Pelican Road Read online

  PELICAN ROAD

  A NOVEL BY HOWARD BAHR

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-59692-963-0

  M P Publishing Limited

  12 Strathallan Crescent

  Douglas

  Isle of Man

  IM2 4NR

  via United Kingdom

  Telephone: +44 (0)1624 618672

  email: [email protected]

  PELICAN ROAD: Originally published by:

  MacAdam/Cage

  155 Sansome, Suite 550

  San Francisco, CA 94104

  www.MacAdamCage.com

  Copyright © 2008 by Howard Bahr

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bahr, Howard, 1946-

  Pelican road / by Howard Bahr.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59692-289-1

  1. Railroads—Employees—Fiction.

  2. Railroads—Maintenance and

  repair—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.A3613P46 2008

  813’.54—dc22

  Book design by Dorothy Carico Smith.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  To those who served

  the Main Line of Mid-America.

  I am proud to have made one among you.

  Once, a fear pierced him,

  In that he mistook

  The shadow of his equipage

  For blackbirds.

  —WALLACE STEVENS

  English Composition

  Miss Glasscock

  October 22, 1940

  MY UNCLE ARTEMUS

  by

  Fanny Snowden

  My uncle, Artemus Merton Kane, was born in Meridian, Mississippi on September 8, 1895 and is forty-five years old. He is the son of the late Dr. Basil Kane and Elizabeth Merton Kane of this city, and he has one sister, Mary Kane Snowden of this city, who is my mother, and one brother, Gideon, of New Orleans, Louisiana. Uncle Gideon is a well known artist of the French Quarter.

  When interviewed for this paper, my uncle was asked about his childhood. He said “it was very cold all the time” and told some interesting stories about the horse and buggy days. He said: “My only ambition as a youth was to be a pirate.” I do not believe this.

  My uncle served in France in the Marine Corpse during the Great War and was a Corpral who was wounded. My uncle saw actual fighting unlike many of the people who say they did, according to my uncle, who has stated that the Marines won the war for the army. This is contrary to what I have learned in other places. He was awarded the World War Victory Medal with silver citation star. When asked in this interview to explain further about the Great War, he said “it was very cold all the time,” that is only my uncle’s way of joking.

  My uncle has a degree in English studies from the University of Mississippi, which is also my ambition. He also has a tattoo on his arm of the Marine Corpse emblem. He has written many stories and essays but has been rejected each time by the magazines. He could not explain this, though he was asked to. Since 1922, my uncle has worked for the Southern Railway Co. and is a conductor and brakeman and is currently on a fast passenger train of which he is proud to be there. I, myself, have accompanied him on trips between Meridian and New Orleans many times.

  My uncle has had the experience of being married to the former Arabella Foster, of this city. My uncle is not married at the present time. When asked about this, he said: “I would prefer to be flogged,” but that is only his way of joking. He has a sweetheart whose name is Anna Rose Dangerfield of New Orleans, Louisiana whom is nice and has actually written a book that is published, which aggervates my uncle. Also, he does not own a car but he rides a motorcycle everywhere, which is a very unusual thing for a person to do in the modern automobile age.

  In conclusion, I am very proud of my Uncle Artemus. He is very kind and funny, and when I stay with him, I can do whatever I want as long as it is not to dangerous. Once he quoted: “When you are afraid, just grab a hand hold.” It is a term or phrase they use on the railroad, and Uncle Artemus thinks it is very wise, and perhaps it is, though I don’t know why.

  PEARL RIVER MEET

  On a cold afternoon two days before Christmas, a freight train waited in a passing track below the Pearl River bridge, just inside the state of Louisiana. The locomotive, number 4512, was shrouded in steam, the dimmed headlight pointing north toward a long curve and the river beyond where soon the fog must rise. The locomotive’s tender, heaped with coal and rimed with frost, was coupled to seven cars of LCL freight, two odorous cars of livestock off the Southern Pacific at New Orleans, a government flatcar with a shrouded artillery piece, another with a dismantled Brewster Buffalo pursuit plane, and a wooden caboose once the color of red clay, now almost black with grime. A curl of smoke rose placidly from the stovepipe of the caboose; the marker lamps showed green ahead.

