by Nancy Means Wright

Agatha Award winner Nancy Means Wright is the author of five adult mysteries (all published by St. Martin’s Press), a young adult novel, and two children’s mysteries. She has also written historical fiction and nonfiction. She brings her interests in history and mystery together here for the story of a widow and a hobo riding the rails, along with a coffin and a mongrel dog. A new Wright historical mystery novel, Midnight Fires, is due in April of 2010 from Perseverance Press.

Still, after an hour in the box-car, the hound kept up a growl, deep in the throat. They’d shoved the beast on at the last stop. Grace was wedged between two sacks in a corner; they hadn’t noticed her when they rammed open the door. When it shut she was plunged into darkness. Only gradually her senses returned: to the stench of mold and urine, the skittering of small creatures among the boxes—though mice shouldn’t frighten a farmer’s wife, should they? Her back ached from something sharp in one of the sacks. But if she shifted weight, the hound might crash through its bars and her scream would bring a railroad man.

Then what—whack him with Clyde’s gold-topped cane? And if they put her off the train, what would she tell the children? Who’d be with Clyde the long way to New York? No, she had to endure the moment. She dragged the softer sack over by her husband’s coffin; her weight molded it into a cushion. The dog barked and she held her breath; let it out slowly. “Good doggie,” she said.

At the last minute she’d sold her seat; Clyde had left more debts than she realized. She was shocked at the red ink. The banker, Ollie Runwell, was sober in a black suit, spotted tie—tomato soup, she thought. He said, Yes, Clyde had been there, wanting to borrow money. The banker refused—too much of a gamble in bad times. Anyway, farms weren’t selling, Runwell reminded her, not since the stock market crash. Though Clyde had an offer from a neighbor—didn’t Grace know that? (she didn’t). “But way below value.” He named a figure. She was horrified, but she’d have to accept, turn over most of the money to the children.

It was a two-day journey to Albany, New York; she’d stretch out on the coffin if she had to. It was quiet now, she seemed to have made peace with the dog. Nobody here but herself and the animals. And Clyde. As usual, she thought, almost smiling, he had nothing to say.

Well, he was a quiet man—a religious man. A loyal man, hardly glanced at other women. Hardly at her. The time she came over on the Campania, in steerage: the stink worse than this car, smells she couldn’t recognize, though bad cheese came to mind, dead rats, unwashed bodies. Her half-sister Robina dead of some influenza and Clyde writing home to Scotland for her—to help out with his children. The trauma of it for a seventeen-year-old who’d never even seen the city of Edinburgh! When he met her at the boat, he just grunted, swept up her box, strode on ahead to the lighter that took them to Ellis Island. She could smell the onions on him, the pipe tobacco, the garlic. Something stronger—whiskey. Train to Albany, a buggy ride worse than this lurching train to the Vermont farm. He never asked about her crossing, no.

“Mum sent on things for the young ones,” she’d told him anyway, needing to talk, her accent back then thick as pea soup. Mum sick over the death of Robina, she wanted to say, hardly caring about her youngest leaving. It was the day Clyde’s letter came that her mother brought out the copy of Scoonie Kirk Register. In spidery handwriting: “A daughter, Grace—illegitimate.” No further explanation—except a husband gone to Australia, no address. “And me thirty-three just!” her mother cried. Her freckled chin stuck up like the pitcher she kept snapdragons in, the upturned glass lip. “Don’t tell Clyde about—you know,” she warned. “If he wants to marry you, why—”

Grace was shocked: “Why, he’s an old man! He’s got five already. Five boys,” as though that made it the more impossible. “Well, that’s the point now, isn’t it?” her mother said. “He’s a farmer. No time for scullery work, eh?”

And so it happened. Hardly a word, as though it was taken for granted she’d come for the purpose of wedlock. They went to the town hall; it was unseemly to have a real wedding, he said, him with that raucous brood. Though that first night he just ran his hand over her trembly body, said, “G’night,” then flipped over on his side, nightshirt rumpled to his heavy thighs. She’d lain awake for hours, telling herself she’d grow to love him. But they never spoke of love.

