Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (634 page)

“Child,” someone says. “Child.”

The woman in gray has been trying to get my attention for awhile, but I have been sitting and letting myself be rocked.

“Child,” she says again, “would you like some water?”

Yes, I realize, I would. She has a jar and she gives it to me to sip out of. “Thank you,” I say. “We brought water, but we lost it in the crush on the platform.”

“You have someone with you?” she asks.

“My mother,” I say, and start crying again. “She is old, and there was such a press on the platform, and she fell and was trampled.”

“What’s your name,” the woman says.

“Clara Corbett,” I say.

“I’m Elizabeth Loudon,” the woman says. “And you are welcome to travel with me.” There is something about her, a simple pleasantness, that makes me trust her. She is a small woman, with a small nose and eyes as gray as her dress. She is younger than I first thought, maybe only in her thirties? “How old are you? Do you have family?” she asks.

“I am seventeen. I have a sister, Julia. But she doesn’t live in Mississippi anymore.”

“Where does she live?” the woman asks.

“In Beech Bluff, near Jackson, Tennessee.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know it. Is it good country?”

“I think so,” I say. “In her letters it sounds like good country. But I haven’t seen her for seven years.” Of course no one could travel during the war. She has three children in Tennessee. My sister is twenty-eight, almost as old as this woman. It is hard to imagine.

“Were you close?” she asks.

I don’t know that we were close. But she is my sister. She is all I have, now. I hope that the Reverend will write her about my mother, but I don’t know that he knows where she is. I will have to write her. She will think I should have taken better care.

“Are you traveling alone?”

“My companion is a few seats farther in front. He and I could not find seats together.”

Her companion is a man? Not her husband, maybe her brother? But she would say her brother if that’s who she meant. A woman traveling with a man. An adventuress, I think. There are stories of women traveling, hoping to find unattached girls like myself. They befriend the young girls and then deliver them to the brothels of New Orleans.

For a moment Elizabeth takes on a sinister cast. But this is a train full of recalcitrant southerners, there is no opportunity to kidnap anyone. Elizabeth is like me, a woman who has lost her home.

It takes the rest of the day and a night to get to St. Louis, and Elizabeth and I talk. It’s as if we talk in ciphers; instead of talking about home, we talk about gardening, and I can see the garden at home, lazy with bees. She is a quilter. I don’t quilt, but I used to do petit pointe, so we can talk sewing and about how hard it has been to get colors. And we talk about mending and making do, we have all been making do for so long.

When it gets dark, since I have no seat, I stay where I am sitting by the door of the train. I am so tired, but in the darkness all I can think of is my mother’s face in the crowd and her hopeless open mouth. I don’t want to think of my mother, but I am in a delirium of fatigue, surrounded by the dark and the rumble of the train and the distant murmur of voices. I sleep sitting by the door of the train, fitful and rocked. I have dreams like fever dreams. In my dream I am in a strange house, but it is supposed to be my own house, but nothing is where it should be, and I begin to believe that I have actually entered a stranger’s house, and that they’ll return and find me here. When I wake up and go back to sleep, I am back in this strange house, looking through things.

I wake before dawn, only a little rested. My shoulders and hips and back all ache from the way I am leaning, but I have no energy to get up. I have no energy to do anything but endure. Elizabeth nods, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep, but neither of us speak.

Finally the train slows. We come in through a town, but the town seems to go on and on. It must be St. Louis. We stop and sit. The sun comes up and heats the car like an oven. There is no movement of the air. There are so many buildings in St. Louis, and so many of them are tall, two stories, that I wonder if they cut off the wind and that is why it’s so still. But finally the train lurches and we crawl into the station.

I am one of the first off the train by virtue of my position near the door. A soldier unlocks it and shouts for all of us to disembark, but he need not have bothered for there is a rush. I am borne ahead at its beginning, but I can stop at the back of the platform. I am afraid that I have lost Elizabeth, but I see her in the crowd. She is on the arm of a younger man in a bowler. There is something about his air that marks him as different—he is sprightly and apparently fresh even after the long ride.

