Chapter 2
The nights were the worst. Every child in the car knew it, though none of them said it out loud.
By day there was scenery to look at. Fields ran past the windows, brown and endless.
Here or there a farmhouse stood alone under the big sky.
There were rivers to cross, with the wheels drumming hollow over the trestles.
There was the bread, twice a day, and the water cup going down the benches hand to hand.
But when the lamps were turned down, the dark came inside.
Then the car filled up with small sounds. A boy crying into his cap two benches back. A girl saying a name over and over, someone who was never going to answer. The littlest ones whimpering in their sleep, and the wheels underneath it all, saying the same word mile after mile after mile.
Gone, gone, gone.
Nora had cried the first nights too. She knew how the dark pressed down. But she did not cry anymore, and the reason sat across from her with his back against the wall of the car.
On the third night, when the sounds began, the boy leaned forward.
“Hey,” he said, soft. “You awake?”
She nodded in the dark.
“Come sit by me, then. I’m going to tell you a story.”
She crossed the aisle with her shawl around her. Against his shoulder she settled, small and light as a bird. For a while he said nothing at all. She could feel him thinking, the way you can feel a kettle before it sings.
“Once there were two children,” he said at last, low, under the sound of the wheels. “A boy and a girl. And nobody in the whole world wanted them but each other.”
Nora went very still.
“So one morning, early, before the town was up, they went down to the river. And there, tied in the reeds where nobody had ever noticed it, was a little boat. Just their size. As if somebody had left it for them special, a long time back, and it had been waiting all that while.”
“What color was it?” Nora whispered.
He paused, and she felt him smile in the dark more than saw it.
“Blue,” he said. “Blue like a jay’s wing, with one white stripe painted round it. And the rope holding it was old, but the boat itself was sound as a barrel. So the boy handed the girl in and pushed off from the bank. Then he jumped in after. And the river took them.”
“Where did it take them?”
“That,” he said, “is the story. The river is the longest river there ever was. It goes past everything.”
He let the wheels roll a moment under them.
“Away down at the end of it, farther than any map goes, there’s a place.
The girl had heard about it once from an old sailor.
A place where it doesn’t matter who you are or where you came from.
Nobody asks. Nobody sends you off. Once you come to that place, you belong there, and no soul on earth can ever send you away again. ”
Nora let out a long breath.
“Is it real?” she asked. “The place?”
“In the story it’s real.”
“Do they get there? The children?”
“Well now,” said the boy. “That’s the thing about a river. It’s long. All manner of stuff happens on the way.”
And he began to tell her the way.
He told how the two children floated down past the last houses, past dogs that barked from the banks.
A fisherman tipped his hat as they went by, having taken them for royalty traveling quiet.
He told how they ate wild plums that hung down over the water, so many the girl got a stomachache.
He told how they slept under the boat, turned over on a sandbar, snug as mice.
The wheels ran on underneath. One by one the crying sounds around them stopped, as here and there a child gave up grief for sleep.
Frost flowered on the window glass. At the far end of the car the lamp swung with the curves, throwing its little light up the aisle and back.
Nora hardly noticed any of it. She was on the river.
Then came the first danger, a snag in the dark water that near tore the little boat open.
Nora grabbed his sleeve with both hands.
The boy steered his story gentle then. His little boat scraped through.
The children bailed her out with their shoes, laughing with fright, safe again on the wide brown current.
“And round the next bend,” the boy said. Then he stopped.
Nora waited. The pause stretched so long she finally tugged his sleeve.
“What?” she whispered. “What’s round the bend?”
“That’s tomorrow night’s piece.”
“No.” She sat up. “Tell it now.”
“A story keeps better than bread does,” he said. “You can’t eat tomorrow’s bread tonight, and you can’t hear tomorrow’s story tonight either. Round the bend is for tomorrow. Go to sleep, so it comes quicker.”
She argued. She was six, so she argued the way six argues, fierce and brief. But secretly, under the arguing, she understood the gift he was giving her. She could not have said it in words.
Tomorrow there would be more story.
Whatever else tomorrow brought, it would bring that. The dark was easier to bear with more story waiting on the other side of it.
Nora slept.
After that it was every night, and every night the same small ceremony to begin it. The lamps went down. The car went quiet. Nora crossed the aisle with her shawl and settled in against his shoulder. Then she said the words she had decided were the proper ones.
