Robert Alter - 100 Malicious Little Mysteries

“Not at all,” she assured him. And, smiling a Borgia smile, she set about planning her ultimate menu.

Quarter before midnight, like on every evening except the Sabbath or when it’s storming or when my rheumatism gets to paining too bad, me and Billy Bob went down to the Chigger Mountain railroad tunnel to wait for the night freight from St. Louis. This here was a fine summer evening, with a big old fat yellow moon hung above the pines on Hankers Ridge and mockingbirds and cicadas and toads making a soft ruckus. Nights like this, I have me a good feeling, and I know Billy Bob does too.

They’s a bog hollow on the near side of the tunnel opening, and beside it a woody slope, not too steep. Halfway down the slope is a big catalpa tree and that was where we always set, side by side with our backs up against the trunk.

So we come on down to there, me hobbling some with my cane and Billy Bob holding onto my arm. That moon was so bright you could see the melons lying in Ferdie Johnson’s patch over on the left, and the rail tracks had a sleek oiled look coming out of the tunnel mouth and leading off towards the Sabreville yards a mile up the line. On the far side of the tracks, the woods and the run-down shacks that used to be a hobo jungle before the county sheriff closed it off thirty years back had them a silvery cast, like they was all coated in winter frost.

We set down under the catalpa tree and I leaned my head back to catch my wind. Billy Bob said, “Granpa, you feeling right?”

“Fine, boy.”

“Rheumatism ain’t started paining you?”

“Not a bit.”

He give me a grin. “Got a little surprise for you.”

“The hell you do.”

“Fresh plug of blackstrap,” he said. He come out of his pocket with it. “Mr. Cotter got him in a shipment just today down at his store.”

I was some pleased. But I said, “Now you hadn’t ought to go spending your money on me, Billy Bob.”

“Got nobody else I’d rather spend it on.”

I took the plug and unwrapped it and had me a chew. Old man like me ain’t got many pleasures left, but fresh blackstrap’s one; good corn’s another. Billy Bob gets us all the corn we need from Ben Logan’s boys. They got a pretty good-sized still up on Hankers Ridge, and their corn is the best in this part of the hills. Not that either of us is a drinking man, now. A little touch after supper and on special days is all. I never did hold with drinking too much, or doing anything too much, and I taught Billy Bob the same.

He’s a good boy. Man couldn’t ask for a better grandson. But I raised him that way — in my own image, you might say — after both my own son Rufus and Billy Bob’s ma got taken from us in 1947. I reckon I done a right job of it, and I couldn’t be less proud of him than I was of his pa, or love him no less either.

Well, we set there and I worked on the chew of blackstrap and had a spit every now and then, and neither of us said much. Pretty soon the first whistle come, way off on the other side of Chigger Mountain. Billy Bob cocked his head and said, “She’s right on schedule.”

“Mostly is,” I said, “this time of year.”

That sad lonesome hungry ache started up in me again — what my daddy used to call the “sweet fever.” He was a railroad man, and I grew up around trains and spent a goodly part of my early years at the roundhouse in the Sabreville yards. Once, when I was ten, he let me take the throttle of the big 2-8-0 Mogul steam locomotive on his highballing run to Eulalia, and I can’t recollect no more finer experience in my whole life.

Later on I worked as a callboy, and then as a fireman on a 2-10-4, and put in some time as a yard-tender engineer, and I expect I’d have gone on in railroading if it hadn’t been for the Depression and getting myself married and having Rufus. My daddy’s short-line company folded up in 1931, and half a dozen others too, and wasn’t no work for either of us in Sabreville or Eulalia or anywheres else on the iron.

That squeezed the will right out of my daddy, and he took to ailing, and I had to accept a job on Mr. John Barnett’s truck farm to support him and the rest of my family. Was my intention to go back into railroading, but the Depression dragged on, and my daddy died, and a year later my wife Amanda took sick and passed on, and by the time the war come it was just too late.

But my son Rufus got him the sweet fever too, and took a switchman’s job in the Sabreville yards, and worked there right up until the night he died. Billy Bob was only three then; his own sweet fever comes most purely from me and what I taught him. Ain’t no doubt trains been a major part of all our lives, good and bad, and ain’t no doubt neither they get into a man’s blood and maybe change him, too, in one way and another. I reckon they do.

The whistle come again, closer now, and I judged the St. Louis freight was just about to enter the tunnel on the other side of the mountain. You could hear the big wheels singing on the track, and if you listened close you could just about hear the banging of couplings and the hiss of air brakes as the engineer throttled down for the curve. The tunnel don’t run straight through Chigger Mountain; she comes in from the north and angles to the east, so that a big freight like the St. Louis got to cut back to quarter speed coming through.

When she entered the tunnel, the tracks down below seemed to shimmy and you could feel the vibration clear up where we was sitting under the catalpa tree. Billy Bob stood himself up and peered down towards the black tunnel mouth like a bird dog on a point. The whistle come again, and once more, from inside the tunnel, sounding hollow and miseried now. Every time I heard it like that, I thought of a body trapped and hurting and crying out for help that wouldn’t come in the empty hours of the night. I shifted the cud of blackstrap and worked up a spit to keep my mouth from drying. The sweet fever feeling was strong in my stomach.

The blackness around the tunnel opening commenced to lighten, and got brighter and brighter until the long white glow from the locomotive’s headlamp spilled out onto the tracks beyond. Then she come through into my sight, her light shining like a giant’s eye, and the engineer give another tug on the whistle, and the sound of her was a clattering rumble as loud to my ears as a mountain rockslide. But she wasn’t moving fast, just kind of easing along, pulling herself out of that tunnel like a night crawler out of a mound of earth.

The locomotive clacked on past, and me and Billy Bob watched her string slide along in front of us. Flats, boxcars, three tankers in a row, more flats loaded down with pine logs big around as a privy, a refrigerator car, five coal gondolas, another link of boxcars. Fifty in the string already, I thought. She won’t be dragging more than sixty, sixty-five.

Billy Bob said suddenly, “Granpa, look yonder!”

He had his arm up, pointing. My eyes ain’t so good no more and it took me a couple of seconds to follow his point, over on our left and down at the door of the third boxcar in the last link. It was sliding open, and clear in the moonlight I saw a man’s head come out, then his shoulders.

“It’s a floater, Granpa,” Billy Bob said, excited. “He’s gonna jump. Look at him holding there, he’s gonna jump.”

I spit into the grass. “Help me up, boy.”

He got a hand under my arm and lifted me up and held me until I was steady on my cane. Down there at the door of the boxcar, the floater was looking both ways along the string of cars and down at the ground beside the tracks. That ground was soft loam and the train was going slow enough and there wasn’t much chance he would hurt himself jumping off.