Chapter 9
She hadn’t put the bag down once in two days.
She had carried it through changes of trains, across a platform full of strangers and porters, and she had let no porter take it.
She had bought a snack at a counter without setting the bag at her feet, holding the loaf under one arm and the bag in the other hand, and she had eaten while walking back to her carriage, because walking with the bag felt safer than standing still with it.
She had slept upright with the bag wedged between her hip and the wall, and she had woken three times in the night to feel for the buckles and find them where she had left them.
Two days in, the panic had stopped arriving in spikes. It lived behind her sternum now, permanent and dull. The train jolted over a coupling joint. The bag tipped against her shin and she straightened it with her foot without looking down.
She pressed her palms against her skirt. What do I do with it?
She had thought, the first night, of leaving the bag on a bench at the next station and walking away. The thought of abandoning it for somebody who wouldn’t even know what it was felt to her like a second theft.
She had thought, finally, about Beau Ferris.
She did not know him. That was the trouble.
She had read his letter and read it again and held it under her chin in the dark on the third night out of Chicago, and she trusted it.
But trusting a letter and trusting a man were two different things.
Beau Ferris might be all of the things his letter said, and he still might be a man who, faced with a bag of money in his front room, would do what most honest men would do with a sudden change in their luck.
She did not, even in her own heart, mean that unkindly.
She only knew that nobody she had ever loved had passed that test, and she could not afford, in the first hour of meeting him, to put it to him.
There was another reason, too, and she let herself look at it directly.
If she told him on the platform, he would be a witness.
He would know, the way the conductor would know, the way anybody who saw inside the canvas would know, and his knowing would tie him to her trouble whether he wished it or not.
She could not do that to a man who had agreed to meet her at a train station out of a faith written into three sheets of careful handwriting. He had risked enough.
She decided, with her cheek pressed against the cold of the window and the country going by in a long brown blur, what she would do.
She would keep the bag. She would keep it close. She would keep it secret.
She would not put it down at the station.
She would not, when Mr. Ferris reached for it, allow him to carry it for her.
She would not tell him what was in it, not yet, not until she’d had a chance to see him as a man, and to see how he held the silences of his own life, and to see whether he was a man who could be told the truth of it without becoming, in the telling, somebody she could no longer trust.
She would do nothing with the money. She would not spend it. She would not give it away. She would not bury it… well, she would not bury it yet. She would only carry it, and watch, and wait, until she knew how to be free of it.
The brakes hissed. The train was slowing.
Out the window a small wooden building came forward and steadied, with a square painted sign that read PROSPERITY in white letters above the door.
Behind the building the country opened out to a long pale plain with hills the color of bread crust at the edge, and over the hills a sky so wide the bag at her feet felt smaller.
She bent and lifted it onto her lap, and tightened the buckles.
She put her gloves on, straightened her hat and picked up the small travel bag with her clothes in it in her other hand.
Carefully, she stood up, and went down the swaying aisle to the door.
At the door she paused and looked out, and saw, on the platform among the few people waiting, a tall man in a dark coat standing very still beside a girl in a blue dress with one uneven braid down her back.
Both of them were looking at her.
Her hand closed tighter on the canvas handle.