Читать книгу A Train through Time - Elizabeth Farnsworth - Страница 16

I asked where we were going.

“We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz . . .”

After picking up Marcia at her junior high school, we drove downtown to the Jayhawk Theater, where The Wizard of Oz, in rerelease, had just opened. It was a rare treat, and the three of us giggled as the theater darkened and the movie lit up the screen.

Some weeks later our Buick sedan raced alongside a Santa Fe passenger train speeding toward Kansas City from Topeka. Tracks and highway ran along the river, and horses and cattle grazed in nearby fields. My father was driving; Marcia and I sat next to him in the front seat.

The speedometer climbed to eighty as the car pulled alongside the great engine, which flashed red and silver in the afternoon sun. The roar of the train made it hard to hear, but as usual we yelled, “Go Daddy Go! You can beat it!”

At eighty-five he slowed down, and the train disappeared around a bend. It was the Super Chief on its way from Los Angeles to Chicago. We considered it almost our own because so many members of our family worked in Santa Fe Railroad shops by the river and in offices downtown.

When we got home, Mother handed me a small pad of paper and a pencil to make a picture story about the afternoon. I filled several pages, which she stapled together. Later she placed the booklet with others in a small drawer of our living room desk.

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Berkeley—2014

As part of my exhumation, I have unearthed from deep in the basement one of the picture books I made as a child, but I can’t find the red spiral notebook I bought in the eighth grade to write a story about the Hungarian Revolution. In the fall of 1956, television images of teenagers throwing Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks caught my attention, and at the end of that year a Hungarian freedom fighter came to Topeka and spoke at our church. He was a solemn eighteen-year-old who had seen friends killed when the Soviet army attacked. Now he was traveling through the United States raising money for refugees like himself. I wanted to ask how he dared risk his life for freedom but never got the chance. In the red notebook, I wrote a long story about him, imagining what I didn’t know. He told our youth group at church that he had fled to Austria across a rickety wooden bridge. I tried to picture that place. Was he alone? Did anyone meet him on the other side? How had he gotten from there to our town?

Later I saw a photograph of the Bridge at Andau, infamous for the tens of thousands of Hungarians who escaped over it before November 21, 1956, when Soviet troops blew it up.

That bridge glows in my memory, as does the freedom fighter, whose name I don’t remember.

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From the vestibule, Sally and I moved into the next car of the train. Some people were playing cards on wooden trays they had gotten from beneath their seats. A mother soothed an unhappy child. Other passengers were asleep, sitting up. It was a “chair car”—no compartments or roomettes. The train leaned into a wide turn, tossing us into the lap of a young woman in a blue sweater and skirt, dyed to match. She frowned at first, then smoothed her skirt and laughed. Sally jumped up and apologized in what seemed to me a southern accent, “Ma’am, we are very sorry.”

I said nothing.

In the next chair car, we met four uniformed soldiers who said they’d boarded the train near Fort Riley, an army base west of Topeka, and were headed for Alaska.

“But we’re pretty sure we’ll end up in Korea,” one of them said. I knew about the war in Korea from watching the news on television.

My father sometimes worried aloud about the war,

but after hearing about atomic bomb drills at our schools, he told Marcia and me not to be afraid. We’d be safe, because in a nuclear conflict we’d go to our cottage up north. No one would bother to bomb Alexandria, Minnesota,

he said.

As we walked forward, Sally introduced both of us to almost everyone and especially porters, who were—as far as I could tell—all African Americans. In one vestibule we encountered porter James Dodge (he wore a name tag), standing at an open window. It was snowing now, and a prairie wind blew snowflakes into the vestibule. James Dodge said he found it invigorating.

He was taller and younger than my father. I stood on tiptoe to take in the cold air and agreed it felt good. “Where do you sleep?” Sally asked. “Do you like being a porter?” He explained that he slept in “sort of a dorm in an auxiliary baggage car” next to the engine but didn’t say if he liked his work. He also told us about the trip ahead. I was listening to the clickety-clack music of the train and heard only bits of what he said.

“I got on the Portland Rose in St. Louis. In Cheyenne, some cars, including yours, will be switched to the City of San Francisco, which is speeding north of us from Chicago right now.

“We may be delayed. A blizzard . . . Donner Pass . . . California. ”

After a few minutes, Sally and I got cold in the vestibule and went forward again. Near the engine, we came to a door that looked different from the rest. The door was locked, and when we knocked, no one came. We could hear men talking and an occasional thumping.

Sally asked, “What do you think is in there?”

“Guns and snakes—and we’ll need to get a key to feed them because porters and conductors will be afraid.” I made up explanations for what I couldn’t explain.

Brakes squealed—the train was slowing down.

“I have a promise to keep,” I said, and I ran back through the train to a car with elevated seats and a glass top. I sat down in the first empty chair. Sally followed and stood in the aisle to watch.

The windows were dirty, and I couldn’t wipe them clean.

On the platform, a woman in a heavy coat and feathered hat walked from the station toward the train, her face shadowed by the hat.

Please let her take it off, I thought.

She walked up and down, seeking her assigned car, and for a moment, the shadow lifted from her face. I cried out in disappointment. Then I saw people getting out of a car in a parking lot. They came toward the train and passed under my window. I studied each person’s face and sank back into my seat.

Sally asked why I was crying.

I told her to leave me alone, and seconds later she did. I heard the door of the car wheeze shut behind her and thought, “Perhaps I do want her as a friend.”

Leaving the station, the train rocked gently—a ship on a prairie sea. I sat for a while thinking about the promise I had made. Was it too hard to keep? When I returned to our compartment, my father was sitting in the chair looking back toward home. He asked if I’d felt the locomotive pulling harder than before.

