Lunch-Box Dream (4 page)

“This is important,” I heard Olivia say from where I was in my room.

She was talking in the kitchen to Jacob as he finished his milk. “You and Cora must find Uncle Frank. I can't go there right now. He's at the market. Or was supposed to be, but I think Cora knows where he is.”

I came into the kitchen then. “I think I do,” I said.

“Will you do that for me?” Olivia said to Jacob and me together. “Will you bring Uncle Frank home? With whatever bags he might have?”

“Sure we will,” Jacob said, looking at me, so I nodded at him.

“And don't laugh if he jokes with you,” Olivia said.

“Okay,” I said. I knew what she meant.

So we two left together. We were as quick as we could be, but it was some walk downtown past the tracks, and we had to pace it. Jacob told me about fishing Sunday afternoon and how since it was not going to rain anymore he and Uncle Frank were going to go to the creek every morning till the end of his stay here. He said it was good Uncle Frank wasn't working at the rug factory anymore so they could go to the creek early every day. I said yes that the fishing might be good, but it wasn't so good that Frank was not making rugs now, and he shouldn't forget to call Aunt Weeza. He said of course not, he always remembered to do that.

I worry about Jacob sometimes. He looks older than his years and he whistles at fancy cars that we see. Two of them so far on the Dixie Road, and I don't know who was driving them.

“You can't whistle like that,” I told him the second time.

“Sure, I can,” he said. “I just showed you I could. Poppa taught me. I'm even louder than he is, and better.” And he whistled again.

“I know that,” I said. “I mean you shouldn't whistle like that when you are not at home with us. It's okay when you're home with us.”

“I don't understand,” he said.

“I know you don't,” I said. I told him just listen to me, I knew what I meant. He said okay and didn't whistle after that, at least not when he was with me.

My sister Olivia was right. Her husband Frank was at the tavern as she guessed he was. I know why. He just lost his job and his friends were there. Olivia probably thinks if Frank sees Jacob when he comes out of the tavern it will shame him. I'm not so sure, but that's why she wanted us to go together. And also for me not to walk alone. Being tall, Jacob helps like that. I do like him lots. He can be so funny. Frank came out snorting and laughing and had three bags with him. “I was on my way to church. Honest!” But he wasn't funny, and I hushed Jacob's laughing as we walked him home.

So death was all around him.

From the moment he glimpsed those rusty iron rails weaving off into the trees, Bobby couldn't turn his mind from the ghastly railroad hearse of the assassinated president—how it wound its way from state to state, station to station, every mile from Washington to his faraway home, on rails like those.

In school he had seen photographs his teacher had tacked on the bulletin board, clippings from newspapers, all part of the lesson on Ohio history, because the Lincoln train had passed through Cleveland on its way to the burial in Illinois.

The terrible circumstances of the president's death! The evening dresses, satin and ruffled, the black suits unutterably stained, the unspeakable spatter on the box's tufted velvet chairs. That so-familiar face so distorted. And didn't she say there was a smell? By the time he—it, the body—reached Cleveland, they said the odor was awful, even outside in the park, where crowds passed by the open casket. Not only that, after two weeks the dead president's features had twisted and turned purple. Why had his teacher told them this?

“The better to love our greatest president,” she had said, pinching her lips together, the classroom utterly silent.

But sitting in the car now, speeding away from the weedy rails, it came to him in a flash of remembrance what his mother had told him once: that Grandpa's body had traveled by train, too. From Florida all the way back to Ohio, his coffin had weaved its own way to burial, station by station, town by town, in a reverse journey to the one they were traveling right now.

But really? A casket on a train?

A casket draped with black shrouds, crape, and bunting? It was beyond terrifying. Squirreling up in the seat and closing his eyes, Bobby realized he didn't want to be anywhere but his own room. No one had died there. But as much as he tried to think of his bed and the wall it faced, he thought only of the long box.

Where exactly had they put Grandpa's coffin?

In the aisle? Did passengers have to squeeze by it on their way to their seats? Did they have to reposition the cloths they had disturbed on their way by?

Or did trains have body cars? Maybe in front of the caboose? Or was the box wedged, unthinkably, in some sort of general baggage car, with trunks and suitcases, cartons of oranges, racks of hanging trousers and jackets, caged pets? Did they allow people to ride in such baggage cars, too? Were there guards of some kind? Railroad employees? Was the coffin in the train car where the conductors went for a smoke? Did they play cards on the casket? Did bums crouch in there among the baggage? Immigrants? Negroes?

