Crossing the Tracks (9781416997054) (15 page)

All night long the goddesses guard me from my ghosts.

Tuesday I wake up to the smell of coffee and Leroy's easy laugh coming from the kitchen. Patches of sun shuffle across the rug. I stretch, roll to my side, and reach out, back in the moonlit grass floating up and up.

The phone rings. I hear Dr. Nesbitt say, “Celeste,” and “Yes, I'll tell her.”

I wash my face, sprinkle powder under my dress, and walk down the hall barefoot.

When I come in the kitchen Dr. and Mrs. Nesbitt don't do any of the things I would hate. They don't stop talking. They don't tilt their long faces and pat me on the shoulder,
sorry that I'm not part of their club for folks who understand God's whim. No one explains that for some mysterious reason He needed the last of my family to get smashed by a train.

In fact, Leroy looks up at me, like he's still gazing at a star. I see my hairpin in his pants pocket. He puts his hand over it—his way of saying he's not giving it back.

Dr. Nesbitt stands at the stove. “I told Leroy that today,
I
wear the apron in the family. Do you want bacon and eggs, Iris?”

Marie's stumpy tail taps the linoleum at the word bacon. She gives me a pleading look.

“Yes, thank you.”

Mrs. Nesbitt sparkles, a ruby in her fiery Japanese jacket and slippers. Leroy straddles his chair. His pale blue shirtsleeves are rolled back. He looks as if he could reach over and lift Mrs. Nesbitt and her chair in one hand. I straighten my back. Have I changed that much too?

We discuss how everybody slept and how Leroy needs a tour of the chicken house. I glance at the telephone on a triangle-shaped table in the corner. “I have got to call Celeste back,” I say flatly. “She's tried to reach me, hasn't she?”

“Twice,” Dr. Nesbitt says.

It takes forever for the operator to make the connection. I haven't given a thought about what to expect or what to say.

“Iris?”

“Celeste.”

There's silence. I cautiously step onto the gaping, rickety bridge that connects us: my father. “I'm so…”

Celeste interrupts, her voice panicky, bossy. “We'll sit together at the service. We're a family now.”

No.

I focus on my group still rooted around the breakfast table. Dr. Nesbitt lowers his coffee cup. Leroy doodles on Mrs. Nesbitt's crossword. I know they can hear Celeste's every word.

She sniffs and whines. “I wanted you to catch the bouquet.”

“Bouquet?”

“At my
wedding
! Oh, God. Everything… I'm… except…” Celeste dissolves into sobs.

Mrs. Nesbitt hands me her hankie. Leroy shakes his head.

“You need to come to Kansas City right now,” Celeste pleads. “Please.”

“Don't you mean Atchison? I thought the funeral would be in…”

“You've got to move before our Labor Day weekend sale, Iris. You're good with numbers, and we've got so much to do at the store.”

I start coughing. Celeste has sucked my breath right through the phone.

Her voice gets wobbly. “My sister promised to come from Oklahoma! I wanted her to see my store, our new apartment. Of course, she already has a rich husband and three
perfect
children.” Celeste's tone becomes confidential. “But so what? She's lost her figure and she's only twenty-six!”

“She's coming for the memorial?”

“No! The wedding.”

“But…”

“Please, Iris…”

There's a long impossible pause. I imagine every ear between Wellsford and Kansas City listening on the party line.

“I'll call you back,” I say.

“Iris. Please come. You know your daddy would want you to.”

“I'll call.”

I hang up. Marie looks up at me. I toss her a bite of bacon.

Mrs. Nesbitt folds her hands. Dr. Nesbitt pours more coffee. I take a long sip, let the steam fill my nose. “God! Celeste is…” I shudder. “Mixed up. I need to call Carl about the arrangements before she does.”

Leroy explains Carl to the Nesbitts. They help me think through Daddy's funeral details. I decide I don't want a visitation like Mama had. We can't get the house ready for it. The services will be Thursday at the church in Atchison with another at the cemetery.

