Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [78]
Thinking these thoughts was no way to make the best of a bad journey. And to be locked inside a windowless space was no way to travel.
Back braced against the wall, sitting cross-legged on the floor, swaying shoulder to shoulder with his neighbours, Joey breathed in stale air that grew thicker as the hours passed. The others occupied the body of the train, in compartments whose windows had been blacked out, for fear the occupants might signal to hidden enemy agents or draw dangerous information from the passing scenery.
The wheels turned and from the south-western seaboard a hundred thousand people rattled across an unseen landscape in ramshackle rolling stock brought out of retirement, heading for hastily constructed camps in desolate corners of the land. The sound of this particular train’s metallic rhythm pounded in Joey’s head. Next to him, Ichir picked up the beat and improvised his own version of ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’:
‘Pardon me, boy, is this the train for Chattanooga
now?
No, no siree, not this train, no how!
This train’s for Utah, Wyoming, or somewhere not
so near:
Idaho, Nevada. Or could be California out there,
Arizona. Colorado, Arkansas, some hot dam’ camp
somewhere!’
Through a crack in the wall tantalising glimpses of landscape flitted past, flashes of blinding white intermittently cut through the darkness. Hours passed. The train clattered on.
This was how his father had travelled when he made the journey to Washington, DC with the vets ten years before. But mood can transform an experience: Joey remembered Ben’s letters to Nancy, the picture they gave of the men; their buoyant spirits, their hopes on that outward journey, rocked by the train, retelling old army jokes, occasionally enjoying a shared slug of whiskey – an illegal activity under Prohibition – singing old songs. There had been army ditties, but also a song that Joey remembered hearing hobos singing as they tramped past his grandparents’ house years before, a song that at the time he thought was funny, with its chorus of sandwiches that grew on trees and streams of lemonade, but which he now saw differently, heartbreakingly, as a bum’s picture of a place of plenty. ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’ was just another way of describing a land of dreams, Cockaigne.
The men Ben rode with then were noisy, shaggy, shabbily dressed and confident; en route to confront the government, demand their rights.
Around Joey, barely visible in the boxcar gloom, his fellow passengers swayed with the train. At the assembly Center they had been euphemistic evacuees. Now, bound for the camp, they would be prisoners. They crouched, sat or squatted neatly, elbows tucked close, trying not to embarrass their neighbours with bodily contact. Nobody lolled or sprawled; the older men attempted to protect their clothing from the filthy boxcar floor by placing scraps of paper precisely beneath buttocks, like doilies under cakes. They made no noise, and certainly no one would have thought of consuming alcohol. The mood was quiet, crushed. Not far from Joey an old man wept quietly; shamed, mortified: he had wet his pants. They had committed no crime but they were on their way to prison and they knew that none of them had any rights.
In Joey’s pocket, the cream-coloured envelope plastered with stamps had grown grubby. He drew it out now, and squinted inside, at the photograph. Cho-Cho looked grim, admonitory Half closing his eyes, he attempted to superimpose a younger, softer image on this angular woman. In the dimness he tried to imagine his mother’s mouth curving in a smile.
The sun from an early morning slant had moved high overhead, later sinking low in the sky. From time to time the train stopped, its engine dying into silence. Peering out, Joey would find they were stranded on a stretch of track in the middle of nowhere, shrivelled bushes casting no shade. Then, with a jerk and a laboured clanking, the train moved on, rocking, wheezing, sighing steam.
This time, when the train came to a halt, instead