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CHAPTER SEVEN
She appeared out of the skirl of smoke and snow like a figure torn from a black and white dream. Fragments of her form dissolved, and she looked as if she were floating on the stone platform. She walked along the heaving iron flanks of the Portland Rose, its huge grinding driver wheels stopped. Then, in a burst of sallow light from windows of the station, I finally saw her black velvet hat shaped like a small cake box, her eyes covered with a mesh of black netting, making her arrival as mysterious as the destination of the waiting train.
“There she is!” I shouted, leaving my mother and father, and bowling through the snow toward the diminutive apparition with delight. When she caught me up in her arms I smelled the city– tobacco and strange soap– and her perfume and the clean white silk of the collar of her blouse. In the gesso wash of light I saw sprinkles of black cinders from the fire-foaming smokestack of the engine, like freckles, on her white gloves. Then, with the knowledge this was no ordinary visit, but an unexpected arrival she released me, and I saw tears in her violet eyes, the dull bruise on her cheek under a pancake batter-colored powder, the blackness of her carriage.
There was no hint from my mother and father that Grandmother Rada would return so soon to Immigration Valley, and my questions on the way across the valley that night were parried with looks that stopped my questions cold. It had been less than two months since she and Buck, her second husband, had arrived to visit us in Immigration Valley on the good tides of Christmas with suitcases packed with tinseled gifts; more mysteries from the city. Now she was suddenly back, with no harbinger of telephone, no tingle of holiday anticipation between mother and father.
My mother embraced Grandma Rada, and saw the bruise, and led us into the station. I glanced at the windows of the Pullman cars. Inside I saw cocooned warmth, and plush seats, and men and women reading papers, unaware of the storm. What I was looking for, however, were the black men. I’d only seen them once before in my life, through the windows of the Portland Rose. Then, from the tinted window, a round black face, dark as the smoke from the engine looked at me and grinned. The red tongue and white teeth startled me, and I was full of wonder. Black men. The world was wondrous.
The station was heated by a large black iron stove glowing cherry red, and the cavernous room was redolent of the smells of tobacco and wax and coal smoke. On the plaster wall opposite the shiny brass barred ticket windows was a large Union Pacific clock above the street door that had a wreath of red neon illuminating its dark face. Plates of dirty water pooled in the depression of the tiles, and I tried skating through a few of them before I was set firmly on one of the oak benches, like the ones in the Second Ward, and told to shush. This was no occasion of joy, I’d discovered as we waited in silence. Grandmother was the only passenger to step out of the future and into the warp of the Immigration Valley that night.
I sat waiting on a cold bench for my father to get her luggage. It was as if we were at some formal church affair, faces so arranged as to help the reception of whatever wisdom that was being dispensed like penny jawbreakers from a pine pulpit. I squirreled around the station reading arrivals and departures, locked into longing to go to places like Rock Springs, or Boise, or to Los Angeles where they had honest to God palm trees!
The clock’s hand swept tiredly to vertical, and then fell slowly to six before it began to climb again. I studied the snow-blind windows, and heard the rumble of the black train as it began to move in a direction as inexorable as the hands of the clock. The very foundations of the station trembled and shook like the Yellowstone earthquake that had thrown me from my bed just two months ago. And overall, there was this great hanging precipice of a question that I dare not ask. Where was Buck?
I studied my Grandmother’s face in the white light. She looked like my mother, yet was much smaller, a fragile, doll-like woman with an unlined, quite beautiful face. Her small nose, dark black hair, and violet eyes set her apart from the plain people of the valley. Even then I imagined her to be a porcelain doll. She even moved her hands differently. I was used to thick-bodied women with plain faces, dour men with thumbs hooked in coverall suspenders, children with manure streaked boots and running noses.
But my Grandmother had a brilliant diamond on her finger, and her nails were painted a sleek glossy crimson color, and I often thought if she were to scratch your arm it would be bleed whiter than snow. One of the first glimmerings of the thing called awareness was that my mother and her mother were– different– from the people of my father’s people. Rada was dressed like a picture in Life magazine, fresh and pressed and fashionable with a throw of a beady eyed fox fur over her shoulder, velvet lapels on her overcoat, patent leather shoes with heels higher than those worn by any woman I’d ever observed in the valley. But now, sitting between these two attractive women, they wore faces not of delight at meeting again so soon, but of an inexpressible sadness. When Dad came into the station brushing snow from his shoulders he carried one small simple suitcase instead of the usual armada of alligators and Gladstone.