Something ran over her foot and she squealed. The hound stuck its nose through the wire grate and growled. When she squinted at it in the half dark she saw the bulging belly. Female, she thought.

She got pregnant. Hardly knew what was happening to her, no one to ask—the midwife too occupied with her pie business for long visits. She wouldn’t go to town, didn’t want people to look—they might see through to her dubious beginnings.

She and Clyde slept apart after the pregnancy. “Six is enough to feed,” he allowed. But she had Jessie, a wee plump thing with a smattering of freckles, like herself. Yet small time to enjoy her. Those other five! The work of the farm—and boys never wanting to help. Inside, the mending, making the old over into new, scrubbing, cooking. Clyde ate meat four meals a day: she could hardly bear to hear him chew (twenty times a mouthful, his mum taught him that). Couple of whiskeys after dinner. And when she was almost in a routine—”Get packed,” he announced one night at supper: “I bought a farm in Indiana. We leave in a fortnight.”

She was stunned. He’d never asked if she wanted to go. But that was the way of marriage, her mother said in her next letter: “At least he’s there for you.” So she packed up and went.

The train was slowing down, she felt it in her knees. She moved back off the sack—something squirmed under her feet; she hit at it with Clyde’s cane. Light entered the rail car, a splatter of thin rain. Someone heaved on a large box; it struck a corner of Clyde’s coffin. The dog barked, cats howled—half human they sounded. Something in the box squealed, a pig maybe. “Jesus, the smell,” a man said; then mercifully, left and shut the door. Grace stumbled back by the coffin: “I’m sorry, Clyde, I’m sorry.”

He died on a Saturday night, in his bath. It was just before a neighbor knocked on the door with a pot of borscht. Lucky, actually, the neighbor came along, for Clyde was a big man, corpulent. He once prided himself on his lean frame, thick calves that walked him about the farm all day, only gave out when he turned sixty-eight and his muscles turned to dough. So he sat himself in his black leather chair and drank his toddies, and when the last child was gone—no one willing to take over the farm—left her to milk and pick stone and mend fence and bring him his meals.

None of the offspring could get back for a funeral: Brodie’s wife pregnant, John out of the country, Ian in a new job. Her Jessie in Maine with three now, and a husband who’d lost what little he had in the markets. Like the others, Jessie considered the East—western Vermont—”home.” Even Clyde, when they’d moved to Indiana, would talk about the Revolutionary battles fought back “home.” Hubbardton, Ticonderoga, Bennington—as if he’d fought them himself. He’d be buried in Vermont, he decreed, in a cemetery overlooking Lake Champlain.

Marge, her neighbor, helped lay him out on the three-quarter bed. The bed was never big enough; narrower still when Clyde put on weight. He got to be huge! While she shrank to bones from all the work. She hardly wanted to go to kirk, the way clothes hung on her, no money for new ones. “I’ll be taking him back,” she told the minister when he came to make his duty call. “The children sent money. I’ve got a home with any one of them, they all want me.” Though she knew that to be a lie. Even her own exhausted Jessie—one more mouth to feed could kill her.

“Well, isn’t that nice,” the reverend said. “Children should do for their old.” Old? She was only fifty-four, twenty years younger than Clyde. Clyde was the only man in her whole life she’d been intimate with—except—well, Jimmy, but him only in her fancies. In her thirties, she was then. She hardly thought of Jimmy now, she’d killed him in her heart, hadn’t she?

There was a terrible jolt. She was thrown off the sack; struck her spine on a metal box. The coffin slid forward, then back. The boxcar heaved, and halted. She sat paralyzed as the metal door grated open and someone jumped in. The hound protested. It was an adolescent boy. He stared at her, stunned. Then grinned and shoved the door behind. He went over to the dog’s cage and murmured to it. It quieted. “Didn’t expect a passenger,” he said. “Not in this death car. A coffin in it, I heard. You not superstitious, then?”

