The Train

He woke at four, because he always would.

He lay in the dark in the front room with the window open and the lake under the floor, slapping at the posts, and listened for his father getting up. It was the sound he had woken to every morning of his life: the bed in the next room creaking, the feet on the boards, the door, the steps down under the gallery, the lantern being lit at the end of the wharf.

His father got up. The bed creaked. The feet on the boards. The door.

He did not go down the steps. Lucien heard him stop on the gallery, at the top of them, and stand there. For a long time. And then come back in, and go through to the kitchen at the back, over the trap in the floor, and sit down at the table.

Lucien got up and went out on the gallery.

The lake was black. The camps were dark, both rows, except the Robichaux’, where somebody was going out; he heard their oars, and saw their lantern go out of the bayou mouth past the end of the last camp, small and yellow on the black water. At the end of their own wharf, on the post, there was no lantern. Below the gallery, where the Marie-Ange had been tied every night of his life, there was nothing. The water. The post with the ring on it. Up the shore at the end of the camps, on the shell beach above the weed line, a shape under a canvas, very still, leaning a little on its blocks.

He stood on the gallery and looked at it until it was light enough to see the knots on the canvas.

---

His grandmother gave him the blue paper.

She gave it him at the kitchen table at six, after the coffee, which his father had made, black, in the old pot, without saying anything, and which the three of them drank at the table over the trap in the floor with the light coming up grey through the window and the gulls starting outside. She had it in her lap. When she had finished her coffee she put it on the table and pushed it across to him with her old bent hands.

A packet. The blue paper she had kept in the drawer for forty years for letters, the good paper, from a shop on Royal Street that had closed in 1890, and the envelopes that went with it, and a pen with a steel nib in a wooden holder, and a little stoppered bottle of ink, wrapped in a handkerchief so it would not break.

“Tu vas écrire,” said his grandmother. You will write.

“Oui, Mémère.”

“En français.”

“Oui, Mémère.”

“Pas le français de l’école. Le nôtre. Comme tu parles.”

Not the French of the school. Ours. The way you talk.

He looked at her. She was looking at him with her old black eyes in her old brown face under the white cap, very steady.

“Comme ça, quand Octave l’entend, il saura que c’est toi.”

That way, when Octave hears it, he’ll know it’s you.

He put the packet in his bag. His father, across the table, looked at his coffee and did not say anything.

---

The widow Fontenot was on her gallery at seven when they went along the planks.

She was standing at the top of her steps in her black, with the yellow dog beside her, facing the shore and the road and the streetcar line, the way the dog had faced it all winter; and when Lucien and his father came along the planks from the fourth camp, Lucien with his bag on his shoulder and his father in his old canvas coat, without the brass tag, she turned and looked at them.

She did not give him anything. He had thought she might. Hippolyte’s rosary, or his missal, or something; the women of the lake shore gave the men who went something, the way they had given the men of the First Louisiane medals of the Virgin at the Cabildo in June to sew into their caps. She did not. She stood at the top of her steps and looked at him.

Then she said, in French, very clearly, the way she had said it in the Opera House:

“N’oublie pas ce que tu parles.”

Don’t forget what you speak.

He did not know what to answer. He nodded. She looked at him a moment longer, and then she looked at his father, and something passed between the widow Fontenot and his father that Lucien did not see the whole of, a look between two people on the lake shore who had both put somebody on a train; and then she turned back to face the road, and the dog lay down at her feet.

---

The station was not the station of July.

There was no band. There were no colours. There were no crowds in the street with flags and handkerchiefs and no men on the iron balconies of the Quarter shouting. There was the station yard on a grey Monday morning in May with a light rain, and men in it, a few hundred, in their own clothes, with bags, and the people who had come with them, mothers and wives and fathers, standing close, not talking much, under umbrellas; and a table under the canopy of the platform with two clerks at it and a sergeant behind them and a list.

They called the names in alphabetical order. The sergeant called them and the clerks found them and gave each man a card, and the man took it and looked at it and went to the train.

