“Is that so?” Deputy Greer asked Judith Troy, but she shook her head like she had no idea what the man was talking about.
“She run off yesterday,” William said, still addressing his words to the deputy.
“Abigail wasn’t even in school yesterday,” the teacher said, “so, how could I possibly know where she might be?”
William looked right at Judith Troy, “You know!” he said. “You know, because you’re the one who put those crazy notions in her head.”
“Miss Judith says she doesn’t know where your girl is,” the deputy told William. “If she says she doesn’t know, then that’s all there is to it—
she doesn’t know!”
When it began to look like William wasn’t going to accept such an answer, Deputy Greer pressured his hold on the twisted back arm and shoved William Lannigan down the walkway. After Judith Troy closed her door and the deputy was able to let loose of William, he warned, “You don’t want this kind of trouble, so stay real far away from Miss Troy. You understand? Real far!”
M
alvania had been ridden at a gallop all the way into town, but on the way back to the farm, William walked the horse at a slow trot.
When he arrived back at the farm, William sat on the front porch and buried his face in his hands. Later that evening he noticed that Livonia’s apron was not hanging on the peg in the kitchen, he then walked into Abigail Anne’s room and found the closet door standing open. Her clothes were gone; the white wedding dress was the only thing left hanging in the closet.
J
ust as Abigail had climbed aboard the train, she’d paused for a moment and glanced back at Will—half expecting him to be waving and smiling. Instead he’d already started walking back down the platform. She couldn’t see the way his eyes had filled with tears or the sorrowful droop that had settled on his mouth; all Abigail saw was her brother’s back, turned away, as if she’d already been forgotten. “Bye, Will,” she whispered softly, then lifted herself onto the last step and left the Shenandoah Valley behind.
For as long as she could remember, Abigail had harbored a wonderful image of what it would be like to travel on the train—dressed up folks chattering about places they were off to, Pullman porters serving champagne, everybody happy just to be aboard—not once had she imagined it would be so hot and stuffy. For a moment she tried to see things as she had pictured they would be; but with the cramped together seats and peeling paint it was impossible. On the platform there had been a cool breeze and the smell of summer apples but inside the railroad car the air was thick with other smells—gasoline, whiskey, cheese that had gone bad. Most folks were waving a cardboard fan back-and-forth in front of their faces; but Abigail had not thought to bring such a thing.
In the back of the car a group of men were having a heated discussion about a game of cards they’d been playing. “I ain’t never cheated in my life,” the skinny one argued; the others seemed pretty adamant about the fact that he had.
“Pipe down back there!” the woman sitting in front of them called over her shoulder, then she went back to clacking a pair of knitting needles and counting aloud, “Knit one, pearl two, knit one…”
Abigail looked down the row of seats. She had hoped to sit beside a window and watch as the Shenandoah Valley gave way to new places, but the passengers had scattered themselves about like isolated towns; solemn-faced people each one taking up a space alongside of a window. No one looked as if they might welcome the thought of someone sitting down beside them. These weren’t anything like the folks Abigail had imagined—a narrow nosed man reading a newspaper, several more sleeping and one of those snoring loudly, a red-faced woman banging on the window and trying to cuss it open—all of them people who seemed exasperated to be in such a hot place. Halfway down the aisle, there was an empty seat alongside a pleasant looking woman with a fast-asleep baby in her arms. Abigail made her way through the aisle, stopped alongside of the woman and hoisted the largest of her suitcases onto the overhead rack, the satchel she placed on the floor beneath the seat.
“I’d clean that seat ‘fore I sat down,” the woman said. “Isaac here, spit up a bit.”
“Oh my,” Abigail said and pulled Livonia’s good lace hanky from her purse.
“It wasn’t much,” the woman said, “…hardly worth mentioning.”
Abigail swished her hanky over the velour seat then sat down.
“The soot; now that’s way worse than any mouthful of milk. That soot settles into things; turns them black as coal. These seats is covered with soot.”
Abigail checked her hanky and saw a residue of black dust. “My goodness!”
“Crying shame folks has to sit in a dirty seat! They ought to do something!”
As she was wondering who would be the one to do something, the conductor came through the car hollering “Tickets, please!” so Abigail fished in her purse and pulled her one-way ticket from Miss Ida Jean Meredith’s pink envelope.
