The Train of Small Mercies (28 page)

He lived in Anacostia, where he was born and raised. At eighty-seven, his mother still lived on her own in the house that he grew up in, five blocks away. He often stopped by to see her on his way home from work, but tonight he had dropped by Hank's Bar for a couple of beers. He and Hank had been friends for half his life or more, and on Saturday night, Hank was always glad to see his old friend.

“My man,” Hank shouted out at the sight of Mr. Hinton. “Now I
know
it's Saturday night.” The bar was only half full, and almost no one there was under forty, and most of them men. But you didn't go to Hank's to pick up a woman. And Mr. Hinton hadn't done that in more years than he cared to count.

He let Hank pour him exactly two beers, and when he declined a third, Mr. Hinton said, “Not that my gut agrees with me on that.” At Hank's you could count on hearing Ray Charles and the Cadillacs and Ruth Brown and Louis Jordan, but nothing on his jukebox had been recorded after 1960. This was nothing any customer had ever thought to complain about.

Now that he was home, it wasn't too late to call his mother, since she didn't go to bed until well after the evening news. She had no doubt watched the funeral that morning on television, and she would be eager to know if there were other tidbits he had learned about the service or the funeral train while at work.

“Hello, Robinson,” he said to his fifteen-year-old cat, who waited until the man sat in his recliner to greet him. He stroked the cat around the ears for several minutes until his fingers tired, and this helped the cat forgive him for being gone for so many hours at a time. Robinson leaped up into his lap, sputtering like an old generator. “Uh-huh, I know you've missed me,” he said to the cat. “I know that much.”

Six years into his job at the Churchill, in 1937, Mr. Hinton was listening to one of the bellmen describe the strange guest in room 445 when a radio report announced that the Hindenburg had become completely engulfed in flames while landing at an air station in New Jersey. Four years later he was fixing a leaky staff toilet when word reached the lobby that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. He had just finished pushing a cart of ten bags on a Sunday morning twenty-two years later when a fellow bellhop told him a church in Alabama had been bombed, and that four little girls were dead. That same year, Mr. Hinton was standing just outside the kitchen on his fifteen-minute break, chatting with one of the dishwashers, Miguel, when over the radio it was announced that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. In his first week on the job as concierge, he watched through the front windows of the hotel as a long parade of protesters marched through the streets, their arms stiff and raised to the heavens, demanding that President Johnson pull American troops out of Vietnam. A middle-aged father and his two sons from Chicago watched from the next window over, and finally the man said, “All those hippies want is to be free, but you think they'd be willing to fight for that freedom?” The sons assured him that they wouldn't.

And it was just two months earlier when Mr. Hinton had stepped out into the night air and fell into a harsh coughing spell as the dark smoke of a city being burned poured above. As he tried to make sense of what was happening, a group of young black men ran past him, one of them holding his arm as pools of blood trailed behind. June, from the front desk, quickly pulled Mr. Hinton back in and convinced him it was too dangerous to get into his car. That night he slept at the hotel for the very first time.

There was almost nothing in his life that he hadn't experienced through the filter of the Churchill, and he sometimes wondered what he would do if something of national consequence happened while he was sitting in his home.

He needed to feed the hungry Robinson, but getting back up anytime soon seemed unimaginable, so sore were his hips, his knees, his ankles and feet. He could have fallen asleep in a matter of seconds, but he needed to check in on his mother. Otherwise, on Sunday morning, after he drove over to pick her up for church, the first thing she would say would be, “Well, hello, stranger.” She would not say it unkindly, but neither could she pass up the opportunity to let him know that a day without hearing from him was unsettling. What if she had needed a prescription refilled? What if she had fallen? Or needed orange juice? She would even manage a half-smile when she said it. But her son knew about the difficulties of living alone all too well. What if
he
had fallen? How would she know? How long before anyone would find him? They needed to stay in constant communication; they were all each other had.

His mother believed that his never getting married was a fate worse than disease. How she had ached for grandchildren. He was an only child, and she had held out hope that he would still marry even at fifty, but fifty came, and then sixty came, and there was her boy, Earl, still on his own, no companions he ever spoke of, no dinner dates that she ever heard about. He was married to his job, he sometimes said to end her prying.

“Well, don't bring it over to dinner,” she said. “It's too big to sit at the table.” She could be clever like that, even now.

