The Train of Small Mercies (2 page)

What Avery Tate had forgotten to ask—and in the last year, he had been forgetting more than usual—was whether Roy knew Jamie, since they had gone to the same high school. Roy wouldn't be studying ethics in journalism until the fall semester, and in the days before beginning his reporting and interviewing, it never occurred to him that he was the wrong man for the job.

The Wests knew to look for the reporter at one that Saturday. Beyond that, not having ever been interviewed before, they didn't much know what to expect.

W
hen Edwin Rupp woke up that morning, he turned on the radio beside the bed and searched for a weather report, despite having followed the forecast for Saturday all week long. His wife, Lolly, rolled over, annoyed and not ready to open her eyes.

“Just go outside and look,” she said in a raspy voice. “That's your forecast.”

Instead, Edwin opened the blinds of the bedroom window. The sun poured in. “Blue skies,” he said, and exhaled deeply.

The radio was playing the Doors' “People Are Strange.” For a few minutes Lolly tried to sort through her dream about their new pool brimming with fish, then, understanding it no better now that she was awake, she pushed her way through deep morning fog and thought about Saint Patrick's Cathedral, in New York, and how many people must already be lining around the block. She lifted the top sheet and reached over to find a station broadcasting any news about the service.

“Hey, you're turning Jim,” Edwin said.

“I want to see if they're saying anything about the funeral. Jim won't mind.” She went around the dial but couldn't find anything.

“We're going to have fun today, right?” Edwin asked. “We'll see the train, but I really don't want that to just hang over the whole day, with the party.”

Lolly yawned. “It's just Ted and Georgia, so I hadn't really thought of it as a big party. But sure, we'll try to have fun. It's just that it's going to be kind of a heavy day. I mean, there's some very sad shit going on right now.” Since growing her hair out, she had developed a habit of tugging on the ends when she was irritated, and now she held her auburn strands with two hands.

“I know,” Edwin said. “It's heavy, I know.” Edwin glanced out the window again. He tried to offer Lolly a smile, but his mouth turned into a pucker, and then he gave up. “I'm going to go ahead and fill it up,” he said. “Chlorine needs to sit for a couple of hours before you can get in.” He changed T-shirts and stepped into his old madras shorts, which had become as thin as tracing paper over the years, then glanced over at Lolly before walking out of the room.

Lolly wrapped herself in the sheets again. The house began its quiet rumble when Edwin turned on the hose, and it was not a noise she could listen to for an hour or however long it would take. The water hit the bottom of the pool with a loud smacking sound, like a hailstorm. From the window she could see Edwin holding the hose, his face set gravely in concentration.

Y
ou want to come to breakfast?” Ellie whispered outside of Jamie's door. “Or do you want me to bring it in? I'm glad to.”

Joe was lying awake in bed, and his face was twisted as he listened. As Joe saw it, the more Ellie pampered Jamie, the more Jamie was going to see himself as an invalid. He tried to never look at what remained of Jamie's leg.

“He's not six years old,” Joe told Ellie one night, a week after Jamie had come home. “You've got that old singsong voice you used to use when the kids were little and sick. Jamie's lost a leg, but that doesn't mean he's a little boy again. And you can't treat him like one.”

Ellie, who had been quietly crying herself to sleep since Jamie had come home, bristled when Joe spoke to her that way.

“Don't you tell me what my own son does and doesn't need,” she said. “A mother knows what she should do. Don't make it your business to start monitoring everything I say to him.”

Now, both Ellie and Joe waited for Jamie's reply. A truck—probably Dilbert Ray's tow truck—drove past, causing the house to shake like a subway car.

“All right,” Jamie said after a while. “I'm coming.”

Joe hoped Ellie would not respond with high-pitched enthusiasm, but she did.

“Breakfast for you, too,” she said to Joe, sticking her head in their bedroom. He could see that she had erased her grin, lest he see it. Lately they were constantly studying each other's expressions.

“Coming,” Joe said.

