She walked nearly an hour before she reached the deserted highway. The sun was just peeking over the horizon marked with miles of green sugarcane fields. It was harvesting season, and white smoke from the burning of the cane before the harvest, something they did to make the cane cutting easier, billowed up from the fields, leaving a pungent scent of burnt sugar in the air. Fannie hated that smell.
When she reached the train station, a good five miles down the road, the front door was padlocked. She went around the back, climbed the steps to the train platform, and sat on the wooden bench by the back door to wait for the ticket master to arrive. She had no idea where she was going, but she prayed she had enough money to go far enough away that her father wouldn’t come looking for her.
As soon as she heard the rattle of the door being unlocked, she jumped up.
“My, ain’t we in a hurry this morning,” the stationmaster said as he opened the door.
She gave him a minute to settle himself behind the ticket window. “Where’s the first train out going this morning?”
“New Orleans.” The bleary-eyed man peered over the ticket counter. “Say, I know you. You’re Jake Hadley’s daughter, ain’t ya?”
“Yes sir.” She had hoped he wouldn’t recognize her.
The man behind the counter, O. D. Landry, also ran the only grocery in town. She was feeling a little guilty standing there in front of him, given that she had stolen an orange out of his store just last week.
“How much is a one-way ticket?” she asked.
He tilted his black visor back on his head. “One way, you say? Cost you about . . . well, let me see . . . how much you got?”
Fannie counted the coins in her hand. All she’d been able to scrape up for her journey was seven dollars and some change.
“Sorry about your mama,” Mr. Landry said.
“Thank you kindly.” She counted the money in her hand for the second time, trying hard not to think about her mama.
Fannie’s mother, Clara, had taken ill a few weeks ago, after she developed an infection and then a fever from a cut on the back of her leg she’d received from a cane knife while out in the fields. It festered, no matter how much Mercurochrome Fannie swathed on it. The Hadleys were too poor to afford a doctor, and within a few days, her mother was dead. With no money for a proper burial, her father covered Clara in a blanket and carried her out to the woods, where he buried her next to a tree with nothing more than two twigs tied together as a grave marker. When Fannie went to look for it the next day, the grave was covered in leaves, the twig marker gone, probably carried away by squirrels. She never forgave her father for burying her mother out in the woods like a wild animal, and that very day she swore on her life that she’d never suffer the same fate.
After he buried Clara, her daddy took to chasing Fannie around the cabin at night. At first, Fannie thought the wildness in his eyes was from the liquor, but then he caught her and tried to force himself on her. That same night she packed her little bag, scraped up what money she could find in his pants pockets, and left.
“Tell ya what, sweetheart. Just give me a few dollars, and we’ll call it a day.” Mr. Landry gave her a friendly wink.
Fannie nervously handed over the coins.
“You ain’t changing your mind. ’Cause if you is, you can go on back home, and I won’t say nothing to nobody.” Mr. Landry set his eyes on her as if he understood her predicament.
She shook her head. “I ain’t changing my mind.”
“Okay then. You take care now, you hear?” Mr. Landry nodded.
The train was pulling up just as Fannie went out onto the platform. She hurried over to the door at the rear of the first car. She found an empty seat by the window and let her head fall back against the headrest as the train engine sputtered and the wheels squealed against the tracks. She pulled her worn brown leather satchel up on her lap. It held everything she possessed in the world—a pair of breeches, a few cotton panties, her Sunday church dress, a poplin shirt, a few undershirts, a nightie, and a small tattered prayer book that had been her mother’s.
Fannie rested her forehead on the window, watching the cane fields flash past—first green fields, then the burned fields dotted with the salt-and-pepper faces of the weathered field hands who would stop briefly from the cane cutting and look up with hollow glances, the same look she used to give the train as it passed, wishing one day that it would carry her away from all the misery. She turned away from the window and fingered the small gold cross around her neck, hoping that Mr. Landry would keep his promise not to let on where she’d gone. The last thing she wanted was for her father to come looking for her.
The swaying of the train soon sent Fannie into a deep slumber. She awoke with a start to a loud whistle as the conductor made his way down the aisle toward her.