Enoch's Folly

  “What’s that you’re carrying?”

  Comely had just kept smiling and asked “Where are you heading?”

  Robert shuffled a little. “Visiting, visiting a friend of mine.”

  He had handed the box to Robert without a second’s hesitation and said “This is for her. Well, for both of you, enjoy. It’s a cake.”

  He’d stopped smiling, then patted Robert warmly on the shoulder and briskly walked away, in the same direction he’d been going before.

  Robert smiled at Anna, who smiled back.

  “It is black forest – I love this cake! That is… strange. It is my favourite.”

  “Are you from Germany?”

  “Do I sound German?”

  “Well, no.”

  “You are educated, farm boy. How many Americans know the Black Forest is in Germany?”

  “Well, I know a baker. How are you? Much work today?”

  “Very much. What is the matter with you?”

  She was sharp and without compunctions when it came to questions, Robert observed. Anna simply believed if you noticed something and wanted to know more – you asked. For someone accustomed to the extraordinarily, sometimes painfully polite world of a Methodist farming family, it was startling to him, even after his time in this city where just about any kind of person and any kind of thinking could be found.

  “Should we get a knife from your kitchen?” He remembered she said she lived above the shop.

  Her smile vanished.

  “My shop and my home are different things. I do not have a strange man in my house so readily.”

  Robert gulped, there had been no ruse – he genuinely intended for them to get a knife and bring it back down stairs.

  “I’m sorry. I, uh, I didn’t really think about what I was saying and how you might take it – I just figured, since we’re here and you wouldn’t want to keep it in your icebox.”

  She softened, even showed a glimmer of regret for her initial reaction. In that moment, Robert remembered she had not actually answered his question earlier.

  “So, you’re not German?”

  “Nein.”

  “Where are you from?”

  Anna moved towards the glass door, flipping the OPEN/CLOSED sign but not turning back to face Robert as he had expected.

  “I come from a little island. It is mostly rock and some dirt and trees. There is some farming and some fishing. What we do there is tell stories – always about the past. Most of the young leave, the others become old fast and stay old for a long time before dying. Every generation is as the last, they dream of the same thing and it remains just as far out of their reach.”

  The silence was heavy and Anna did not turn around. Robert thought of his own childhood, of his own town and all the things he could say to let her know he understood – but he didn’t really and he knew it, and anything he would say now would sound cheap and easy and stupid, like all trite attempts to tell someone you’ve known the same troubles, so he said nothing.

  The cake was delicious.

  * * *

  The sun rose over Paradise and Rosti was already up to see it. His head as pounding from sleeplessness and yesterday’s panic was coming back like bad eggs. He’d talked with Watson and Mrs Hatfield late into the night and, despite his usual meticulous adherence to punctuality and organisation, had lost track of the evening at some stage after midnight. He crept out of the room without waking Watson and had made his own coffee as quietly as possible in the still dark morning before wandering out into the cool damp and scaling the building. From the ceiling he watched the sun rise and wished he’d been able to bring his coffee with him. Paradise, the skeleton town, could have been a living thing in this light. The husks and frames made silhouettes and bathed in fire could play tricks on the eyes. The town was just sleeping, you could tell yourself, and would burst into life any second now. Rosti listened and heard nothing, and hoped hard he’d hear a cock crow – just once – to keep the game alive for a few more moments. Instead, not even the usual sunrise chirp from the birds. Nothing. Put the silence out of your mind or it will suffocate you, he thought, focus on the beauty. His mind turned to Mrs Hatfield and the impending train. It would be two hours yet but he figured she was a classy lady who would appreciate being allowed a fair preparation time in the washroom before continuing her journey. He looked at his watch, pocketed it, and calculated the best moment to clamber down and wake her.

  He crab-walked to the edge of the roof and peered over. I’m getting too old for this, he thought and started to lower himself off the edge. He was agile for his age. The roof sheeting was covered in due and Rosti’s hand slipped, he missed the ledge and fell the full height of the building to the gravel below. He did not cry out.

  Inside, Watson, who’d emerged from his room, heard the snap clearly and headed for it, sensing trouble.

  Rosti lay on the ground, perfectly still and white. Only his eyes moved as Watson approached and the blind man slowed down as he got nearer to the source of the cracking sound.

  “Mr Rosti?” He said cautiously.

  Rosti grinned a strange grin and, forgetting himself, he pointed down to his leg.

  “You’d be surprised how much this hurts,” he whispered.

  “Are you alright Mr Rosti?”

  Fortunately neither of them could see his leg. Mrs Hatfield, who surprised them both by emerging, was not so lucky. The sight of Rosti’s shinbone burst through his skin, bulging slightly through a tear in his trousers, sent her reeling back clutching her mouth, but being a woman who’d quite a lot, she quickly regathered her composure.

  “Mr Rosti I will be back in one moment – you will be quite fine I can assure you.”

  “I’ll wait here,” he smiled.

  Watson instinctually found Rosti’s side and knelt beside him, putting a hand on the stricken man’s shoulder.