I almost let them pass, but the prospect of being alone makes me reach out and touch her shoulder.

“There you are,” she says.

We join a queue of people waiting to use a trench. The smell is appalling, ammonia acrid and eye-watering. There is a wall to separate the men from the women, but the women are all together. I crouch, trying not to notice anyone and trying to keep my skirts out of the filth. It is so awful. It’s worse than anything. I feel so awful.

What if my mother were here? What would I do? I think maybe it was better, maybe it was God’s hand. But that is an awful thought, too.

“Child,” Elizabeth says when I come out, “what’s the matter?”

“It’s so awful,” I say. I shouldn’t cry, but I just want to be home and clean. I want to go to bed and sleep.

She offers me a biscuit.

“You should save your food,” I say.

“Don’t worry,” Elizabeth says, “We have enough.”

I shouldn’t accept it, but I am so hungry. And when I have a little to eat, I feel a little better.

I try to imagine what the fort will be like where we will be going. Will we have a place to sleep, or will it be barracks? Or worse yet, tents? Although after the night I spent on the train I can’t imagine anything that could be worse. I imagine if I have to stay awhile in a tent then I’ll make the best of it.

“I think this being in limbo is perhaps worse than anything we can expect at the end,” I say to Elizabeth. She smiles.

She introduces her companion, Michael. He is enough like her to be her brother, but I don’t think that they are. I am resolved not to ask; if they want to tell me they can.

We are standing together, not saying anything, when there is some commotion farther up the platform. It is a woman. Her black dress is like smoke. She is running down the platform, coming toward us. There are all of these people and yet it is as if there is no obstacle for her. “NO NO NO NO, DON’T TOUCH ME! FILTHY HANDS! DON’T LET THEM TOUCH YOU! DON’T GET ON THE TRAINS!”

People are getting out of her way. Where are the soldiers? The fabric of her dress is so threadbare it is rotten and torn at the seams. Her skirt is greasy black and matted and stained. Her face is so thin. “ANIMALS! THERE IS NOTHING OUT THERE! PEOPLE DON’T HAVE FOOD! THERE IS NOTHING THERE BUT INDIANS! THEY SENT US OUT TO SETTLE BUT THERE WAS NOTHING THERE!” I expect she will run past me, but she grabs my arm and stops and looks into my face. She has light eyes, pale eyes in her dark face. She is mad.

“WE WERE ALL STARVING, SO WE WENT TO THE FORT BUT THE FORT HAD NOTHING. YOU WILL ALL STARVE, THE WAY THEY ARE STARVING THE INDIANS! THEY WILL LET US ALL DIE! THEY DON’T CARE!” She is screaming in my face, and her spittle sprays me, warm as her breath. Her hand is all tendons and twigs, but she’s so strong I can’t escape.

The soldiers grab her and yank her away from me. My arm aches where she was holding it. I can’t stand up.

Elizabeth pulls me upright. “Stay close to me,” she says and starts to walk the other way down the platform. People are looking up, following the screaming woman.

She pulls me along with her. I keep thinking of the woman’s hand and wrist turned black with grime. I remember my mother’s face was black when she lay on the platform. Black like something rotted.

“Here,” Elizabeth says at an old door, painted green but now weathered. The door opens and we pass inside.

“What?” I say. My eyes are accustomed to the morning brightness and I can’t see.

“Her name is Clara,” Elizabeth says. “She has people in Tennessee.”

“Come with me,” says another woman. She sounds older. “Step this way. Where are her things?”

I am being kidnapped. Oh merciful God, I’ll die. I let out a moan.

“Her things were lost, her mother was killed in a crush on the platform.”

The woman in the dark clucks sympathetically. “Poor dear. Does Michael have his passenger yet?”