“Where were we?”
“Round the bend,” the boy would say. And off the little boat would go.
The river unwound night after night, longer than any river on any map, because he made it longer as he went.
Nora knew that, in the way children know what they do not say.
She had seen him during the day, staring out the window at nothing, moving his lips a little.
Building the next piece. Laying it up the way other folks lay up firewood.
Once she caught him at it and asked what he was smiling about. Nothing, he said. But that night the story had a waterfall in it, with a dry cave behind the falling water. Then she knew where the smile had gone.
Down the river the two children sailed, past wonders.
Past a city on stilts where all the people lived above the water, with ladders for streets.
Past a meadow so crowded with fireflies at dusk it looked like the stars had landed there to rest. On one island lived tame deer that ate from the girl’s hand, then followed the boat along the shore all afternoon, splashing in the shallows.
And past dangers too, because he was too honest a storyteller to leave those out.
One storm ran the boat aground and cracked two boards. The children spent three days mending her with pitch from a pine tree. A cold stretch came where the plums ran out, and the fish would not bite. They went hungry until they found a bee tree fairly bursting with honey.
Worst was the man in the slow black barge. He offered to carry the children faster, and he smiled too wide when he said it. The boy in the story took one look, then poled away hard for the far bank.
“Good,” Nora breathed. “I didn’t like him.”
“Nor did I,” said the boy. “That’s why the story got shut of him.”
Always, always, he stopped before the end.
Every night the little boat came round some bend, with something new just coming into sight.
And every night his voice went quiet at exactly the wrong moment.
It became a game between them, a grievance, and a treasure.
She would beg. He would shake his head, solemn as a judge, and tell her a story keeps better than bread.
But one night, somewhere past the middle of the journey, she asked a different question.
The dark was thick that night, and the day had been bad.
They had stopped at a town in the afternoon, and children had been taken off the train.
Six of them, chosen on a platform by strangers while the rest watched from the windows.
A brother had gone to one wagon, his little sister to another.
The sound she made was still in everybody’s ears.
Nora sat close against the boy’s shoulder, story or no story, and her hands would not let go of his sleeve.
“Do they get there?” she asked. “At the end. Do the children in the boat get to the place? Where nobody’s sent away?”
For a long time neither of them spoke. The wheels ran on in the dark.
“You’ll hear it,” the boy said at last. “The end. I’ve got it made already, most of it. It’s the best piece of the whole tale, so it has to come last. You’ll hear it when you hear it.”
“But what if...” Her whisper wobbled and righted itself. “What if there’s not time? What if we come to my town, or your town, before the story’s done?”
She felt him breathe.
“Then you’ll have to wait for it,” he said. “However long. That’s how it’ll work, see. I keep your name, so you keep my ending. I’m the only one that knows it, and you’re the only one I’ll ever tell. It’s yours already, really. You just haven’t heard it yet.”
Nora thought that over with her whole might.
“Then you have to find me,” she said. “Wherever they put me. Else I’ll never know how it comes out.”
“I already promised that.”
“And I have to be there when you come.” She said it slowly, working it out. “I have to be alive, grown maybe, and still waiting to hear it.”
“That’s it. That’s your half. Waiting’s a job too, and I’m giving it to you. So mind you do it well.”
“I will,” Nora said. “I promise. I’ll wait, I’ll stay alive, and I’ll hear the end.”
He shook her small hand on it, slow and formal, there in the dark of the rattling car.
Neither of them knew what they had done, of course. They were children. He thought he was buying her courage a night at a time, the way you feed a stove stick by stick through a cold spell. She thought she was only getting a story.
Nobody told them that a story is the one thing that cannot be taken from a child.
Not by agents, however kind. Not by new families, however good.
No new name could touch it, nor new towns, nor twenty years of living.
Everything else the train would take from the both of them.
It would deal them out to strangers, scattered across three states.
The story it could not touch.
Away down the dark car, a lamp swung gently with the grade. The boy talked on, low and steady. The little blue boat ran on down the endless river, always one bend short of home. Against his shoulder the girl who kept his ending slept without dreaming.
She would carry it further than either of them could have believed. And she would wait for it, just as she promised, twenty years past the last night he ever got to tell.