Over dinner, the woman—Mary Morse—tells Lucy her story. Her parents were poor, the children always hungry, Miss Morse the oldest and hungriest. She has lived in Medford, Massachusetts, since she was sent there, at thirteen, to take care of her dying aunt. The aunt was her father’s favorite sister. She was good to Miss Morse, made sure she kept up with school. She died, Miss Morse said, the way you hope a person will die, already used to the idea, and because she’d taught Sunday school, her funeral was well attended. Miss Morse became a history teacher. She met a man to marry but he ran off with her best girlfriend. (“Don’t you go doing that,” she says to Lucy with a coy, surprising grin.) For a while after that Miss Morse thought she would die of heartbreak—that was like a separate life, that time, a black pit between her first life and this one—but now she knows nothing like that will kill her. She likes her students, but she’s going back to Quebec, where she was born, to take care of her dying mother.
“See how it goes? New year, old journey. Nothing extraordinary in it, not the least little bit. Most people want to be extraordinary. Make a mark in the world. But for what? In my experience it’s the extraordinary people what aren’t happy, always expecting something better than they get. Whenever anything at all happens to me, I tell myself it’s happened to everyone else, too. It’s actually very comforting. I feel steady almost all the time because I know that nothing out of the ordinary will ever happen and if it did, or if it seemed like it did, it wouldn’t be, anyway. Well, aren’t you patient. I bet you want to be the next Charles Lindbergh when you grow up. But don’t you see how that makes you ordinary, too?”
Lucy nods vaguely. She hears little of the woman’s words—it’s the cadence of her voice she likes, its carelessness, an almost frothy cheer, and that it keeps on coming, like a tide.
? ? ?
Her bunks have been made up. She climbs into the top one and opens the book Uncle Ira gave her to a poem about a bluebird who is saying good-bye to a girl, but he can’t tell her himself because he has already flown away. He has told a crow, who tells another child, who will have to tell the girl. But before that happens, the poem ends. Lucy reads it twice, then shuts the book and turns out the light. Tears spill down her face. Her stomach is full in a way she’s unused to, the passing sky milky with clouds. She longs to be in bed with Janie. There are questions she would have liked to ask Miss Morse: Did you know, when you left, that you would one day go back? Why did your father live so far from his favorite sister? How can you be sure that the dangers you already know are worse than the ones you’re heading for?
The conductor passes through the car, telling a few people to talk more quietly, and Lucy is sorry for the silence that spreads behind him. She hears his accent as he nears her bunk, Quiet down, please, a bit quieter, please . . . Irish, she thinks, a different kind of Irish, maybe from a county near Emma’s, and Lucy lets this idea soothe her a little. She thinks of the first letter she will write, and wonders what she will have to say. (This: that she has found Peter, that he is the same, that he makes her go to school, that she has learned a little French, that they are neither rich nor poor. And this: She is sorry. She misses Emma. She misses them all. She addresses the letters to Emma, though everyone who can write writes to her, including Mrs. Cohn. She thinks she will devastate Emma if she writes to Mrs. Cohn and she is right, though this devastation would be nothing compared with what Lucy has already put them through. For months they wake to footfall and think it is her. They wonder silently which of them is more to blame for her leaving. They wish out loud that they had chained her to her bed.)
Lucy is wrong about the conductor. He is British. Thirty-one years ago he was hired to watch over a bunch of pear trees en route from Sussex to Massachusetts, and he never went home. He has worked as a water boy in the quarries, a messenger in Boston, a busboy in Providence, a conductor for the last fifteen years, always carrying things, or people. He knows where Lucy is. He noticed the boy alone, of course. He notices everything. He stops at the kid’s bunks. Hasn’t said a word. Doesn’t seem to know about the curtain. He’s lying there in full view, facing the window, not asleep—the conductor can tell by the stiff way his head doesn’t quite rest on the pillow. He hasn’t taken off his cap. Most people who ride the Pullman think it’s going to be their chance to play high class. Then he sees their faces change as night falls, sees their fear. He hears them call for the porters, a glass of water, an aspirin, this or that, and the porters think it’s despotism—which maybe in part it is—but the conductor knows it’s also fear. The ghostly shapes of trees, the moon behind a cloud, old stories of wolves. He lets the people be. By morning they have forgotten. They revise the night’s demons, boast to their fellow passengers how civilized it is, traveling this way. But the boy can’t be more than ten, maybe eleven. The conductor wasn’t much older when he left home. He rises on his toes next to the bunk and, though this is the porter’s job, asks quietly, “Is there anything you need?” After a pause, still facing away, the boy shakes his head. Black curls escape from his cap, snarled, but not dirty. Long. The conductor itches to touch one, pop it, see just how long. “I’ll be back in the morning,” he says. But he doesn’t go. He won’t go back to his compartment tonight. He’ll stay awake, watchful. He lifts himself closer. He murmurs, “It’ll be all right.” Then he pats the long pile of the kid, pulls the curtain, and snaps it shut.
Acknowledgments