“What makes you think I’m not staying near here?”
“You walked a while to get here,” Comely said easily, without any kind of self-consciousness. He turned in his seat and look back toward the front of Greco’s café. “If you need to take the subway, I’ll cover that. You like to walk, but it might be far.”
He handed Robert an address. “Come and see what we do. If you like it, try a week in the yard. If you’re good – try being foreman. Like I said, it’s a lot of responsibility.”
“I can’t do it. I am very busy this week and next week, then I am leaving.”
Comely looked surprised. “Why would you do a thing like that? This is the last stop – there’s no place anywhere better than this. You must have something special waiting for you – and not a lady, otherwise you’d go now and not wait two weeks.”
Robert couldn’t help but smile.
Comely continued.
“Well come down if you need a hand, or a bit of income while you’re here. This can be an expensive place to live, even for just two weeks.”
Comely’s coffee arrived and he downed it in a split second. His eyes darted to the clock and he smiled genuinely at Robert.
“Alright?”
Robert wouldn’t commit so far as a second ‘alright’, but when Comely left he had kept the address in his hand and his hand in his pocket, even as he walked past a trashcan just outside Greco’s. Interesting, Robert considered later, that Comely had walked in to a place full of people who knew him and had spoken to no one but the only stranger.
He threw open his small window to listen to the hum and rattle of the city below. What he once found jarring had become a comfort, a torch against the darkness of silence. Looking down he watched people mill and squawk and soon spotted a woman, perhaps in her late 20s, carrying a large crate. She held it with both hands in front of her but did not place any support under the crate. It’s empty – or carrying pillows, he thought to himself. He’d learned a little more about observation from Comely. People tell you a hell of a lot without opening their mouths. She was beautiful, olive and healthy, her face framed by dark curls falling behind her ears where the four clips ended and freedom began. Her eyes were bright but not wide. From the front the shoulders of her dress could be seen, it was knee length, white with red thin vertical stripes. It wasn’t warm and she was wearing just the dress, and for a moment he wondered if he was hallucinating. Robert longed to charge down the stairs and meet her but knew it was a foolish idea for a number of reasons. She passed by directly under his window and he followed her to the end of the street, her dress brilliant in the light, tight against her waist and firing a dull ache in his heart and a jangling in his hands that made him forget the strange fact she was hauling a huge and apparently empty crate despite being dressed for the pictures, not the dockyard.
* * *
Mrs Hatfield arrived in town to no fanfare. Indeed, she arrived to no town. Paradise, named as such by way of an accidental cruel joke, had been a booming town before the mine bummed out. In the glory days you could reach into a river bed and pull out your destiny, and the speed with which success turned to ash took just about everyone by surprise. First the pan men either learned to dig or learned to run, then the pits and shafts started to turn up nothing but anger. The hotels and the prostitutes called it a day and the banker followed suit. The school held out until the last child decamped and a town without children is just a prison without bars. The buildings were stripped for timber and fixtures where it was worthwhile, and a few relics and skeletons clustered around the train station. The station, now a mere stop, and the rail repair depot had been opened just days before the first prospector quietly slipped out of town, and it quickly became what some would call a white elephant. Nothing makes less sense than an angry bureaucrat so the Paradise rail repair depot continued to operate. As a result, the manager and now sole employee of the depot, Mr Rosti, established a small coffee house for the benefit of engine drivers and associated rail workers, where he in turn employed a man he called Mr Watson. Watson liked to talk and Rosti liked hearing stories, so they made a good pair, which was just as well given they also lived together on the premises.
As Mrs Hatfield stepped off her carriage, and a number of passengers held their heads out of the windows like turtles, Rosti smiled. He broke off his conversation with the driver mid-sentence and called out to her;
“Ma’am, if you’d like a hot drink of any kind, or a cold one, speak to Mr Watson just through there.”
Rosti pointed to a double door wide open under an already faded sign: Rail Café.
Mrs Hatfield curtsied in a way Rosti found slightly confusing and took his advice.
The small bell on the door alerted Watson, who smiled in the direction of the door and waited to hear the footsteps before offering;
“Hello ma’am”.
“Hello sir,” Mrs Hatfield replied with a smile that made her feel foolish once she realised no one was around the see it.
Watson’s glorious face beamed as he had heard the smile in her voice. He was nearly 80, but had an indestructible face, Ivory Coast black; lined and striking but never decrepit. He was genetically bald but shaved the last of his hair every two days, and with his strong, rumbling voice, could pass for as young as 55.
“Black or white ma’am? Sugar?”
“Black with a half please.”
As Watson made his way easily around the small kitchen, Mrs Hatfield walked to the back of the coffee house and pulled out a chair so her back would face the wall furthest from the door. The legs left four definite canals of clean wood through the dust and she doubted this place saw many full houses.
The room was Spartan but the abundant natural light gave it a kind of beauty Mrs Hatfield appreciated after hours in a cramped carriage. The tables were immaculately clean, which is what counts, small dark and round, five of them arranged like the side of a dice, those closer to the wall of windows facing the train line somewhat warped, those further seemingly new. A rail company bill was pinned to one wall and by the kitchen door a framed portrait of Joe Hill caught her eye. Rosti was a brave man, she thought, and clasped her hands together until they went white.