“No,” she said, sitting very still, knees together under the black skirt, nails digging into her lisle stockings. Though he looked harmless enough, smooth-chinned, raggedy-cut brown hair under the feed cap, almost pretty features. He was still smiling, watching her.

“Got on at Omaha,” he said. “First time I seen a lady aboard?”

It was a question. She had to reply. Cleared her throat and nothing came out. She finally tapped the coffin. “My husband,” she said stiffly. “So he wouldn’t have to travel alone.” She felt the stockings give under her nails. The train was chugging forward again. She could hardly see the boy now where he’d dropped back into a corner.

“Alone?” He sounded amused. “Too late for that, innit?”

“My children don’t think so.”

Her friend Marge had said why didn’t she cremate him, take him back in a jar—it was cheaper that way. But the boys wouldn’t allow it. They were churchgoing Presbyterians like their father (herself, she daydreamed through the long sermons about a Jesus she couldn’t put a voice to). So there was nothing for it but to take him back in one piece—in a freight car, it was all she could afford. Besides, the old rusted Ford would never make New York. She imagined Clyde in his coffin, complaining about her driving: “Foot stuck on the clutch,” he’d grunt, “you’ll destroy the engine.”

“How far you going, then?” the boy asked.

He wants the car to himself, she thought. So he can open the baggage—steal. Her heart lurched with the speeding-up train. She had two hundred dollars sealed inside the lining of her case, her only cash. She put a foot against the case to be sure it didn’t slide in his direction.

She could hear him humming, something high-pitched, tuneless. “Albany, New York. Ian will meet me—our son. To bury his father,” she said when the boy didn’t respond. She explained about the battlefields Clyde loved. She heard the boy chuckle. Was it so funny? “But the children are scattered all over. I’ve no one back in Vermont now.”

It was true. She’d not kept up with friends—all these years away. A fly buzzed past her ear and she waved it off. The jogging motion of the train, the darkness, the almost absurd proximity of the coffin, the boy’s quiet amusement, emboldened her. “Where are you headed?” she asked.

“Lansing Corners,” he answered at once as though he’d been waiting for the question. “Nobody’s heard of it. Gotta jump off at Elmira. My dad’s got a farm there. My mom died.” He stopped, and took a breath. Grace heard a small sound—weeping? The pig squealed.

“I’m sorry,” she said, putting a hand on the coffin. It was chill to the touch. Cold for early April and no heat in the car. She shivered. “Is that why you’re going home?”

“Four months ago. I didn’t know. Just got the letter, general delivery. I ran off, you see.”

“Oh.” It was none of her business to ask why. But she’d shared with him, hadn’t she? It might help him to talk. “Really?” she said again, to encourage him. Talking would get her mind off Clyde, the thought of living with Ian, maybe, and his socialite wife, who never looked at her when she spoke.

“I never wrote home. Scared, I guess. Felt bad, you might say. But I hated that farm. I had no brothers. I had all the barn work. Didn’t matter I was a girl.”

“Girl?” Grace squinted at him. “Oh, but I thought you were—”

“Boy? Well, I try. Riding the rails can be tough for a girl. Had a close one yesterday. Fellow caught on when I had to pee. Hopped out after me when the train made a stop—saw me squatting. Then he—well, jeez, I ran!” She laughed. “Didn’t get back on that car, I tell you. Hung around a whole day for this one.”

Grace couldn’t imagine it. Riding boxcars all the way from Nebraska? A young girl? The adventure, the fright of it! She felt a thrill in her spine. Then stiffened her back. “I came a long way, too,” she said, “when I was seventeen,” and told about the journey. “But a boxcar, that’s harder still. I didn’t think out all the problems.” In fact she’d never thought of a woman riding a boxcar. Though she was. Illegally, too! Grace Brown Wallace, who’d never done an illegal act in her life. Except being conceived. She smiled at the irony. (Often wondered who her father was, how it happened—her mother never said.)

