John McManus - Born on a Train - 13 Stories

You stop where you’re going and get here.

Are you Virginia’s boy? said Wayman.

But English wasn’t spoken where he’d walked to. Had he crossed the state line into Georgia? It was Wayman who had brought his family here, because country people were good people and they wouldn’t have to worry, as long as they stayed off unpaved roads and went to the general store one at a time.

First help me out, then go where you were gonna.

Is your name Forbus? said Wayman.

That’s one name, said the man.

I have some news for your mother.

Can you tell if somebody’s dead or not?

Most people I know are alive.

But if you see folks, you know if they’re dead?

Wayman hid why he was uncomfortable with these questions. The funeral wasn’t all that tormented him, but it was a central thing he could work his feelings around. Kip wanted so much that didn’t work in the world. It made Wayman want to split himself in two. He supposed this would kill him. He didn’t believe in Western science, and he didn’t believe in the principles of things.

You don’t want to be going that way none, said Forbus. You ain’t going nowhere that way. I think you’ve got yourself lost. Those tracks just peter out to nothing. Suddenly Forbus seemed as scared as Wayman was scared, and he began to cackle. You’ll die if you keep going that way. That is not a good way.

The train bore down the tracks and between them and blocked each man’s view of the other. Wayman thought how Kip was being filled with wafts of fuel, too, a mile west. Together they lost themselves in the clackety rhythm. One way not to look at Kip was to pretend he was crying. Wayman couldn’t go through the old photographs anymore. Cobby didn’t remember those times. On the magician’s world, the dying only disappeared like wisps of dust that floated out of sunbeams, and Cobby would agree and nod off so Wayman could write down what he’d learned from the progenitor of his fantasies.

Well you stuck around for me, said Forbus when the train had passed.

Do you see why I’m not scared of the men here? he dispatched to Kip across their rain-washed mile. They trust in me; your fears are mythological. Forbus held the catalpa branches off the trail for Wayman. In the magician’s world, youths still hid their love, because Wayman questioned his own trust too much to nurture it into Cobby, who should experience just enough torment in these years, no more. Wayman’s mother hadn’t died until Wayman was eighteen, and now he couldn’t give his son the same childhood. Kids who didn’t love their parents were so free, running off to the wicked cities never to be seen again, so he prayed for Cobby not to consider himself as part of the same blood.

This is a seventy-three, Forbus said of his trailer home at the edge of a clearing.

You ain’t going nowhere that way. Wayman wasn’t scared to follow Forbus into a musty room, even if it was a trap. He thought he would have met their landlady’s son before, but he and Kip were renegades who’d erased themselves from the map, so when Virginia told stories of growing up in their cottage, of planting the sweetgum tree on her brother’s grave in the year 1930, they were ashamed of themselves and paid little attention, focusing instead on the threat she presented, although Wayman felt he and Kip were the threat in allowing themselves not to listen, thinking instead of their own welfare as unwanted settlers on enemy soil.

She’s lying down in there, said Forbus.

It was me who called, said Wayman.

I suppose we ought to give her a look.

Wayman followed Forbus into a dark yellow room and climbed a gentle slope to the bed. She’s under there, barked Forbus, pointing at a quilt.

If she’s alive, she’ll need air to get through.

Forbus inhaled a breath for ten straight seconds. There’s air, he said.

You think it can get through all those covers?

She sewed it herself. I reckon she knew what she was doing.

Wayman shrugged. Pull them off then, he said.

Oh, no, said Forbus, drawing back. It’s my mama under there.

One tendril of kudzu had reached the window from the trees beyond. The phone was off the hook at the woman’s bedside.

That’s how it is when it’s your mama. You were inside her, dead in her, and then you lived. If I breathe her air into my body, she’ll get inside of me instead, and that’s backwards. Lord I hope she’s okay. I don’t even know how she mixes up the ice tea.

Wayman looked at the quilt and wished everyone would live exactly as long as their mothers and die on the very same day. And if there was no mother? Kip was the one who needed to live, so Wayman would be the father, but Wayman, of the two of them, was not the man, and had no idea how his body could be made to feel that way.

The ghost world is three feet higher than ours, said Forbus. That’s why a ghost is always floating, instead of on the ground. If a ghost stands inside you, its feet are always kicking at your stomach.

Wayman shut his eyes and pulled the quilt from the bed. Virginia’s skin was white and shriveled. Her eyes were wide like she was falling off a cliff.

Her name’s Virginia. Never called her by it, though.

She’s dead, said Wayman. Good Lord.

Forbus shook his head. You got to use the mirra, he said.

Wayman felt sick to his stomach, for Kip had done this to her with the phone call.

You got to use the mirra. Last time I nearly had her in the ground.

Wayman sighed. Where is one, then?

Ain’t you got one yourself?

Who carries a mirror around?

I thought maybe you had one of them knifes.

Wayman shook his head. All my knife is is a knife.

There was a dresser mirror, four feet wide, circular, and framed. Forbus pushed his mother’s jewelry box to the floor. Even in these moments Wayman was incapacitated by the same old feelings. He wanted to do something new with grieving. Virginia’s ghost was kicking at his stomach, because he could believe at this moment what Forbus had said. The logic that had made him love Kip came geographically closer to him. A mile was too far for Kip to walk! These thoughts as they wrenched the frame back and forth proved little besides his control of nothing, and when the wood snapped, he caught the mirror just before it would have shattered.

Help me hold this, he said.

Forbus put a finger to his lips.

I’ll drop it, Wayman threatened.

Shhh. I heard her breathing.

You didn’t hear any breathing.

I might have, if you’d have got quiet.

The image of the room behind him dizzied him until Forbus took the other side of the mirror. They covered Virginia’s corpse with its round shadow. Dust in the air grew thicker until Wayman finally sneezed, showering the brown paper of the mirror’s back side with all the droplets of his spit.

Look at that, said Forbus, she’s alive!

That was me, said Wayman. I did that.

Tears began to form in the old man’s eyes. He was trying not to move his jittery hands, but then his arms jerked back so that the glass hit a bedpost and shattered, causing Wayman’s image to disperse into the four corners of the room.

Forbus gasped. It’s all gone. That was all the mirra we had.

Wayman extracted a small triangle of glass from his forearm. I’m sorry, he said as Forbus sank to sort through the motley fragments. Forbus turned the pieces over and over, and his left foot nudged the jewelry box aside. On its lid Wayman saw a small mirror.

We’ve got to find the ones she breathed on.

I don’t think you’ll find any like that.

Hurry, Forbus said, his voice shaking. The frost will fade away.

There were three ways, the magician told his apprentice boy, that having a dead mother was like falling in love for the first time: he wouldn’t think about anything else anymore; it would frighten him to change his every feeling — but Cobby had never been in love, his mother wasn’t a mother at all, and Virginia might have been the only woman he knew, cordoned off as he was from the world, his one grandmother dead and his other having disowned Kip when Kip was fifteen, a common thing really, they said when Cobby asked why, so there were no women in the magician’s world save the witches and dryads who mined elixirs from the forest floor.