He did not know how long he would be with Foster—a day, he reasoned. A day should be enough. And then he would return to Atlanta and stay another day, maybe two. Long enough not to inspire questions about the time needed to go to Boston and return.
He knew he would be asked about Milo Wade by the townspeople. Had he seen Milo? Had they had supper? Had Milo introduced Ben to teammates? Ben guessed at the questions and made up answers. He and Milo never had a chance to talk person-to-person, he would say, but he was pretty sure Milo waved to him in the stands and made some signals that he could not understand. Mainly, though, the mix-ups were the fault of the office people for the Boston Red Sox.
It would not be hard to cover questions about Milo Wade, Ben believed.
On the map, a large black dot represented Boston, with a pen drawing of an ancient sailing ship anchored in its harbor. The Atlantic Ocean dipped against the dot, floating the ship, and Ben imagined foam-capped water slapping beneath piers.
Someday he would go to Boston, he thought.
Someday he would see foam-capped water beneath piers and ships on the ocean, and he would see Milo Wade.
ON THE SIXTH day after receiving Lottie’s letter, Ben requested permission from Arthur Ledford to be excused from work for the following week.
It was late afternoon. Only one customer—Beatrice Windom—was in the store, deliberating over the purchase of a new hat. Sally Ledford was waiting on her, enduring her annoying chatter.
He wanted to go to Boston, Ben said in a low, polite voice to Arthur Ledford, to see Milo Wade.
Arthur looked at Ben with a frown.
“I don’t expect to be paid for it,” Ben told him.
“Well, Ben, I don’t think I need to remind you that you’ve got a job,” Arthur said patiently. “When I hired you, it was because I needed you. Nothing’s changed about that.”
It was exactly what Ben had expected to hear.
“Mr. Ledford,” Ben said, “I’ve worked for you for six years, six days a week, and only missed nine days of work, six of them when I was beat up and three of them when my daddy died.”
“Now, Ben, how many days do you think I’ve missed?” Arthur asked.
“Yes sir, but it’s your place of business. I only work here.”
Arthur nodded. “That’s true enough. What do you think your father would have said about this?”
“I think he’d be happy to see me go, sir. He knew me and Milo were friends.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Arthur suggested tactfully. “I think your father would have put his foot down. I think he would have called it a waste of time and money.”
Ben did not reply.
“What about Margaret? Have you talked to your mother?” Arthur asked.
“No sir. Not yet. I plan to do that tonight.”
Arthur did a half-turn away from Ben. He looked across the store to Sally. Sally’s smile was radiant. She seemed to be on tiptoe, like a ballerina. He turned back to Ben. “What about Sally? Does she know about this?”
“No sir.”
“Why not?”
“Well, sir, I just don’t think she’d understand it.”
“I think you’re probably right about that,” Arthur said.
“Yes sir,” Ben replied quietly. “It’s—well, it’s just something I always wanted to do and I thought I’d do it before—well, sir, before getting on with my life.”
Arthur’s eyes narrowed with suspicion.
“I guess maybe I take after my daddy,” Ben added. “I know he took a train trip to Washington, D.C., when he was about my age. I guess I just want to go a few miles more up the track.”
“I don’t remember your father doing anything like that,” Arthur said.
“It was right before he got married, the way I understand it,” Ben said.
Arthur’s lower lip curled and he began to scrape it with his upper teeth, a habit that telegraphed a test of his patience. He said to Ben, “Well, I guess we’re at a stalemate. If you want to do this, then it’s up to you. But I’ll have to let you go and bring somebody else in to take your place if you do.”
Ben dipped his head. “Yes sir,” he said meekly.
Arthur mumbled something Ben did not understand, then walked across the store toward Sally and Beatrice Windom. “That hat looks nice on you, Beatrice,” he said in a pleasant voice.