When the conductor stopped alongside Abigail, the woman leaned forward and said, “These seats have soot on them! A body ought not pay
full fare
for seats with soot.”
The conductor looked at Abigail and said, “Ticket?”
Abigail handed it to him and asked, “How long ‘till Richmond?”
“Richmond? Well, that’s quite a ways.” The conductor swiped at his face, which was shiny with perspiration, then punched three holes in Abigail’s ticket. “Eight hours, give or take.” He smiled and moved on to the next passenger.
A few seconds later the whistle blew and the train started to rumble along the tracks. Isaac stirred a bit and twisted deeper into his mama’s arms, but when the whistle blew a second and third time he started screaming like he was being killed. “Oh, mercy,” the woman moaned; she shifted the baby onto her chest and started rocking back and forth. “That noise woke him.”
“Maybe he’ll go back to sleep,” Abigail suggested.
“Isaac? Go back to sleep? Uh-uh. He’s got the colic!” The woman moved the baby to her lap and jiggled him up and down. “Now, now, darlin’,” she said in the most soothing voice, but Isaac just screamed all the louder.
After about an hour, the conductor, who’d already taken a dislike to Isaac’s mama because of what she’d said about soot on the seats, came through calling out, “Next stop, Hampton Crossing,” but he had to shout it three times before folks could catch the name of the station above Isaac’s wailing.
The baby carried on that way through MillertonCounty and halfway through Somerset. At times, Isaac would wail so hard you’d swear the mama was pinching him, but of course she wasn’t. Abigail knew if that baby belonged to her papa, he’d have gotten a royal slap on the rear end; but Isaac’s mama kept rocking him back and forth no matter how hard he screamed. Twice Isaac fell asleep; then the minute the train whistle blasted, he woke up screaming louder than ever. At Bogbottom, which is at the far end of Somerset County, a peddler climbed aboard and shuffled through the aisle selling sandwiches and little bitty containers of milk at twice what the price should have been. Abigail, who by now had grown weary of listening to the crying, suggested that maybe Isaac was hungry. The woman paused for a moment and looked at the peddler like she was thinking of feeding the baby an overpriced cheese sandwich; then she shook her head and went back to rocking.
Halfway through BuckinghamCounty, Abigail was certain she should have sat next to the snoring man. She closed her eyes and tipped her head back, hoping to close out the sound; but she started picturing Will’s back as he walked away from the Lynchburg station. The louder Isaac screamed, the more she missed her brother. Abigail tried to call to mind Will’s face; the crooked way he’d grin, or how he’d pinch the tip of his nose when he was studying a problem. She even tried remembering the pleased look that settled on his face when Papa bragged about how
his boy
was becoming a fine farmer; but all she could picture was her brother’s back.
Abigail bent down, reached into her satchel and pulled out the snow globe. It was heavy in her hand, not at all a practical thing to pack, especially since she’d had to decide between carrying the snow globe or a history book Miss Troy had given her. She shook the globe and watched the snow fall around the fair-haired girl.
“Oh, look-y here,” Isaac’s mama said and turned the baby toward the snow globe. “Ain’t that pretty?” she oohed and aahed for a bit and finally, the baby quit screaming. “He’s all wrapped up in watching the snow,” she told Abigail. “Keep shaking that thing, will you, honey?”
Abigail shook the globe again and as Isaac watched the swirl of snow his little arms and legs pinwheeled with delight. “Ain’t that something? Just look how he’s taken to that thing.” The woman moved Isaac closer to Abigail and he reached out for the snow globe. “No, no, sweetie’,” she said, “you can’t
have
it.” Isaac obviously didn’t like hearing the word
no
because he stiffened his legs out and bucked so hard that he knocked Abigail’s most prized possession from her hand. It happened in a split second, so quickly there was no time to grab hold of the globe; yet in that brief moment Abigail thought she heard the fair-haired girl scream as her tiny world splintered against the metal floor.
The woman’s eyes about popped out of her head. “Oh, Good Lord,” she exclaimed, “Isaac has
never
done a thing like that! He didn’t mean it. He’s real sorry! Isaac!” she snapped, yanking the baby back onto her lap, “You better be sorry!”