Jimmy now. Why did his face come floating into her mind? Though Jimmy wasn’t the one to leave; it was Clyde sent him away. Once he came on her and Jimmy in the barn, talking. Jimmy’d worked on farms all over, he was full of stories, loved to talk. He’d even get her telling about her girlhood in Scotland. He’d listen, he wanted to hear! At twenty-eight he was younger than she, but did it matter? There was something between them, they both felt it. But nothing happened—though it might have if Clyde hadn’t sent him packing. But Jimmy came back, time and again, in her dreams. Dreams that woke her up, hugging herself. Touching secret places.

“So you’re a farmer, huh?” the girl said.

A farmer? She hadn’t thought. Well, she was, wasn’t she? She picked stone, swept the mangers, plowed, seeded corn, hayed. “Yes,” she said, and louder, “aye, yes. A farmer.”

“Big place? I seen some gigantic ones yesterday. Snuck corn out of a guy’s field. I mean, I gotta eat, right?”

Grace opened her bag. “I’ve more than I need. Apple?”

“Sure, sling it over. I’m not proud.” The girl squatted on the coffin and crunched into the apple, made a quick cider of it. Grace wanted to remind the girl that she was sitting on her husband! Then swallowed the words. How could Clyde mind? Though alive he’d occupy one whole end of the table. He liked elbow room, as if he was king of something.

She remembered the question. “Not so big, but big enough. I sold it. Lost money, but what can you do these days? I’ll miss it.”

And she would. She thought of how the earth smelled in spring, just after you plowed. It made her downright giddy sometimes. Once Clyde caught her singing in the fields—a Sunday, it was. Presbyterians didn’t sing mundane songs on Sundays. That was back in Jimmy’s time, the singing.

“Your kids tell you everything they want you to do? I wouldn’t dare tell my mom. But she’s gone. She and Dad argued a lot. Maybe that’s why I left. But he’s alone now.”

Grace thought over the question. Ever since they were children, Ian especially, silencing her with a look when she contradicted Clyde—not that she did often. But she was used to silence, wasn’t she? At church socials, though, he’d talk, he was the kirk elder. Afterward her neck ached from squinting sideways at him while he ground out his slow story—about crops or dust storms or the dropping price of milk. He made her think of a turtle making its lumbering way to the pond. Sometimes she just wanted to shrink down into her chair and disappear.

They were quiet for a bit; the girl stretched out on Clyde’s coffin. “Perfect size,” she said, a tall girl, one could tell. Grace might have nodded off herself, her head against a sack of grain. But the train hooted, cars rammed together as the engine slowed; the train ground to a stop. The girl sat up.

“Pee time,” she said. “All that brook water. Anyway, good idea to get off ‘case they come in for a bag or something. Or pick up doggie, here.” She stuck a finger through the cage and Grace drew in a breath. “Doggie’s a pushover,” the girl said. Grace watched it lick the girl’s palm with a slow, sticky, wet tongue. The girl sprang up. “Coming?”

“What?”

“To pee.” She shoved open the boxcar door an inch. “We’re near a station, but not too near. There’s woods out there.”

There was that fullness in her stomach: Grace needed to go, she hadn’t realized. She was ready to burst, in fact. Why, it had been hours! She pulled out Clyde’s watch; she’d brought it for Jessie, a keepsake, but couldn’t see the hands. Then realized it had stopped ticking.

“If it starts without us?” She was suddenly breathless. Ian’s stern face flashed into her eyes.

“Aw, it won’t,” the girl promised. “We won’t go far. C’mon.” She opened the door wide enough to push through, and yanked Grace behind her. Broke into a run toward a clump of bushes. Grace thought she’d wet herself, getting there. For no reason at all she got laughing. A respectable farm woman: riding a boxcar, peeing behind a bush? The girl was already squatting when she arrived, her bottom a pale round moon. “Hope s’not poison ivy,” the girl said, grabbing a large leaf. “I got it once, bad, peeing in the dark. Jeez! I was a burning bush.”

