Jane Smiley - Some Luck

The pastor boomed out again: “My friends, who can say where it will end? Who can say when the Lord will at last be pleased with us?”

Walter shifted in his seat, and Lillian took his hand. Rosanna saw him squeeze hers. Right then, Henry woke up and coughed. Rosanna knew a sign when she saw it. She poked Walter and cocked her head toward the entrance. Walter took her meaning as if he had indeed been waiting. As one, they got up quietly, and eased out in Walter’s direction — thank the Lord, not the center aisle but the right-hand one — and they walked toward the door without looking back or looking down at any of their fellow worshippers. Behind them, Pastor Elmore said, “My friends, I think, humbly and even with thanks, that we should be prepared for just about …” The door swished closed behind them, and they were out on the porch.

FRANK WAS SITTING in his seat in the fourth coach (right behind the dining car). Out the window, there was nothing to look at but snow, snow, snow. That was the way it had been all winter — at home, the drifts on the west side of the house were above the roof of his and Joey’s room — when you looked out the window you saw a crystalline white wall. This snow was blowing, but it was still utterly white, and Frank could feel the train slow. He had been on the train for three hours, so maybe they were almost to Clinton, maybe not. The last stop, where the stationmaster had put the flag up for some folks who got on and then passed through to the sleeper, was DeWitt.

The reason Frank found himself on the train, the Challenger, the newest and best train on the Chicago and Northwestern line, was that Mama just could not put up with him any longer, though what she said was that he had to go to school, there was no way around it. Maybe it wasn’t so important for Joey, but Frankie needed school. The idea that he would go to school in Chicago had rolled across the table as a silly thought at Thanksgiving, when Eloise came home with Rosa and Julius. Already by that time, Frank had missed six days of high school, off and on, because of snow, and Mama was plenty steamed about it — steamed at Papa, it seemed, as if the blizzards were Papa’s fault. “Well, send him to me in Chicago,” said Eloise, and Mama said, “Oh, don’t be ridiculous!”

But between Thanksgiving and Christmas he had missed nine days, four of them because the school itself was closed when the water pipes burst. Grandpa Wilmer and Granny Elizabeth and all the oldest people Frank knew said that they had never seen a winter like this — it wasn’t just that there were layers of snow on the ground, five feet in some places, not including the drifts, but it was deathly cold and windy, too. Papa’s cows and sheep and hogs hadn’t been out of the barn for any reason in two months. “Are we living in Minnesota now?” exclaimed Mama. But Papa said it would turn out fine in the end, because the drought was over. At Christmas, Eloise issued her invitation again — yes, the snow was deep in Chicago, too, but she and Julius had a big apartment a block from the high school. Frank would like it, she thought. And Mama said yes.

The train came to a halt, but there was no town to be seen, even dimly. Frank looked around at the other passengers — there were twelve of them in this car, a family with three kids, two ladies, and the rest businessmen. The ladies kept talking, and the businessmen kept reading their newspapers. Only the kids gawked at the windows. The car was quiet. Frank got up.

The wind in the vestibule was sudden and breathtakingly cold, even though it was surely no sharper than Frank had felt many times heading home from school. As Frank pushed and pushed on the door into the dining car, he felt a moment of panic. In the dining car, there was more news — the locomotive had run up against a huge drift. Crews were coming. No telling how long it might take. Frank eavesdropped on a man asking the porter “whether you expect supplies to hold out.” Since he had a glass of whiskey in his hand, Frank figured that was the supply that he meant.

“Yes, suh. I expect they will hold out for a week, suh.” The porter was the first black man Frank had ever seen. Mama had told him that he would see plenty of black people in Chicago, and that he was to avoid antagonizing them by looking them in the eye, and that only low-class people called them “niggers,” and that that word was another thing they didn’t like, so to be careful. They were to be called “colored.” But it looked to Frank like it was the porter who was being careful. Frank bought a chicken sandwich from him for a quarter, avoided looking at him, and went back through the vestibule to his seat. It was disconcerting how warm and still the interior of the coach was, compared with how wild and cold the weather was. Frank picked up his book — he was reading Robbers’ Roost , by Zane Grey. He had gotten it from one of the guys at school, and he planned to send it back before the guy realized it was missing.

The conductor did not say what “held up” the crew, but by the time it was dark, and everyone knew they were stuck at least until morning, things in the coach weren’t quiet anymore. Two of the children were crying, and the two ladies were tutting and shaking their heads; one of them said in a low voice (but Frank was used to listening to low voices), “If we make it till morning … but you heard about that train in New York. Mumble-mumble frozen to death.” Frank could hardly keep himself from looking around, but he didn’t dare. If he did, they would lower their voices even further and he wouldn’t learn a thing. One of the businessmen kept pushing a button next to the window, but the conductor didn’t come. And then the lights went out. Frank set down his book, but still there was nothing to see in the pale, snowy darkness, least of all “crews.”

Not long after the lights went out, the conductor did come through with a flashlight, and he had two porters with him. He announced that the Chicago and Northwestern Railway was very concerned about the comfort of its passengers, and that since there were berths available in the sleeper car, it had been decided that coach passengers would be allowed to make use of those berths for the night. Other passengers had chosen to bunk down in the dining cars and the bar car (one of the businessmen laughed at this), and perhaps, given the comfort of the seats in the coach, others would prefer to stay where they were. If so, the railroad would be happy to supply them with blankets and pillows. Crews were ready to get to work before dawn, but the drift was a large one — not so high, but extensive and difficult to clear.

It was one of the ladies who said to Frank after the conductor left, “Son, you better claim one of those berths, because at least you can insulate yourself in there. We heard of a train near Buffalo — it was the coach passengers who froze to death. You come with me.” The two ladies led Frank to the conductor, and declared that they wanted upper berths (“because heat rises”) and also one for their nephew here. The conductor was in no mood to argue.

His night in the berth was a strange one — maybe he had never been in anything that felt so much like a hole in the ground. He could open his eyes and see the window, but as soon as he closed them, he sank again. When, in a dream, he thought Joey poked him, he threw out his arm and hit a wall. That woke him up. And then, lying there, he was as sure as he could be that he was going to die — that on this train, unlike the one in New York — not Buffalo, near Rochester, was it — everyone would freeze to death, and it didn’t matter that he was perfectly warm. The freezing part seemed to have more to do with being three hours from home and three hours from Chicago, as far as he could be from everything and everyone he knew, than it did with mere temperature. “Hell’s bells,” he said aloud, “I miss Joey.” And he did. His head touched the wall, his feet touched the wall, his hands touched the wall, and only a curtain hung between him and falling out of the berth into the aisle. If it hadn’t been for those dead passengers in Rochester, he would have gone back to his seat.