The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [3]
So her sister-in-law consents and Tobias dances a clumsy reel while his mother steadies him for his hat, points him in the direction of the door out of which his aunt has just walked, and stares after him as he bounds down the wooden steps.
Don’t be long, she says to Lizzie, who is waiting in the street. I worry about him, you know. That boy has thumbs on his feet. And Lizzie promises that she’ll keep him within arm’s reach.
The streets and alleys of this shantytown neighborhood she knows well and has walked them for church, visits, meals, but as she moves past the farthest house she has been to in over a year, sees the smelter dumps huffing even while idle on a Sunday, and presses on in the direction of the river beyond a block of warehouses, she feels awake to the landscape so close and new to her, even in its filth and disarray. It could be close to Hell itself (as some have said) and she would still feel as though she’d been released into a garden. She looks down into the wrap that’s carrying her son, and he’s awake now, lips pursed and silent, his eyes azure beads gazing upward, a body content with her constant rhythmic movement.
L’úbim t’a, she says, and hugs him closer.
They come to the tracks before the bridge and Tobias hopscotches along the ties, but she knows—or thinks—there is only one train due on a Sunday afternoon and that won’t be for a while, so she leaves him to his game, which he plays without any grace, says that his mother was right, and laughs when he teeters off a rail and tumbles onto the ground.
Som v poriadku, he says, smiling and dusting himself off. Then they come to the trestle at the river’s edge.
For the first few minutes, they are both hypnotized by the water. He is thrilled at the height, the roar of the strong course below, the distance he has been allowed to venture from home. She is drawn to the rise of the bridge from the river, too, and lets herself hang between the two emotions of daring and fear, then feels against her face the cool, moving air rising from the surface of the muddied water that has come this far south and east out of the mountains. Tobias points to a group of boys swimming in a back pool on the banks below, where the water’s slowed and deep, and she clasps her forehead and mock gasps in a mime of disbelief that they should brave the cold. He pretends to shiver and can’t control himself for laughing, until she moves out farther onto the bridge and motions for him to follow, and they make their way in the stop and start of looking down and moving along, as though explorers more enraptured than careful, until they find themselves in the middle of the trestle and Lizzie signals to her nephew that it’s time they went back.
Before the eastbound passenger train number two approaches the river trestle near the smelter dumps in Pueblo, it has to negotiate a bend, so that when the engineer is in full sight of the bridge, the fireman is still in the blind of the curve as he stokes the engine for the run. To anyone standing on the bridge, the train is almost invisible until it has come around that turn and opened up to its full thirty miles an hour.
Lizzie sees the train as the engine makes the bridge, wonders how it could be. How could it be early? How could it be so quiet? Nearly silent, as though a moving picture.
But she sees then the whistle steam and hears its high note break through the sound of rushing water. And beyond the gray coal smoke the train spews, the sharp stretch of track that disappears back into the bending river, and (her eyes lifting) the farther horizon that the Sangre de Cristos frame majestically, she notices that the sun hasn’t far to go before it begins setting. She wonders again to herself, How can it be time? She is more bewildered than frantic, and yet she knows, too, that she has moved slowly all day, as she has done every day since winter and so has learned to misjudge time.
There is as much distance before her on the tracks as behind. Maybe thirty yards.