“It’s not,” said Grace, who poisoned the ivy around the farmhouse each spring when the children were small. She felt the waste flow out of her body, slow at first, then thick and fast, the relief of it. Her bowels were clogged, but she couldn’t do anything. She recalled how constipated she was the long ten days over from Scotland; then she broke wind when she met Clyde. He’d turned his face away.

She got laughing again.

“What’s so funny?”

“I don’t know. All this.” She waved an arm. “If Clyde could see me now.”

The girl laughed, too, a deep, melodious laugh. “You’re a sport.” She sprang up, pulled herself together. “Let’s go.”

But Grace was laughing too hard. Eyes and nose running. Wiped herself with the first leaf that came to hand, too shady to see; prayed that one wasn’t poison. Giggled at the thought. Mopped her nose with the palm of her hand.

“Uh-oh. Run, lady! Listen!”

The girl was lurching up the bank toward the slow-moving train. “Oh my God,” Grace gasped, the laughing stifled now, “I’ll never make it.”

She was almost sick with running. Clyde’s coffin rushing forward, without her. The girl was already at the car, pulling open the door, racing alongside, waving at Grace.

She stopped, a terrible stitch in her side; an ache in her groin. “I—can’t.”

The girl hung there, like a leaf stuck in a crack, moving with the car that was picking up speed. The woods looked dim and lonely beyond the train, which resembled a long dark snake. Far to the right was a squat wooden building. Grace turned toward it, giving up.

The girl dropped off; rolled down the bank and came running at her. “We’re not far from Lansing Corners. This here’s Corning. Can’t be more’n a day’s walk.”

Grace felt a rush of panic. “We could get a taxi and pick up the train at the next station. I can’t leave him—Clyde—”

“He never left you alone?” the girl said, coming close, her cheeks rosy with running. Her palms were blood-red where she’d hung onto the moving car.

“He was usually around,” Grace said. Then stopped to think. He might have been a hemisphere away for all they said to each other. “Well, maybe not always. I don’t know. But I have to—”

“Have to what?” the girl said, looking at her.

The girl’s eyes were green, grass-green, she hadn’t noticed before. She was too out of breath to think. The station was boarded up, its loudspeaker rusted. “You shouldn’t have waited for me,” Grace said. “You’d be home by now.”

“Then what would you do?” the girl said.

Grace looked down at her muddy shoes, her skirt ripped at the hem from running through briars. She’d let herself go, as her mother would say (her mum who put on a fresh shirtwaist every day though there was no one to see)—and sighed. “Ian’s meeting me. In Albany.”

“He’s the one tells you what to do?”

“One of them.” She straightened her stockings, though it did little good. Something was bursting in her chest, but whether it was a giggle or tears she didn’t know. “I always embarrassed him—thin as a stick. Saying the wrong thing. Homemade clothes all out of style.”

“So forget Ian,” the girl said. “Meet Claire.” She stuck out a hand. “Claire Whynoweth. Lately of Nebraska.”

“Grace Wallace. Lately of Indiana.” Now the sound came out of her chest, a blubbery laugh. “But who’s to prove it? I left my case in that car. My husband. My two hundred dollars.” She pulled a breath up out of her bones. She was swept away with the magnitude of what she’d done.

“Sit up a minute, Clyde,” she’d said, “hold on to the tub sides, I’ll be right back—it’s Marge at the door.”

“That one again? Don’t stand and gab like you always do,” he said, and reached for his toddy.

It was what she wanted—needed. A chat with a neighbor. Marge was a bit of a gossip, you had to watch what you said. But she’d listen. She had “an hour to spare, Joel off with his poker buddies. Lord—this drought never going to end?” She edged an elbow through the kitchen door. “My arm’s numb from lugging water. Though you got it worse’n me, your husband can’t do for himself.”

“Gained too much weight,” Grace said, and Marge hoisted an imaginary bottle—she knew. She giggled, and got Grace going, too.