  Between the rails, just ahead of the engine’s pilot, lay a sheet of newsprint—in fact, the opened front page of yesterday’s Baton Rouge Advocate, shrill with recent outrages of the Japanese army and the Louisiana legislature. Farther along, almost to the main line switch, a black crow, stark against the white ballast, worked over the last dingy scraps of a dead raccoon. In the manner of crows, he was watchful, and when a vagrant wind plucked at the newspaper, he tilted his eye toward the movement.

  Suddenly, the paper spread itself and leapt aloft on the wind, danced, twirled, spiraled upward toward the gray sky as if in panic or joy. In all that still and cold-shrouded landscape, nothing, not even the bird, seemed so much alive. The crow flapped away from his meal and lit teetering in the crest of a short-leaf pine. The paper went on dancing and settled at last over the matted fur and bones of the raccoon. Then the crow, crying his opinion across the afternoon, lifted from the pine and creaked away southward.

  The wind died as quickly as it came. In one of the cattle cars, a calf was bawling. The air pump of the locomotive throbbed intermittently, and now and then a white plume of steam jetted noisily from the cylinder heads. Save for these things, the world was silent. The Piney Woods—dense, shadowless, empty of sound and movement—lay close around. Where the passing track joined the main, the lens of the switch target gleamed like a polished emerald.

  Pelican Road, whence the train had come and to which it would soon return, was the name given the two hundred and seven miles of ballasted heavyweight main line rail between Meridian, Mississippi, and New Orleans. The name had always been there, older than the railroad, older than any of the men who worked on it now. On a stone in the weed-grown cemetery at Talowah, Mississippi, was an inscription leached by the rains and barely visible under the moss and resurrection plant:

  UNKNOWN TRAVELER

  MURTHERED BY BANDITS

  ON PELICAN ROAD

  JULY 25, 1868

  There was a road, then, storied and ancient, worn deep by the passage of generations of men, and before them the elk and deer and foxes. Their stories were forgotten, their blood long since raised to heaven in the sap of pines and sycamores, the old road itself swallowed by the vast wilderness it once defied. Only the name remained, and no one could say who first attached it to the railway: an act of collective memory, perhaps, whispered by the voice of time. It was a steel road now, of graceful curves and long straightways, journeyed by fast trains, illuminated for a moment by the bright cone of a headlight, then dark again, or silver under the sun, lying quiet and expectant. The men who traveled it, and those who lived beside, called it by the old name without thought, as if they remembered. Maybe they did, in the same way th
ey remembered sometimes to be afraid of the dark.

  A sandy road ran beside the railway, and across it, against the flank of the woods, stood a ramshackle, paintless store, set on brick pilings and fronted with a wide gallery. This was Gant’s store, known to all the railroad men. The store’s weathered face was plastered with rusty signs for Bull Durham tobacco and Shell motor oil and Goodrich tires. A cotton scale stood on the gallery, and rocking chairs with swayed cane bottoms, and three barrels of empty bottles, and a crosscut saw and a pile of firewood and a wringer washing machine of galvanized tin. Over the door hung a genuine curiosity: a ten-foot alligator skin nailed to the wall, jaws agape, most of its scales fallen away. The door itself, decorated with a barely visible advertisement for Barq’s root beer, was shut against the cold.