“In a moment,” Elizabeth says. “We were lucky for the commotion.”

I am beginning to be able to see. It is a storage room, full of abandoned things. The woman holding my arm is older. There are some broken chairs and a stool. She sits me in the chair. Is Elizabeth some kind of adventuress?

“Who are you?” I ask.

“We are friends,” Elizabeth says. “We will help you get to your sister.”

I don’t believe them. I will end up in New Orleans. Elizabeth is some kind of adventuress.

After a moment the door opens and this time it is Michael with a young man. “This is Andrew,” he says.

A man? What do they want with a man? That is what stops me from saying, “Run!” Andrew is blinded by the change in light, and I can see the astonishment working on his face, the way it must be working on mine. “What is this?” he asks.

“You are with Friends,” Michael says, and maybe he has said it differently than Elizabeth, or maybe it is just that this time I have had the wit to hear it.

“Quakers?” Andrew says. “Abolitionists?”

Michael smiles. I can see his teeth white in the darkness. “Just Friends,” he says.

Abolitionists. Crazy people who steal slaves to set them free. Have they come to kidnap us? We are recalcitrant southerners, I have never heard of Quakers seeking revenge, but everyone knows the Abolitionists are crazy and they are liable to do anything.

“We’ll have to wait here until they begin to move people out, it will be evening before we can leave,” says the older woman.

I am so frightened; I just want to be home. Maybe I should try to break free and run out to the platform. There are northern soldiers out there. Would they protect me? And then what, go to a fort in Oklahoma?

The older woman asks Michael how they could get past the guards so early and he tells her about the madwoman. A “refugee,” he calls her.

“They’ll just take her back,” Elizabeth says, sighing.

Take her back—do they mean that she really came from Oklahoma? They talk about how bad it will be this winter. Michael says there are Wisconsin Indians resettled down there, but they’ve got no food, and they’ve been starving on government handouts for a couple years. Now there will be more people. They’re not prepared for winter.

There can’t have been much handout during the war. It was hard enough to feed the armies.

They explain to Andrew and to me that we will sneak out of the train station this evening, after dark. We will spend a day with a Quaker family in St. Louis, and then they will send us on to the next family. And so we will be passed hand to hand, like a bucket in a brigade, until we get to our families.

They call it the underground railroad.

But we are slave owners.

“Wrong is wrong,” says Elizabeth. “Some of us can’t stand and watch people starve.”

“But only two out of the whole train,” Andrew says.

Michael sighs.

The old woman nods. “It isn’t right.”

Elizabeth picked me because my mother died. If my mother had not died, I would be out there, on my way to starve with the rest of them.

I can’t help it, but I start to cry. I should not profit from my mother’s death. I should have kept her safe.

“Hush, now,” says Elizabeth. “Hush, you’ll be okay.”

“It’s not right,” I whisper. I’m trying not to be loud, we mustn’t be discovered.

“What, child?”

“You shouldn’t have picked me,” I say. But I am crying so hard I don’t think they can understand me. Elizabeth strokes my hair and wipes my face. It may be the last time someone will do these things for me. My sister has three children of her own, and she won’t need another child. I’ll have to work hard to make up my keep.

There are blankets there and we lie down on the hard floor, all except Michael, who sits in a chair and sleeps. I sleep this time with fewer dreams. But when I wake up, although I can’t remember what they were, I have the feeling that I have been dreaming restless dreams.

The stars are bright when we finally creep out of the station. A night full of stars. The stars will be the same in Tennessee. The platform is empty, the train and the people are gone. The Lincoln Train has gone back south while we slept, to take more people out of Mississippi.

“Will you come back and save more people?” I ask Elizabeth.

The stars are a banner behind her quiet head. “We will save what we can,” she says.

It isn’t fair that I was picked. “I want to help,” I tell her.

She is silent for a moment. “We only work with our own,” she says. There is something in her voice that has not been there before. A sharpness.