Death Train
From across the Iowa cornfields, sneaking
through the early September night, Luke can hear it coming closer, closer,
louder: The death train, starting to slow, easing up on the throttle, going to
be a stop tonight.
Cat-like, he goes to his bedroom window,
peers through the screen, the outside smells rich and sweet, harvest can't be
but a week off.
He shivers and his upper body is getting a
case of the chills again and at first he can't look.
Then he looks and...
...nothing.
'Course there's nothing. Can't see the death train, no sir.
Death train don't run with lights. Don't have no switchmen with kerosene
lanterns, don't have no friendly caboose rip-rollin' along, a big old pot belly
stove burning.
Can hear it, though, sure you can, the clackety-clack of its
wheels, the breathing heaving fire of its steam-engine belly, the laughter of
its death engineer as he gets ready to pull down on the death whistle.
Matthew said:
(Listen to it, but don't listen to it for
very long, Lukey my boy. Them that listens to it too long is as good as ---
(Don't say that word.
(Is goin' for a ride.)
``What is it, Luke?'' The voice is old and
stern, the voice of Uncle John. Luke starts, like he's been caught touching
himself where he oughtn't to. He turns
toward the light, a single 25-watt bulb hanging on a black cord from the hall
ceiling. There he is now, Uncle John, his fat, doughy body filling the doorway
to Luke's room. He's rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He's sweating. Always
sweating, Uncle John.
``I asked you a question, boy, and I expect
an answer. What is it?''
``Nothing,'' Luke says, thinking
desperately there must be some way to explain everything without really
explaining anything at all.
``Gotta be somethin', it bein' past 1 in
the ayem and you kneelin' by your window, son, lookin' out over a cornfield
that's as black as pitch. Gotta be somethin'. Nothin' don't look like this.
Nothin's nothin. This is somethin'.''
``It was just, just a---''
``Train, Luke? You gonna say train?''
``A crow, uncle. Eating on the corn.
Honest, I heard it.''
``Crows don't fly by night. You know better
than that, son.''
``You leave him alone, you old fool. You
hear me?''
Now Aunt Edna is up. He listens to the
softness of her slippers gliding across the upstairs hall floor. He can hear
the rustle of her silk nightgown, disturbing the end-of-summer heat that hangs
heavy and wet and still, like the YMCA pool on a busy Saturday, up here on the
second story.
``Stay out of it, Edna. Just stay out of
it.''
Great big hissing, the death train, its death wheels turning
slower, the sound of metal brake on metal axle like fingernails on a grammar-school
chalkboard.
``What is it, Luke? A nightmare?'' Her
voice is soothing, cool, like the autumn that doesn't seem to want to come this
year. She never talks to John like that, only him. Only Luke, the child nature
never let her have, the child her no-good sister left for her that day she
packed her bags and left for California, goodbye and good riddance.
``No, Auntie. It's not a dream.''
``What is it then, Luke?''
``It's the...''
``What, Luke? What do you hear?''
Should he say the word? Should he?
Edna pushes past John. John grunts like a
hungry old sow. On a Saturday night, after filling his body with bourbon and
beer, he might have started in on her, his voice getting filthy and loud and
his face turning redder than a freshly painted barn. Might have wished her
stinking lousy soul to hell, and Luke's right along with it, the two of them be
damned forever.
``Train,'' Luke says.
It's more than John can take. ``Now, you
know there ain't no train within 50 miles of here, son. Never has been. Never
been no old tracks, no new tracks, no way, no how. County road, and that's it.
We been through all that before.''
Aunt Edna has his arm around him. She is
gazing out with him over the corn, dark and mysterious and speaking in hushed
tones under a sluggish breeze that barely has the strength to reach the
farmhouse. Whole summer's been like that, hazy, humid, never-ending. Overhead,
there is a rind of moon, and it shines ghostly through the cornfields, over the
barn, past the oak grove and beyond to where---
I can hear the death train grinding to a halt.
Death whistle blowing, a low, shivering sound as might come
echoing around and behind and through and off of the cracked marble stones in
that graveyard out back of St. George's Episcopal Church. Out in that graveyard
alone on a late November afternoon, it could be, Uncle John's corn crop long
since in, the pumpkins going orange to brown, the air promising flurries, the
daylight draining away into the trees, the shadows lengthening.
That kind of day, Matthew said, you might hear it.
Or on the sunniest most perfect day God ever did make -- then,
then you might hear it, too.
Matthew said:
(Heard it myself there more than once,
Lukey boy. In the churchyard.
(Heard what?