  The interior lay in the perpetual twilight of coal-oil lamps. It smelled of kerosene, of rank hoop cheese, of harness and roach powder and sweeping compound. Salted hams dangled from the ceiling, and seed bins stood open, each with its tin scoop, each giving, even in wintertime, of the sweet, indefinable odor of spring. On the dark shelves were the notions the country people used: Dr. LeGear’s Poultry Inhalant; Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp-Root; Father John’s Medicine; Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic; Castoria; Sia Smith’s Improved Antiseptic; Bauer & Black Corn Pads; Noxema Ointment; Calomel; and Glover’s Mange Medicine. Dr. Tichenor’s Antiseptic, label printed with the irrelevant image of a charging battle line of Confederate soldiers under the old flag. Lancets. Bleeding cups and eye cups. A jar of leeches (still packed tightly, though all of them had been dead half a century) and a jar of Smith Brothers cough drops. Band-aids and mustard plasters. For rations, the store offered Ball jars of beans and corn, flour in printed sacks that the people could make aprons of, cornmeal sacks with dishes inside. A briny tub of pickles. Fresh Sunbeam bread delivered daily from the bakery in Slidell.

  The railroad men could buy their bread at Gant’s store. They could buy coffee, ground in an ancient red hand-cranked grinder, and aged cheese, and slices of ham, and warm Coca-Colas. Beyond that, their main interest in winter was the Warm Morning stove whose isinglass window glowed with ferocious combustion. In the shadows beyond the stove, motionless in a chair held together with wire, sat Mister Demeter Gant, his white beard draped over the bib of his overalls, his eyes milky with cataracts. Mister Gant’s hands were large and knobby and seemed permanently attached to his knees. He was present in all seasons, immovable and silent like an exhibit of petrified wood. The railroad men regarded Mister Gant with awe. He seemed immortal, old as Pelican Road itself, older than the oaks. It was said that, in the blue-veined, shrunken calf of the old man’s leg, a pistol ball from the Confederate War—or the Revolution, perhaps—was lodged like a watermelon seed. No one had ever seen it, but everyone believed in it.

  Around the stove, the crew of the freight train, six men, spread their cracked, cold-bitten hands toward the heat. They had come in the store to get warm and to buy some bread and canned beans. As it happened, a diversion had presented itself: a new clerk, a small girl of flawless complexion, her straw-colored hair pulled back in a ponytail, with a face that renewed a man’s faith in Possibility. Her name was Allison, they learned, and when Sonny Leeke made her smile, she illumined the dark, cobwebby store with images of spring, of moonlight, of red bridges arcing over quiet water. Four of the crew—Smith, Leeke, Necaise, and Ladner—were qualified to admire her, and they did.

  The fifth man, Eddie Cox, the fireman and the oldest of them all, was a black man, so the girl did not exist for him. The space she occupied in the universe was empty as far as he was concerned. He kept his eyes on the window of the stove, and that was all right. The hot fire reminded him of his old lean wife and how her body glistened with sweat in the summertime.

  The sixth man, Mister A.P. Dunn, also thought of his wife. He imagined her as she would be in this moment: smelling of detergent, her arms white with flour from the biscuits she would leave on the table for him tonight. She would be playing the radio in the kitchen, and from time to time she would raise her eyes to the foggy window that looked out on the yard. Mister A.P. Dunn had taken such things for granted once, but he didn’t now.

  Mister Dunn pulled his watch from the pocket of his overalls. Fifteen minutes had passed since they got off the train, and fifteen minutes yet remained to dally in the passing track. As usual, the dispatcher had done them a disservice. They might have easily got to Picayune in all this time, but now they would be stuck for every southbound train. If they got home at all before the hog law caught them, it would be in the deepest shambles of night, in a cold hour long before day. The streets would be quiet under the tin-shaded streetlamps, and the houses would be dark, and Mister Dunn would have to walk home by himself in the silence. He used to like walking through town in the late hours. Everything was still after the noise of the engine, and he would stroll along and look in the store windows and let his mind settle itself. That was before he started getting lost.

  Mister Dunn shook the thought away and counseled himself to be patient. Among the many ghosts of the last fifty years were those of men who had fallen under the wheels or taken a curve too fast because they were in a hurry to get home. A man had to be patient, and above all, he had to be philosophical. Time would pass if you left it alone, and even faster if you didn’t have much of it left.