Upstairs, Clyde was calling, but Grace couldn’t stop laughing. She poured Marge a glass of wine, one for herself—a special occasion. They talked about poor Jean Doane who broke her hip slopping the pigs, and her with a ninety-three-year-old mother who couldn’t even feed herself. It was a relief almost, Grace thought, someone worse off than her—at least Clyde could get to the refrigerator for his toddy. But in the next breath, guilt she had no time to help Jean—though she could send over a pie by Marge. Then guilt for leaving Clyde in the tub, and him yelling for her again. “Grace! Get up here! Now!”

And Marge, who was a relaxed Catholic, telling about her latest “confession” to the local priest. Grace wanted to hear the end of Marge’s story. She’d send Marge home with a pie for Jean. And Clyde still hollering.

“Don’t go, Marge. I’ll be back.”

She found Clyde in the clawfoot tub, still complaining, water up to his chin. The gold-topped cane in with him—he’d have tried to get out himself. “Help me out o’ here, woman. Now, I said. Send that Popish female home. Y’hear me? I said now. Now!” He held up his massive arms.

“Grace, I’ll be on my way,” Marge called up. “I’ll show myself out.”

Grace fished out the cane and looked down at him: the big Wallace nose, the pale naked body with hardly any hair at all, the shriveled-up privates. The second (or third) glass of whiskey on the tub rim. The pale watery blue eyes that never really saw her, had no idea who she was.

“Marge,” she called back. “A pie for Jean—it’s in the freezer. No, wait! I’ll come down.”

“Bitch!” He picked up the glass—heaved it at her—it struck the sink and shattered, bits of glass ricocheting back. “Do as I say, goddamn you!”

She didn’t answer, couldn’t—no words for it. Just shoved him back, down, into the water—glass splinter in her eye, she was seeing red. Ran crazy-legged, half blind, down the steps to give Marge the pie. But Marge already gone.

Had to call Marge back an hour later when she’d stopped shaking, when she’d drunk a second glass of wine (even then thinking, what would the boys say to that?). “Help me, Marge, help me get Clyde out of the tub....”

She told Marge he must’ve fallen asleep. But Marge knew—the way her eyebrow shot up at the word “asleep.” Marge, her friend—who could never keep a secret for long.

“Blackberries!” The girl began grabbing handfuls. “We’ll follow the tracks. I know the way from Elmira. It’s just south of here. Dad’ll be glad to see you, honest he will. You won’t need money. He’s dying for company, said so. You know how to milk?”

“I guess,” Grace said, looking at her hands. They were coarse-looking, purplish veins. But strong. Strong enough to hold down a two-hundred-fifty-pound man. Underwater. Seemed like a dream now—nightmare. Like something she’d read that someone else did—never her.

But it was.

“Well, there’s some cows over there, in that field. I’m thirsty as heck. A good squirt, that’s all I need. I never learned. Poor Mom. I guess she had to do it all.”

“Now?” At least Grace had on sturdy shoes, shoes a farmer ought to wear. It was warm enough, she’d throw out the stockings—they wouldn’t take another mending. But the shoes. Good for tramping fields.

Already she felt her chest and throat full, the way it got with Jimmy’s stories—the time he took the funeral wreath off a neighbor’s door and presented it to his ma for her birthday. The time he was chased by a swarm of bees and dove into a pond and came up mud—she’d laughed till she doubled over. The time Jimmy took her to see the five kittens the barn tabby birthed in the hay—his and her shoulders touching as they stood close, watching, listening to the sucking, hardly breathing.

“Look!” It was Claire this time, grinning, pointing up at the sky.

Canada geese. Grace heard them before she saw them: the thrilling double-syllabled ha-ronk. Over two dozen, in that deep-throated V, flying low over the cornfield....

Ian will meet the train, she thought. He’ll find the coffin, the gold cane he covets. He’ll spend the two hundred dollars on a memorial for his father. He won’t miss his stepmother.

Later she would contact her daughter, and tell her what really happened. Jessie would know what to do.

For now it was like herself up there, flying along with the geese as they hollered south on their wide-spread wings.