Wish You Well (5 page)

The nurse examined Amanda and came away even more sour-faced, apparently finding the interruption of her cigarette break unforgivable. She put Amanda’s arm back across her stomach and covered her with the sheet.

“The train went around a curve. That’s all.” As she bent low to tuck in the bedcovers, she saw the necklace on the floor, incriminating evidence of Oz’s plot to hasten his mother’s recovery.

“What’s this?” she demanded, reaching down and picking up Exhibit One in her case against the little boy.

“I was just using it to help Mom. It’s sort of ”—Oz glanced nervously at his sister—“it’s sort of magic.”

“That is nonsense.”

“I’d like it back, please.”

“Your mother is in a catatonic state,” the woman said in a cold, pedantic tone designed to strike absolute terror in all who were insecure and vulnerable, and she had an easy target in Oz. “There is little hope of her regaining consciousness. And it certainly won’t happen because of a necklace, young man.”

“Please give it back,” Oz said, his hands clenched together, as though in prayer.

“I have already told you—” She was cut off by the tap on her shoulder. When she turned, Lou stood directly in front of her. The girl seemed to have grown many inches in the last several seconds. At least the thrust of her head, neck, and shoulders seemed emboldened. “Give it back to him!”

The nurse’s face reddened at this abuse. “I do not take orders from a child.”

Quick as a whip Lou grabbed the necklace, but the nurse was surprisingly strong and managed to pocket it, though Lou struggled hard.

“This is not helping your mother,” the nurse snapped, puffing out the odor of Lucky Strikes with each breath. “Now, please sit down and keep quiet!”

Oz looked at his mother, the agony clear on his face at having lost his precious necklace over a curve in the track.

Lou and Oz settled next to the window and spent the next several rolling miles quietly watching the death of the sun. When Oz started to fidget, Lou asked him what was the matter.

“I don’t feel good about leaving Dad by himself back there.”

“Oz, he’s not alone.”

“But he
was
in that box all by himself. And it’s getting dark now. He might be scared. It’s not right, Lou.”

“He’s not in that box, he’s with God. They’re up there talking right now, looking down on us.”

Oz looked up at the sky. His hand lifted to wave, but then he looked unsure.

“You can wave to him, Oz. He’s up there.”

“Cross your heart, stick a needle in your eye?”

“All of that. Go ahead and wave.”

Oz did and then smiled a precious one.

“What?” his sister asked.

“I don’t know, it just felt good. Think he waved back?”

“Of course. God too. You know how Dad is, telling stories and all. They’re probably good friends by now.” Lou waved too, and as her fingers drifted against the cool glass, she pretended for a moment that she was certain of all that she had just said. And it did feel good.

Since their father’s death, winter had almost given over to spring. She missed him more each day, the vast emptiness inside her swelling with every breath Lou took. She wanted her dad to be fine and healthy. And with them. But it would never be. Her father really was gone. It was an impossibly agonizing feeling. She looked to the sky.

Hello, Dad. Please never forget me, for I won’t ever forget you
. She mouthed these words so Oz couldn’t hear. When she finished, Lou thought she might start bawling herself, but she couldn’t, not in front of Oz. If she cried, there was a strong possibility that her brother might also cry, and keep right on going for the rest of his life.

“What’s it like to be dead, Lou?” Oz stared out into the night as he asked this.

After a few moments she said, “Well, I guess part of being dead is not feeling anything. But in another way you feel everything. All good. If you’ve led a decent life. If not, well, you know.”

“The Devil?” Oz asked, the fear visible in his features even as he said the terrible word.

“You don’t have to worry about that. Or Dad either.”

Oz’s gaze made its way, by steady measures, to Amanda. “Is Mom going to die?”

“We’re all going to die one day.” Lou would not sugarcoat that one, not even for Oz, but she did squeeze him tightly. “Let’s just take it one step at a time. We’ve got a lot going on.”

Lou stared out the window as she held tightly to her brother. Nothing was forever, and didn’t she know that.

It was very early morning, when the birds had barely awoken and thumped their wings to life, and cold mists were rising from the warm ground, and the sun was only a seam of fire in the eastern sky. They had made one stop in Richmond, where the locomotive had been changed, then the train had cleared the Shenandoah Valley, the most splendidly fertile soil and temperate climate for growing virtually anything. Now the angle of land was far steeper.

Lou had slept little because she had shared the top bunk with Oz, who was restless at night under the best circumstances. On a swaying train heading to a new, terrifying world, her little brother had been a wildcat in his sleep. Her limbs had been bruised from his unconscious flailing, despite her holding him tight; her ears were hurting from his tragic screams, in spite of her whispered words of comfort. Lou had finally climbed down, touched the cold floor with bare feet, stumbled to the window in the darkness, pulled back the curtains, and been rewarded by seeing her first Virginia mountain face-to-face.

Jack Cardinal had once told his daughter that it was believed that there were actually two sets of Appalachian mountains. The first had been formed by receding seas and the shrinkage of the earth millions of years before, and had risen to a great height that rivaled the present Rockies. Later these ridges had been eroded away to peneplain by the pounding of unsettled water. Then the world had shaken itself again, Lou’s father had explained to her, and the rock had risen high once more, though not nearly so high as before, and formed the current Appalachians, which stood like menacing hands between parts of Virginia and West Virginia, and extended from Canada all the way down to Alabama.