Joe heard Jamie push himself off his mattress and onto his crutches. And because he had to stop himself from listening to Jamie negotiate his way from one room to the other, he got up and forced himself to cough.

In the kitchen Miriam had turned the radio up, and her grim expression told everyone not to try to talk over it. Jamie rested his crutches against the wall and took two hops over before working himself into a chair at the end of the table. Miriam reached over and ran a hand over his hair.

“I want to hear, too, but it's too loud,” Ellie said, and indicated with her fingers how minimally she was lowering it. “What a day for that family. My God.”

Joe wanted coffee but didn't feel like making it, and he hesitated to ask Ellie. She had stopped drinking coffee much lately, and now that she was doing so much for Jamie, she didn't want to spend any more energy on Joe than she had to. These days, he thought about coffee as much as he drank it.

“Jamie, do you still feel like talking to that reporter today?” Ellie asked. “This was the day he was going to come over. I still don't understand what they want to write about, exactly.” Since Jamie had returned home, she had come to enjoy pretending to be uninformed.

“It's all right with me,” Jamie said. “I don't know what I have to say, though. I lost a leg. Charlie's winning the war. And does anyone want to hire Captain Peg Leg for a job?”

They were used to his making comments like this, but even now it could still make them skip a breath. “Don't say stuff like that,” Miriam finally said. She tried to scold him with her version of a glare, but he wouldn't look over. “So how do you know exactly what he's going to ask?” she said. “I mean, what if it's one of those reporters who accuses soldiers of killing women and children?” Before the last words had come out, she felt a great tightness in her chest. This was not an altogether new sensation for her; Miriam frequently said the wrong thing, and her family hadn't grown more tolerant over the years, but instead, seemed to, in ways only she could measure, move further and further away from her. She had been acutely aware of this in recent weeks as she watched her parents stare at Jamie. And when they did return their gazes to her, she was sure they remembered again their disappointment in her.

Before her mother or father could speak, she was going to beat them to it.

“I'm just saying, you don't always know what someone wants to say about the war. I know Jamie didn't do anything like that—God! Of course I know that. Don't even
look
at me like that. I just want to protect Jamie. How do we know what this reporter wants to ask? How do we know, is all.”

Ellie kept her mouth open, but it was unclear when a reply might come out of it.

“That's enough of that kind of talk,” Joe said. “
The Gazette
's not that kind of paper, and Jamie shouldn't have to hear that garbage in his own house. From his own family.”

There was a hint of enjoyment in Jamie's face then—not for the scolding that his sister received, but for how quickly such upset could befall them all. He knew better than anyone how on edge his family had been since his return, and he was grateful when the hushed reverie and manners could be so easily pierced. He only wished that it happened more often.

Miriam studied Jamie's face, wondering if she needed to apologize. She could see that she didn't.

Ellie was content for once that her husband had more or less expressed the appropriate message in a reasonably appropriate manner. Still, she cocked her head toward Miriam out of habit.

“I've got to get this house in order is what I need to do,” she said to all of them and to no one. “I can just see the first sentence of that article now. ‘Jamie West lived in cleaner quarters while serving in Vietnam than he does in his own home.'”

“I'm going to go listen in my room,” Miriam said, feeling confident once more, “where I can actually
hear
it.” She put her hand on Jamie's shoulder and squeezed as she moved past. “Do you want to come?” she asked him.