His mind flying now, Bobby recalled seeing news-reels of Indians from India hanging on the sides and roofs of railroad cars. It was how they traveled. Were people like that on his grandfather's death train? Did they cling to the windows of the carriage with stalky arms, jabbering at the white man's coffin within? Oh, Grandpa.

I have been on trains.

You know what I'm talking about. There was one car set aside for colored people. It was called the Jim Crow car.

It was a hot noon on the day I'm remembering, and hotter in the car, with us jammed in like sardines. There were heaps of baggage at one end of the car, too, which made it more crowded. There wasn't a casket this time. I've sometimes seen a casket in with the bags. They put them in with us, thinking we don't mind.

I had to go to Mobile because Weeza wanted me to talk to her mother, who was living there. That was six years ago. There was nothing I wanted to say to her, her cold eyes always staring me down. She never thought much of me, but I went because Weeza asked me to. I ate my lunch on the train. Weeza had packed it for me in my lunch-box. Now, that day the colored car was right up behind the engine, so I had to shield my sandwich from the cinders flying in the windows. Try that sometime. Even so, eating lunch in that hot car, crammed tight, with cinders in my eyes, was the last good thing that happened that day.

Another time a man stole my jacket in the train station. I saw him slide it off the back of the bench when he went past. It was brand-new. It was hot in the colored room and I had hung it over the back of the bench when I went to the restroom one last time. When I came out I saw a man swipe it off the seat and run off outside. He was a white man but he was a bum and he had come into the colored side and taken my new jacket. A woman on the bench yelled at him but she didn't get up, she was old. I wanted to chase that man and pull my jacket off him and kick and hit him, but the train came and I  couldn't miss it. Negroes didn't want to be in that town at nighttime. This was when Weeza and I were first married and little Jacob was sleeping in our room. When I got home without my jacket and told her, Weeza took my hands into her lap and pulled my head down on her breast and held it there while I cried. I was mad as a hornet or a bomb. I wanted to hurt someone, but she didn't let me go until the sun left the yard and we were in the dark room crying together. She told me I was right not to chase that bum. I do some things right and some things that don't seem it.

Tuesday, June 16

They hadn't reached Columbus after all, but stopped to pass the first night at a motel called El Siesta in the town of Delaware, still deep in Ohio. Bobby hardly remembered the drab walls of the room when they got on the road early the next morning, but he couldn't shake the smell of mothballs and dusty crawl spaces like the one in the ceiling over his room at home.

The engine droned hour after hour the first full day, into the hilly country just before the border at Ripley, where the Ohio River wavered between Ohio and Kentucky.

“Ripley was a huge Underground Railroad stop,” Ricky said, flinging his arm toward Bobby's window. “There's a house here where it stopped. They still have it. You can go inside it.”

Trains stopping at houses. Bobby didn't ask. The moment they neared the end of the bridge over the brown river, Ricky added, “And…we're
in
the South. Kentucky started as a border state, you know. See these yellow states.” He pointed to a page from a book. “Then it went Confederate and got bloody. It's a slave state. They had slaves even when they were in the Union.”

Trains. Slaves. Bobby felt heavy and breathless. He cranked down his window and tried to fill his lungs with air.

Soon they were heading down through horse farms toward Lexington for lunch and the promised first battlefield site in a town called Perryville he had never heard of, even from Ricky.

But that was still hours away. The engine ground on, and so did the relentless boredom of the highway, past columned homes and meadows dotted with horses as unmoving as if they were stuffed. So they played car games.

“Highvay Touring Games,” his grandmother called them, reading from the TripTik, and she helped the boys start playing them when they got restless in the backseat and didn't want to sleep or read or stare aimlessly outside anymore. Later Bobby saw what the TripTik said about the games: “Keeps Children Quiet and Occupied (For a While).” He thought it was funny for a printed thing to put in a little joke like that—(For a While). “For a Vhile.”

There was “Highvay Bingo,” where the first one to see five of anything shouted “Bingo” and won. Five cows. Five barns. Five blue station vagons. Five bums. Five hearses. Another was “I Am Tinking…” where someone says he is thinking of an object and names the letter it begins with. The person who guesses it gets to think of the next object. That lasted until Ricky started using words he knew that Bobby didn't—“Gatling” (machine gun), “ordnance” (artillery), and the absurd “chevaux-de-frise” (barricades made of spiked logs), and Bobby started yelling at him.

