Ben had looked at her in disbelief, and then he had busied himself again with the dresses, dropping one to the floor.
It was in that moment, as he stooped to retrieve the dress, that she knew she was in love with Ben Phelps, and that one day she would marry him.
She brushed her face with her fingers, pretending they were Ben’s fingers. The reflection in the mirror smiled back at her, and she knew that she was beautiful and that her lovemaking would be beautiful.
“Mrs. Ben Phelps,” she said again in her soft voice.
Before she went to bed, she wrote another letter to Ben.
My dearest Ben,
Tonight, I believe you are here with me, so close that I can touch the air and feel your face. I love you with every tender thought I have ever had and wish for sleep only to dream of you, as I have every night that you’ve been away. Someday, I will tell you of those dreams, or, better still, I will live them with you.
If you do not come home soon, I think I will die of loneliness.
But now, I will dream. And in my dream, you will be here.
I kiss the air that is your face, and hold the night breeze that brings me your arms.
With my love,
Sally
THE TRAIN DID not arrive in Beimer until twenty minutes after three, which did not surprise Henry Quick.
“Sometimes it don’t get here to almost dark,” he had said to Ben. “Must’ve been some trouble on the track between here and Bowling Green.”
Ben and Lottie and Little Ben had waited on the porch of Henry Quick’s store, taking a lunch of baked sweet potatoes and biscuits and water from Henry’s well. After the lunch, Little Ben had curled in his mother’s lap and slept as Lottie fanned him with an ivory-handled folding fan she had taken from her purse. Ben knew it was the fan he had seen before, in the tent on the night that Lottie had offered her body to him. The thought of the night made him blush.
“Guess the boy’s wore out,” Henry had suggested quietly.
Ben had agreed with a shake of his head.
“Looks like his daddy did when he was little,” Henry had added. “Got the same eyes. Maybe he’ll be a baseball player, too.”
“Maybe,” Ben had replied.
“Foster was something else, he was,” Henry had declared. “God-o-mighty, he was something else.” He had rooted his shoulders into the chair back and had begun to tell stories of Foster.
The man that Henry Quick described was not the man Ben had known in Augusta. The man in Augusta was old and tired and drink-addled, his skills eroded, his passion spent. The only thing that had seemed alive in Foster was his bitterness and his confusion over failure.
He remembered what Foster had said to him in Augusta, when Arnold Toeman had called him from the batter’s box, sending in Foster to hit for him. Foster had said, “It’s all right, Ben. It’s not what it’s made out to be, nohow.”
Henry could have been talking about a god from Greek mythology, Ben thought as he listened, and he had imagined Foster wrapped in clouds with a crown of lightning bolts resting on his head, and in his hand he held a baseball bat as a warrior would hold a sword.
“Sometimes, when he was home, he’d sit out here at night with a bunch of us fellows, and he’d tell us about games he’d played in,” Henry had said with a chuckle, “and he’d look up and say that playing a good ball game was a little like being a star on a black night. Said it was like being shot full of twinkle.”
And maybe that is how he would find Foster one night, Ben had decided. As a constellation, a string of star-dots against the dark velvet of heaven, star-dot lines connected by memory, outlining Foster, the god, his body muscled with moons of distant planets.
WHEN THE TRAIN arrived, Ben and Henry put the luggage on the passenger car and Ben took Little Ben from Lottie.
“I’m glad you going home, Miss Lottie,” Henry said. “But you always welcome up here.”
Lottie shook Henry’s hand. “Thank you for all the kindness,” she said. She stepped up into the train, then turned back. “Sometimes, if you could put some flowers on his grave, I’d be grateful.”
Henry nodded. He extended his hand to Ben. “Glad I got to know you, young fellow. Foster was a good judge of men, and I reckon he judged you right. You take care of them two.”
“Yes sir,” Ben said.
“You come through this way, you stop in,” Henry said.
“I’ll do that,” Ben told him. He followed Lottie onto the train and took a seat across from her, still holding Little Ben.
