch crevice where the dresser had implanted itself. His bones were broken for certain and his toes were starting to swell and turn blue. They all knew he'd have trouble walking for the rest of his life, and he did.

Nothing much to be done for a broken foot. Mose carried Hamond all the way home and they laughed later at what a sight they must have made. Especially Hamond, for in Mose's mind it was one man carrying his injured friend, but in Hamond's it was a white man carrying a black man. Samuel wept as he helped ease his father into the bed.
Mose and Hamond both pretended not to notice as they thought it unseemly for a man to cry.

Mose made Samuel promise to look in on his Aunt Addy each day while he and Chick were gone. Mose knew Addy wasn't coming on the train. The look of her when he'd come in the room had frightened him as much as Hamond's screaming. In fact, after Chick finally fell asleep, he spent the better part of the evening begging Addy to stay, convincing her she was too sick to travel and, most of all, insisting she could not and should not bring her illness into his dying mother's house.

Addy had not the strength to argue and knew in the end he was right. Then Mose decided that he was staying too. He was suddenly afraid for his wife's health and gripped by a feeling he shouldn't leave her at all. She had to do the convincing then, and remind Mose of all the money they'd spent on the tickets. She urged him to go for the sake of his mother, and for Chick. “Go, Mose. Think of Chick. Think of how she wants to see the ocean. I'll be fine. I got Samuel and Ben to come and look after me. And Mrs. Yardley and the Baldwins too.”

“I'm gonna miss you though, so much,” Mose said, and recalled his shame for Samuel when tears formed in his own eyes.

“What's this?” she asked, quietly moved by his tears. “You're used to not seeing me. What's wrong, Mose?”

“This is…different.”

She pressed her fever-hot lips to his forehead. “I'll miss
you too. I always do. But it's Chick I'm thinking about. I haven't been separated from my baby girl for more than four or five hours in all the years she been alive.”

“I'll take good care of her.”

“I know you will, Mose. You're her good, good Daddy. Besides, I'm more worried about me missing her than her missing me. I'll be just sick from missing you both.”

There was no tantrum, as Addy'd secretly feared, when she told Chick the next morning she was too sick to come along. “Just me and Daddy?” Chick asked.

“Yes, Chicken, but it's only for one week and then you'll be right back here and you can tell me all about the train and about what Nova Scotia looks like and all about Nana Mosely too.”

Chick nodded and looked deep into her mother's eyes. “You gonna die, Mama?”

Addy was shocked by the question. “No. NO! Why would you ask such a question as that?”

Chick shrugged, looking too sad to cry. Mose had already taken Addy's clothes from Poppa's little suitcase, which considerably lightened his load. Addy smiled at Chick. “You suppose your Nana like to see your special doll?”

The porcelain doll was removed from her satin box so seldom that Chick had never even named her. She never dreamt her mother'd allow, let alone suggest, such a thing. “She can look out the window,” Chick said, clapping.

She seemed so grown-up, Addy'd recall when she
pictured Chick standing in the doorway with her hand in her father's. She was wearing her good coat and hat, cradling her doll like an infant. She had a look on her face that said she'd changed, grown from one person to another all in a day, like she finally understood she couldn't always have her way. Addy'd been too weak to rise from the bed but had hugged Chick till the poor child lost her breath. And she'd let Mose kiss her mouth, too, though she'd said he really shouldn't.

Mose paused at the door and smiled, saying, “Don't you have yourself too good a time without us.”

Addy cleared her throat a few times because she didn't want to start bawling and get Chick upset. “I won't,” she said, and waved.

It had been a surprise to all of them when Chick ran back into the room and pressed the porcelain doll into her mother's shivering arms. “I got my Daddy for company. You have her, all right, Mama?”

Addy did cry then, and squeezed Chick again and whispered, “I love you so much, Chicken.”

 

 

THE TRAIN HAD BEEN
late from Windsor to Chatham and they'd lost an eternity switching tracks after London. Mose and Chick had been travelling for well over five hours and were still miles away from Toronto's Union Station, where they'd meet the connecting train that would take them on the longest leg of their journey. Mose was worried they'd
miss the second train and wondered if they could impose upon Olivia and her husband, whom he'd met only briefly, to put them up for the night.

It was hot on board and Chick had been restless and whiny from the start. “How much longer?”

“It's a long, long way, Chicken. Be quiet now, so you're not disturbing other passengers.”

“But I'm hungry.”

“There's an apple in my coat pocket.”

“I already ate a apple.”

“Eat another.”

“I don't want a apple.”

“Chick.”

“I want Mama.”

“Chicken.”

“I want to see Uncle Hamond and Sammy and Ben.”

Mose had not been so confident as Addy that they'd seen Chick's last tantrum. He looked around the train and wondered what he'd do if she started up just now. His eye caught the landscape flashing by. He knew the route and he knew definitely that they were approaching the trellis over that wide river whose name he couldn't recall.
We're moving too fast,
he thought.
They're trying to make up for lost time and they're moving too fast.

Chick looked out the window and saw the train was about to cross water.
Don't be afraid,
she told herself, and shut her eyes. When she opened her eyes again, she was looking at the bare arms of herself and her father, side by
side on the armrest. As if it was the first time she'd noticed, she said, “Look, Daddy. I am darker and you are lighter.”

Mose looked down at their arms and nodded. A thought flashed across his mind, and like a shooting star, where if you were a practical person you had to ask yourself did you
really
see it, Mose thought of Hamond Ferguson's broken foot and the way Hamond's big toe and second toe were joined by a bird-like web of brown skin. He decided that, like the shooting star, he had not really seen the web of skin at all. He looked down at his beautiful daughter—“Peas in a pod” is what Addy'd always called them—and said, “Your skin is beautiful.”

She smiled at him. “And Mama's too.”

Mose nodded, gripping her hand in his, and would have said, “Yes, Chicken,” except at that moment the speeding train jumped the rail and left the tracks. The passengers, including Mose and Chick, died instantly, as the impact of the locomotive with the water was severe. It took only minutes for the river to drag the big train down.

 

 

ADDY WOKE BEFORE DAWN
, not with a premonition or sense of doom, but because she'd already slept ten hours straight and couldn't sleep any more. She smiled, imagining her husband and daughter side by side on the train. They're near Quebec City by now, she guessed. She remembered Mose last week, urging her to reconsider a move to Montreal. A porter friend named Rufus had opened a
nightclub there called Rockhead's Paradise, a place where, Mose had kissed her and whispered into her ear, “We could dance all night long.” Addy'd laughed at that because they had never danced all night long and hadn't danced at all since their wedding. Maybe she
should
reconsider Montreal, Addy thought. She was surprised to hear a knock at her door before breakfast. She read the words on the telegram that Mrs. Yardley brought up, then read them again, and again, and still she did not understand.

Hamond's younger son, Samuel, would carry his father to William Street and heft him up the three flights of stairs, neither man feeling ashamed of his tear-stained cheeks. The three would sit in silence, Addy feverish, shivering, and numb, praying that Mose and Chick would rise from the dead.