“Okay, cut it out,” their mother said. “We'll be stopping soon.”

Finally there was the game Ricky and Bobby had invented together. It wasn't really a game, and it was private so their mother and grandmother never heard them playing it, and it didn't have a name, but if it did, it might have been called “What If.”

The point of it was to describe a situation in which it was impossible not to do something disgusting to yourself.

“Okay,” Bobby whispered after they left Lexington, and his grandmother had fallen asleep with her head resting on the passenger window, “okay, I have one. What if you're in a desert. You're in a desert, and you're there for a week and you're starving to death, you're nearly dead, and it's incredibly hot, and then you find a bottle of mustard. All you have to eat in the whole desert is mustard. There's nothing else. It's just desert. And it's a hundred and fifty degrees. Would you eat it?”

“Mustard?” said his brother.

“It'll burn out your throat. You know it will make you throw up, it's so hot out, and it'll burn a hole in your stomach, but you're empty and you're starving. Would you still eat it?”

Ricky frowned. “Yellow mustard? Regular yellow mustard? Like for hot dogs?”

Bobby couldn't keep from laughing. “No, spicy brown. Hot. Like fire—”

“Boys?” said their mother. “Bobby?”

He lowered his voice and leaned toward Ricky, who leaned away as if he smelled sour armpits again. “It burns your tongue and that…hing unner yur tonnnnn,” he said, holding his tongue up to show what he meant.

Ricky shook his head. “Gross. I don't know.”

“It's been a week. You have no water. Your stomach is empty. It burns. And your water ran out days ago—”

“Then you just die from starvation,” Ricky said.

“But no, because then you find a bottle of brown mustard. It might keep you alive, but will burn big  holes from your tongue all the way to your stomach.”

“I don't know. I guess so.”

“You'd throw your guts up, you know—”

Ricky laughed now with a flicker of bitterness in his voice. “Yeah, I would. All over you!”

“Aww, gust!” Bobby made the sound of throwing up.

Grandma woke up when he said that and looked back, so they stopped playing. Her hair was funny, thought Bobby. His mother was just driving and driving, eyes ahead now.

Perryville was twenty-five miles off the TripTik route, straight west on country roads. It was middle afternoon when they turned off, and the snaking bands of trees along the smaller roads were shady and full of the early, still quiet of summer. Ricky fidgeted with his books for the longest time before he finally let them go and perched forward in his seat, casting looks out every window until he spied the sign—
PERRYVILLE BATTLEFIELD
—and they turned left and entered the park.

The road to the information center was long and straight and rising, and its shoulders were paved with gravel. They parked and got out. The sunny hills (there were always hills on Civil War battlefields, Bobby knew from the brown photographs) rolled so easily up and down and away from the car, overlapping one another like silent green waves, it was hard to imagine these fields as places of death. Ricky charged immediately up the nearest hill to a paved circle around a stone wall. Inside the wall stood an obelisk memorializing the battle and the dead. Beyond that several old cannons stood poised on a ridge. All around, the standing rocks, the bending flow of trees, the isolated groves moving ever so slightly in the heat, the long wooden fences zigzagging at the edges of fields, all were muffled, peaceful, and somber.

“You can't believe it,” Ricky said, the first one to speak. “Places like this, a hundred years ago, there used to be thousands of guys fighting, shooting, riding. It was a mass of yelling men. Plus there was a fog of smoke, even if it was a clear day, from all the rifle shots, and who knew where you were.”

“Yeah,” said Bobby.

Following Ricky's animated charge back down the hill and beyond it to another hill and another, Bobby paused when he glimpsed a white house in the far distance below the crest. It stood angled at the bottom of the downward slope, near a sliver of creek, amid a loose gathering of trees in full leaf. The house was as unmoving and serene, he thought, as if you might gaze at it for hours and see no change at all save the sun's slow crossing, until a face appeared in its doorway, a woman's face, her hands wiping a towel, and she called you in, gently and by name, for lunch.

It was true, thought Bobby, you
couldn't
believe it. You
couldn't
understand how such peace could turn so deadly.

“It was the bloodiest battle in Kentucky,” he said, recalling from a bronze plaque near the obelisk what he thought Ricky might like to hear, “1862.”

“Sure it was. Thousands died here. Four hundred and ten on a small patch of ground, somebody wrote.” Was Ricky making that up? “Their bodies all stacked up and ready to be buried,” he added.