Ben watched the play between Beatrice Windom and Arthur Ledford. It was as old and as rehearsed as a scene from a play. He saw Sally glance toward him, flick a shy smile. He ducked his head and began to rearrange shirts on a display table. The face of his father flashed in his mind.
Arthur Ledford had wept openly at the funeral of his father, calling him a man of principle and fair play, a man he had used as a model for his own life.
“If you ever need to talk to somebody, man to man, you come to me,” Arthur had said to Ben at the gravesite. “I know I’m not your father, but I’ll try my best to fill in when you need it.”
Ben turned and walked to the back of the store, to the storeroom and the storeroom office he had created for himself. The office was not an office, only a cleaned-out place with an old rolltop desk and a chair. The one expensive item in the room was a desk lamp with a large frosted globe that had a design of grapes circling it. He had bought the lamp with his own money.
He filled a box with personal items—his father’s photograph, the record books on Milo Wade, the letter from Lottie, a watch fob given to him by Sally, his train schedules and maps—and he pulled down the desktop and locked it and left the key on the lip of the desk.
Sally stopped him as he walked through the store with his box of personal items.
“Ben,” she said. “Where are you going?”
He paused, let his eyes sweep the store. “To Boston,” he told her.
“Boston?”
Ben nodded, then he walked out of the store.
AT HIS HOME, Ben placed the box on the kitchen table.
“What’s that?” asked his mother.
“Some things I’ve been keeping at the store,” Ben answered.
“Why did you bring them home?’
Ben looked at his mother. “Because I’m not working there any longer.”
His mother’s face turned pale. She touched her throat with her hand. “What?” she whispered. “What—happened?”
“I asked Mr. Ledford about having a few days off,” Ben said. “He said if I took them, I wouldn’t have a job.”
His mother sat heavily in a chair. “Days off? Why, Ben?”
“I want to go to Boston to see Milo play ball.”
“But, Ben—”
“I’ve worked six years and just missed nine days time,” Ben said firmly. “It’s not asking for much.”
“But, Ben, you’ve got to have a job,” his mother said desperately. “Your father’s will left us well off enough, but a man needs to have a job. You can’t just walk out on Mr. Ledford. He’s been good to you all these years.”
“Yes ma’am,” Ben said. “I know that. But I’ve worked for every penny, as hard as I would have if it was my own store.”
“Does Sally know?” his mother asked.
“I told her,” Ben answered.
“You know how Arthur is, Ben,” his mother whimpered. “He may not let you see Sally again, and even if he would, Alice probably wouldn’t.”
“Mama, that’s up to Sally, I guess,” Ben said wearily. “If we ever get married, it’ll be her I’m going to marry, not her daddy or her mama. She might as well know that now.”
His mother put the palms of her hands together in a begging gesture. “Why now, Ben? Why do you want to go see Milo now?”
Ben looked away, through the window. He did not like deceiving his mother, but it was necessary. “I’ve been waiting a long time,” he said. “I just keep feeling that time’s running out.” He swallowed away the shame that he could taste.
Margaret Phelps sat in silence, gazing at her son. He seemed more
boy than man. She had heard the stories of his boast about going to Boston. Fence gossip. The laughing kind of tale that mothers often passed among themselves concerning something their children had said, or done. Ben planning to go to Boston was no more than that, the gossipers lightly suggested. A childish thing. When it got out that he had given up a good job to chase after a dream, he would always be treated with snickering. She could not let him live with such indignity, even if she had to lie.
“Ben, I want to tell you something I should have told you long ago,” she said.
Ben looked at her quizzically.
“Before your father died, he talked to me about taking you to Boston,” his mother continued. “He was keeping it as a surprise.”
“He did?” Ben said.
“Yes.”
Ben sat in a chair at the table. He shook his head in disbelief. “I wish I’d known.”
“It’s my fault,” his mother said. “If he’d lived, it would’ve happened by now. But I know he’d still be happy if you went by yourself, so I want to know when you want to leave.”