  “Where are you hurt?”

  “My leg.”

  “Broke?”

  “I’d guess so.”

  “The rest of you ok?”

  “Winded. But I didn’t land too heavy on my back. Seems my leg broke my fall.”

  Watson stopped himself from saying he’d heard it from inside but sensed he had to keep Rosti talking.

  “Mr Rosti…”

  “Call me Al.”

  Mrs Hatfield arrived with a blanket, a small bottle and a pair of silver scissors. She covered most of Rosti, but for his injury, and began to cut gently away at some of his trouser leg. He stayed silent and listened to Watson.

  “Sure Al. Ah, I don’t know. I’ve been calling you Mr Rosti and you’ve been calling me Mr Watson so long… Feels strange, like Al’s some man I don’t know.”

  “Mr Watson, I knew your name when you first came here. I knew it when you came to work here for me, when this town was a town, but I called you Mr Watson from day one because that’s what you call a man who works with you, whether he works for you or the other way around.”

  Rosti had gone whiter than white, almost blue-white, and his eyes were wide and wild. Mrs Hatfield saw this, this and the glistening sweat on his face, and knew it was bad. She held his thigh, pushing it tightly down to hold his leg in place poured some of the little bottle’s contents over his wound. Rosti cried out and his leg spasmed under her grip but not enough to make the damage worse. This would stave off any infection. Strangely, the wound bled very little. Mrs Hatfield wondered if this was a sign Rosti’s heartbeat had slowed. She knew that bone needed to be pushed back into place and the leg bandaged and put in a splint, then, as soon as possible, in a cast.

  “Mr Watson,” she said quietly. “Where is the nearest doctor?”

  He told her that would be Havana, a fair trip by anything other than train. Forgetting she’d seen a telegraph machine she asked Watson to call Havana; hoping he’d operated a telephone before and had no trouble doing so. He went right away, returning to let her know the doctor in Havana had taken ill – but a n
urse would come by motorcar within two hours.

  “Mrs Hatfield…” Watson began – but she already knew it.

  “I will be staying until the nurse arrives, Mr Watson, and I am more than prepared to miss my train as a consequence.”

  She wanted to relax them both and asked about their telephone. “I did not know you had one, and had not seen it.”

  “It’s in the kitchen ma’am.” Watson said and it made sense to her at once. “But we save it for emergencies; railroad policy.”

  Rosti dug his fingers into the ground and liked the feel of the cool sand and pebbles between them. Under normal circumstances he couldn’t stand anything getting under his nails – for reasons tactile, not aesthetic – but today it was different. He was prepared to move his head now and leaned back a little. The sky was clear of clouds and without them to catch the sunrise the scene was beautiful but unsettling in its monotony, with one uniform solid colour simply and evenly fading into another – lacking the effect of multiple reflective surfaces rippling shades of red, purple, blue and gold. Rosti was struck suddenly by the notion that the sky would look like this from heaven and it horrified him.

  He turned as best he could and peered at his café and the front of the repair depot. He noticed that the building he’d called home for years, hell, the only two buildings where he spent any time indoors, were looking shabby today. His café, in which he took an almost indestructible pride, looked like a small decaying timber barn. The Rail Café sign he meticulously kept clean and had planned to re-paint looked pathetic, forlorn and utterly pointless. Rosti was startled to feel anger, but more potently a feeling of urgent despair, a belated sense of panic. What have I done with my life?

  “Mr Watson,” he winced and sucked in a deep breath. “If I die you will own this place. The depot belongs to the rail company, but the café – it’s all yours, and do with it whatever you want. Bust it up and sell it for scrap, timber, fittings, copper wire, what ever. Do whatever you like – but you own it. It’s all yours.”

  “Stay calm there Mr Rosti – you hurt your leg that’s all. Whoever died from that?”

  Rosti rolled his head and looked away.

  “Let’s get out of here Mr Watson. How about that? You and me. This is a nice blanket, careful it doesn’t get dirty.”

  Mrs Hatfield placed a hand on Rosti’s forehead.

  “You’re a good temperature Mr Rosti, neither too hot nor cold.”

  He looked at her, terrified, seizing her arm tightly in one hand.

  “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.” Rosti paused, then forced a strange smile across his face which clung at the edges like a condemned man refusing to take the last steps up the scaffold.

  Leaving Watson with his boss, Mrs Hatfield went inside to look for anything that could be used as a stretcher. Watson did his best to keep Rosti calm.

  “You want to move on, Mr Rosti? I have a cousin in Boston who has a restaurant. We could work there. He might need a manager maybe. Hell, you could work anywhere. I might be…”

  Watson stopped, sensing a new stillness in Rosti. He searched his face and felt under his nose, detecting faint but regular breathes. Rosti, mercifully, had passed out.

  Mrs Hatfield returned and Watson turned to face her. Her face went as white as Rosti’s and Watson heard her quiet gasp.

  “He’s alive ma’am.”

