A Train through Time. Elizabeth Farnsworth
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Copyright © 2017 by Elizabeth Farnsworth
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-61902-601-8
Cover design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc.
Interior design by Megan Jones Design
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Printed in the United States of America
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
For my husband, Charles Farnsworth, and our family
Jenny and Chris Fellows
Colter, Monique and Heath
Sam Farnsworth and Charlotte Hamilton
Gilbert, Daisy and Thomas
What is a self when riding along
clackety-clack, in the rain—?
(Grieving intensity, it is a fire egg . . .
A wishbone cave in a book on the history of flame.)
—From Brenda Hillman’s
“A Halting Probability, on a Train”
(From Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire)
PART I
Several years ago, at Skywalker Ranch in northern California, the child I used to be appeared out of nowhere and asked a haunting question that I couldn’t answer and can’t forget.
It happened in the Technical Building among old movie posters and other treasures from George Lucas’s collection. I was overseeing the audio mix of a documentary film I had codirected. We had already labored for three ten-hour days, and I was tired and worried that we’d miss the deadline for the San Francisco Film Festival. Editor Blair Gershkow and sound mixer Pete Horner were making most of the decisions. I didn’t trust my judgment anymore.
Pete cleaned up the audio of an exhumation on a farm in southern Chile. I heard grains of dirt shaken through a sieve. On screen, Judge Juan Guzmán, the subject of the film, watched as a forensic anthropologist looked for pieces of bone and other evidence of violent murder thirty years earlier.
She picked something small and dirty out of the sieve and exclaimed, “Mira! Look! It’s part of a cheekbone.”
Guzmán said, “Could you pass it to me?”
“It’s the lower part of the bone.”
“So the cranium must be here?”
“Yes, these are human remains.”
The judge held the bone gently in his hand. In 1973 he had toasted General Augusto Pinochet’s bloody coup with champagne. Now he was investigating Pinochet’s crimes.
A door opened nearby, and I heard laughter. They were mixing a comedy.
Lucky them.
Pete replayed the exhumation scene over and over, sweetening the sound.
I bolted from the dark room and ran down the stairs, past a poster for Paths of Glory, to a large atrium where a copper-colored man stood among ficus and ferns. I had seen him many times before and knew who he was, but now he stood in a pool of radiance streaming from the skylight above, which caught my eye. I stopped to look at him more closely.
He was about three feet tall and had a fat belly, big mustache, and eyes the color of emeralds. He was Tik-tok, Dorothy Gale’s mechanical friend from Walter Murch’s 1985 film, Return to Oz.
I heard the voice of Judge Guzmán: “So the cranium is here?” I must have left the mixing room door open.
Stepping over a protective barrier and brushing plants aside, I kneeled in front of Tik-tok and hugged him. Then, time did something I can’t explain. I felt a jolt, like electricity, and saw myself as the girl who had loved the Oz books half a century before.
That girl asked, “What sent you on a path through death and destruction?”
Minutes passed. Memories flashed through my mind like film in a projector.
A green snake, thin as a pencil, rising from an altar in Cambodia.
A plain wooden file drawer with 3 x 5 cards for each of the desaparecidos in Chile. Randomly, I take out a card and read the name—Jorge Müller, a friend.
A man on a bridge across the Euphrates, haloed by the setting sun.
We finished the mix at Skywalker Ranch, and The Judge and the General screened successfully in festivals and on public television. After that, still haunted by the child’s question, I began to fit memories together, like bones from an exhumation.
l
Topeka—Winter 1953
I woke up in the dark that morning as the whooshing sound drew near and prayed that whatever it was would stay outside.
I had seen it once—a dark shape hovering above the bed, bellowing—whooooshhh whooooshhh. When I told Mother, she called it the “monkey with a motor on its tail.”
“Nothing to fear,” she said.
I tried to call for help, but fright stole my voice away.
Suddenly—the ring of an alarm clock, and I was saved, at least on this morning. My father came in the room. “It’s time, Elizabeth. Today’s the day.”
I dressed in new blue jeans, grabbed my overnight bag and teddy bear, and waited at the top of the stairs. I had recently turned nine. My sister, Marcia, who was fifteen, and our dog, Cindy, had gone to an aunt’s house, where they would stay while my father and I were away.
I waited for several minutes before looking into my parents’ bedroom to see why Daddy hadn’t come. He stood in front of Mother’s dresser, staring at her hand mirror as if he’d never seen it before. Then he packed it under a sweater in his suitcase and turned and saw me waiting.
I could tell he didn’t want to leave. I couldn’t wait to go.
Outside, an icy wind almost knocked me down. My grandfather had arrived early—a familiar trait in our railroad family—to take us to the station. We drove across the flatness of Topeka, weaving through neighborhoods so dark that I could hardly see the houses, passed my sister’s high school with its brightly lit tower, and crossed the river on the Kansas Avenue Bridge. I waited for my father to tell a story about these places—he liked history—but neither he nor my grandfather spoke.
At the Union Pacific Station, our train, the Portland Rose, was late, and I sat on a wooden bench in the huge waiting room, watching people walk up and down, their voices echoing off the high walls. Somewhere down the track, a steam engine was switching cars—whoosh,