Читать книгу A Train through Time - Elizabeth Farnsworth - Страница 14

On another day, we film a UN volunteer from Milwaukee, tall and stately with freckles and straw-colored hair, teaching peasants how to mark a ballot and assuring them that the Khmer Rouge are lying. “No satellite in the sky will be able to reveal how a person votes,” she tells them.

“If the village chief tells you to vote for this or that party, you say, ‘No, it’s my choice.’ A human right is something all of us are born with. No one can give or take it away. It’s yours from the time you are born.”

The villagers squatting before the makeshift stage are illiterate. Few have ever held a pencil. Some look weak from hunger. Does the volunteer note the chasm between her experience and theirs? It would be easy to mock her, but I am surprised to feel moved, even hopeful. I admire her courage and the UN’s determination to press forward with elections in spite of threats from the Khmer Rouge.

“Thomas Jefferson meets Pol Pot,” a reporter from The Guardian says later over dinner. “Bloody fine show if you ask me.”

l

When light seeped around the window shade that first morning on the train, I climbed down the ladder and looked outside. Wind blew sleet hard against the glass. The clickety-clack of the wheels on the track reminded me of a metronome keeping time. Looking around, I saw that my upper berth could be folded into the wall, and my father’s bed would make a seat big enough for two. There was a chair in the corner. I liked the way everything fit just so—like a playhouse. Even the sink could be stowed. My father watched, smiling, from his berth.

He wanted me to love trains like he did.

His father had left high school to lay track for the Santa Fe and was now an executive with that railroad, but we were traveling on the Union Pacific to experience the northern route to San Francisco. My father liked dramatic weather, and the year before we had watched news reports about a train stuck in a blizzard in the mountains of California. “Maybe it will happen to us,” he’d teased before we left home.

Sitting next to him on the bed, I held Louie up to the window to see cows and horses in fields along the tracks. He was a small brown bear whose fur had worn thin from years of hugging. Next to me were Mother’s hand mirror, my new Toni doll, and a book, The Road to Oz.

I wanted them close when so much was changing.

Before reading to Louie, I described what he’d missed in the story so far. The orphan Dorothy Gale had wandered away from the farm in Kansas where she lived with her aunt and uncle and gotten lost “somewhere near to Oz.” Now she and her companions were walking down an enchanted road toward the Emerald City in search of a princess with the power to send them home.

I read aloud, “Turning the bend in the road, there came advancing slowly toward them a funny round man made of burnished copper, gleaming brightly in the sun. Perched on the copper man’s shoulder sat a yellow hen, with fluffy feathers and a pearl necklace around her throat.

“‘Oh Tik-tok,’ cried Dorothy, running forward. When she came to him the copper man lifted the little girl in his copper arms and kissed her cheek with his copper lips. . . . ‘This,’ turning to her traveling companions, ‘is Mr. Tik-tok, who works by machinery, ’cause his thoughts wind up, and his talk winds up, and his action winds up—like a clock.’”

My father called Tik-tok a robot or automaton, but I thought of him more like a child who couldn’t always do what adults expected of him.

Later we walked forward through the train to the dining car, where tables were covered with white linen and waiters called stewards wore spotless white coats. As we sat down, I noticed a girl about my age across the aisle with her mother and father. They were writing on a pad like the ones my friends and I used when playing waitress at home. My father explained that on the train, we filled out our order and a steward picked it up. In the past I would have wanted to make friends with the girl, but now I feared she’d ask questions.

When she finished her pancakes, she came across the aisle and sat down at our table without waiting to be invited.

She spoke directly to me. “I’m Sally from Tulip Lane in St. Louis, and those are my parents. I’m ten years old. Who are you?”

Daddy waited for me to answer, and when I didn’t, he said, “I’m Bernerd, and this is Elizabeth, who just turned nine. We’re on our way to California for a vacation.”

The girl wore a plaid skirt, white blouse, and patent leather shoes and seemed older than ten. Her hair was blonde with stylish bangs; mine was light brown and held back on each side of my face by plastic barrettes.

I bet she’s in fifth grade, I thought. I was in fourth.

She asked, “Why are you going to California? Do you have a dog?”

I wanted to say something but couldn’t. I didn’t know for sure why we were traveling to California and was trying to avoid thinking about Cindy, our dog, who I feared would be left alone at my aunt’s house. I knew how it felt to be too long alone.

I wished the girl would go away. I didn’t want a friend on the train.

“Let’s go exploring,” she said, jumping up from the table. Assuming I’d follow, she walked past the galley, the train’s kitchen, and down the passageway until I couldn’t see her anymore.

I stayed where I was, finishing my French toast.

A few minutes later, the door at the end of the car opened and closed, and then opened and closed again. I heard the sighing noise, like an intake of breath. My father had explained that pneumatic doors between the passenger cars of a train were controlled by compressed air.

“That’s why they sound like they’re breathing,” he said.

The door down the corridor opened again. At least Sally from St. Louis was curious. I liked that.

Daddy excused me to join her. Together, we opened the door and watched it wheeze shut. Then we did it again. We were standing in the vestibule between the cars. Sally pointed down at the narrow space between us and the next car. Snow-covered prairie and wooden ties raced by under our feet. I heard the deep horn of the engine warning horses and cows off the track.

“Do you think trains can go faster than time?” I asked Sally. “Will we arrive in California and no time will have passed?”

“What do you mean?”

“Because we’re traveling so fast, won’t we get ahead of where we’d be if we’d stayed home?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I never thought of that before.”

l

Topeka—1949

April. The smell of hyacinths filled the air. I glanced out an open window of my Randolph School classroom and saw my mother walking up a path flanked by crabapple trees in bloom.

A thunderstorm during the night had left rivulets of water flowing to a nearby creek, and she skipped over them like a child.

When she came into the room, I jumped up, surprised, because she had never picked me up so early before. She stood in the front of the room and whispered to Miss Gray, who beckoned me to come forward. Mother took my hand and we left. Outside, white blossoms swirled as we ran down the path.