The cards said where you were going. Lucien saw that from the queue, watching the men ahead of him take theirs and look at them. Not the regiment. Not yet. The camp. And the camps were everywhere. Iowa, said one man, a big stevedore from the river, out loud, holding his card, as if he did not know what it meant. Ohio, said the boy behind him. Montana. Georgia. Michigan. The men of Orleans parish, called in alphabetical order, were being sent to nine camps in nine polities, two or three to each, and no two brothers and no two cousins and no two men from the same street to the same one, and they stood on the platform with their cards in their hands and looked at each other and understood it.

The Tregre cousin, whose number had been on the first page in the first column, was ahead of him. He took his card and looked at it and said, Michigan, and looked round at Lucien, and Lucien said, Michigan’s cold, and the Tregre cousin said, everywhere’s cold except here, and went to the train.

---

“Prudhomme.”

He went to the table. The clerk ran his finger down the list, found him, and wrote on a card, and gave it to him.

PRUDHOMME, L. O. Report: Camp Smoky Hill, Kansas.

He looked at it.

“Kansas?” he said.

The clerk looked up. He was the young man with spectacles from the parish office on Esplanade, who had written none twice on his registration card. He looked at Lucien, and at the card, and he said, in French, very kindly, as if he were telling a child where the sea was:

“C’est au milieu. Le milieu de tout. Pas d’eau.”

It’s in the middle. The middle of everything. No water.

---

His father had taken the morning off from the river.

He had never taken a morning off from anything. He had gone out on the lake every morning of his life except Sundays and storms and the morning of his wife’s funeral, and he had gone to the river wharves every morning for three weeks at five in the morning on the first streetcar with his lunch in a tin. He had not gone this morning. He had not said he would not go. He had sat at the kitchen table at four in the morning and not gone, and made the coffee, and put on his canvas coat, and walked along the planks with Lucien to the streetcar, and stood beside him in the streetcar all the way in without saying anything, and stood beside him in the station yard in the rain.

He stood on the platform now, by the train, in his old canvas coat with the sleeves rolled, with his hat on, with the rain on it, among the mothers and the wives.

Lucien got into the car. He found a seat by the window, the way Achille had in July, and let the window down on its leather strap, the way Achille had, and leaned out.

His father was on the platform under the window.

He did not say anything. He stood under the window with his hands at his sides and looked up at Lucien. His long brown face, cut into lines by forty years of sun off water. His pale grey eyes, that looked at you as if you were a long way off across the lake. The rain on his hat.

All along the train men were leaning out of the windows and their people were standing below them, and talking, and crying, and holding hands up to be held. His father did not hold his hand up. He stood.

The train jerked. All along the platform the cars banged together, one after another.

And his father stepped forward, one step, to the side of the car, under the window, and put his hand up, flat, on the side of the car. Not to Lucien. On the car. On the painted wood, under the window, the way he put his hand on the gunwale of the Marie-Ange at the end of the wharf at four in the morning; and he bent his head towards the car, a little, the way he bent over the gunwale; and he said, very low, in French, so low that Lucien, leaning out of the window above him, only just heard it over the train:

“Allons, mon beau. Allons, asteur.”

Come on, my beauty. Come on, now.

---

The train moved.

His father did not walk beside it. He did not run. He took his hand off the side of the car and stood on the platform where he was, in his canvas coat, in the rain, with his hand at his side, and the car went past him, and the window went past him, and Lucien leaned out of the window and looked back at him, standing on the platform among the mothers and the wives, getting smaller, very still, a man in a canvas coat with his hat on, not waving, with the rain on his hat, the way he had sat in the Marie-Ange a quarter of a mile out on the lake on the Sunday after the prince was killed, for two hours, without a sail.

Then the platform ended, and the train went out of the station, and the city went past, the backs of the houses and the yards and the washing and the levee and the river, wide and brown and fast in the rain, and the ships on it, grey, with numbers instead of names, three deep at the wharves where his father would be tomorrow at five in the morning with a hook and a brass tag on a string.

He sat down.

The man across from him was a stevedore from the river, with Iowa on his card, crying without any noise, with his face turned to the window. Lucien did not look at him. He took the blue paper out of his bag and looked at it, the good paper from the shop on Royal Street that had closed in 1890, and the pen with the steel nib, and the ink in its handkerchief.

He did not write anything. Not yet.

He sat with the packet on his knees and looked out of the window at the river going past, and then the cane fields, and then the swamp, cypress and water and moss, and then he could not see the river any more, and the train went north.