The Train of Small Mercies (7 page)

Later, when they were about to cross the New Jersey state line, Michael thought of giving a small cheer. He thought his father might appreciate that, but then it came and went, and no other sound he could think of over the low moan of the motor seemed particularly right.

J
amie took a bath these days, though he still referred to it as a shower, and everyone had made silent note of this. Joe had become tired of trying to catalog all the things that were different now for his son, but at the end of every day Ellie and Miriam talked about how Jamie seemed to be, what daily tasks he seemed to be getting more comfortable with, which tasks he seemed to avoid altogether, what he did and did not like to talk about. They saw themselves as caseworkers, and when Joe was not listening, they filled each other in on any new observations or insights.

When the water shut off, rattling for a moment the thin walls of the kitchen, Ellie looked out the back window toward the train tracks. The grass already had suffered from a hot stretch in May, and the blooms of the azaleas—lining the edges of the yard—had been spectacular this year, but now they were withering. The funeral was over, and on the radio the announcer was talking about Robert Kennedy and his publicized skirmishes with union organizer Jimmy Hoffa. Ellie tried to imagine if a train carrying Robert Kennedy's coffin would look any different from the ones on the C&O line that passed by twice a day usually—a forty-to-fifty-car train carrying lumber or coal or sometimes automobiles. How long would the Kennedy train be? Would his children be on board? she wondered. What would they think of all the people who would be lining up to stare at them as they passed? What sense could they make of any of it?

L
ionel had come with his mother plenty of times to Penn Station—to say good-bye to his father and then go off in the city together, or sometimes to meet him after his train had come in and take the subway back home together. As a child, Penn Station had felt overwhelming, and he clung to his mother's or father's hand so tightly that they had to laugh.

“What's the matter?” Maurice said, after a twenty-hour ride to Savannah, Georgia, and back. “You afraid you're going to lose us and end up on a train to Bangor, Maine? Or Richmond?”

“No,” Lionel said.

“Or Chicago?”

“No.”

“Ending up on a train to Chicago wouldn't be so bad, now,” Maurice said. “Be a little hard you navigating the South Side by yourself, but a man could do worse than to end up in Chicago.”

“I'm not a man,” Lionel said.

“'Course you're not,” Vera said, rubbing a gloved hand over the back of his head.

“Chicago. Philadelphia. St. Louis. Boston. Detroit. The trains have taken me just about every place I want to see in this country. And some I don't ever need to see again.”

Lionel and his father had always strolled through the original Penn Station with dizzy wonderment—the intricate patterns of the iron-and-glass ceiling like metallic spiderwebs, the marble columns thicker than redwoods—before most of it was demolished in 1963 and reconstruction began. He remembered the way his father shook his head when they first stepped into the new station together, after construction was complete. The new ceiling seemed as low as the one in their apartment, and the grand columns had been replaced with stumps that held the dull glimmer of tinfoil. The fluorescent lights looked like they had been lifted from a cafeteria.

“If this is modern,” Maurice said—to his son and anyone else who was listening—“then I don't want nothing to do with the future.”

Lionel checked in at the Penn Central office, where he was directed to the Kennedy train. Stepping outside toward the rail yards, he had his head down, trying to fix the zipper on his bag, and when he looked up again and saw the immense crowd on the opposite track, he was startled. They were packed in together like gumballs. There were men in light business suits and straw hats, and young women in brightly colored slacks cradling cardboard signs that read: “We'll Miss You Bobby” and “Rest in Peace” and “God Bless You RFK.” Several young mothers had children on their hips, and some of the women's faces looked swollen from crying. There were a dozen young white men in their plaid shorts and button-down Oxford shirts, their faces pink from the body heat all around, and elderly black men and women hunched over, trying to will their knees to hold firm.

Just below the crowd, on the tracks, was a flank of stony-faced police officers positioned twenty feet apart, soaking up the blinding sunlight and sweating through their blue short-sleeved shirts, the handles of their pistols pinned against their ribs. Their arms were crossed, when they weren't wiping the sweat off their cheeks, and they stared straight ahead, not talking to one another or to the crowd above. Lionel couldn't remember when he had seen so many black police officers at once.

Several Secret Service agents were talking with crew members in front of the train, and when they broke up, Lionel approached, flashing his new badge to them for inspection, as he had been instructed to do inside the station. One of the agents removed his sunglasses and studied Lionel's photograph. “First day on the job,” he said. “How about that?” He then indicated with a turn of his jaw that Lionel could keep walking.

“I'm looking for Buster Hayes,” he said to the porter whose shoulders were as broad as a linebacker's. “I'm assigned to his crew.”

Buster Hayes was counting something on his clipboard. He let a little time pass before he looked up and took Lionel in. “Well, you're in luck,” he said. Lionel nodded and jutted out his hand. Buster Hayes considered the hand first and could see that Lionel had done little manual labor in his life. Hayes nodded once and took Lionel's hand in his, showing him the strength of his grip. “What do you say, young buck?”

“Fine, thank you.”

“No, my question was,
What
do you say?”

“Excuse me?” Lionel said, his hand still being crushed by the older man.

“I'm just checking to see what kind of listener you are, young buck,” Hayes said. “I said, ‘What do you say?'—which was not my way of asking you how you were, and yet you told me anyway. A porter has to
listen
. At all times. I ask you to go get me a crate of Cokes, I need to know you're not going to come back with a box of M&M's. If a man says, ‘I'll take my coffee with sugar,' then you need to not come back to him with cream. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, then. Welcome aboard. This is a hell of a first shift for a young buck like yourself. Do you know everything about this train today, and the important trip we're about to take?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Of course you don't, young buck. I just asked if you knew everything about this train, and you just told me you did. You don't know about the tender wheels or the poppet valve or how to locate the compressors, now do you?”

