The Winslow Tunnel
by John M. Floyd
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
part 3
How exactly had it happened? Logistically speaking, that is. Had I just appeared here, from nowhere, during the train’s passage through the tunnel? At first I hadn’t thought so. My modern-day attire would certainly have been noticed by the other passengers. Now, however — now that I realized my elderly seatmate had been blind the whole time and, since she’d been shielding me from view anyway, I realized it probably had happened that way. I must have appeared instantly, out of thin air. One minute my seat was empty, the next minute I was here. Presto. Had I also vanished, I wondered, from my seat on the train with my folks, to come here?
For whatever reason, I was here now, like it or not. And now that Mrs. Derryberry had gone, my foreign presence was exposed to anyone who cared to look in my direction. Even as that thought occurred to me, a middle-aged farmer in the seat across the aisle began staring at my colorful outfit. I was trying to make myself smaller when I happened to look up into the eyes of the conductor.
He rose from his seat in front of the farmer and crossed to the row ahead of me, where until twenty minutes ago my mother and sister had been sitting. That recollection was enough to bring tears to my eyes. I was beginning, slowly but surely, to realize the gravity of my situation.
“Hello, young man,” my dad’s great-grandfather said to me.
I just looked at him. My only conscious thought was that this, then, was final proof that this was no dream. I had actually been spoken to, aloud.
He studied me a moment. “Could I see your ticket, son?”
I blinked. My ticket? I remembered vaguely, from another lifetime in another world, my dad handing out the little printed rectangles of cardboard and telling us to keep them safe in our pockets in case they were requested. The fact that it was now a hundred years earlier than the date of purchase was something none of us had planned on.
I pulled the ticket from my jeans pocket and held it out for inspection.
The change in the conductor’s face would have been comical under other circumstances. He examined the ticket, frowned, and held it closer to his spectacles. Then he raised his eyes to look at me. “Where’d you get this?”
I hesitated, then said truthfully, “The Delores station.”
He waited a long time before speaking again. When he did, his voice was firm but not unkind. “Someone’s played a joke on you, my boy. This ticket’s a fake. The company address is right, but unless I’m crazy there’s no such thing as the Ozark & Arkansas Railroad Company.”
“Not yet, anyway,” I said.
“What?”
I just shook my head. What was there to say?
He gave me back the ticket and regarded me a moment.
“Where you from, son?”
“Rogers,” I said, voicing a name I remembered from the Arkansas roadmap. I decided the truth — Nashville — might not be such a good idea. Rogers was local.
“And where are you going?”
“Van Buren. With my fo—” I paused. “To meet my folks.”
He nodded toward the ticket in my hand. “Your folks get that for you?”
“Yessir,” I said, then remembered, too late, telling him I had gotten it in Delores. At any rate, he didn’t seem inclined to press the issue. He just kept looking at me. “What’s your name, young man?”
“Timothy Franklin.” I was glad to be answering something honestly for a change.
He raised his eyebrows. “My daughter’s engaged to a Franklin fellow. He’s from Harmon, though, if I remember right.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. My head was beginning to hurt. It didn’t take a genius to realize he was talking about my dad’s grandfather.
“My name’s Burnside, myself.”
I almost said “I know,” but stopped just in time. I nodded dumbly. “Pleased to meet you.”
Both of us were quiet a moment. At last he sighed and rose to his feet, still watching me. In his blue eyes I saw a mixture of feelings. Curiosity, mostly, but something else, too. When he spoke next, his voice held a note of warmth that hadn’t been there earlier.
“You been on a train before, Timothy Franklin?”
“No, sir.”
“Come over here,” he said.
I spent the next hour sitting beside him in the conductor’s reserved seat, looking out the window with him as his finger pointed out a world I’d never seen before. Like Thomas Hardy had done earlier that same day, this stern but kind man told me a hundred fascinating tales about the countryside and the railroad that passed through it. The difference was, these stories were for me alone, and geared to the level of a ten-year-old boy who wanted to learn everything about everything.
He told me how an engine works, and what a cowcatcher is, and how a fresh snowfall paints the rocky slopes beside the track, and what it feels like to sit on the back platform of a caboose watching the rain blow out and away from you as the train slices at full speed through a thunderstorm.
Together we looked down off hundred-foot high trestles and out over deep vistas and along foaming blue-white mountain streams while the wheels played their strange rattling music on the rails. At one point he showed me the old route taken by the St. Louis-to-California Butterfield Stage Line, where women passengers were often warned to cover their eyes on some of the steeper roads.
When there was nothing particularly interesting about the landscape, he told me about his days of driving spikes and his travels up north after the war, and his dreams of owning a home on one of the taller mountains.
He told me also of dozens of different rules of the railroad, like the special rhythm of the whistle when approaching a crossing: two longs, one short, one long. “That rule’ll never change,” he said. “It’ll be the same a hundred years from now.” When I looked up at him sharply, he didn’t appear to notice.