“I was thinking next week,” Ben told her. “But as soon as I can.”
“Tomorrow?” asked his mother.
Ben nodded yes.
“Good,” his mother said. She stood. “See to what you need. We’ll pack when I get back.”
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“You’re not going to see Mr. Ledford, are you?”
His mother turned to him. “Only for a minute.”
“Mama—”
Margaret Phelps moved past her son and out the door.
SHE WALKED WITH her shoulders erect, her face lifted, her arms swinging free, and she realized that she was not carrying her purse or wearing a hat. A flutter of gladness trembled across her chest. She could not remember walking into town without carrying a purse or wearing a hat—not since childhood.
She had read a story about a women’s march for suffrage and remembered the name the women were called—suffragettes—and that was how she felt. A suffragette in march step, but not for the right to vote. The right to be a mother, perhaps. Her face was damp from the heat of the July breeze, and she drew her left index finger across her cheek, beneath her eye, rubbing away the moisture. She could feel perspiration at her neck, clinging to the white shirtwaist she wore.
She wondered how Arthur Ledford would react when she stepped into his store and asked to see him privately. He would be unnerved, she believed. He had always been tentative around her, even from their childhood together. Once, when they were very young, Arthur had tried to kiss her, and she had pushed him away. He had seldom looked directly at her since that day, even through the years of friendship that he had shared with her late husband. Secretly, she had always thought of his lookaway behavior as humorous, and had occasionally teased him about it, causing him to blush. The truth was, Arthur Ledford was a handsome man with impeccable credentials. He would have been a good choice for a husband, and she would have put herself in the path of his search if she had not fallen in love with Elton Phelps. Now, she pitied Arthur. He had married Alice Barber, and Alice Barber Ledford was a hateful, complaining woman. Everyone in Jericho knew the only thing that qualified as marriage between Arthur and Alice was Sally, their daughter, and she was far more the child of her father than the child of her mother.
She paused at the door of Ledford’s Dry Goods. Across the street, she saw Frances Yerby going into Merriweather’s Furniture and Appliance holding the hands of her five-year-old twin sons—Luke and Linton. The boys moved with her like listless shadows. Frances deserved sympathy, she thought. A sorry, quarrelsome husband, twin boys given to illness and injury. She wondered what sort of malady the twins were now suffering. Something. Later, after Ben left for Boston, she would call on Frances, she decided.
She stood for a moment, composing herself. She could feel the heat on her face. She inhaled deeply, then opened the door and stepped inside.
Sally and Arthur were behind the counter, talking. They turned in unison, surprised.
“Margaret,” Arthur said uncomfortably.
“I want to speak with you, Arthur,” Margaret told him. “Privately, if you don’t mind.”
Arthur looked away. “All right,” he said.
“I’ve—got some things to do in the storeroom,” Sally said timidly.
“It won’t take but a minute, Sally,” Margaret said.
Sally smiled a worried smile, then rushed away.
Margaret crossed the store to the counter. Arthur kept his eyes from her. He drummed nervously on the countertop with a pencil.
“Arthur, look at me,” Margaret insisted.
He looked up. An expression of embarrassment clouded his face.
“I’ve come to tell you that my son is going to Boston,” Margaret said calmly, “and when he returns, the job that he’s had for six years will still be here.”
NINE
HIS MOTHER WORRIED about him riding on a train.
There were train wrecks every day, she had said in a woeful voice. People killed by the thousands. Always something in the newspapers about it.
“Remember what I’ve told you about your great-uncle Abner?” his mother had asked.
Yes, he remembered. His mother had told the story often, with such dramatic intensity it left the impression that she had been on the scene, and the sight of it was seared permanently into her memory. “The most horrible death imaginable,” she would say at the conclusion of each telling. “Just horrible.” And she would bow her head and close her eyes and sigh like a stage actress. Sometimes she would whisper, “Horrible,” a final time.