Jamie shook his head. He could see that his parents were interested in his answer either way. Generally they seemed to worry that he was spending too much time alone—alone on the front porch, alone in his bedroom, alone in the backyard, where Joe had set up two round targets at the yard's end for Jamie to practice archery. As a soldier, Jamie was an expert marksman, the best in his company with the M-16, the M-60, and M-79, and Joe had encouraged him not to let those skills recede just because he had lost a leg. In junior high school Jamie had placed third in the state's national target archery finals for his age division, and the summer before he was drafted, he briefly considered trying to get into the
Guinness Book of World Records
for most consecutive bull's-eyes from forty meters. Now, seated on an overturned wooden barrel, he spent a couple of hours most days shooting with his longbow; Joe had bought him thirty arrows and a backpack so that he wouldn't have to keep getting up and retrieving them; Ellie was only too eager to sit out there with him, sorting through the wet laundry and hanging it on the lines and pulling the arrows out every few minutes to hand him, and in the evenings Joe liked to do the same, though he didn't busy himself with anything but watching Jamie shoot. Or often Jamie's friend Sutton came over and held a small tin of chewing tobacco out for himself, watching Jamie shoot into the two small yellow circles. Sutton walked with a limp because of a football injury in high school. A tackler had crushed his left femur as Sutton tried to take the ball into the end zone, and it was poorly reset. Jamie was one of the team's wide receivers, and when he watched Sutton's leg bend left when the rest of his body was knocked right, he knew that Sutton would never play football again. Now Sutton worked as a driver for Pepsi. He didn't have to worry about the draft.

“Do you know how long this reporter will take?” Jamie asked. “Sutton was coming over later to watch the train pass by. Since the shooting, Sutton thinks he's Walter Cronkite. Last night all he could talk about was Sirhan Sirhan and Arab nationalists.”

“I keep wondering if there is going to be a Jack Ruby in all of this,” Joe said. “I keep thinking Mr. Sirhan is going to meet the same fate as Oswald.”

“Then more killing and more killing,” Ellie said, untying her apron strings. “More violent chaos. I hope they don't shoot that man. Or when is it ever going to end?”

She stopped to look at Joe and Jamie. Jamie's thin face looked like Joe's when they first married, like the picture from their honeymoon in Ocean City they had gotten a stranger to take, with Joe's arm around Ellie on the boardwalk, the ocean breeze lifting a lock of his hair and sending it across his broad forehead, his expression almost stunned. Had he really just met this girl Ellie two months prior?

T
he first woman Lionel Chase passed that morning, a heavyset white woman in a sundress marked by giant sunflowers, took pleasure in the appearance of the new train porter's suit and offered him a shy smile. Without thinking, he reached his fingers to the tip of his hat to acknowledge her. Already the uniform, with its six brass buttons and dark jacket with gold trim at the cuffs, was doing what it was supposed to do.

When he picked up the suit at the Penn Central office the week before, the company tailor who fit him studied his shoulders without speaking. “You want them edges so sharp, someone bump into you, they get
nicked
,” the man said.

Lionel offered the man a chuckle, but the man said, “You think I'm joking, son? You want everything
goddamned
right.”

On the sidewalk his patent leather shoes squeaked terribly, but he was sure that inside the train they would be drowned out. Even at its quietest rumble you couldn't outduel the power and crudeness of the locomotive engine. Lionel worried that by summer's end the roar of the train would be difficult to get out of his head. Before retiring two years ago after a massive heart attack, his father, Maurice Chase, had worked as a Pullman porter for thirty-seven years. When Lionel was a boy he heard his father say that the train was always running around somewhere in his head. “Trying to make up the time,” he said.

As Lionel walked toward the Queens Plaza subway, he checked his front jacket pocket to make sure the letter from Adanya was secure. He had read it a half-dozen times in the two days since it had arrived, but he wasn't about to leave the house without it; his mother might happen upon it while delivering clean clothes to his room.

In three pages, sprayed with a perfume called Lotus, Adanya had started out by saying how much she missed him already. On the second page, she wrote that she had gone to see a doctor. She was pregnant. The rest of the letter was skillfully vague. She was just shy of four weeks along, she wrote, and then added, “It's a good time to find out, I guess. Not too late to give us plenty of time to think about what we should do.” She wrote that there was a joy she couldn't deny about carrying Lionel's child in her, and she followed that by saying, “We have our whole lives ahead of us, and I know this is sooner than either of us imagined being parents. We haven't even started our sophomore year!” By the third page, Adanya steered back to where the letter had begun. “If you were drawing me in one of your comics right now, draw me with my arms wrapped around you so tight, and a caption bubble (is that the right word?) that says, ‘Never let go.'”