The Appalachians had prevented early expansion westward, Jack had taught his ever-curious Lou, and kept the American colonies unified long enough to win their independence from an English monarch. Later, the mountain range’s natural resources had fueled one of the greatest manufacturing eras the world had ever seen. Despite all that, her father had added with a resigned smile, man never gave the mountains much credit in shaping his affairs.

Lou knew that Jack Cardinal had loved the Virginia mountains, and had held high-angled rock in the deepest awe. He had often told her that there was something magical about this stretch of lofty earth, because he believed it held powers that could not be logically explained. She had often wondered how a mixture of dirt and stone, despite its elevation, could impress her father so. Now, for the first time, she had a sense of how it could, for Lou had never experienced anything quite like it.

The bumps of tree-shrouded dirt and slate piles Lou had initially seen really qualified only as small offspring; behind these “children” she could see the outlines of the tall parents, the mountains. They seemed unlimited by sky or earth. So large and broad were they that the mountains seemed unnatural, though they had been born directly from the planet’s crust. And out there was a woman Lou had been named for but had never met. There was both comfort and alarm in that thought. For one panicked moment, Lou felt as though they had passed right into another solar system on this clickety-clack train. Then Oz was beside her, and though he was not one to inspire confidence in others, Lou did feel reassurance in his small presence.

“I think we’re getting close,” she said, rubbing his small shoulders, working out the tension of another round of nightmares. She and her mother had become experts in this. Oz, Amanda had told her, had the worst case of night terrors she had ever seen. But it was something neither to pity, nor to make light of, she had taught her daughter. All one could do was be there for the little boy and work out the mental and physical snarls as best one could.

That could have been Lou’s own personal scripture:
Thou shalt have no greater duty than taking care of Thy brother Oz
. She meant to honor that commandment above all else.

The little boy focused on the landscape. “Where is it? Where we’re going to be?”

She pointed out the window. “Somewhere out there.”

“Will the train drive right up to the house?”

Lou smiled at his remark. “No. Someone will be waiting for us at the station.”

The train passed into a tunnel slashed through the side of one of the hills, throwing them into even greater darkness. Moments later they shot clear of the tunnel and then how they climbed! Their degree of ascent made Lou and Oz peer out anxiously. Up ahead was a trestle. The train slowed and then eased carefully onto the bridge, like a foot at cold water’s edge. Lou and Oz looked down, but could not see the ground below in the poor light. It was as though they were suspended in the sky, somehow carried aloft by an iron bird weighing many tons. Then suddenly the train was back on firm ground, and the climb was on again. As the train picked up speed, Oz took a deep breath interrupted by a yawn—perhaps, Lou thought, to stifle his anxiety.

“I’m going to like it here,” Oz suddenly proclaimed as he balanced his bear against the window. “Look out there,” he said to his stuffed animal, which had never had a name that Lou knew of. Then Oz’s thumb nervously probed the insides of his mouth. He’d been diligently trying to stop sucking his thumb, yet with all that was happening he was finding it tough going.

“It’ll be okay, right, Lou?” he mumbled.

She perched her little brother on her lap, tickling the back of his neck with her chin until Oz squirmed.

“We’re going to be just fine.” And Lou somehow forced herself to believe that it would be so.

The train station at Rainwater Ridge was no more than a glorified pine-studded lean-to, with a single cracked and spider-webbed window and an opening for a door but no door to fill the space. A narrow jump separated this wreck of nail and board from the railroad track. The channeled wind was fierce as it fought its way through the gaps in rock and tree, and the faces of the few folk hanging about, along with the runted trees, evidenced the blunt force of its chisel.

Lou and Oz watched as their mother was loaded into an ancient ambulance. As the nurse climbed into the vehicle, she scowled back at her charges, the confrontation of the day before obviously still rankling her.

When the doors of the vehicle closed, Lou pulled the quartz necklace from her coat pocket and handed it to Oz.

“I slipped into her room before she got up. It was still in her pocket.”

Oz smiled, pocketed the precious item, and then reached on tiptoe to give his sister a kiss on the cheek. The two stood next to their luggage, patiently awaiting Louisa Mae Cardinal.

Their skin was scrubbed raw, each hair on their heads assiduously brushed—Lou had taken extra time with Oz. They were dressed in their very best clothes, which managed barely to conceal their pounding hearts. They had been there for a minute when they sensed someone behind them.

The Negro man was young and, in keeping with the geography, ruggedly built. He was tall and wide of shoulder, deep-chested, with arms like slabs of ham, a waist not small but not soft either, and legs long but one oddly pushed out where calf met knee. His skin was the color of deep rust and pleasing to the eye. He was looking down at his feet, which necessarily drew Lou’s gaze to them. His old work boots were so big a newborn could have slept in them with some room to spare, the girl observed. His overalls were as worn as the shoes, but they were clean, or as clean as the dirt and wind would allow anything to be up here. Lou held out her hand, but he did not take it.