Who looked at her husband as if she’d only just remembered his existence.
“Jesus Christ,” she said.
Elias tried to charm her. Pale and bedraggled as he was, he still had dimples. “I suppose itisa kind of resurrection,” he said, spreading his arms as if to encompass a whole audience.
The conductor cried, “All aboard!” The edge in his voice and the aim of his glare told Malcolm he wasn’t happy with them.
Violet stared at Elias. “How did you get here?”
Elias surprised them both with a slow nod of acceptance, absorbing the vitriol in her voice. “I guess I’ve got it coming to me, whatever darts you feel like throwing. I won’t trouble you. I’m just here to pay my respects and see Maggie put to rest.”
“You’re joining us?” Violet said.
Elias glanced from his wife to his brother, puzzled. “Of course I am.”
The conductor cried out again, this time walking toward them, and Malcolm put one hand on the small of Violet’s back as he guided her aboard.
14
Benjy had never been on a train. In stories he’d read, children ran away and hid in a boxcar. If Root had allowed him to speak, he would have asked the passengers around them at least a hundred questions. But he couldn’t speak. It felt as if Root had installed a switch in his brain, that Root could slide a finger into Benjy’s head and turn the switch, but right now, it was off.
No speaking. No panicking. All was well.
As the train left Buffalo, the passengers around them muttered unhappily to one another. One man waved a hand beneath his nose, asking too loudly if anyone knew the source of the stink that had arrived in the train car. Politely, someone suggested the brakes were burning, or oil had caught fire, but the way they kept glancing toward him and Root, he knew what they were smelling.
Dirt, centuries of dead worms, and something else. A kind of rot that put a strange taste in the air. Beneath the brim of its hat, shadows swathed Root’s face, turning its sunken eyes to shadows with tiny embers at their centers. The tips of distant cigarettes, burning orange.
“Tickets?” the conductor said as he stopped at their row.
Benjy couldn’t be afraid. That part of him had been buried deep inside. Turned off, just the way Root had turned off his voice. He wanted to reply to the conductor, had even selected the words in his head, but all he could do was sit beside the thing from beneath his cornfield as if he were accompanying his grandfather on a journey.
Root inhaled deeply, and when he exhaled, a sound emerged. A voice like the wind in the corn, without words. The conductor stared at Root and then at Benjy. There were no tickets, of course. No permissions of any kind.
The conductor raised a shaking hand to cover his mouth. He staggered and caught himself with one hand on the back of a seat. The man had a thick white mustache, and as Benjy watched, fat tears rolled down his face and slid inside his mustache. Around them, the other passengers in the car began to make small noises of grief and despair. An older woman who seemed to be traveling with her daughter began to breathe in quick, short sips of air, wide-eyed moments of desperation. The old woman’s breathing stopped then, and she slumped in her seat.
“Is this all there is?” a small voice from the rear of the car asked.
Root raised a thin, withered hand. Bits of bark were attached to the skin. It flicked spidery fingers to gesture for the conductor to continue. The man blinked as if waking, and when he finally moved on through the train car, he did not bother to ask for tickets.
The conductor opened the door at the rear of the car to pass through into the next. Benjy wondered if his sorrow would follow him and how long he could continue like that. He wondered if the conductor would simply step off the train.
Is this all there is?that small voice had asked. Trapped inside himself, unable to act, Benjy thought it might be. He wanted to follow the conductor.
But he served Root now, and there was work to be done.
Root was in pain, anditspain had to be stopped.
15
While they were stopped in Buffalo, the porters had been busy in the baggage car. A dozen square cages had been stacked toward the back, each cage holding two or three unhappy chickens. Malcolm knew they were unhappy because they seemed to be complaining all the time, squawking and flapping their wings against the cage. He hoped they’d settle down, but even if they all went to sleep and the noise ended, the worst part about sharing space with a couple of dozen caged chickens was the smell of their shit. People thought about chickens as little egg-makers who pecked at the dirt and were delicious when fried. Those people never had to spend time with them in confinement.
The broken window had been temporarily solved with a piece of plywood nailed into place. It would make the onward journey warmer and dryer, but with the chicken stink, Malcolm thought he would have preferred the cold wind whipping through the broken window.
The goat didn’t stink. Or if it did, he couldn’t discern its particular odor from the smell wafting from the chicken cages. A porter had tied the goat to a metal railing screwed into the rear wall of the car and left it with a pile of hay and a bowl of water. Malcolm wasn’t sure if this was the appropriate meal for the goat, but given its apparent disdain for those offerings, he suspected not.
Other items had been added to the baggage car, too. Several trunks had been removed, and suitcases had appeared in theirplace. Five barrels that might have contained anything from grain to whiskey had been arranged on the right, just a few feet from where the window had been boarded over. The amount of work the porters had done loading and unloading impressed the hell out of him.
“Luxurious digs, brother,” Elias said, propping himself on top of a wooden crate whose labels were in French. “You know how to really live it up.”