(Why, the death train, death whistle
blowin' full away. And don't it make sense, boy, hearin' it there? Hearin it
where it stops? Don't it now?
(I guess it does.
(Sure it does. Sure.)
Luke covers his ears. He starts to cry.
``You make him stop that now,'' John
bellows to the woman who long since stopped sharing his bed, his room, his
life. ``You get him back in that bed, Edna, so's we can have peace and quiet. A
man can't even get a good night's sleep in his own house no more, all this
horseshit goin' on. Been goin' on now two years, it has. I mean to put a stop
to it.''
``You shut up, John. Just keep that trap of
yours shut. Can't you see he's afraid?''
``Nine years old, and afraid of the dark.
It's downright sinful, is what it is.''
``I told you, shut up.''
``Where's he get all this nonsense, that's
what I'd like to know.''
``Go back to your room, John. I'll handle
this. This is none of your concern.'' She's sounding angry now, Aunt Edna is,
angry like the day she threw that young whippersnapper from the electric
company right out of the front parlor.
``Goin' on like somebody fresh on the lam
from the looney bin.''
``Put a lid on it, John.''
``Well, I'll tell you where he gets this,''
John goes on, the rage building in his voice. ``From Matthew Dorfman, that's
where.''
``Matthew Dorfman's your best worker,''
Edna says. ``Anybody around here's talkin' nonsense, it's you, John Johnson.''
``Idiot, no-good, sonofabitch Matthew
Dorfman. Sits on his brains, that one does. Tomorrow, gonna fire him. Don't
need no farmhand gettin' this kid riled up like that. First light, gonna fire
him. That'll put an end to this midnight crap with the kid here.''
``Matthew's my friend,'' Luke says, but John
doesn't hear him.
Matthew said:
(They laugh at me, Lukey, all the time.
Call me names. Your own uncle's 'bout the worst.
(Why, Matt?
(Folks are like that, I guess. Mean, some
of 'em. Downright mean. You look a little different, talk a little slow, and they
laugh at you. Human nature, I guess. The dark side of things.
(But I like you, Matt.
(I like you, too, Luke.
(And I don't think you look strange.
Honest, I don't.
(You're a good boy, Lukey. Gonna be a fine
man. I'll see to that. I'll see you make it.)
``It's okay, Luke,'' Edna says when John's
gone back to his room.
Eleven stops the death train's made in
Carson's Corners since Luke started hearing it two years ago, the same summer
Uncle John brought a simple-minded out-of-towner named Matthew Dorfman onto the
payroll. Eleven folks ticketed, boarded and taken away. Phyllis Smith, who died
of a heart attack the evening of the day she had tea with Edna. Uncle John's
schoolhood buddy George Snyder, who put the barrel of a shotgun into his mouth
and pulled the trigger the third night of a three-day drinking binge. Mr. and
Mrs. Gerard and their two children, killed instantly in a car crash a mile down
Route 16, right there by the end of Uncle John's number-two cornfield. The
three scouts from Troop 112, drowned when their canoe tipped over the afternoon
of St. George's annual parish picnic. Old Mrs. Wannamaker, the Sunday morning
Bible teacher, whose house burned down Christmas Eve.
Matthew said:
(Trains run on schedule, Luke.
('Course they do.
('Specially this one.
('Specially this.
('Course, it ain't no ordinary schedule.
Comes and goes as it sees fit, if you get what I mean.
(I do.
(Ever wonder who makes up those funny
schedules, Lukey, my boy?
(Never did. Who, Matt? Who makes them up?
(Folks that run 'em, that's who.
(But who runs them, Matt?
(Can't tell you that, my boy. Don't know
myself. But it's gonna be someone pretty important, right? Train that big?
(Right.)
They stay by the window, sitting, staring
out, Edna's arms around Luke.
Death train's stopped now. Baggage's being unloaded. Taking on
water. What's that bang? Must be adding on a car. Must be that.
In his room, John closes his eyes and is
almost asleep when he swears he hears it, from across the moonlit fields: a
sound like a train whistle, then the uncomfortable grating of metal spinning on
metal, and then, as the death train gets traction, builds momentum, a steady
chug-a-lug-a-lugging.
He thinks of Luke, but only for a moment,
because the aneurism that's been quietly blowing up inside his brain finally
bursts, flooding his skull and drowning out the scream starting to form on his
lips.
``On its way, ain't it, Luke?'' Edna whispers
as the breeze suddenly freshens and the staleness begins to move out of the
farmhouse.
He shakes his head, Luke does. ``Yes,
Auntie. On its way.''
On his forehead the new wind is cool,
comforting, reminding. Outside, the cornfields are dark, quiet, asleep.
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