  The girl Allison awoke in Mister Dunn a yearning that was empty of desire but full of sadness. That came with an aging of the flesh, he supposed. Anyway, even in his youth he had never been good at flirtation, and now he was uncomfortable in the presence of this child who, merely by leaning forward on the counter, could generate more heat than the Warm Morning stove. Worse, he could feel the tension in his comrades, and that embarrassed him. Mister Dunn rubbed his sore leg for a moment, then stood up. “Well, boys,” he said, “I am going back to the engine.”

  The men nodded without comment. Mister Dunn never sat with them long, and sometimes he never left the engine at all. They accepted this behavior in the old man, though they might not have in a younger one.

  “I reckon I’ll come, too,” said Eddie Cox, a broad, stooped, deeply black man in greasy coveralls. His eyes and fingernails were ochre, his hair white and nearly gone, his hands knotted with arthritis. He pushed slowly, stiffly, out of his chair. For most of his thirty-five years of railroading, Eddie Cox had worked on hand-fired engines. Tons of coal, a mountain range of coal, had passed through his hands and worn him out, and now his time was short. He would make his last run on Christmas Day.

  Eddie followed his engineer across the groaning wood floor. Neither man looked at the girl. Then they were outside, crossing the gallery, down the steps, and into the lot.

  “It’s cold, Mist’ Dunn,” Eddie remarked. “Maybe it’ll snow Christmas.”

  “It has not snowed for Christmas since nineteen and twenty-three,” said Mister Dunn.

  “Yes, sir,” said Eddie. “I remember that, I surely do.”

  Mister Dunn also remembered the year it snowed. He could remember what he had for breakfast on that vanished morning, and the number of his engine, and conversations held along the trip. Odd that he could not remember what he had for breakfast on the day he was moving in now.

  They crossed the lot together. An old bucket of a T-model Ford, painted yellow, sat beside the woodpile. It was the girl’s no doubt, for it was lettered with phrases Mister Dunn did not understand, like “Lindy Fool” and “Hold Tight, Mama.” More and more young women were driving these days, and wearing pants, and smoking, and things of that nature, even way out here in the country. The radio was the cause of it, he thought, but no matter. Such behavior might have bothered him once, but it seemed of little consequence now.

  In a corner of the lot, nearly buried in dead cow-itch and honeysuckle vines, stood an ancient open-cab truck. The tires had rotted from the rims, and on the bed was a load of gray, spongy lumber from which a twenty-foot hickory tree grew. It was told that Mister Demeter Gant h
ad parked the load there a quarter century ago, and there it sat yet, waiting for Judgment Day.

  Mister Dunn bit off a chew of tobacco and worked it in his jaw. So many changes, as if the world had shed its old skin like a snake. The Great War, the Hard Times, and now another war coming. Still, Mister Dunn had come to view such things not as change but as the unraveling of a thread old as Cain. Murder and chaos, the loss of faith and decline of morality—all ancient and familiar, though many shouted and wrung their hands as if nothing of the sort had ever visited the race of man.

  It was the other kind of change that bothered him, the personal kind that altered the shape of where a man stood and changed the air he moved through. In the last year, Mister Dunn had gone to three funerals, men he had worked with in the link-and-pin days, the coal-oil headlight days, the time before the law kept them from working more than sixteen hours. He could still see them, still hear their voices, but they were gone. After all their striving, thousands of midnights, ice storms, rain, snow, flood, and a million miles, they were gone. Soon Eddie Cox would be, too. Eddie would sit on his front porch in Jumpertown for a year or two, listening to the trains go by, then he would pass like the rest. The Negroes, especially, never survived retirement for long.

  Mister Dunn drew deeply of the cold air. It was all of pine and dust and wood smoke, of the odor of coal and steam and the indefinable scent of December, of nights that were long and dark—the dead time, the cold and empty time. Once, in such a time long ago, a star burned steadfastly in the east, lighting the deep blue sky. Mister Dunn once believed that the same star burned for everyone, showing the way out of darkness. He was not so certain now, and that was the change that sorrowed him most. The star was there, no doubt, but if you quit looking even for a moment, you could lose sight of it.