“No, sir,” Lionel said.

“You got me worried already, young buck,” Hayes said. He looked over at the crowd across the way.

“No, you don't know this train,” Hayes said. “And this ain't a day for me to teach you anything about trains, neither. The best thing you can do on this day is to stay out of the way and watch and learn. You Maurice Chase's son?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That's a long-timer right there,” Hayes said. “Pullman porter. Yes, sir. Men like your father made the brotherhood. Of course, the Pullman brotherhood has pretty well come to an end, and that's a sad development. But that's all I'm going to say on that today. Senator Kennedy's coffin is scheduled to arrive in half an hour, but you don't have anything to do with that, and that's for a reason. First day on the job, you need to stay as far away as possible from that coffin. No telling what you'd do, you so green. I'm going to take you to the car you're going to be serving today and get you situated.” But first Hayes stepped back and held out his hand in the direction of the train, as if it were a prize on some game show. “And welcome to the Pennsylvania Central. You see where it says Penn Central?”

Lionel studied the glistening coaches and took a step back, not finding anything that helped him.

“The reason you don't is because it's been blacked out by request of the Kennedy family,” Hayes said. “Maybe they wanted the train to resemble a hearse. Makes sense to me, though. We got twenty-one cars, and the last two are where the Kennedy family is going to be, so no one goes in there. Not me, not the conductor, nobody wearing this uniform. Unless they ask for somebody.”

“Yes, sir,” Lionel said.

Buster Hayes took another look at the new employee, crinkling his eyes for effect. “You ready to work, young buck?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, then, let's get to it.” Buster Hayes led Lionel down the narrow aisles of the train, letting his hands bounce softly over the tops of headrests, whistling a tune he surely whistled all the time. Here and there he slowed to lower his head so that he could survey the crowd out the window. “No, not like any ordinary day, and that's true for every one of us on this train. This day is some history.”

“FDR had a funeral train,” Lionel said. His father had ranked Roosevelt highest among all other presidents during his lifetime. “And Abraham Lincoln.”

“Whoa, young buck knows something about the history of funeral trains,” Hayes said. “Young buck knows something after all.”

The train smelled of vinyl and aftershave, and every surface had been scrubbed until the cleaning crew was satisfied that each car looked like it had just rolled off the assembly line. As they headed toward the rear they met a porter whose hair was the color of marshmallows.

“Mr. Chalmers,” Hayes said, and they shook hands. “Mr. Chalmers, this here is Lionel Chase. First day on the job.”

“They put a new man on the job on
this
train?” Mr. Chalmers said. He hadn't looked over at Lionel, but he arranged his face in a show of utter dismay. “Lord Almighty.”

“They must have confidence in him,” Hayes said. “He's Maurice Chase's boy. So maybe they know what they're doing after all.”

Mr. Chalmers offered his weak hand to Lionel. “How's he getting along, son?”

“Doing very well,” Lionel said.

“Good, good. That's a good man, Maurice Chase.”

“I'm taking him to his car,” Hayes said. “Mr. Chalmers can assist you in any number of ways because he knows this train. Young buck tried to tell me
he
knew this train.”

At this Mr. Chalmers shook his head, his face reset in amazement.

They kept walking, and after Hayes stopped to straighten a doily on the back of a seat, they stepped into a car featuring a miniature bar on the far end. The passenger seats were replaced by long couches and four round, elevated tables for passengers to use while standing up.

“This is your car today, young buck,” Hayes said. “And the man behind the bar over there we call Big Brass, but you will call him Mr. Trent. You're going to be helping Mr. Trent serve drinks and snacks and whatnot. We're expecting maybe a thousand people on this train, and I figure seventy-five percent are going to stay in the snack cars. There's three of them, but you stay assigned to the one.”

Hayes introduced the two, and he told Big Brass the same story he told Mr. Chalmers about Lionel's supposed knowledge of the train, and Big Brass appeared equally troubled. But Lionel knew there was no point in offering a defense. He could see that this was all part of the experience for the new man. “You do your job the way you're supposed to, and you can count on your crew members for
everything
,” his father had told him. “Porters always have to have each other's backs.”

Lionel planned to save virtually all the money from his paychecks, since he was staying with his parents. At night he would focus on his artwork, not spend his money at the bars or jazz clubs or on women. Adanya was in North Carolina, and they might go the whole summer without being able to see each other.

“You're in Mr. Trent's hands right now,” Hayes said. “I got to go to my own station, but you give Mr. Trent your full attention, and he'll take care of you. Remember this, young buck: you're going to have a few hundred bosses today, in addition to Mr. Trent. And by serving them, you are doing your small part to serve your country today. Am I overstating things, Mr. Trent?”

“No, sir,” Big Brass said. “That's Senator
Kennedy
we're talking about. And God rest that man's soul.”

Hayes stuck out his hand, and Lionel grabbed it and tried to squeeze harder than before, but this time Hayes's grip was twice as hard, as if he had anticipated Lionel's impulse. Hayes smiled broadly—for the first time. As Hayes walked back, he was whistling the same tune as before, though more fully this time, so that it swept through the car, ringing off the glass windows. Then he stopped abruptly and headed back in their direction. “Mr. Trent, you hear the news?”

“What news is that?”

“They've arrested the man they think shot Dr. King.”

Big Brass barely let his lips move. “Well, that's good. What's it been, two months now?”

Hayes said that was right.

“How long did they take to nab the Kennedy assassin—about two
seconds
?” Big Brass said.

“Well, Sirhan didn't even try to get away,” Hayes said. “Dr. King was killed by a sniper. It's a little different. They caught him in London, in fact. This just came over the news a little while ago. They said the name, but I can't remember.”