“I’ll take him,” Lottie said.
“It’s all right,” Ben replied.
“He sure is sleeping hard,” Lottie said. “Never saw him sleep this hard in the day.”
Ben swept his hand across Little Ben’s face. “He’s a little hot.”
Lottie frowned. “I thought he was, too,” she admitted. “But I was thinking maybe it was because we was sitting outside.”
“Maybe that’s it,” Ben said.
“Maybe,” Lottie repeated. She reached across the space separating them and touched Little Ben’s forehead. “Maybe it’s just a summer cold,” she added. “Mama said I used to get them all the time.”
THEY RODE MOSTLY in silence, the train rocking over its tracks, lulling them with the clicking of wheels on rail, the Kentucky and Tennessee landscape spinning away from them in a blur of green and haze. It was the second time that Ben had been on a train with Lottie, but six years had passed and their lives had changed. She was no longer with a traveling salesman promising the quid pro quo of good times for good times, and he was no longer a baseball player wounded by dreams. She had married Foster, had had a child with him, had buried him. And Ben was a dry goods clerk in love with a girl who was seven years younger than he was. He had made a place for himself in Jericho. People liked him. Treated him with respect. He was no longer the boy played for a fool by Coleman Maxey and Bill Simpson and Frank Mercer. The only link to his youth was Milo Wade, and it was chain-strong, a link Ben could not break. As long as Milo Wade waged his wars on the baseball fields of America, Ben could daydream, could hold to wishes that were private and tender.
Still, Lottie was with him. And Little Ben, curled on the seat beside his mother, sleeping his child’s sleep. And he had made a deathbed promise to Foster that he would take her home to Augusta. He could not turn away from such a promise.
It would not be easy. He had been away from Jericho for four days. By the timetable of his deception about being in Boston, he had three days before he needed to be home.
It was not the timing that concerned him. The timing would work. They would be in Augusta in less than a day, if there were no delays, and he could easily return to Jericho in another day.
He worried only that someone in Jericho would see him on the stop-through. It was a risk. He would have to stay on the train, hide himself from Akers Crews’s annoyed eyes, and he would have to hope that no one from Jericho boarded the train for a trip to Augusta.
He rolled his head against the seat rest, looked at Little Ben, still sleeping, his face rose-blushed with the heat, and then he turned back to the window. He saw a grainfield, a pasture with grazing cows, a farmhouse on a knoll, a waterfall that poured from the hip of a mountain and tumbled over a rock wall and splashed into a narrow stream that cut a silver scar across the pasture.
If anyone from Jericho got on the train, he would tell him the near truth. He would say that one of the baseball players he had met had asked him to accompany his wife and child back to Augusta, and because the player was a friend to Milo, he had agreed. Lottie would not dispute him. Lottie would understand.
He thought: I have to buy newspapers at the stop in Atlanta. Have to find out the baseball scores, and how Milo played.
He did not need any other information. It would be simple enough to tell stories about the games. He had imagined being in Boston at the Huntington Avenue Grounds ballpark for so many years, it seemed he had been there hundreds o
f times.
He would tell of other things, also. Of going to Boston Harbor to see the waters where American colonists, wearing the dress of Mohawk Indians, dumped three hundred and forty-two chests of tea in the year of 1773. Of visiting the Old North Church, where Paul Revere saw the lantern that would light the American Revolution. Of traveling one morning to Harvard University. Of walking the city until he was exhausted. He would say he stayed in a clean and airy boardinghouse and had fine meals and met good people. He would promise Sally that, one day, both of them would go to Boston. On their honeymoon, perhaps.
In Atlanta, he would buy a small gift for Sally and one for his mother. He would not say the gifts were from Boston; he would say they were from his trip.
Little Ben opened his eyes and looked quizzically at Ben. He moved against his mother’s lap, waking her.
“Mama,” he said weakly.
Lottie touched his face, felt fever. She looked at Ben. “He’s burning up,” she said fearfully.