Mrs. Nesbitt holds my hand while I call Carl. “Yes, I know you are.… Thank you. Could you please call Reverend Wolver for me? Set the service for Thursday afternoon? And, Carl, would you pick out a casket? It needs to be the glossiest black they have, with polished silver handles… and expensive.”

Leroy smiles.

“You know exactly what I mean. Nothing cheap.”

We hang up with the promise to talk again this afternoon.

I pace the kitchen. Celeste's dizzy desperation shoves at me all the way from Kansas City. I imagine us bumping around her little apartment together. A wall, not a bridge, grows inside. I erupt to the group at the table. “Celeste was all dolled up to marry my father and give birth to a shoe store. That's all the family they wanted… not
me
. What am I supposed to do with her? I'm not her housekeeper, or her bookkeeper, or her sister, either. She's already got a living, breathing sister, even if all they do is
project
their two-faced perfectly phony selves at each other!”

The Nesbitts' stunned looks make me feel like I just spit on everybody, including Daddy. I burst into tears and out the door.

Leroy follows me to the stinky chicken house. “I'm gonna move in here,” I sputter. “There's room for one more chicken.”

Leroy stuffs his hands in his pockets. “Why can't you stay out here with them?”

“Because they need somebody to
help
them instead of a hateful, crazy person who is only good at hurling raw eggs.”

Leroy screws up his face.
“What?”

“Never mind, Leroy. The Nesbitts didn't know much about Daddy or Celeste… until now. They probably thought that they were… well, they probably wondered what he was like, because I never… But, anyway, they haven't offered, and they've hired somebody else.” I roll
my eyes. “Gladys Dilgert. So, la-di-da. Here she comes… and there I go.”

“So? Have Gladys go live with Celeste and you stay here.”

Leroy sneezes. The chickens fuss and peck. “You're making them nervous, Leroy.” I grab the basket and gather eggs—so wound up I could break one in my fist.

I hear footsteps crunch across the driveway. “Iris?” Dr. and Mrs. Nesbitt gingerly step in, fanning their faces. I turn to them, blinking in the dusty light. Dr. Nesbitt still wears the red-and-white checked apron. “Does your father have a will?” he asks.

“Sir?”

“A will.”

“I suppose so.”

“Would he have changed it yet, to include Celeste?”

“I don't know.”

Mrs. Nesbitt covers her nose with her hankie. I worry about her satin slippers in the chicken manure.

“Does he have any living relatives besides you?”

“No, sir. His brother, Marion, died.”

“Do you plan to go to Atchison tomorrow?”

“Yes. I need to check the train.” I hear the phone ringing in the house. Celeste.

Dr. Nesbitt says firmly, “We know Leroy has to leave today. Mother and I would like to drive you to Atchison tomorrow, stay overnight, and go to the services on Thursday. In fact, Mother can stay longer, to help you sort through what needs doing at your house.”

“Thank you.” My mind reels. “I guess I should pack everything. My trunk…”

Mrs. Nesbitt's voice is solemn, official. “Iris, our contract with you goes through Labor Day, so you will be unavailable to Celeste until then. I trust you will tell her as much.”

Leroy and I sit on the stoop. I shiver in the August
heat. “I think Celeste gave me permanent poison ivy.”

He moves close, rubs my arms. “Here, give me the poison ivy. I'll get rid of it for you.” He cups my hands. I feel the pulse in his thumbs and wrists.

“Sit next to me,” I say.

“I am.”

“On Thursday.”

“Okay.”

We take Leroy to the depot. “We can all stay at my
house in Atchison, although it will be kinda musty,” I tell Mrs. Nesbitt on the way back.

“And dusty,” she adds. “Don't worry about that now, you've got enough on your mind.”