Finally he reached over for the telephone, much to Robinson's frustration, since he was dislodged in the process, and stuck his finger into the holes and dialed. Her phone would ring once, maybe twice, but never more than that before she picked up.

“Hey, Ma,” he said.

“Hello yourself,” she said. Her voice was sharp for this time of night. “You just got in?”

“Just now,” he said, his voice so low and tired that he repeated himself to be sure he was heard.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Well, I know you work hard.” Then there was a pause. There was always a pause before her first question, which was always the same. “So,” she said. “How was the day?”

The Train of Small Mercies
is a work of fiction based on actual events. The details that relate to Robert Kennedy's funeral, the funeral train, and the burial are true. My primary sources included accounts from
The Washington Post
,
The New York Times
, and
Time
magazine. I also interviewed reporter David Broder, who was on the train for the
Post
. Thurston Clarke's
The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America
(Henry Holt and Company, 2008) was very helpful to me for understanding the spirit of Kennedy's brief presidential bid—and also the effect it had on Americans of all persuasions.

The novel was inspired by the extraordinary photographs in Paul Fusco's
RFK Funeral Train
(Umbrage Editions, 2000). Fusco worked for
Look
magazine at the time of Kennedy's assassination, and he was assigned to shoot the senator's burial at Arlington National Cemetery. After the train left New York's Penn Station, Fusco was moved by the lines of mourners—sometimes unbroken for miles—gathered along the tracks, and he kept his camera trained on them until the arrival at Union Station in Washington. He had shot well over a thousand pictures before stepping out onto the platform.

Leaving Penn Station a few minutes after one p.m. on Saturday, June 8—and already late by then—a doleful journey turned even more tragic. In Elizabeth, New Jersey, a man and a woman who was holding her granddaughter were killed by another train named the Admiral, headed to New York from Chicago, as it plowed through an overflow of mourners waiting for the Kennedy train. The granddaughter was thrown into the air and not seriously injured. Soon after, a man in Trenton, New Jersey, was critically wounded while standing on top of a boxcar for a better view and touching an 11,000-volt wire. Later that day, a Kennedy press officer announced that the man was dead, but in fact he survived and gave an interview to
The New York Times
in 2009, in which he revealed the Kennedy family had helped him with his extensive medical bills.

After these grisly incidents, the Kennedy family threatened to stop the train if other trains couldn't be halted. For the duration, the Penn Central traveled at a significantly reduced speed, and the 226-mile trek ended up taking twice as long as was originally scheduled.

The coffin was placed in the last of the twenty-one cars and propped up on chairs so that it could be seen; at times, it had to be braced from falling.

By day's end, it was estimated that there were anywhere from 500,000 to 2 million people who had turned out by the railroad tracks to catch a glimpse of the train's historic journey and to pay their respects. Many of those mourners lived in small, rural towns that were bisected by the rail lines. Old and young turned out in the simmering heat, black and white, the poor and middle class, the distraught and merely curious. There were choirs singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and Honor Guards and mothers in curlers with babies on their hips and older women who had thought to bring flowers but who realized, as the train roared past, they were unsure what they should do with them. Some mourners, including many African-Americans, having come to expect this tragedy, dropped to their knees in anguish as the train passed—not only for the loss of an essential voice in the fight for civil rights, just two months after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, but for the violent state of lawlessness their country had become.

Hubert Humphrey went on to win the Democratic presidential nomination and lost to Richard Nixon in the national election. America didn't officially end direct involvement in the Vietnam War, which Robert Kennedy had come to bitterly oppose, until early 1973. The U.S. casualties numbered near sixty thousand.

As it turned out,
Look
magazine didn't publish Fusco's pictures taken from the funeral train, and they remained largely unseen until their first publication thirty years later. An expanded edition of that work,
RFK
(Aperture, 2008), included an additional seventy pictures never seen before. That book, to my mind, offers some of the most searing portraits of American grief ever captured. It's a country that has come to know too well the cost of seeking justice for all its people, and while a sense of hope has not been completely extinguished, never has it seemed so far out of reach. For a single day, at least, politics were put aside for something more fundamental, more humane: a man who had dared to challenge, sometimes to condemn, the country he loved was dead, and here was a chance to say thank you for the work he did and had intended to do. The people who gathered along the tracks that day were too late to save Robert Kennedy, but they could honor his vision by going about their lives with renewed moral courage and conviction.