“The Kansas prairie tilts up toward Denver,” he said, “which is a mile high. The engine is straining a little as we climb.” I looked over his shoulder and saw the incline. I also saw horses and cows left outside in pastures on this snowy day. We passed a farmer pitching hay to cattle from a truck. He waved, and I frowned in response.

“It’s wrong, Daddy, don’t you think? They should be in barns.”

“They’ve got thick coats, Elizabeth. Don’t worry. They prefer winter to summer bugs and heat.”

I studied women’s faces at stations in Ellis, Oakley, and Sharon Springs, recognizing the names of the towns because my father had taught me to read a Union Pacific timetable. The list of stops and estimated times of arrival appealed to me—a journey of eighteen hundred miles reduced to a single page. We were nearing a state, Colorado, where I’d never been before. Wyoming was next, then Utah, Nevada, and California.

It would be sunny in California, my father said. We’d see flowers called birds of paradise and eat lemons fresh from trees.

“We’ll feel better. You’ll see.”

We got off the train in Denver and, because of engine trouble on our Portland Rose, spent several hours in Union Station. I liked the café and the store full of books and newspapers. For a long time we sat on a wooden bench watching people rush to and from trains. I looked closely at each woman. My father noticed but didn’t ask what I was doing. He often said I had the right to my own thoughts.

Back aboard the train, as we sped north from Denver to Cheyenne, a bright moon hung low over the Rockies. I was reading The Road to Oz, and Daddy interrupted to show me a high peak that glistened in the cold light. It was no longer snowing, and the world seemed frozen to a stop, except for us. In the book, Dorothy was showing a new friend named Button Bright how to wind up Tik-tok—his “thinking machine first, then his speech, and finally his action; so he would doubtless run perfectly until they had reached the Emerald City.”

I wondered if people could be wound up and brought back to life.

“Good night, Louie,” I said, closing the book. “Good night, Daddy.

“Good night, Mommy.”

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Haiti—1994

We drive slowly along a dirt road next to the Port-au-Prince International Airport.

The last flight out of Haiti took off last night, and the island is now cut off from the outside. UN-sponsored negotiations are failing; an invasion of US troops is imminent. The United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the Clinton administration are determined to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. The military junta that overthrew him three years ago has declared a state of siege.

We need a few shots of the deserted airport for a NewsHour story.

Suddenly—an open gate. We drive through it and stop next to a runway. The crew and our interpreter, Louis Saint-Lot, jump out to shoot while I stay back with driver André Thelussa. We’re a little nervous because potential military targets like the airport are off-limits to reporters, but in our ten days of working here, those rules have not been enforced.

We get the necessary shots and are loading the gear into the car when a man comes running at us, waving his arms.

“Sir, wait, sir!” He yells.

He’s an airport security official, and he’s irate. As he and Louis argue in Creole, a four-door Toyota truck wheels through the gate. Four soldiers armed with M-1s jump out and hold us at gunpoint. Louis tells them that his uncle is director of the airport and will be displeased to learn we’ve been treated rudely. The official calls the director on a cell phone. A half hour later he arrives—an older gentleman in a dark suit—and assesses the situation. He’s a civilian, and the military is in charge. He tells Louis he’s sorry but he can’t help.

We’re under arrest for trespassing in a restricted area. The soldiers will escort us back to our hotel, and Louis and André will be taken somewhere else.

This is the nightmare I’ve prayed would never happen. Protecting local people who help us produce pieces for The NewsHour is a requirement of my work. Sometimes danger can’t be avoided, but we didn’t have to go through that gate. We’d violated a sacred trust by unnecessarily endangering Louis and André.

John, Jaime, and I refuse to leave without them. If the soldiers try to take them away, we’ll throw ourselves under their truck. The threat produces a tense standoff.

Finally, Louis insists that we go.

“No one will hurt me,” he says, “and I will protect André with my life. Go back to the hotel and call my wife. She knows what to do.”

Louis’s brother is a colonel in the Haitian army. His father was the first Haitian ambassador to the United Nations. The family has close connections to the military government and to the opposition, which makes Louis an especially good fixer. That’s what news crews call a local interpreter who also helps in other ways, like deciding when it’s safe to shoot. After studying at UCLA, Louis returned to Haiti to make T-shirts for the National Football League. A UN-imposed economic embargo has made it impossible to get the cotton he needs, and his business is going broke. That’s why he’s working for us.

We leave with the armed men. They take us first to the Civil Aviation Building, where Lieutenant Colonel Marc Valmé, chief of airport security, confiscates our tape cassettes. They include some of John’s best work so far on this trip, and he vigorously objects.

“I’m taking them instead of you,” Valmé snarls. He’s a thug, a member of the original group that overthrew Aristide.

Of the hour and twelve minutes of exposed tape, about two minutes contained footage of the airport.

From the Civil Aviation Building, a police guard escorts us to the hotel and Louis and André to the army’s Twenty-Second Company headquarters, known as Fort Dimanche.

In the next days, we’re forced to give up passports and press credentials and are forbidden to work. We hire an attorney, and he and Louis’s wife organize a vigorous but quiet campaign to free our colleagues. At first we keep their detention secret, because the lawyer says that publicity will make their plight worse.

A Creole phrase describes how we feel: casque zombie, shell of a zombie.

Along with their families, we’re allowed to take Louis and André food and cigarettes. They’re held in the reception area of Fort Dimanche and are not mistreated. Louis thinks they will be released any minute; André is more realistic. He’s a gentle seventy-two-year-old man who walked three hours from his home every morning to drive for us. He’s dignified and stoic, but clearly afraid. After four days they’re moved to the National Penitentiary, an infamously pestilential place.