  With some difficulty they worked an old ironing board – which had never been used and Watson was at a loss to explain its origin – under Rosti, cautious to support his head and neck and gentle with his leg despite his lack of consciousness. Rosti was surprisingly light and making the journey smoothly was not difficult, as long as it was painfully slow.

  Mrs Hatfield wondered what a nurse could do for Rosti beyond making a splint. She had made splints herself when family members went down whole and came up broken. She knew an unclean break when she saw one. Rosti would need a hospital. She gathered he was, as well as the café manager and station master, the chief mechanic of Paradise. Another would have to be brought in, one who did not share Rosti’s passion for the Rail Café and with it the continuing employment of Mr Watson. She did not know for certain how many alighted in Paradise, and suspected the café was Rosti’s labour of love, the shared hobby of two old men who, for reasons unknown, had little more than their memories and their friendship, and in that they had all the world. She imagined them in the long stretches between trains, Watson sitting on the long bench by the café door, Rosti pacing with his arms behind his back, talking, Rosti stopping now and then to watch in the direction of the next expected, Watson making coffee, the two of them eating lunch, eating dinner, wishing each other goodnight, bidding each other good morning, addressing one another as Mr Rosti and Mr Watson. They had watched the town wither and crumble around them. Rosti had stayed because someone had to, Watson had stayed out of loyalty to his friend.

  Mrs Hatfield did what she could to ensure Rosti’s comfort while Watson prepared instinctually prepared breakfast for two, without contemplating why it still made sense.

  She placed her hand on Rosti’s forehead. She felt the blood gently pulsing in the vein running down the middle and remembered she’d seen it bulge whenever he was agitated or enthused during conversation. She felt a strong conviction he would make a full recovery, and was just as certain the three of them would be aboard the next train out.

  * * *

  Robert was ashamed of his little place but wanted dearly to cook a meal for Anna. After her initial surprise at his visit with the cake, she had seemed comfortable with him; more comfortable than anyone in his hometown who he’d known for 24 years. In Kansas, he was born local and had grown up to become a foreigner.

  He looked around the tiny room, the sink and single electric hotplate… the table for one, the tiny window with its yellow blind and filthy glass, the solitary naked bulb hanging overhead. It was no way to live, and while Robert had only been there a short time – at an inflated rent – he knew others were on long-term leases and the thought made him shudder. He tried to imagine one or two years in the room, imagine this being the place he came home to, day after the day – his refuge from the machine for years on end. It made him sick. ‘I can’t bring her here’. But perhaps it was all academic, he thought. Could he bring her anywhere? He tried to stay calm, but it wasn’t easy. He’d been a materialist and as such thought himself a cynic for a long time in the context of his short life – so it had hit all the more hard. First things first, he thought – better to see her again before contemplating the dilemma of his inadequate dwelling. He looked out the window.

  “I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.” He said aloud.

  He watched the street – it was blue and cold without her in it, as it had been every other day but only now he noticed. It had been a long day at the school – almost relentless; the depth of theory he examined was exhilarating and exhausting, and the more he learned the more he realised how little he knew. Robert was nothing if not modest, and hungry for knowledge. But each hour in the school dragged him closer to the end of his time in the city, and the future – once so clear…

  Robert grabbed his coat from the bed, where he’d thrown it just moments earlier, and pulled it on. The room key still on the pocket, he burst out into the dank hall – where he walked right into Mrs Cottlebridge – the widow who had lived in the building, according to others, for as long as any of them could remember. She never paid rent – so it was assumed she owned her apartment. The old woman, barely five foot and frail, stumbled when Robert accidentally brushed her as he went by, but he quickly reached out and supported her so she would not fall.

  “Be careful young man, I am not as robust as I was during the war between the states.”

  He could not help but laugh.

  “How are you Mrs Cottlebridge?”

  “Oh I am very well young man. We met last week did we not? Was it Ryan?
Herbert?”

  “Robert ma’am – a combination of the two, and you can call me Bob.”

  Robert looked up and down the corridor and wondered what she was doing on his floor… She lived in one of the bigger first floor apartments – above the tobacconist and the newsagents who dominated the ground floor.

  “That’s it, that’s the one.” She looked troubled.

  “Are you well, ma’am? It must have been hard work coming up those stairs. I can barely do it myself after a long day.”

  “Robert, is it?” There was an awkward silence and she held on to her handbag tightly. She had thinning white hair in a tight bun, she dressed in once-fine clothes still impressive in their advanced years and was adorned with old and beautifully maintained earrings.

  “Yes ma’am. Would you like me to accompany you to your apartment? Have you just finished visiting on this floor?”

  “Why yes, yes,” she looked up and down the corridor. “Indeed I am – I was just visiting a friend. I would be delighted – I so rarely have an escort home.” She laughed, and Robert laughed with her though he was at that point overwhelmed by an intense sadness – not pity – but sadness. She took his arm and he barely felt her hand through his coat, and he walked at a slow pace towards the stairwell.

  “It has been frightfully cold today. I am looking forward to the spring.”