Authors: Tim Gautreaux
The locomotive was followed by one passenger car and five red, sun-dulled boxcars. The train stopped and the fireman cut off the locomotive and it pulled ahead past a switch, then backed into a siding and ran alongside the train, where it went through another switch and then came forward to pluck the five boxcars away from the coach, chuffing backwards through town to distribute them on sidings. The conductor opened the vestibule door and put down his stepstool, handing the passengers down to the platform. Twelve men got off, local men, the sheriff nodding to each in turn as they walked down the platform to be greeted by those picking them up in Fords or buggies. After the last man was off, the sheriff boarded and walked through the coach. When he came back into the station, he shook his head. “Maybe they’ll come Monday.”
“We shouldn’t have sold the mule,” August said, his voice cracking. “We’re stuck here.”
The man wearing overalls stood up. “Sheriff?”
“You can go back to the office. I know those hogwashers you’re wearing are hot.”
The man jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “What about Mike?”
“Bring him with you. Tell him we’ll try the same thing on Monday.”
Sam walked out on the platform and stared down the track. He could hear the locomotive huffing around in the yard of the window-frame factory. “I don’t know.”
Tabors looked in the same direction. “What do you think?”
“Once they start something, the Skadlocks don’t strike me as the kind that waste time.” Sam turned to the train board. “What’s Fault?”
“Just a flag stop right over the Louisiana line, though nobody seems to know exactly where that line is. There’s still two farmers that ship a few cans of milk, and a little shop that sends out a half-car of cypress shingles every week. Plus a little barrel operation. There’s just one road that runs through the area and crosses by the station.”
Sam looked down the crooked rails again. “Where’s the road go?”
The sheriff squinted an eye. “From the prison on one end to a gate five or six miles miles east of the railroad, where it reaches the highway.”
“I rode the mule across a straight gravel road when I went down to the Skadlocks’. Was that it?”
“Had to be.”
He stared at the board, then walked into the station, where the conductor was taking an order from the agent. “Excuse me, but did you let off two passengers at Fault?”
The conductor was an old man who arched a thick eyebrow. “And who might you be?”
“He’s all right, Sidney.” The agent shoved his orders at him under the window grate.
“As a matter of fact, we did. A gentleman and a lady.”
“Well dressed? Maybe thirty-five years old?”
“I’d say so. The lady was taking from a flask right on the aisle and I had to ask her to go to the restroom if she wanted a sip.”
Sam glanced at the sheriff and August walked up and stood between them.
“Is there an agent there or what?”
“Yeah,” the conductor said. “On the days the train comes.”
Sam shook his head. “Hell, they’re down there right now waiting for the train to come back.”
The sheriff crossed his arms and looked at his boots. “If they are, well, I’d like to help you, but I can’t. Not my jurisdiction.”
“Could you telegraph the Louisiana sheriff?”
“It wouldn’t do any good. I don’t like to talk about the man. Let’s just say he’s never been to Fault.”
Sam turned to the agent and paid two fares to Fault.
August watched the agent retrieve the tickets. “You think she’s down there, sure enough?”
“I can’t take a chance on thinking otherwise.”
The locomotive turned on the wye in the mill and drifted back to the station with three empty flatcars and coupled to the coach.
August boarded ahead of Sam and they chose the first seats on the left. “Well, we’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?” the boy said.
Then Sheriff Tabors stepped on and sat behind them. “Don’t look at me like that. I had the agent write me a pass.”
“How’ll you get back to town?”
“My brother-in-law lives at Gashouse. He can ride me up here in his Ford after supper.”
The whistle let out a growl and the train jerked into motion, swaying and rattling over the branch-line track toward Fault, six miles away. Sam counted telegraph poles and figured they were going twenty miles an hour. The train went past a pasture full of milk cows and plunged into a brake of old-growth pine for a mile or so.
August looked up at him. “How’s your shoulder?”
“I try not to think about it.”
“You won’t do much in a fight.”
“I don’t guess so.”
They passed a clearing and he saw a small barrel factory, nothing more than a shed covering an undulating machine and a mud yard stacked with blond-wood kegs bound with metal hoops. A switch ran into the yard, and two flatcars sat loaded in the sun. A mill hand waved and waved like he’d never seen a train before, but the little engine kept on puffing south, leaking steam and wobbling along the kinked rails.