THIRTEEN
THE MEDICAL CLINIC was only three blocks from the Nashville train depot, and Ben fast-walked the distance, carrying Little Ben, with Lottie keeping his stride. Worry was on her face.
“He’ll be all right,” Ben said over and over, as though muttering a chant that contained the power of healing. “He’ll be all right. He’ll be all right…”
Ben did not believe the words. He believed he was holding death. Little Ben’s eyes seemed glazed. His body was limp, his breathing shallow.
And then in his mind—deep in his mind—Ben could hear the music of his church choir, and the words rushed silently into his throat, tangling with the muttering: His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me…
Little Ben was sparrow-light.
“Sparrow,” Ben whispered.
“What?” Lottie asked anxiously.
“He’s like a sparrow,” Ben said.
Lottie did not reply.
THE DOCTOR WAS young and handsome, with dark, darting eyes. He smelled of hospital alcohol and pipe tobacco. His name was Spencer Adams.
“Let’s see about this little fellow,” he said in a kind voice. He touched Little Ben’s forehead, then his throat. His eyes dimmed, his lips wiggled.
“Get me some wet towels,” he said to his nurse, “and chip some ice.”
He turned to Ben and Lottie. “Best let us look at him,” he said. “I want to take his temperature and try to work the fever down. The two of you can wait in the hallway. You’ll find some chairs.”
“I want to stay with him,” Lottie said quickly.
“Best to let me do it,” the doctor said. He looked at Ben. “I’m sure your husband understands.”
Lottie turned to Ben, then back to the doctor. “He’s not my husband.”
The doctor’s head ticked slightly.
“We’re just friends,” Ben said. “Her husband died a couple of days ago and I’m helping her and her son with their move down to Georgia.”
“I see,” said the doctor. “Still, I think—”
“We’ll wait outside,” Ben said. He took Lottie’s arm. “Come on. He’s with the doctor. Couldn’t be in better hands.”
Lottie did not resist.
“We’ll take good care of him,” Spencer Adams promised.
THE HALLWAY WAS wide. Benches and chairs were shoved against the walls, leaving room enough for walking without hindrance. Walking made heel-clicking echoes. All the benches and chairs were empty except for a man who appeared to be Ben’s age, or younger. The man sat near the door leading into the doctor’s office, hunched forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, his fingers laced together, a look of anguish on his face. If he heard the heel-clicks of the people walking along the hallway, or the echoes, he did not acknowledge them.
Ben and Lottie took chairs that had a small table between them. A Bible was on the table.
“I think it’s just a cold, like you said,” Ben said quietly. “I had one a couple of weeks ago, sore throat and all.”
Lottie turned her head to look at the man sitting near the door of the doctor’s office. She said, “All his clothes are in my bundle.”
“They’re at the train station,” Ben told her. “I left everything with the ticket agent. He said he’d watch after them.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to pay for all this,” Lottie said fretfully.
“Don’t go worrying about it,” Ben said. “I’ve got some money.”
A short, squat woman wearing the white uniform of a nurse came out of a room and hurried down the hallway and disappeared into another room.
“Do you know what I was thinking on the train, Ben?” Lottie asked softly.
“What?” Ben said.
“I was thinking about the first time I ever saw you—on that train from Augusta.”
“That seems a long time ago,” Ben said.
“Sometimes,” Lottie whispered. “Sometimes it seems like it was yesterday, or last night.” A smile warmed on her face. “You looked scared.”
“Guess I was,” admitted Ben.
“I was, too.”
“We were both pretty young,” Ben suggested.
“I almost got off when you did. Would have if I’d had any money to turn around and go back home,” Lottie said.
“I thought you were asleep when I got off.”
Lottie shook her head. “I was just pretending. I saw you. Even looked out the window at you. You looked lost standing there, watching the train pull off.”
“Guess I was,” Ben said.
“I remember thinking: How can he look so lost when he’s at home?”
