A String of Beads Read online

  A train snaked around the hill on the far side of the valley and sounded its horn as it came into town at the first intersection—two short, one long, one short blare, still somewhat faint. At each spot where the tracks crossed a road, they could see red lights begin to flash, and then a black-and-white barrier came down, and the train came through. Now they could see that the train had a big yellow engine in front and one right behind, and more and more freight cars appeared behind them from around the hill.

  “It’s a big train,” said Jimmy. “I’ll bet it’s a hundred cars.”

  “That’s got to be good for us,” Jane said. “Let’s get closer.”

  They came down through the trees just as the front of the train passed, moving along at a slow, steady rate. There were hoppers, tank cars, boxcars, flatbeds laden with big loads of pipes or thick packs of flat material like wallboard or plywood, all strapped down tightly. There were gondolas full of coal or slag. The names blazoned on the cars were familiar from their childhood—Canadian National, Georgia Central, Chicago and North Western, Erie Lackawanna.

  Jane stopped beside the tracks. The engines were at least twenty-five cars ahead of them now. Jane looked ahead toward the place where the tracks turned and climbed upward, and looked back to the curve where the next part of the train was still to appear, rolling toward them. She looked back up the hillside through the trees. She said, “I’m ready. Are you up to this?”

  “Yep,” he said.

  “Stay low. When we see the one we want, we’ll run for it. You get aboard, and then I will.”

  He looked at her. “Are you sure you don’t want to go first?”

  “I’m being sensible. If you get up there first, you’ll be able to pull me up. If I’m there first, I won’t be strong enough to pull you up.”

  “What you’re really afraid of is that you’ll make it and I won’t,” he said. “But that’s okay. We’d better get going before that cop catches up and sees us.”

  They watched the cars coming past, and then Jane said, “I see one coming. It’s a hopper with an open top. Black. See it?”

  “I see it.” Jimmy began to trot, then sped up a little to match the speed of the car, jumped to grasp a vertical bar at the back that formed part of a ladder, and then stepped onto the small level space just before the rear coupling.

  Jane ran in right behind him, grasped the bar, and pulled herself up. She clung there for a few seconds, and then they looked at each other and smiled as the engines pulled them around the first curve into deeper woods. “Let’s see if we can get up there on top,” Jane said, and sidestepped to the ladder. She climbed up, stepped over the rim of the hopper, and disappeared.

  Jimmy climbed up after her, looked over the rim into the hopper, and climbed in beside her. The hopper was loaded with tiny, coarse stones like the gravel under the railroad ties. It was mounded in the center and shallower along the sides, so if they stayed near the outer areas, they were well hidden. Jimmy gave her a high five, and then lay back to look up at the sky. There were a few wispy white clouds very high up, each like a single brushstroke, but most of the sky was a pure blue.

  The train stopped. A moment later, it began to back up. It went about twenty feet, and then stopped with a jolt, as though something had collided with the rear of the train. “They must be adding more cars,” said Jimmy. In a moment, the train started moving ahead again, very slowly overcoming its inertia and immense weight, and making its way up the first hill.

  Jimmy started to sit up, but Jane put her hand on his chest. “Please don’t sit up yet. Let’s wait until we’re at least a few miles farther on, where there’s zero chance Tech Sergeant Isaac Lloyd will see us.”

  Jimmy smiled. “You certainly have gotten cautious as a grown-up.”

  Jane didn’t smile. “Sometimes the difference between sort of safe and absolutely safe is pretty unpleasant, so I lean toward absolutely safe.”

  The train climbed the hill slowly, tugging its long string of cars up the gradual incline until it reached a gap in the hillside and sped up to twenty-five, then about thirty-five miles an hour.