Snaking out of the pines, the railroad traversed three miles of scrub country, cut-over land crowded with brambles and trash-wood saplings. Soon the engineer was blowing the whistle for the little wooden station, and Sam felt the air brakes grab. He looked at August.
“Showtime,” the boy said.
They got up and stepped off onto the platform. A man wearing a tailored suit was standing next to the bench outside the station, a streamer of tickets in his hand. A woman was struggling with Lily, who was angry at being held and kicking her legs, her face red and running tears. “I want Vessy,” she wailed. “Where’s Vessy gone?”
“Oh, hush up,” the woman snapped. “Aren’t you glad to see us? What’s the matter with you?”
Sam and August walked up, the sheriff dawdling behind as if he didn’t know anyone there. Sam looked around but saw only an old Ford and no horses. “Where’s Ralph Skadlock?”
The man looked at him blankly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
August drew close and looked at Lily, smiling.
“Get away,” the woman told him, a shining alarm rising in her eyes. “What do you want?”
“That’s my sister. Let her look at me.” And when the child did turn around, she gave him the look of a baby who hadn’t seen her brother in many months. She wriggled out of the woman’s grasp and stood there on the rough planks. Lily shaded her eyes and peered up at him but said nothing. The sheriff made a clucking noise in the back of his mouth and looked away.
“I know who you are,” Sam said. “You’re the Whites from Graysoner, Kentucky, and that girl was stolen from Krine’s department store in New Orleans.”
Acy White looked at the conductor, who had his watch in his hand. “Will you board us?”
The conductor looked at the sheriff and the child. “I can’t stop you from getting on if you got a ticket.”
“Well, come on, then.” He made a move toward the coach.
Sam grabbed his arm. “We’ve come for the girl.”
“Get your hands off me. I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is our daughter, Madeline.” He grabbed Lily by the hand but Sam pulled him away from the train and the two of them stumbled backwards across the platform and fell against the bench. Lily began to shriek and August kneeled next to her as Sheriff Tabors went over and began to separate the men.
The agent dashed outside, shouting, “Everbody calm down. What’s this all about?”
Sam had banged his shoulder against the bench, but even the pain couldn’t overcome his worry that the Whites would get Lily on the train and slip away with her. He couldn’t show up empty-handed in New Orleans and have to tell Elsie they’d lost her again. He got untangled and stood up. “You’re not getting away with this. I know what you did, and I’ll follow you until you’re both in the jailhouse.”
At the word “jailhouse,” Mrs. White reached into her purse and brought out a nickel-plated revolver and pointed it at Sam, her mouth open and trembling.
“Take it easy,” Sheriff Tabors said. “Let’s sort this thing out.”
She shifted her aim to the lawman’s forehead. “You stay on the platform, whoever you are, or I’ll blow your brains all over this god-forsaken station.” She was sweating and didn’t look at all well, more like a woman who’d made a monthlong journey on foot.
“Damn it,” Acy White said. “Let’s just get on.” He grabbed Lily and took his wife by the arm, and they stepped up into the coach.
Before getting on, the conductor turned around and faced the platform. “I wouldn’t board if I were you.”
“I sort of have to,” the sheriff said, pushing back his coat and putting a big hand on his revolver. His face was flaming, and his eyes showed he was furious.
Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “Step over here a minute.” He motioned to the station agent to join them. “Why didn’t this crew pick up those two flatcars of barrels about three miles back?”
The agent’s eyes moved off, as though he’d been caught in a lie. “It don’t really matter none. They’ll get ’em Monday for sure.”
“When we passed the switches, those boys in the yard were waving for your train to stop. Can you cut the crew an order to back to that switch and get their cars?”
The agent pulled his watch. “I reckon. It ain’t like this outfit runs on a tight schedule, if you know what I mean.” He looked at August and the sheriff. “What’s this all about with children and barrels?”