Abner Phelps had been killed in Pennsylvania in a train wreck in January of 1878, when a brushfire burned into cross ties and shifted the rails and the train tumbled down an embankment into a creek. A coal-burning stove in Abner Phelps’s passenger car had broken apart, spewing fire, and all the passengers had died in the blaze.
Trains were not safe, his mother had declared.
“I’ll be fine, Mama,” Ben had said. “It’s nineteen ten. They don’t have coal-burning stoves on the trains I’ll be taking. Anyhow, it’s July, not January.”
“I won’t sleep until you’re home,” his mother had vowed.
He was dressed in a dark brown, well-tailored three-button suit cuffed at the sleeves and pants. He wore a matching vest over a high-collar shirt and a stylish tie. A new chocolate-colored felt hat with a narrow brim rested at a tilt on his head. His shoes were polish-bright. He had the look of a garment salesman setting off to invade a new territory, or of a politician on the speech circuit.
Inside the suitcase on the seat beside him were three additional shirts, two older pairs of trousers, another pair of shoes—broken-in and comfortable—underwear, socks, handkerchiefs, toothbrush, shaving needs, writing materials, Lottie’s letter, an assortment of sandwiches his mother had prepared, and, in an envelope, money he had secretly put away, week by week, in a clothes trunk. He had no specific reason for saving it, other than habit, but now was glad for the habit.
In another envelope, kept in the inside pocket of his suit coat with his travel schedule, he had a letter from Sally, a letter written late at night and riskily delivered to the front door of his home. His mother had discovered the letter when she opened the door. The message was simple:
Ben, I love you. I’m sorry about how Daddy acted. I don’t want you to go away, but if you do, I want you to come home to me. I already miss you. I already hurt so much I can hardly breathe.
The letter had made him ache, made him want to stay. He loved Sally Ledford. Knew that he did. Sally dazzled him, made him feel awkward, out of control, the same emotions he had heard others describe when they talked of being in love. He had lingered on the platform of the train depot, believing she would appear to tell him goodbye, to embrace him in public. Perhaps kiss him.
She did not appear.
He licked his lips over the thought of t
he kiss, imagined the sweet, peppermint heat of her mouth. A single glad heartstroke drummed in his chest and throat, and he swallowed it and swallowed also the imagined heat of Sally’s mouth.
He sat near a window, resting comfortably, gazing at the scenery that seemed to move dizzily past the window. He knew that he, not the scenery, was moving, but he liked the thought of sitting still and having the countryside zip past the train window. It was like being on a merry-go-round at some carnival, riding to the thundering sound of the engine and the rhythmic clicking of wheels over rails, and, occasionally, the high, shrill scream of the steam whistle. Once his father had told him in secret that he had always wanted to be a railroad man, but knew better than to suggest it publicly. Uncle Abner’s death, his father had lamented, had chilled any fancy he might have had for riding trains for a living. “Your mother would never have put up with it,” his father had said in a voice that fathers used with sons when the story being told was mixed with humor or with cloudy instruction.
He leaned his head against the headrest of the seat and thought of his mother. She had marched off to Ledford’s Dry Goods with so much righteous anger it steamed from her, and she had returned home as a one-woman parade, with the gladness of music and song curling from her voice, and with the promise of Ben’s job when he returned from Boston.
Later, when the euphoria of her bravery had subsided, she had begun her anguish over Ben’s long train ride.
“I just know I’m going to dream about Uncle Abner,” she had said woefully.
It was Ben who had dreamed of Uncle Abner. A dream of fire and screams. A dream so vivid it might have been a premonition.
He took his written-out travel schedule from his coat pocket and studied it. Athens and Atlanta in Georgia, Chattanooga and Nashville in Tennessee, Beimer in Kentucky. And between them, so many stops at so many small places. He had sketched out a crude map from the atlas, and he touched the names with his fingertip, following the pen line of his drawing. He would travel through late afternoon and night before reaching Beimer in midmorning.