A Train through Time. Elizabeth Farnsworth
but I thought of him more like a child who couldn’t always do what adults expected of him.
Later we walked forward through the train to the dining car, where tables were covered with white linen and waiters called stewards wore spotless white coats. As we sat down, I noticed a girl about my age across the aisle with her mother and father. They were writing on a pad like the ones my friends and I used when playing waitress at home. My father explained that on the train, we filled out our order and a steward picked it up. In the past I would have wanted to make friends with the girl, but now I feared she’d ask questions.
When she finished her pancakes, she came across the aisle and sat down at our table without waiting to be invited.
She spoke directly to me. “I’m Sally from Tulip Lane in St. Louis, and those are my parents. I’m ten years old. Who are you?”
Daddy waited for me to answer, and when I didn’t, he said, “I’m Bernerd, and this is Elizabeth, who just turned nine. We’re on our way to California for a vacation.”
The girl wore a plaid skirt, white blouse, and patent leather shoes and seemed older than ten. Her hair was blonde with stylish bangs; mine was light brown and held back on each side of my face by plastic barrettes.
I bet she’s in fifth grade, I thought. I was in fourth.
She asked, “Why are you going to California? Do you have a dog?”
I wanted to say something but couldn’t. I didn’t know for sure why we were traveling to California and was trying to avoid thinking about Cindy, our dog, who I feared would be left alone at my aunt’s house. I knew how it felt to be too long alone.
I wished the girl would go away. I didn’t want a friend on the train.
“Let’s go exploring,” she said, jumping up from the table. Assuming I’d follow, she walked past the galley, the train’s kitchen, and down the passageway until I couldn’t see her anymore.
I stayed where I was, finishing my French toast.
A few minutes later, the door at the end of the car opened and closed, and then opened and closed again. I heard the sighing noise, like an intake of breath. My father had explained that pneumatic doors between the passenger cars of a train were controlled by compressed air.
“That’s why they sound like they’re breathing,” he said.
The door down the corridor opened again. At least Sally from St. Louis was curious. I liked that.
Daddy excused me to join her. Together, we opened the door and watched it wheeze shut. Then we did it again. We were standing in the vestibule between the cars. Sally pointed down at the narrow space between us and the next car. Snow-covered prairie and wooden ties raced by under our feet. I heard the deep horn of the engine warning horses and cows off the track.
“Do you think trains can go faster than time?” I asked Sally. “Will we arrive in California and no time will have passed?”
“What do you mean?”
“Because we’re traveling so fast, won’t we get ahead of where we’d be if we’d stayed home?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never thought of that before.”
l
Topeka—1949
April. The smell of hyacinths filled the air. I glanced out an open window of my Randolph School classroom and saw my mother walking up a path flanked by crabapple trees in bloom.
A thunderstorm during the night had left rivulets of water flowing to a nearby creek, and she skipped over them like a child.
When she came into the room, I jumped up, surprised, because she had never picked me up so early before. She stood in the front of the room and whispered to Miss Gray, who beckoned me to come forward. Mother took my hand and we left. Outside, white blossoms swirled as we ran down the path.
I asked where we were going.
“We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz . . .”
After picking up Marcia at her junior high school, we drove downtown to the Jayhawk Theater, where The Wizard of Oz, in rerelease, had just opened. It was a rare treat, and the three of us giggled as the theater darkened and the movie lit up the screen.
Some weeks later our Buick sedan raced alongside a Santa Fe passenger train speeding toward Kansas City from Topeka. Tracks and highway ran along the river, and horses and cattle grazed in nearby fields. My father was driving; Marcia and I sat next to him in the front seat.
The speedometer climbed to eighty as the car pulled alongside the great engine, which flashed red and silver in the afternoon sun. The roar of the train made it hard to hear, but as usual we yelled, “Go Daddy Go! You can beat it!”
At eighty-five he slowed down, and the train disappeared around a bend. It was the Super Chief on its way from Los Angeles to Chicago. We considered it almost our own because so many members of our family worked in Santa Fe Railroad shops by the river and in offices downtown.
When we got home, Mother handed me a small pad of paper and a pencil to make a picture story about the afternoon. I filled several pages, which she stapled together. Later she placed the booklet with others in a small drawer of our living room desk.
l
Berkeley—2014
As part of my exhumation, I have unearthed from deep in the basement one of the picture books I made as a child, but I can’t find the red spiral notebook I bought in the eighth grade to write a story about the Hungarian Revolution. In the fall of 1956, television images of teenagers throwing Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks caught my attention, and at the end of that year a Hungarian freedom fighter came to Topeka and spoke at our church. He was a solemn eighteen-year-old who had seen friends killed when the Soviet army attacked. Now he was traveling through the United States raising money for refugees like himself. I wanted to ask how he dared risk his life for freedom but never got the chance. In the red notebook, I wrote a long story about him, imagining what I didn’t know. He told our youth group at church that he had fled to Austria across a rickety wooden bridge. I tried to picture that place. Was he alone? Did anyone meet him on the other side? How had he gotten from there to our town?
Later I saw a photograph of the Bridge at Andau, infamous for the tens of thousands of Hungarians who escaped over it before November 21, 1956, when Soviet troops blew it up.
That bridge glows in my memory, as does the freedom fighter, whose name I don’t remember.
l
From the vestibule, Sally and I moved into the next car of the train. Some people were playing cards on wooden trays they had gotten from beneath their seats. A mother soothed an unhappy child. Other passengers were asleep, sitting up. It was a “chair car”—no compartments or roomettes. The train leaned into a wide turn, tossing us into the lap of a young woman in a blue sweater and skirt, dyed to match. She frowned at first, then smoothed her skirt and laughed. Sally jumped up and apologized in what seemed to me a southern accent, “Ma’am, we are very sorry.”
I said nothing.
In the next chair car, we met four uniformed soldiers who said they’d boarded the train near Fort Riley, an army base west of Topeka, and were headed for Alaska.
“But we’re pretty sure we’ll end up in Korea,” one of them said. I knew about the war in Korea from watching the news on television.
My father sometimes worried aloud about the war,
but after hearing about atomic bomb drills at our schools, he told Marcia and me not to be afraid. We’d be safe, because in a nuclear conflict we’d go to our cottage up north. No one would bother to bomb Alexandria, Minnesota,
he said.
As