  Jane and Jimmy both unrolled their bedrolls and spread them on the gravel, their heads slightly inclined toward the mound. They used their packs as pillows and rested from their long, hard run. They passed through areas where the tall trees and the cuts through the hillsides kept them in shade much of the time, and then through rolling farmland. After a half hour they were both asleep, rocked gently in their hopper, hearing only the constant clacking of the wheels and feeling the fresh breeze passing over them.

  They woke when the train blew its whistle to signal its approach to the first crossing at the next town, and they remained alert but out of sight until it regained its full speed on the way out of town.

  As Jane lay on the gravel bed she decided riding the train was like lying in a boat. The hopper was open to the sky, and traveled at a nearly uniform slow speed, almost never stopping. Even twenty miles an hour felt like a huge luxury after so many days of traveling on foot.

  Jane had been trying to keep herself persuaded that her wounded leg had recovered completely from the gunshot. She had certainly proven that it was strong enough to do what she had needed to do. Over a year of hard, steady training had brought back enough strength to travel on foot for two hundred miles or more in hilly country. But she wasn’t so sure the injuries nobody could see had healed.

  The four men who had captured her in California had wanted desperately to find out where she had sent James Shelby, the man she had rescued from the courthouse. She would not tell them. For years, whenever she had taken on a new runner, she had promised, “I will die before I reveal where you are to anyone.” To make sure her promise would never be a lie, she had always carried in her purse a cut-glass perfume bottle containing the distilled and concentrated juice of the roots of Cicuta maculata, the water hemlock plant. Swallowing two bites of hemlock root was the traditional Seneca method of committing suicide. The common name for water hemlock in Western New York was cowbane, because now and then a foraging cow would try some. A single root would kill a fifteen-hundred-pound Holstein. But Jane had lost her purse in the fight before she’d been captured.

  She’d had no way to kill herself, and so they had gotten the chance to torment her, to inflict enough suffering to make her want to trade James Shelby’s life, not for hers—she’d known they would kill her anyway—but for simple relief, the chance to make the pain stop. She had not told them. She had been preparing for death when her captors realized that Jane had helped victims to escape many times before, and so she had enemies who would pay millions to interrogate her themselves.

  The four men who held her were all dead now. But in her dreams sometimes they would come back, and she would have to kill them again. It was as though she hadn’t yet been able to make their deaths final. She knew that the dream meant something. It meant that what had happened to her was not over. This afternoon, if she stretched and ran her own hand up her back from the waist to the shoulder blade, she could still feel the rows of horizontal scars. They had heated steel barbecue skewers with a propane torch and laid them on her back. She knew that in a few years the scars might be level with the rest of her skin, or even be hard to see, but they would never be gone. The puckered scar on her thigh from the bullet would never be smooth again.

  She was not able to forget any of it, and that was the part that she felt most. From the time she was a child she had been strong, physically confident, and occasionally even reckless. She had gotten hurt, even hurt badly, but she had always known that bruises would fade, pain would go away, and she would be fit and strong again. She didn’t know that anymore.

  Jane was feeling something that she had never felt before her capture, the suspicion that she was harboring an inner weakness, like a virus, that had begun to attack her during those awful
days and nights. Now that she had felt the sensation of being utterly powerless, and the knowledge that somebody had really hurt her—not just caused her pain, but disfigured her, changed her so she would never be the same—she was sure she was the worse for it internally too. Would she be able to face the risk of going through such pain again?

  Jane had learned to accept death fifteen years ago, when she started carrying poison with her every day. She had become accustomed to rising from her bed with the knowledge that she might have to die that day—die quickly, a few minutes of sharp pain and then darkness. This new condition was worse, a threat that she could not control by thinking about it. It was a reflex. She had been hurt once, so would she flinch each time after that? If Jimmy needed her, would she be quick and decisive, or would she hesitate?

