was the train’s terminus. When the roustabouts opened his boxcar to unload it, what they saw held them as stockstill as the apparition within. Eventually someone sent for the plug-chewing foreman, who had Ruby carried into the station office to determine his degree of vitality. There they perched him on a potbellied stove and began to unfold his stiff limbs as if coaxing parts of a rusted machine into operation. They cranked his jaw like a pump until words spilled out, a mumbling that promised them compensation for assisting in the transfer of his lading to a westbound freight. But along with the thawing of his joints came the helpless release of his bladder and bowels. “Boy done messed his britches,” declared the foreman, as the yard hands fled the office in disgust, though some returned to accept their gratuities from the hands of the sullied passenger. Then they fetched Ruby’s duffel and, while he cleaned himself up, conveyed the rabbi on a handcar via an intricate spaghetti junction from the Union Pacific to the Sequatchie Valley Line. A day later at the freight-yard in Knoxville the procedure was more or less repeated, the casket transferred this time to a brine-tank reefer of the Tennessee Railroad, bound for Memphis in the far southwestern corner of the state.
It was early evening when the train pulled into the yard on the edge of the river bluff. Still poker stiff in his movements, Ruby nevertheless oversaw the removal of the tzaddik’s box from the railcar to a nearby baggage wagon. It was a balmy, overcast twilight, and branched lightning above the depot and the river below it made the dome of the sky look as if he were viewing it from the inside of a hatching egg. In the prestorm atmosphere the air tasted of mercury, and the fragrance of honeysuckle overwhelmed the odor of cinders and engine grease, further narcotizing Ruby’s muddy brain. As a consequence he was only half aware of a passing porter, the man leaning at an impossible angle into a hand trolley laden with lumber stacked higher than his head. Blind to the path in front of him, the porter nudged the wagon with his overloaded trolley, dislodging the wooden chock wedged beneath a rear wheel. Unhobbled, the wagon began to roll slowly backward over the gravel embankment and onto the cobbled levee, its burden bouncing about the boards of the flat bed as the vehicle started to pick up speed. Ruby watched with only moderate interest as the runaway wagon careered toward the bottom of the slope, splashing into the river in a geyser that promptly subsided along with the vehicle’s forward momentum. The casket, however, was further propelled into the water, where its decayed cedar planks splintered on impact. The zinc lining floated free a few seconds like a wallowing washtub, then abruptly capsized and sank, but after the length of an inheld breath its frozen contents bobbed to the surface and continued to drift out upon the turbid Mississippi.
At that point Ruby was shaken from his stupor. His limbs were still so rigid that he felt as if he were confined to a suit of armor, but as he lurched down the hill the gauntlets and greaves began to fall from his body. By the time he’d descended half the incline he was sprinting with the alacrity he’d always relied on. At the foot of the bluff he leaped into the mile-wide river, invigorated by the shock of cold water, and began splashing toward the escaping hunk of ice. Here it dawned on him that he didn’t know how to swim, despite which he managed to stay provisionally afloat, thrashing and sputtering after the ice that the braided current carried farther beyond his grasp. Coughing up a throatful of water, he churned his arms and feet in another desperate effort to reach his frozen consignment. This time he was able to get a tenuous grip on the slick-sided berg, only to have it slip away again, leaving him to sink below the surface of the river. He felt the weight of his clothes dragging him down, the tar-black water closing over him, but just as he’d resigned himself to drowning, the current buoyed him back up from the depths, bearing him into a whirlpool where the stalled block of ice had begun to spin like a compass dial. There Ruby made to grab hold of it once again, wrestling the slippery mass as it rolled