He also talked of colorful characters like Judge Isaac Parker and Butch Cassidy and Owen Langtree and John Wesley Hardin and a dozen more topics he knew would interest a young boy. He even mentioned the fact that odd things had been known to happen back down the track a ways, around the town of Winslow. Something about an Osage burial ground, and lights in the sky, and sightings of Civil War soldiers camped in the valleys years after the war ended. Once more he ignored my questioning glances, but I think he sensed my concern, and the eerie feeling that broke my skin out in gooseflesh as we sat there together on that swaying brown seat in the coach.
I think he also, though there was no way he could have known, sensed the relationship between us. Now and then I saw a peculiar expression on his face, and every time I saw it I was reminded of a similar look I’d seen on the face of my father last night, when we’d entered the rest stop on the interstate, just before he strolled over and picked up the brochure for the train ride. As if somehow, without really knowing, he knew.
* * *
When we finally pulled into the Van Buren station, I found I didn’t want to leave this man. The feeling grew stronger when the train actually stopped and people started getting off. My head had cleared a bit by then, and I remembered the seriousness of my predicament. I had nowhere to go if I left him.
“I think this is your stop,” he said, watching me.
“I can’t get off,” I murmured.
“Why not?”
I looked up into his eyes. My own were beginning to fill with tears. “I can’t leave. I don’t know where my folks are.”
He studied me a moment.
“Timothy Franklin,” he said quietly, “this has been a happy time for me. Meeting you was... special.” He paused, and I could see the deep concern on his face. “This sounds silly, but I think you were somehow... sent to me today. I think also — no, it’s stronger than that: I know — that you have to leave me now. I don’t know why, but I know you must.”
The train, though still wheezing like a winded fighter, was motionless now. Passengers were filing past our seats and down the steps to the wooden platform of the station. Through the open window I could see a row of iron-wheeled loading carts lined up like parked cars against the side of the building. Bulging sacks of northbound mail were being hauled out of the station and tossed on board.
“But you don’t understand,” I pleaded. “I can’t—”
“You must,” he said, and then he did a strange thing. He pulled me to him and hugged me tight. I could feel his whiskers on my forehead, could smell his cologne. I hugged him back, and held on.
After a long moment we separated, and he smiled at me one last time. Though I wasn’t sure, I thought I saw the sparkle of a tear in his eye.
And then, so quickly I could do nothing to stop him, he turned and marched down the aisle and out the back end of the coach.
I stood there a minute, my head spinning. At last, as if in a dream, I turned toward the doorway at the front of the car, not because it was what I wanted to do but because there seemed to be no other choice. It was almost noon. In a short while, Cecil Burnside had said, the train would take on freight and another set of passengers and head back north again. Though I had no idea what awaited me here at the Van Buren station, I felt this was where I had to go.
Then I saw the mail bags. For their trip north they’d been stuffed into a corner of the forward compartment, where only a few hours ago I had heaped my plate with goodies from a buffet table. There was no table in there now, buffet or otherwise. Just two brown canvas sacks filled to the brim and loosely bound with lengths of heavy twine. And just above the bags, on a waist-high shelf near the outside door, was a shallow box of supplies. Pencils, paper, string, ink, a bottle of glue.
I knew, without even thinking twice, what I had to do. I took a blank sheet of paper from the box, spread it flat on the shelf, and grabbed a pencil. In a hurried but careful hand I wrote:
To Mr. Cecil Burnside:On the afternoon of July 4, 1910, Owen Langtree and his men will try to rob this train. The tracks will be blocked near the White River bridge.
This is not a joke — You have been warned.
A Friend
Breathing hard, I read over what I’d written. I realized it was a poor effort. My warning, if taken seriously at all, would be forgotten long before it would make any difference. But at least it was something.
I folded the paper once, pulled open the mouth of one of the mail bags, and stuffed the message inside with the other letters.
And then two things happened, almost at the same time. First, a tall black man in work clothes stomped in carrying a bucket and broom; second, I heard a BANG somewhere in the distance, and the muted sounds of cheering. I jumped, and the workman stopped and grinned at me. “Don’t be scared, little buddy,” he said. “That’s been going on all morning.”
“But... what was it?” As I uttered the words, I heard another explosion, louder than the first.
“Just folks getting an early start, is all. Where’d you find them clothes?”
I frowned. “An early start? For what?”
“For the celebration.” He gave me a long look. “It’s Independence Day. You know, the Fourth of July?”
It took a minute for that to sink in. When it did, I took a step back and looked at the calendar, pinned to the bulkhead wall. “But it’s May,” I said.
The black man reached past me and tapped the calendar with an accusing finger. “Dunno why they don’t throw this out. Guess they keep it ’cause of the pretty picture. Dern thing’s two years old.”
The words, at first, didn’t register. Neither did the connection.
1908? Plus two years?
The answer hit me so hard I felt my knees buckle. My heart froze in my chest. This was the day.
“You okay, little podner?” the black man said. “You don’t look so hot.”
Even as I tried to calm myself, to formulate what I would do next, I felt the workman’s strong hands helping me, steadying me, guiding me out the doorway and toward the steps.
“No!” I shouted. “I’ve got to warn him—”
“Come here, little man. Just two more steps down. We get you a drinka water, you’ll be good as new.”
“Wait!” I was struggling now, trying to pull loose from his grasp. “Grandfatherrrrrrrr,” I yelled, as loud as I could...
* * *
Copyright © 2018 by John M. Floyd