  When the clan mothers came to her she had not felt ready to take on Jimmy Sanders and his problems. She had wanted to agree with Carey and stay home. But having all eight clan mothers waiting on her doorstep had simply not permitted her to make excuses or even tell them that she was not the person they thought she was. They were modern American women like her, but they were something else too. They had inherited the powers of eight women who had lived somewhere deep in prehistory, in the times when the names of matrilineal families were first represented by wolves or bears or herons. In those days the world was a deep, endless forest, and being a lone person was always fatal.

  Jane glanced at Jimmy. He was asleep again. Maybe things would be all right. Maybe she had completed this errand without having to test her courage or her confidence. She watched the utility poles going by. Thirty miles an hour, she thought. As long as the train kept going, they might get through this without trouble.

  After a time, her own exhaustion caught up with her again. She had been on the trail, moving at high speed, for nearly a week. Her energy was depleted. She remembered there was a bottle of water and a protein bar or two in her pack. When she opened it and looked, she saw there were two of each. She set aside some for Jimmy, and opened hers. She ate and drank, and then slept again.

  Next time she awoke, it was dark. The train was slowing down, and when she looked up she could see tall buildings with hundreds of tiny windows in rows. She crouched to look out over the side of the hopper. They were on tracks that had been joined by others, so there were at least five sets in a row. She gave Jimmy’s foot a kick.

  He sat up, and then knelt beside Jane to see what she saw. “Do you know where we are?” he asked.

  “No idea,” she said. “I’m looking for some sign, or something I recognize.”

  “If you’ve been here, you probably didn’t ride in on a load of gravel.”

  “No. But it occurs to me that what we’re doing is illegal, and we’re coming to a place where there will be more people to catch us at it. There seems to be a big train yard up ahead. Let’s collect our belongings and get ready to bail out.” She knelt, rolled up her bedroll, arranged everything in her pack, and craned her neck to look ahead while Jimmy packed up his gear.

  The train began to slow markedly. Jimmy said, “Ready to go?”

  “Yes,” Jane said. She put on her baseball cap, hid her hair under it, hoisted herself up on the back rim of the hopper, found the first rung of the ladder with her foot, and climbed down. The train was slowing more and more. Jimmy was beside her now, so she dropped her pack, jumped, and ran for a stretch to slow her momentum. Jimmy jumped a few yards on, and then they both went back and retrieved their backpacks. Jane slung her backpack over one shoulder. “Carry it this way, so you look like a worker with a tool bag, and not a train jumper.” Jimmy imitated her, and they looked ahead. The train was moving into a huge freight yard, with fences and buildings and lots of lights, so they walked briskly away from it, toward the back of the train. They didn’t walk so briskly that they seemed to be running from something.

  When they were in a darker, more deserted area, they crossed several sets of tracks, walked across a weedy plot of land that had been paved once but now had plants thriving in each crack, and came to a street. It was dark, and the old brick buildings seemed to be abandoned with the doors and windows boarded. The next street had a few neon lights, and cars passed now and then.

  Jane stopped and said, “Let’s dust ourselves off and straighten up before we get into the light. That gravel wasn’t exactly clean.” They spent a few minutes getting themselves freed of dust, buttoned up, and looking a bit better. The evening was cool, so Jane took her jacket out of her pack and put it on, and then turned around so Jimmy could see. “What do you think?”

  “Very respectable, and dust-free. How about me?”

  “Much better.”

  Jimmy put on a light jacket too. “Are you hungry?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Maybe there will be a restaurant on one of the next streets, where there are lights.” She looked at her watch. “It’s only eight.”

  They walked for another couple of blocks, and when they came to a trash basket, Jane looked into it, then reached down and pulled up a newspaper. “The Syracuse Post-Standard.”

  “What’s the date?”

  “Today’s. I guess we’re in Syracuse.”

  “Okay,” Jimmy said. “Let’s see about that food.”

  They walked toward the streets with bright lights, and passed a small pizzeria. They looked in the window and saw a few people at tables wearing jeans and casual shirts. “What do you think?” she asked.

  “Just the smell makes me want to break down the door.”

