Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

Nate finally moved to the top of the ramp, stood to the bay’s left, and rubbed his hide gently, talking to him in a soothing way. He motioned for Dr. Tom to do likewise on the right side and told him to grab hold of the handrail fixed to the side of the opening. Nate reached across the meaty part of the horse’s rump with his right arm and gestured for Dr. Tom to lock forearms with his left and hold fast. Nate counted to three and with their combined momentum forward, they shoved the skittering animal into the stock car.

Dr. Tom clapped the dust from his hands, saying, “You never cease to surprise me, Nate. That’s another one I’ve not seen.”

They took their seats in the passenger car with Nate facing in the direction the train was moving.

Dr. Tom smiled and asked, “This your first time on a train?”

Nate nodded and, taking in Dr. Tom’s relaxed manner, leaned back onto the bench. Promptly on the hour the train’s whistle screamed, and the car bumped violently forward. To Nate’s embarrassment, he yelped, slapping the seats with the palms of his hands to right himself, which brought smiles from some of the other passengers.

Dr. Tom nodded and pointed for Nate to look out at the surrounding terrain, which had begun to slip past the window at an alarming rate. Once the train had gained momentum, the lurching stopped, and within minutes Nate began to feel heavy-limbed. He hadn’t been subsumed by such a lull since he’d been a child rocked in a chair.

“There’s no feeling like it,” Dr. Tom said and took a newspaper, abandoned by an earlier passenger, into his lap.

Nate read the letter from his wife again and pulled a stub of pencil from his pocket to write his response on the back. He finally had something he could convey to his wife that hadn’t to do with men dying, but the rocking of the train sprawled his writing and caused the pencil lead to break through the paper.

He pocketed the envelope, stretched his legs carefully around Dr. Tom’s, and finally stood up in the aisle, knuckling his fist into his bad hip, trying to release the cramp that had threatened to take hold while he was sitting down in the unfamiliar position: knees together and pointing forward. After a short while, though, he felt conspicuous. His standing caused all the other passengers to look at him expectantly, as though he were about to make a pronouncement. He realized that with his coat off, his badge was visible. A man sitting opposite glanced at it briefly and then gave him a hostile gaze.

Nate eased himself back onto the seat and looked at Dr. Tom. He held the newspaper aloft, but he was staring out of the window, his lips moving.

“What’d you say?” Nate asked.

Dr. Tom looked at him, crumpling the newspaper onto his lap. “Charles Dickens is gone. He died this summer past.”

It took Nate a minute to recall who Dickens was, and then he remembered their night outside Fort Davis, when Deerling was still alive, and Dr. Tom reading some bit of story, barely legible on the scrap of paper he always kept in his pack. He thought of Deerling sitting by Dr. Tom’s bedside, reading from that same paper: I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers…

“Well, now we won’t ever…” Dr. Tom’s voice trailed off beneath the train’s noises. With some difficulty, he reached and pulled a rag from his back pocket and passed it over his face, pressing his thumbs into the depressions under his brow. He drew a short breath, hiding his mouth behind one hand.

To Nate, Dr. Tom’s reflection in the glass made him appear even more gaunt and sickly. In the hours since leaving Middle Bayou, his partner’s body had seemed to diminish, as though the timbre of his thoughts were draining his vigor even more than the laudanum had.

Once, as a child, Nate had spied a frog on a riverbank, poised motionless on a rock. He’d crept up on it, getting close enough to reach out a finger and touch the slick sheen of its head, but still it sat. The frog soon seemed to grow lax in its outer parts and began sinking in on itself. Nate watched horrified as the entire frog, within a quarter hour’s time, deflated into a shriveled, glistening mass. When the frog was as hollow as a skin sock, a large beetle crawled out from under it, scurried into the water, and swam away. The image had stayed with him for a long time, haunting him at night, but finally it had slipped away as other, more necessary and compelling, thoughts crowded into his mind. The remembrance of that event unsettled him, and he wished it had not resurfaced.

Dr. Tom had told Nate that Middle Bayou had turned his thoughts dark. The place seemed to be a conjoining of miracles and draining terrors, almost biblical in scope, where crippled men walked, harlots posed as teachers, and giants with claws and teeth pulled grown men into rivers. And if nothing else, it offered a hardened kernel of damnable proof that foolish men like Bedford Grant could wreak as much havoc as malicious ones.

The train began to slow as it approached Harrisburg to take on more passengers, and at the town limits, a man with a long, filthy coat and beard and looking as though he’d been wandering for years faced the tracks and held up a sign. It read Rouse Yourselves to the Anger of God.

Lost in his thoughts, Nate was startled by Dr. Tom calling his name. When the train stopped, the ranger bolted up, grabbed the Whitworth, and, gesturing for Nate to follow, walked purposefully off the train. He moved briskly towards the front of the railcars and stepped up the ladder, disappearing into the engine cab.

Confused, Nate walked as quickly as his seizing hip would allow, and as he came abreast of the engine, he looked up and saw Dr. Tom in animated conversation with the engineer and the fireman. He turned to Nate and motioned him up the ladder. Offering him a hand, Dr. Tom said, “Nate, I am rousing myself to the anger of God.”

The cab was cramped with the four men, and the noise was so deafening from the escaping steam, the bell clanging, and the whistle signals that Nate couldn’t hear the names of the railroad workers, but he nodded at them and shook hands with the fireman, who was as black with cinder and smoke as the firebox itself.

Dr. Tom shouted into his ear, “I worked for a time on the rails. In Pennsylvania. After I left medical school.”

He pointed to the fireman. “That’s what I did. Stoked wood and carried coal.”

Nate expected they’d soon climb down from the engine and return to the passenger car, but Dr. Tom braced himself against a railing. “Hold on, Nate!” he yelled. “This is somethin’ to write your wife about.”

The train began its thundering pitch forward and a sensation like falling through the floor of a well passed from the soles of Nate’s feet and up his legs. The noise was terrible, making his teeth clash together, and he watched with awe through the forward portal as the train gained speed, pulling the tracks towards and beneath the engine as though they were not being traversed so much as consumed.

The engineer gestured ahead. “Less than forty miles to Virginia Point. Then the bridge to Galveston.”

Nate shook his head, amazed, and a kind of harrowing joy overtook him to the point of giddiness. For several hours he watched the passing of fields and houses and even people who had come to stand by the tracks, gawking or waving up at them. Some boys ran alongside for a brief while until their legs gave out and they tumbled all at once into the grass. One fool on a horse chased them and looked to try and cross the tracks ahead of the engine but pulled up at the last minute, the terrified horse lathered and slinging its head.

The engineer shouted to Nate, “We catch one on horseback every few months. Makes a god-awful mess.”