Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [39]
But Cuyler Goodwill’s longest oration, his longest by far, took place in the year 1916 aboard a train traveling between Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Bloomington, Indiana, a distance of some thirteen hundred miles. His audience consisted of one person only, his young daughter, Daisy, who was then a mere eleven years of age.
They traveled, by day, in a first class lounge car, courtesy of the Indiana Limestone Company, Cuyler Goodwill’s new employer. The green plush seats were roomy, luxurious, and could be tipped back and forth for comfort. An ingenious mahogany panel pulled down to form a table, and one could order tea brought to this table, tea with a wedge of lemon perched on the saucer’s edge. Side by side the father and daughter sat, with only a little wood arm rest between them. They were virtual strangers, these two, and hence each avoided placing an arm on the barrier of polished wood. The journey lasted three full days—with confused, hectic changes at Fargo and Chicago, and again at Indianapolis—and for all that time the father talked and talked and talked.
A switch had been shifted in his brain, activated, perhaps, by sheer nervousness, at least at first. He had not "traveled" before.
The world’s landscape, as glimpsed from the train window, was larger than he had imagined and more densely compacted. The sight filled him with alarm, and also with excitement. The forests and fields of North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin seemed to him to be swollen with growth, standing verdant and full-formed against a bright haze. The land dipped and rose disconcertingly, and he was amazed to see that haying was taking place so early in the season. Towns sprang up, one after the other, the spaces between them startlingly short, and the names unfamiliar. He was discomfited to see how easily men (and women as well) stepped from the train to station platform, from platform to train—with ease, with levity, laughing and talking and greeting each other as though oblivious to the abrupt geographical shifts they were making, and disrespectful of the distance and differences they entered. Many were hatless, their clothes brightly colored. The cases they carried appeared, from the way they handled them, to be feather-light, and made of materials—straw, canvas—that mocked his own dark brown Gladstone, purchased only days before and as yet unscuffed.
South, and further south the train went, an arrow of silver cutting through the uncaring landscape. The sun shone brilliantly. As the miles clicked away, it seemed to Goodwill that the seriousness of the world was in retreat. Singing could be heard from the club car: "Ain’t She Sweet," round after round, as they crossed the Illinois border into Indiana. Rivers, rounded hills, paved roads, fenced fields. Advertisements for chewing tobacco appeared on the sides of barns. The towns grew larger and dirtier. Electric wires slashed the bright air like razors.
The first day was the worst. He talked wildly, knowing that shortly he and his daughter would be called to the dining car for the second sitting, and he deeply feared this new excitement. Soon after that the sun would sink from view, and he would be confronted with the aberration of a Pullman bed, of the need to arrange his body in a curtained cubicle, yielding it up to the particles of displaced time and space.
It was against all this terror