  “Give me a few seconds.” Jane stepped into the doorway, then stood still for a two count while Jimmy was still outside, partially shielded from view behind her. She scanned the people inside, saw nobody she knew, or whose face held an expression of recognition, and nobody who looked hostile. She saw a few women, which was good, because the presence of women usually discouraged the more extreme forms of male misbehavior. She saw a hallway at the back of the restaurant that led to restrooms, and another on the left leading to the kitchen. If they had to they could slip out through the exit that was sure to be at the rear of the kitchen. Jane stepped in, and Jimmy followed.

  A sign said they should seat themselves, so Jane went to a table by the wall and they sat down. Jane sat so she could face the front window and door, and Jimmy could face the back. The side location of the table meant that no matter how rough things got in the place, they couldn’t be surrounded, and nobody could approach unseen.

  They set their backpacks on empty seats by the wall and looked at the printed menus that had been left at every table. In a few minutes a middle-aged waitress emerged from the kitchen with a tray in each hand—the plates on the left and the drinks, which were heavier, on the right. Jane studied her. She had a weary but alert look as she maneuvered between tables. She showed relief when she set down her heavy trays on an empty table and served two couples at the table beside it. Over the years Jane had learned to check the faces of the waiters and waitresses. If there were some kind of trouble, they would see it first, and show it.

  The waitress stopped at their table and took their order, then went off to the kitchen with her trays. She returned immediately with their pitcher of cola and glasses.

  They poured some and drank, and Jimmy spoke to her quietly in Seneca. “I haven’t bothered to thank you for coming to help me. I know you were asked, but we both know you could have found a way out of it if you tried.”

  “I suppose I could have,” she said in Seneca. “They knew I wouldn’t.”

  He raised his glass of cola and clinked it against hers. “You’re more old-fashioned than my grandmother, and it’s a good thing for me.”

  “They said you were innocent,” Jane said. “But I didn’t have to take anything they said on faith. I knew what kind of man you were the same way they did—by knowing you as a boy. I climbed trees with you.
And in case you’ve forgotten it, you once saved me from getting raped. I didn’t forget. Now let’s talk English.” She moved her eyes to be sure nobody nearby had overheard them speaking another language.

  “Certainly,” he said. “Everybody else’s food looks so good. I can hardly wait for ours.”

  “Neither can I,” said Jane. “I guess we’ve both been living on protein bars and candy for too long.”

  While she sat in the restaurant, Jane couldn’t help thinking about what Jimmy had said about her—that she was old-fashioned. What he meant was her attachment to old customs. She hardly ever thought about herself that way, but at times something reminded her that the Seneca ways of looking at the world were part of the structure of her mind. And she knew that one reason she had clung to Seneca traditions was to maintain the connection with her parents and grandparents—especially her father since he’d died.

  She was eleven that summer, and she and her mother had been staying at the reservation because he had been away working on a bridge in the state of Washington. One day he had been standing on a steel beam as a crane lowered it into place. The cable snapped, and Henry Whitefield and the beam fell to the bottom of the gorge below. She sometimes dreamed about his fall.

  In the dream, her father was wearing his bright red flannel shirt and blue jeans, his yellow hard hat and his leather tool belt. As he fell, the beam stayed beside him. He turned as he fell, doing a slow somersault, so his tools spilled from his belt pouch. His hard hat left his head and his black hair fluttered in the wind as he came right again. He spread his arms and legs and faced downward, his shirt flapping violently. In the dream the disembodied Jane was beside him. He and Jane could both see the bottom of the canyon, the thin ribbon of water winding down the gorge like a silvery snake—the water not wide enough to catch him or deep enough to do anything for him but wash his body after he hit. The white buttons of his red shirt gave way, and it opened and flew off him. But as he fell, his fluttering black hair grew longer, and seemed to spread down his back and arms, first like fringe, and then widening and flattening like feathers. And soon his arms were revealed to be wings.