Ben’s head rocked in a nod. “That’s a good question,” he said.
“I’m glad Foster was at home when he died,” Lottie whispered.
“Me, too.”
For a moment, Lottie did not speak. She gazed at the Bible on the table between them, reached to touch it with her fingertip, then pulled back her hand. “I don’t think I’ll ever have a home, Ben. Not a real home.”
“You will,” Ben said. “You’ll see. Little Ben’s going to be all right, and we’ll get back on the train and you’ll be back with your folks in a day or so.”
Lottie looked up at him. “I don’t even know if they’re still alive, Ben.”
“Didn’t you write to them?”
“Some. But they never wrote back.”
Ben could feel a flush on his face. He shifted in his chair. He had not considered the possibility that Lottie’s family might have disappeared, and that he would be left with Lottie and Little Ben, standing in front of an empty house on the bank of the Savannah River. What then? he wondered. He could not abandon them. He knew that. Yet he could not return to Jericho with them—not without suspicion and questions he could never answer. He thought of the money he had in his wallet. Still a lot of it left, since he had not gone to Boston, and he could leave most of it with Lottie, but it would last her only a few days.
“I wonder how Sister is?” Lottie said absently. She paused. “Still rocking, I guess.”
Ben tried a smile. It fell from his face. “Maybe so,” he said.
The door to the doctor’s office opened and the young man sitting near it looked up. An older doctor, balding, red-faced, approached him and spoke in a whisper. The color in the young man’s face vanished and he dropped his head and began to cry. The old doctor reached for his arm, pulled him forward in the chair, and led him through the door.
“Somebody just died,” Lottie said quietly.
Ben did not speak.
“Or maybe somebody was just born—his first baby—and he’s so happy he just had to cry,” Lottie added. “It’s the way I was with Little Ben. I just had to cry. Foster was laughing like a crazy person, like he’d been there with God when God was making everything he put in the world.”
Ben listened for the cry of a baby, but heard nothing.
They sat in silence for a long time, the silence broken only by heel-clicks in the echo cham
ber of the hallway, and by voices of passersby rushing from one door to another, voices like the humming of wings on insects. Ben knew that it was dark outside. A gnawing was in his stomach. He thought of the preacher and his wife raiding Lottie’s garden, imagined them feasting on platters of vegetables. And maybe they had stopped at the fishing spot on the creek and had fished out a few catfish and that, too, was part of their meal.
He wondered what had happened to the catfish he and Little Ben had caught. He remembered dropping them near the house. Probably dragged off by the cat he had seen hiding at the barn. Or a raccoon.
He saw Lottie’s body move suddenly, lift from the chair, and he turned to see the doctor coming from the door, heel-clicks sharp in the hallway. He stood and stepped close to Lottie. Touched her arm with his hand.
“He’s better,” the doctor said wearily. “Temperature’s down some, but he’s a sick little boy.”
“Is it a cold?” asked Lottie.
The doctor shook his head. He fumbled a pipe from his jacket. “Not a cold. I’m only guessing, but I think it could be the first case I’ve ever seen of a disease called anthrax, or what some people call black bain or woolsorter’s disease. I found a small carbuncle on his buttock, near the end of his spinal column, and that’s a telling sign.”
A look of confusion crossed Lottie’s face. “He had a little sore,” she said. “I thought it was like a risen.”
The doctor dipped his head in understanding. He fingered the burned tobacco in the bowl of his pipe and judged there was enough left to light. “Almost the same, by the looks of it,” he said. “Only a carbuncle’s worse. I drained it best I could. I just wish I had the vaccine to give him.”
“What’s that?” Lottie asked.
The doctor lit his pipe and a whip of blue smoke wiggled from the bowl. He thought of his year’s study in Paris and of the work of Louis Pasteur, whose discoveries had changed the practice of medicine. Anthrax was the first disease ever to be treated with vaccine. “Well, it’s not easy to explain,” he said. “Just say it’s a way to handle some problems like your little boy may have.”