Isaac started wailing all over again.
Alongside Abigail’s feet there was a rivulet of water draining out into the aisle. She bent over and rescued the little girl who had lived inside the globe for more years than anyone knew. The glass world was shattered and bits of make believe snow scattered about; there was also a small chip in the Christmas tree but, the little girl was in one piece. Abigail brushed bits of glass from the figurine then folded it into Livonia’s lace hanky and tucked it inside of her purse. In doing so she noticed the figurine’s smile seemed brighter than ever—like Abigail; the little girl was about to discover a new world.
Isaac was still screaming when Abigail got up and moved to the seat across the aisle. She took out the Harper’s Bazaar Magazine that Will had gotten her in Lynchburg and started leafing through the pages. The man sitting alongside her had an oversized sack of sandwiches in his lap.
“Want one?” he asked and offered out the sack.
“No thank you,” Abigail replied, remembering the politeness Livonia had drummed into her head.
“I’ve got plenty. Cheese. Baloney. Apple butter.”
“No thank you,” she repeated and turned back to focusing her attention on the flapper dress in Harper’s. She narrowed her eyes and squinted at the picture until she could see her own face on the flat-chested model.
“How about an apple; or some homemade cookies?”
Homemade cookies, now that was a thing Abigail couldn’t resist. “Well,” she said, “perhaps a cookie.”
The man reached beneath his seat and hauled up an even bigger bag. “Go ahead,” he said, “help yourself to a handful.”
Abigail stuck her hand into the sack and pulled out two big round oatmeal cookies. “Umm,” she said, “my favorite.”
“Me, I like cheese sandwiches. Could eat twenty of them, I suppose.” As the man chomped down on the sandwich he was holding, a sizable chunk of cheddar spit off and dropped into his beard. The man seemed not to notice. “Where you headed?” he asked Abigail.
“Richmond.” She smiled broadly. “I’m going to work with an almost famous woman who writes poetry!”
“Well, now. Ain’t that something! You want more cookies?”
“Uh-uh.” Abigail shook her head but her eyes got fixed on the piece of cheese in the man’s beard. No matter how vigorously he chewed or talked, the cheese didn’t let go. If it had been her papa, she would have reached up and brushed it away; but this man was a total stranger. She tried to focus on something else, so as not to be rude. “Where you going?” she asked.
“Parkerton. I got family in Parkerton.”
Abigail had never heard of Parkerton, but imagined it to be quite a distance away, judging by the amount of food in the man’s sack. Before she had a chance to inquire about the actual whereabouts, the conductor came through the car yelling, “Parkerton, next stop.” He called it out twice because of Isaac’s wailing.
“Time for me to go,” the man said. He clambered over Abigail’s satchel and squeezed into the aisle. As the train rolled to a stop, he reached into his bag and pulled out two more oatmeal cookies. “Hang onto these,” he said, “you’ll be hungry later.”
After he left, Abigail quickly slid over into his seat because it was alongside a window. As soon as she’d settled in, she took the hem of her dress and began polishing up the glass so she’d be certain to see all there was to see.
As the train rumbled through Brownell County, she kept her nose pressed to the glass, watching bean fields and apple orchards whiz by. Here and there she’d spot a farmhouse or a town smaller than Chestnut Ridge but mostly it was endless acres of farmland. After two hours of watching long stretches of green Abigail leaned back in her seat and took out Miss Ida Jean Meredith’s pink envelope.
She reread the letter over and over again, each time trying to imagine what it would be like to live in Richmond. She pictured dwellings of every shape and size; from a townhouse so tall a person would have to stretch their neck to see the roof, right down to a tiny cottage ringed with roses. Abigail Anne had the ability to do that—draw pictures inside of her head instead of taking a pencil to paper. Once she’d settled on the image of a wide-spread house with the veranda painted the yellow of a sunflower; she started picturing what Miss Ida Jean Meredith would look like. First she envisioned a tall woman with a crown of silver hair; but that was too severe so she changed the image to a more rounded woman with ample breasts and cheeks as rosy as a ripe peach. Although unable to put her finger on exactly what was wrong, Abigail sensed that neither of those pictures were right. She finally fashioned a Miss Meredith that looked a lot like Livonia—which seemed to work surprisingly well.