Turning, Ricky looked at the trees soberly, the sun on his glasses. Bobby wondered if so much blood soaking into the dirt burned the grass or made it grow better, greener. He couldn't believe it had no effect either way. It was blood. He asked his brother.

Ricky shrugged, not taking his eyes from the trees. “I don't know, but guess what? After some battles, maybe not this one, there were thousands of dead horses everywhere. Big, huge carcasses that had been shot out from under their riders. They were no good, so they just left them rotting where they died.”

As they made their way back, the two boys saw their mother and grandmother walking out of the information center toward the obelisk, followed by a brown woman with a handled bag.

“What did they do with all of them?” Bobby asked. “The horses?”

“And the soldiers,” Ricky continued, “the dead soldiers? They'd pile the bodies in pigpens,
inside
the pens, with the hogs outside. If they didn't, the hogs would eat the bodies. The Union cleaned up their dead but left the Confederates for days. People had to wear masks over their noses. Also birds, too, would peck at them, but they shot those out of the sky.”

“Gust,” said Bobby.

They walked one last field down to a line of fences, stunned by a quiet that was quieter the farther away you went from the road. There were only two other cars. In the middle of June, only three cars. No one went to Perryville, the bloodiest battle in Kentucky history. Bobby looked once more toward the white house, but couldn't see it now. Grandma was sitting in the front seat, her door open, her feet on the road. She looked tired. Was she thinking of Grandpa? Did she know what a battlefield was? Did she care?

“How we doing?” their mother asked when they got back to the car. “We should be leaving. Moving on. What do you think?”

Ricky said nothing at first. Then, “Yeah. This is good. A good one to start with. It's great. Thanks, Mom.”

“More to come,” she said.

As they drove down to the main road, Bobby's mind drifted back to how his father often took Ricky downtown to Indians games, how there was a giveaway at the grocery store once and his mother brought back a book about old pistols for Ricky while he got a book about watches, how Ricky did this and Ricky did that, and sooner or later any good thing Bobby did was remembered to have been done by Ricky, the first, best son.

He cursed to himself and turned away to the window but had trouble not thinking more of the same. He tried to wash his mind clean and stare blankly at the miles and miles of no change. Trees and white highways. Highways and gas stations. Barns, always barns, and rusting silos, and more highways.

Sometimes, tired of the ceaseless monotony of staring out, Bobby lay sideways with his back on the seat and his knees folded above him. He gazed quietly at the ceiling of the car while Ricky looked out the window from his pillow.

What did his brother see out there when he sat with his head against the pillow and his elbow on the padded door rest, cupping his chin in his hand? It wasn't the barns and horses and truck stops, he knew that. It was something farther away. Tomorrow, maybe, as silly as that sounded. Bobby didn't know, but it was far away. Ricky's face looked so small and pale and thin. He wrinkled his eyebrows when he thought people were looking at him, as if he thought that made him look better. He wasn't frowning now, so Bobby knew he was just himself, looking out the window at whatever it was. And whatever it was Ricky was seeing, it wasn't happy. Bobby knew it made him sad and took him far away from himself, but what was it?

Since the time he was five, Ricky had worn glasses and hated them. They were thick and heavy. Bobby remembered the first time his brother came home from the eye doctor with the glasses. Was their father there? He might have been, but he didn't drive, like Grandma didn't drive, so it must have been his mother who had taken him.

Embarrassed that the lenses were thick, but trying not to show it, Ricky boasted about them. He wrinkled his forehead and said that the glasses proved he was a genius. That girls liked glasses. That Clark Kent wore them. That he could see better with them than Bobby could without them. But the sight of his brother with those glasses broke Bobby's heart in a way he didn't understand. They made Ricky look thin, afraid, weaker than before, with only the frown on his forehead to defend him. How often, after putting the glasses on, Ricky would stare straight ahead and turn his face from side to side, watching the world ripple and distort across the lenses.

That was only the beginning. He had gotten thicker ones after that first pair. What was happening with his eyes?

Bobby tried looking through his brother's glasses once when Ricky was in the bathroom and had left them on the dresser. He was shocked at how blurry everything was. Their bedroom, the hallway outside their door, the whole world smeared with goo. What was it like looking through Ricky's eyes from the car window now? Had he really seen the railroad tracks as he'd told their mother? Had he not seen the white house at Perryville? Might he ever not see anything at all?