I didn’t know if it was true in the city, but in Immigration Valley where one sat in the family car indicated status. On Sunday drives, a ritual as solemn as church, it was men in the front and women in the back. The same couples toured the same roads for years and years and years. If it was family the rules were children in the back and no peeps or quarrels. Any trouble and it was banishment to the house of a warm spring Sunday to languish hateful and sullen. I spent a lot Sundays sitting at home. I knew there would be a stop for hard ice cream at Lowe’s Pharmacy. I missed a lot of ice cream because even then I was refusing to go to Sunday school without a grand fight.
That night I was told to sit in the shotgun seat beside my father, which both startled and pleased me. I got carsick in the back seat. As the Ford plunged into the snowy night it skidded across the railroad tracks as we went west on the nine miles of blacktop to Alma.
In the darkness of the back seat my mother and Grandma were murmuring below the purr of the engine. My father, who never appeared to be ruffled by anything short of the recent announcements of an impending war was uneasy– ruffled at the sudden arrival of his mother-in-law. He peered into the bright cone of the headlights and through the mad scrambling flurries of snow that had coated the road. Occasionally I could see flickers of light from a farmyard to the west, and north, toward Pleasanton and Liberty, but for the most part the huge valley was empty of light. I imagined the herds of cattle driven against the fences by the force of the blizzard, sitting dumbly in the darkness with only the heat within them to keep them alive.
In the car it was suffocatingly hot, an acknowledgment that, whatever the virtues of the ‘49 Ford, heat didn’t get to the back seat except in smelly wafts of moist air that smelled like antifreeze. Occasionally I heard my mother’s strained voice saying, “But why, why?” and then a murmured demure, and I glanced at my father whose jaw muscles were working as if he were chewing on stones of calcified bile. And in this atmosphere I felt myself as dumb as the cattle, lost in the track of the light. It was not until we saw the lights of Alma, a string of a dozen or so new blue arc lights along main street, empty of life as the railroad tracks after the venerable Rose had disappeared into the east.
“Have you decided?” my father inquired with a solicitous tone toward the back seat. He used a deferent manner to my mother and grandmother, and sometimes to high-church officials, but with no one else.
“We think it best she stay at the Hotel Bruxelles, at least for tonight,” my mother said.
“That would be best, Jonathan. There is a chance he may come after me,” my Grandmother said softly. I saw my father’s jaw grinding again.
“If that sonafabitch shows up here I'll . . .” My mouth opened in dumbfounded amazement. I’d never before, in fourteen years, heard my father swear, or curse, or take any kind of an oath. It had the same effect on me as a lightning strike. And I’d known the lash of his anger too, but his words possessed a deep, growling kind of anger that I’d never dreamed existed. His voice was murderous. I tried to watch the road for him.
“Jonathan!” my mother cried in quick alarm.
“Please Jonathan, I don’t want to cause you any trouble.”
“This storm will slow him up if he has any ideas of following you,” my father said. “He’ll surely know that you’ve come here,” my mother said, her voice tight with apprehension.
“I tried to leave the impression that I had gone to Rupert to see the Steeles. But . . .”
“That won’t delay him long,” my father said. “There isn’t a brakeman, conductor or porter that doesn’t drink in the Atom Club. Buck knows who gets on those trains better than the U P.”
“No,” Grandma quickly said. “I’ll be fine, and this will pass. I need some time to think,” she added, and I heard her choke off a sob that held a further undreamed condition of heartbreak.
“I’m serious, Rada, if he shows up here I’ll run him off. I won’t stand for it, not another moment of it!”
“It will be fine, Jonathon, if you’ll just let it go.” But my father wasn't listening. Instead, I heard him, under the mutter of the engine and the heater, “unless he drives. If he drives he could’ve beat her here, considering how late the train was . . .”
“The Brethren” is copyrighted © 2001 by T. O. McCallister. All rights reserved. You may not republish or reproduce this work without the expressed written permission of the author by any means mechanical, electronic, graphic, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems. Permission can be granted by writing the author at alimed42@yahoo.com. He also welcomes your feedback to this story. All violators will be persecuted.
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