Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,61
correctness) and snowchildren. There was a rousing but harmless snowball fight. The adults let the children win, but not so obviously that the children noticed. Finally, energy spent, everyone came back aboard the train and made passable beds out of seats and out of cushions arranged in the aisles. By noontime of the next day, the temperature had risen high enough to enable Julius Jones and the rest of the crew to clear a great deal of snow from the tracks. The train got a running start, and managed to push on through.
The funny thing, he said, was that by the time they got to Pittsburgh, the businessmen were all serious again, and arrogant and buttoned-up and ill-tempered, and when the train pulled into the station they shoved rudely past the same children they had played with so merrily the night before, as if those children were rank strangers, and just obstacles that stood between them and their profits. It was hard to watch, Julius Jones said. He had come to believe in the years since, however, that maybe the night had its own special kind of magic, and constituted an enchanted place, and so it had to stay sealed off forever, and end the way it did: with the businessmen going back to being their mean old narrow-souled selves. It could not last, that magic.
“If we’d tried to make it last,” Jones said, rearing back in his rocker, snapping his suspenders, “it wouldn’t have been magic. Magic’s temporary. Has to be. If it lasts, it ain’t magic. It’s only reality.”
Carla was not sure she understood the logic, but no matter. She loved the story. She could see it, too, in her mind’s eye: the vast blackness of night in the mountains; the unassailable citadel of snow that rose up before the stopped train and its astonished engineer; the kids and the businessmen running around, squealing and shouting and bending down to craft yet another snowball, packing it tight, hurling it with giddy joy; the only light coming from lanterns hooked to the outside of the train and from a high yellow moon; and Julius Jones, watching it all, knowing it won’t last, knowing it can’t last, and knowing, too, that it is the very fact of its not lasting that gives the moment its joy, its singular splendor.
“So why did you stay in West Virginia?” Carla finally asked him. She realized she needed to get back to her script.
“That’s a question,” he said.
She waited. Finally he started talking again, but he did not pull at his suspenders this time. “I intended to leave. I did leave. Once. Had some relatives in Chicago. We all came from Mississippi, you see. Most of my family kept on moving, and ended up in Chicago. I stayed here, though. And when I visited them, I saw that they didn’t have it one bit better than I did. The North was supposed to be so superior to the South, right? Well, that was a lie. I took the train to Chicago. Came into Union Station. Tried to hail a taxicab to get to where my family lived, down in Englewood. No taxicab would stop. They’d just go right on past me. I tried for an hour and forty-five minutes.” He stopped. He moved his tongue around his mouth as if he was trying to clear a sour taste from it. “That’s right. One hour and forty-five minutes. I finally just started walking. I knew how to do that.”
“So you decided to stay in West Virginia.”
He nodded. “It’s not perfect, Lord knows. And there’s never been a lot of folks around here who look like me. I had a good job, though, a job I loved, and I guess that’s what matters.”
Carla was a little disappointed at his conclusion—she had expected a big dramatic finish, filled with noble words about human equality—but of course she did not say anything about her disappointment. She thanked him and shut off the recorder. She gathered up her materials. She thanked him again.
And then, just as she was leaving his tiny, overstuffed and overheated apartment, Julius Jones said, “One more thing, miss. About my staying. There’s this, too. A lot of my friends—they don’t remember anymore. You try to remind them about something that happened, and they just look at you. They’re losing their memories. I’m okay, though. For now. I remember almost everything. Especially from the old days. So I’m glad I stayed—because I have to do all