“I guess Daddy will be buried by Mama…”

Tears well up. I blot them on my sleeve and try to remember the two of them together in their living lives. I have only one memory of it, on the porch at the sanatorium. Daddy sits in a rocker, reading Mama a letter. She has her eyes shut, but you can tell she's listening. His
head is bent, the afternoon sunlight making his hair look silver, then black, then silver as he rocks. I wonder who wrote that letter. A friend maybe? Did she write back? What would she have said? Was she strong or funny or snooty or kind? Was she fumbly like me? Was she good with numbers?

What will she do with Daddy when he shows up in heaven?

Under a bruised sky, fingers of wind stroke the wheat
from bleached gold to tan and back. We pass threshing machines crouched under showers of dust and straw. Fat hay bales dot the landscape.

I'm in the backseat, wondering if the sky will cry and turn the roads to mud before we get to Atchison. The shifting wheat makes the land look upholstered in suede. I shut my eyes, recalling our store and Carl at his bench in the back room.

“Charles, you tryin' to make my life miserable, sellin' this suede? Why every spit of grease and horse shit in Atchison, Kansas, just falls in love with it.”

Suede.

Daddy's shoes!

I sit straight. Oh, God. Oh, no! I didn't tell Carl to pick out shoes. Daddy can't go anywhere without the right footwear.

“Dr. Nesbitt!” I say. “We need to head straight for Daddy's store when we get to Atchison. It's real important.”

Mrs. Nesbitt turns with a curious expression. “Dear?”

I stutter about reverse leather and fashion and Daddy's holy attitude toward the proper shoes for every occasion—even walking through the Valley of the Shadow.

“So your father was a smart dresser, I gather.”

I nod, sick with forgetting the one thing I
can
do for him now, the one thing I ever truly understood about him.

Dr. Nesbitt accelerates a bit. He must feel the engine burning in me to resolve what other folks would find a silly detail at a time like this. But my father was a detail man in every way except one—the details of me.

In the distance ahead I see a railroad crossing with a faded sign. But there is no train today.

Morbid takes over. I sit back, wondering what shoes Daddy was wearing when he died. A sickening image of them scuffed and crushed comes to my mind.

How did the engineer feel closing in on that crossing, unable to stop, his warnings ignored? How must he be feeling now, living with that horrid jolt in his bones? And what of the passengers trapped on the train, knocked and bruised by the impact?

A wall inside me crumbles. In my mind I see the look
of gritty determination on my father's face–the expression I saw when riding with him on a road much like this one years ago, the time he almost killed us trying to beat a freight train.

Dark feelings rush in. I turn clammy, lean forward, grip the top of the front seat, panicked.

“Dr. Nesbitt! Stop at the crossing—
please
!”

We roll up to a rusty sign squeaking in the wind. Dr. Nesbitt hits the brake and turns the engine off.

Dust settles around our car. I sit with my hands over my face. My worst memory has leaped over the barrier inside. I am eight years old again, trapped in the car with my father.

The ground rumbles beneath us. Out my window I see the locomotive bearing down, its whistle shrieking one warning after another:
STOP! Get out of the way!
But Daddy, with me right beside him, speeds up and shoots straight for the crossing, his hands gripping on the steering wheel, his shirtsleeves billowing in the wind.

The train can't stop for us, and Daddy won't stop for it. A wild black ghost of exhaust tumbles backward over the open coal cars.

Daddy's teeth are gritted, his jaw working.

NO! NO!
I grab the door handle, squeeze my eyes shut, every part of me screaming
STOP!
but my mouth.

The slashing beat of the train sounds like knife blades sharpened against the rails. We fly through gravel,
whack-whack
over the tracks, then stop sharp. I knock forward, hit my hands on the dash. My knees bang the floor. The hulking wall of train bursts through our car dust and disappears.

Everything is deathly quiet.

Dizzy, panting, I watch pinpoints of blood appear on my skinned knees. Daddy smoothes his hair. Sweat glistens on his forehead. My hands are ice.

He takes a deep breath, looks over at me, his wide eyes almost mocking. He throws his arm nonchalantly over the seat back. “See, Iris? We had all the time in the world.”