“I think I just figured it out myself,” the sheriff said. “Just write the order and hand it up to the engineer. It’s Ned running the engine today, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Never mind the conductor, he’s occupied. Come on.” The sheriff motioned them along to the engine and they climbed into the cab. Soon the agent came running alongside and handed up a new flimsy. The engineer pulled the Johnson bar into reverse, tugged three short blasts from his whistle, and began backing the train hard.
The three of them stood behind the engineer, staying out of the fireman’s way as he shoveled a thin layer of coal on the boiler’s grates. Over the engine noise Sam hollered, “What you gonna do about her pistol?”
“I think she was just trying to scare us off,” the sheriff told him. “I’d bet she wouldn’t use it.” About three miles from the station, as the barrel mill came into view, he leaned over and hollered something to the engineer above the hiss and chuff of the locomotive. The old man stopped the train, and the three of them slid down the grab irons and walked back to the coach. The sheriff went up first and walked the aisle to where the Whites were sitting with Lily jammed between them, crying silently, her nose running, her eyes cloudy with confusion and grief. He looked around at the five other passengers and told them to stay in their seats.
“Who are you?” Acy White said with the calm assuredness of one who thinks he’s in charge.
“These two men say that little girl isn’t yours.”
The wife began to stand, but the sheriff held up his hand. She looked at it and kept rising, lifting her chin as well. “You three men are the abductors.” She turned to the other passengers. “They’re trying to steal my baby,” she said, her voice nearly screaming. The three farmers and two drummers watched placidly, their heads moving from the sheriff to the finely dressed woman.
“We need to talk to the little girl,” the sheriff said, reaching for the child.
Acy White said, “Don’t,” but it was unclear whom he was addressing, and in the next instant the nickel-plated revolver came up in her hand, aimed at the sheriff’s head, and went off. An orange dart of fire and rotten-smelling smoke bloomed into the aisle as the bullet went through a clerestory above a farmer’s head, and the startled sheriff backhanded the gun out of her grasp, sending it over the next seat, where it clattered to the floor.
“Lady,” he told her, his voice shaking, “assault with a deadly weapon is a felony in Mississippi.” He spread his coat and both Whites focused on the sizeable badge pinned on his vest.
“But we’re in Louisiana,” Acy White protested, his eyes suddenly sick and weak.
“Not anymore. I figure we’re a mile inside the state line.” He pulled back his coat on the other side to show his gleaming Colt. “And you’re both under arrest on that charge. Now let me see that child.”
Sam turned to August. “You’re on, boy.”
He stepped around the sheriff and pulled her gently into the aisle. “Hey, Lily.”
The girl looked at him hard and said nothing.
“Oh, this is ridiculous,” Acy White said. “Conductor, I insist you get this train moving in the direction it’s supposed to. She’s our child. She doesn’t know this young man.”
“Is your name Lily?” The sheriff bent over her like a cloud of dark cloth, and she said nothing.
August seemed to show his panic. “Sure it is. Come on, Lil. Tell them who I am.” He stared at her, seemingly frightened by the blankness in her eyes.
The sheriff stood up and frowned. “If your name isn’t Lily, what is it?”
In a small voice she said, “Madeline.”
“I told you,” Willa White cried.
“Wait a minute.” Sam stepped up and put his hand on August’s neck. “Little girl, do you know what this fellow told me?”
The girl shook her head slowly, on the verge of tears.
“He said he taught you a tune from the Sinbad revue in New York and that you could sing the whole thing through.”
“This is ridiculous,” the wife said. “The child knows proper ballads and some hymns. Do you think she’s a little tramp?”
Sam held up a hand and backed the sheriff and August away a bit, creating a little stage in the aisle. “I told him I didn’t believe it one bit.”
“It’s true,” the child said, slowly raising her head.
“I don’t believe it. Bet you can’t sing a single word of ‘Cleopatra.’”
Her eyes flashed over at the Whites; then she held her right arm out, looked at the coach’s ceiling, and began singing in a schooled, vibratoless voice:
You’ve heard of Cleopatra
Who lived down along the Nile.
She made a “Mark” of Anthony
And won him with her smile.
Her feet began a matching dance step, and the other arm went out.
They say she was Egyptian
But I’ve reason to construe
She was Jewish and Hawaiian