Nevada Barr - Bittersweet

In the shadowlessness just before dawn, Imogene was startled from her sleep by Sarah’s cries. The girl was whimpering, her injured back wedged into the corner where the seat and the carriage wall met. Dried spittle flecked the corners of her mouth. Twitching, she cried out again. Imogene laid a hand lightly on her arm. “Sarah, you are having a bad dream,” she said softly. “Wake up.” Sarah jerked violently at her touch and screamed. Several passengers rustled in their sleep, one turning to cast a concerned glance in their direction. “Wake up, Sarah. It’s Imogene.” She shook her gently. Sarah’s head snapped up as though it were on a spring. Crying, she reached blindly for Imogene and pressed her cheek against the older woman’s neck. “There, there,” Imogene soothed. “You’ve been having a nightmare.”

“I couldn’t wake up.” Sarah said brokenly. She was trembling, and though she cried, her cheeks were dry. “I couldn’t move and I was so afraid. I had to wake up and I couldn’t.” She shuddered and cried again.

Imogene held her, rocking her. “It was a bad dream. That’s all. Fever makes people have funny dreams.”

“It meant something. Like in the Bible.”

“No. You woke up, didn’t you? Can you eat something?”

Sarah had retreated back into herself and turned to stare out the window without answering. Imogene pulled the basket from between her feet and, rummaging inside, drew out two hard-boiled eggs and an apple, its skin wrinkled from a winter in Mr. Jenkins’s cellar. “You must eat. I’m going to peel a hard-boiled egg for you. You’ve got to eat something.” Her voice had a hard, bright edge. Quickly she shelled the egg and pressed it into Sarah’s hand. “Eat it. You’ll feel better.” The girl continued to look out the window, her fingers lax, her face empty. After a moment, Imogene took the egg from Sarah’s lap and ate it herself, chewing and swallowing with difficulty.

Over the following days the fever worsened; Sarah lay back against the seat, breathing shallowly, her lips white and dry. Imogene took money from her dwindling purse to procure a sleeping compartment.

As the train crept across the Midwest, Sarah lay in the sleeper with the curtains pulled close. The stale air, smelling of sickness and unwashed bedclothes, sometimes forced Imogene to the somewhat fresher air of the sitting cars, but mostly she stayed with Sarah, reading or staring out the window at the endless prairie. Occasionally, herds of buffalo dotted the green and brown expanse. Whenever they passed a herd of the shaggy creatures, shots cracked from the windows of the train; puffs of dust would explode from the rough hides and the great beasts would crumple. The train never slowed; only carrion-eaters and sportsmen enjoyed the kill.

The train’s last over-night stop was Elko, Nevada. Imogene booked a room in the Grande Restaurant, Hotel, and Chop House. The train wouldn’t be leaving for Reno until morning. Their room was simply furnished with a bed, a chair, and a washstand; homespun curtains of faded cornflower blue hung over the single window, and no wallpaper or paint softened the bare walls or floorboards.

Before Imogene would let Sarah lie down, she made a thorough inspection of the mattress and bedclothes. Pronouncing it “clean enough,” she helped Sarah out of her gown and fetched water to clean her wounds and change the dressings. The unhealthy red was fading from the skin around the whip cuts across Sarah’s back, and the shallower marks were beginning to close.

“You rest,” Imogene said as she tucked Sarah in the bed. The middle sagged and the frail girl looked as though she were lying in a trough. “I’m going down for our suppers. I won’t be long.”

Sarah said nothing. She hadn’t said more than a dozen words in three days.

Imogene left one candle burning and descended the narrow stairs. Everything was new and bare. Downstairs, a single room ran the length of the building; trestle tables with rude wooden benches were set in rows along both walls, an aisle between. The schoolteacher paused in the doorway. The eating house was filled with coarse-looking men, indifferently bathed and shabbily dressed. Neckerchiefs took the place of shirt collars, and strange tricks of thread and bits of odd-colored cloth attested to inexpert mending.

As Imogene made her way down the central aisle, she was assailed by the smell of hearty stew. A stocky man carried the entire pot and a ladle from table to table. The miners, each with his own tin plate, often dented in a dozen or more places from years of packing, shoveled the food in rapidly, taking huge mouthfuls. They ate without speaking, and the scraping of spoons on plates was loud. When the men finished, they wiped up the gravy with bits of bread or their fingers and held the empty dish upside down out over the aisle if they wanted more.

At the far end of the room a woman with thick, light hair and a red face was handing out baked potatoes from a basket; they were so hot that even the callus-palmed miners tossed the potatoes from hand to hand and cursed under their breath.

When Imogene returned with the food, Sarah couldn’t eat. Imogene finally gave up coaxing and ate her own supper, the tray balanced across her knees. Near the bowl was a periodical with a worn cover. “The proprietress loaned me this.” Imogene indicated the paper-covered book. “She thought we might like to read it, since we are going to be living in Nevada. She’s never read it herself-she speaks English moderately well, but she never learned to read it. She’s from Vienna. A man from the East left it here six months ago and she set it aside for him in the event he should ever come back for it. That’s nice, don’t you think?” She waited hopelessly for Sarah to reply. “I want to read you something,” she went on. “It’s by Mark Twain. I used to read Mr. Twain to the class sometimes, remember? It’s about Virginia City, that’s near Reno. ‘How they rode! The Mexicanized Americans of Nevada. Leaning just gently forward out of the perpendicular, easy and nonchalant, with broad slouch-hat brim blown squire up in front and long riata swinging…”

“Tell me about Mary Beth,” Sarah said suddenly.

Imogene put aside her tray and wiped her hands on the towel that served as her napkin. Fear was souring the food in her stomach. “She was a student of mine. A lovely girl,” Imogene began carefully. “She was about your age. What do you want to know about her?”

“Is it true what the letter said?” Sarah stared at the bare wood of the wall. “Please tell me,” she whispered.

To gather her thoughts, Imogene carried the remnants of her supper across the room and set the tray in the hall, her mind running through the quiet year she had spent in the company of Mary Beth Aiken.

Mary Beth was sixteen when they’d met; it was her last year in school. She was outgoing and pretty. Students had had crushes on Imogene before and she had come to recognize the symptoms, but this time it was different. Mary Beth had fallen in love with her.

What first drew Imogene to Mary Beth was her obvious intelligence and the eager way she had devoured life, wanting to know everything, to experience new sensations. At sixteen, Mary Beth knew things that Imogene, at twenty-eight, never even guessed existed. Much later she told Imogene that she had loved a black servant girl. They’d been lovers until they were found together in the back pantry of the master’s house. Half-dressed and shrieking, Mary Beth had been chased into the street by a knife-wielding cook. The fracas had brought the mistress downstairs, and Mary Beth’s lover was sent away. Both girls had been fourteen.

Imogene closed the hall door and looked back at Sarah’s slight form, hardly noticeable in the hammock of the old mattress. Sarah reminded her of Mary Beth. She was shy but pretty, and there was the same quality of need, a hunger for love and touching.