Listening for the whistle of the coffee pot Mrs Hatfield swept up to the kitchen counter to collect her brew.
“Ma’am,” Watson admonished. “I would have been more than happy to bring your coffee to you.”
“I am sorry if you feel I’ve made assumptions about your dedication Mr Watson, but I can assure you I only wished to improve my circulation after a long journey seated.”
Watson smiled and held out the cup and saucer for her, as she took it they both noticed the rough hands of the other. Watson pondered this. She sounded like an educated woman, perhaps 40, but had clearly worked hard with her hands for years. He wondered if she had married well after a childhood in poverty.
Rosti busied himself with the engine and its driver. Assured the stop was a brief one, the few other passengers remained on the train while Mrs Hatfield drank her coffee in silence. Watson remained in the kitchen, and she could not see from where she sat that he was standing mostly upright, his fingertips dancing across the page of a book he was reading. She would have been happy to talk with him had he wished to, but was in no mind to initiate conversation for conversation’s sake – as she rarely was. Mrs Hatfield had always been quiet, and as Mrs Testerman she had been quiet too and, before that, an impossibly long time ago, she had been the liveliest and prettiest of a brood of ten lively and pretty children. That was before her family and her town had sunk deep below the ground where liveliness and prettiness were not to be found, and suddenly almost everyone awoke to find they owned nothing but a pile of debt.
“This is good coffee,” she said to the unattended kitchen counter.
“Thank you ma’am,” it answered.
Mrs Hatfield bid a temporary farewell to Watson and walked outside the coffee shop. Rosti was in his office hun
ched over something she soon realised with shock was a telegraph machine. Surely the railways had the money and sense to provide the repair stop and mail room with a telephone. Mrs Hatfield kept walking, past debris, the junk not worth salvaging and all else that was left of Paradise. The overgrown dirt roads went on for some time, and she soon found Paradise must have been a well-sized place. She saw the evidence that gas lamp posts once lined the main thoroughfares. They too were gone and with them the names of streets. A handful of empty buildings were scattered among miles of now-vacant lots. All the good timber gone, the newer brick buildings, the glass and wood stripped from their windows and doors, gaped into the dusty lanes and in some cases bore the only detailed indicators of a once grand ancient civilisation; the drug store, the general store, an almost brand-new real estate agent, R.J Sloan & Company; Proprietors of Excavation Goods… Mrs Hatfield stopped and gasped. Looking back she could no longer see the rail repair depot. She had been walking for some time and saw the first hint of twilight coming.
Rosti frantically burst into the coffee shop and asked Watson for a second time if he knew where Mrs Hatfield was.
“I haven’t seen her,” the old man said.
Rosti missed it and darted out. The engineer cried out from the locomotive that he couldn’t keep waiting for one woman. A stoker laughed - “some people wait their whole lives for one woman, chief” – but, like Rosti, the driver was in no mood for jokes.
Rosti charged around the remnants of Paradise, but despite the sorry state the former town had reached there were still enough upright buildings, trees and piles of junk to make finding Mrs Hatfield quite an undertaking, particularly if she didn’t want to be found. He wasn’t a young man and drank far too much of Watson’s coffee and before long he was hot with panic and exertion. Wiping his brow with his fading red handkerchief he paused and shouted again – Mrs Hatfield! – but was drowned out by the train’s whistle. Frustrated, he more screamed than shouted the second time.
Mrs Hatfield, who turned for the depot on noticing the low sun, had stopped when she noticed an abandoned store that, unlike anything else in the town beyond the depot and café, seemed decked out for business. The door was in place and the windows intact, even adorned with curtains. She was startled by the narrow, two storey bluestone building. For someone to have built in bluestone here seemed bizarre enough, but for the stone to have survived the salvage crews was utterly inexplicable. The sign on the awning seemed relatively fresh.
S. NEY AND DAUGHTER
Nowhere at the front of the store was any further explanation visible. As Mrs Hatfield first reached for the door handle, she heard Rosti cry out. By the time he had finished saying her name her fingers were already on the strangely warm brass and Rosti’s cry was in vain. The door opened easily, without a groan or creak but instead a gentle ding of a small bell. Mrs Hatfield gasped, freezing on the spot, half expecting someone to emerge from the door behind the bare wooden counter. She waited, heard no further distant desperate cries – or anything at all – and pulled the door shut behind her. The store, if indeed it was a store, was sparse but for two stools before a long counter that ran the entire width of the room. The floor was dusty and footprint-free. To her left was a wall entirely of closed cabinets, to her right a wall adorned with two maps, one of Paradise and the surrounding area, the other – much older – of a town she had not heard of before. On closer inspection she saw it was entirely in French. Behind the counter were more closed cabinets and a portrait of a fierce looking man with grey eyes and incandescent cheeks. Mrs Hatfield ignored the cabinets to her left, lifting the counter trapdoor – again, with ease – and making her way with some urgency to the next door. Behind it lay a small storeroom, empty, and stairs which she flew up without a second thought. At the landing she found two doors and she halted. ‘What am I doing?’ she whispered and considered leaving and sprinting back to find Rosti, but instead she stared at one of the doors, unable to break away. Her heart pounded in her ears and she knocked on the door firmly, almost mechanically, not anticipating a response. She waited, stopped breathing for a moment and focussed hard, closing her eyes. Silence. Silence.
Rosti;
Mrs Hatfield!
He was much closer now and she considered crying out to him. She knocked on the door a second time and waited. There was a gentle shuffling somewhere – behind the door she was sure – and Mrs Hatfield tightly gripped her own mouth to stop herself from screaming. Rosti screamed instead;
Mrs Hatfield!
And the spell was broken – she ran down the stairs, through the still-open trapdoor and out onto the porch of S. Ney And Daughter.
“Mr Rosti – I, I was lost.”
He stopped, sweaty and red-faced, and turned to her; half not believing his luck and half not believing her words.
“You were lost, in there?”
For this, she had no explanation. The brief but already awkward silence was broken as both of them clearly heard the train pulling out of the station; a development that troubled Rosti far more than it did Mrs Hatfield.
Ten minutes later Mrs Hatfield sat at the same table again in Rosti and Watson’s café.
Watson seemed delighted with the company, but Rosti was noticeably less pleased. It was nothing against Mrs Hatfield, who seemed perfectly agreeable; he was furious at the inconsideration so starkly demonstrated by the engine driver and crew, and also fearful of how this debacle would reflect on him.
“It wouldn’t take much to get us closed down,” he thought aloud and briefly spoiled Watson’s ebullient mood.
Mrs Hatfield fixed her eyes on Rosti.
“I can assure you there will be no complaint on my part. I strolled too far from the stop and you did your best to find me in time. The company couldn’t possibly find fault in your conduct.”
Watson nodded, a gesture which some found disconcerting in a blind man.
Rosti remained unhappy, but Mrs Hatfield sipped at her second cup of Watson’s coffee and sang its praises. Rosti walked out and stood by the rail line with his hands on his hips, looking east perhaps in the ill-conceived hope the train would return. He turned and look at the timetable again and nothing had changed.
Inside, Mrs Hatfield turned to Watson and spoke quietly.
“Mr Watson, are you and Mr Rosti the only inhabitants of Paradise?”
“As far as I know. It would seem Madam that you believe otherwise?”
The man had been blind long enough to read people’s voices well.
“I believe there is someone living in this town.”
“It’s not impossible but I don’t know why you’d do it. You could hunt in the hills, live in one of the buildings. Collect your water from the river though it’s a long walk with two full buckets. Ours is the only building still served by the mains. But I have never heard of anyone living here for a long time. And, if you wanted to get away from people, there’d be better places for it than this.”
“Why are you here Mr Watson?”
“I’m old. I was married once. Mrs Watson died ten years ago. My children know where to find me, and they have all got lives of their own. When you’re blind the hunger to see the world gets faint faster. I’ve done a bit, more than my share I think, and I’ve got no complaints. I live well here, Rosti and I get along just fine. He’s the only boss I have had that has never called me boy or worse, probably because he’s eye-talian and didn’t get trained up in those ideas as a child.”
“He didn’t sound foreign to me.”
“Well he’s not foreign, he’s an American. No Americans are foreign, unless you want to draw only the distinction between native and everybody else. Either the native is the only American or everyone is one.”
“I think that’s very well observed Mr Watson. Perhaps you should be on the next train to Washington.”
Watson laughed aloud, catching Rosti’s attention and drawing him into the café.
Rosti wondered if Mrs Hatfield was any
one important, or if she had a powerful husband waiting for her in the east who would cry havoc over this mess. He was worried. Where could he and Watson possibly go if the Paradise depot was closed? The last time he was in town all he heard was talk about high-ways, great big concrete lines that would scar up the whole country for people to drive automobiles on. Sounded like a load of foolishness to him. Who would drive a slow, cramped, shaking motor car from one city to another in two days when you could make the trip by rail in a few hours?
“Mrs Hatfield, we need to get you to where you’re going.”
“I can’t imagine that would involve something other than awaiting the next train,” she smiled.
Rosti put his hands on his hips and turned around, facing the open door and platform. He turned back again.
“I can wire Havana, I could get a taxi cab to drive here and…”
Mrs Hatfield held up one hand.
“Mr Rosti that would take an eternity and cost a fortune. Better for me to wait for the next train.”
Rosti looked out the door again. It was twilight and the embers of day were dwindling faster by the minute.
“That will be tomorrow ma’am. Tomorrow early in the afternoon. You see that’s why I am so alarmed ma’am. Don’t you have an appointment or someone waiting for you?”
Watson stiffened in his seat and Rosti knew he had probably pried too much.
“I’m sorry ma’am,” he began, but again Mrs Hatfield raised a hand.
“Please, why apologise? I have no pressing engagement, and no one waiting.”
Rosti pulled out a seat at the table. “May I?” he asked as he sat down. “Mrs Hatfield, may I ask… Are you a teacher or some kind of professor? Is this a book tour you’re on?”
She laughed.