Chapter 18
Neither of them could find the beginning of it.
That was the first strangeness, in the small kitchen, in the gray morning light.
Twenty years stood in the room wanting to be spoken.
On either side of a broken cup the two of them stood, unable to start.
Ada’s heart was going like a mill wheel in flood.
Louie had come as far as the doorway and stopped, hat in his hands.
The bag was left out on the path, as if he dared not bring even that much of leaving into the room.
It was Ada who tried first. Her voice came out in pieces.
“That story. The end you told her. Where...” She had to stop and begin again.
“There is no way on this earth you could know that story. I never told it whole to a living soul. The end of it I never knew at all. I have reached for that ending my whole life, do you hear me, my whole life, the way you reach for...”
“For a word on the tip of the tongue,” Louie said quietly. “I know. You told me. On the dock.”
“Then how?” Her hands had made themselves into fists in her apron.
“How do you have it? Say me anything, any sensible thing. Tell me you heard it from some sailor in some town. Tell me stories float the rivers like driftwood, and this one washed up twice. Say something a person can stand on, because I am asking you plainly, and I have nothing left to stand on at all. How do you know how my story ends?”
“Because I made the ending,” Louie said. “The same night I made the rest of it. I’ve been carrying it finished for twenty years. I never got to tell it. They took you off the train at Camden Bluff landing, and me they took to another county. From that day to this one, I have been looking for you.”
The kitchen made no sound. Out on the river, a boat was going away south. Its wheel beat faded, then faded again, then was gone.
“There was a train out of New York in the spring of sixty-eight,” he said.
His voice had gone very low, very level, the voice of a man setting down, one by one, the only things he owns.
“A car full of asylum children, bound west to be given away. Two benches up from the stove there was a little girl, six years old. She cried so hard, so long, that a boy who thought his heart was all gravel found out it wasn’t.
He gave her half his bread the first night.
His coat, the first cold morning. He kept the big boys off her share.
“At night, when the dark came into that car, and the little ones wept, he told her a story to hold it off. Two children. A little blue boat, blue like a jay’s wing, with one white stripe. A river with no end to it, running toward a place where nobody, not ever, not once, is sent away.”
Ada had begun to tremble. Not weeping. Trembling, like a struck bell.
“He told it every night and always stopped at the good part,” Louie said, “so there’d be a reason to live till tomorrow.
A story keeps better than bread does. And the little girl asked him, near the end, what if we come to my town before it’s done.
And they made a bargain, the two of them, in the dark, with a handshake.
He’d keep her name safe. He’d find her, however long it took, and tell her the ending. She’d wait, stay alive, and hear it.”
He drew one breath, and it broke in the middle.
“Her half was the hard half, and she kept it. She kept it better than she ever knew. I heard her keep it, on a rainy night in this room. She was telling my story to her children with the end left open, still waiting on me. Twenty years, and she was still waiting on me.”
“Stop,” Ada whispered. Her hand had gone out to the table’s edge, holding on. “Stop. Say it. Whatever it is you’re circling, I can’t, I can’t breathe until, say it plain.”
And so he said it plain.
“Your name is Nora.”
The word came out of him soft, the word he had carried up eleven states and a thousand landings. It was spoken now for the first time in two deMorritts, in the town where it was lost.
“You were Nora before them, and you’re Nora under all of it still.
That was our lesson. You said it back to me on a platform half a mile from this kitchen.
Your hand was locked so hard in mine the agent pried it loose a finger at a time.
Your name is Nora. I’m the boy from the train.
And I never stopped looking. I want that known, whatever else comes of this morning.
There was never one year of all the twenty that I was not looking for you. ”
Nora.
The name went into Ada Baldwin like a key into a lock she had never known she carried, and turned.
And the first pages came back.
Not slowly. All at once, the way a river comes over a bank, the way a door long painted shut gives all in one cry.
A cold that lived in the floor of a rattling car.
A smell of cinders and crowded wool. Her own feet in buttoned shoes, not reaching the boards.
A weeping that had gone past sound, because there was nobody left in the world to hear it.
Then bread, broken in half by grimy boy’s hands, the bigger half pressed into hers. Eat that much. Then you can cry all you want, and I won’t say a word against it. A coat that smelled of street and coal, dropped over her like a roof. I run warm.
Three notes whistled down a dark car. Where were we? Round the bend. A voice, low, under the wheels, going on and on, holding the dark off her like a hand cupped round a candle. Fireflies, tame deer, a city on stilts, and sleep.
And then the platform. Sun, wind, strangers’ faces bending down. Her fingers pried loose, one at a time, gently, terribly.
A thin figure twisting in a farmer’s grip across the widening yard, shouting over the heads of the crowd. Mind your half. Stay alive. Hear the end. Growing smaller. Gone.
She had been six. She had folded it all away where children fold what cannot be carried, deep past reaching.
It had lain there whole for twenty years.
Under the new name, under the good raising, under Henry, the children, every worked and sensible day, it had waited.
His story had lain in her mouth the same way, all this time, waiting.
The boy on the train had a face now. The face stood in her kitchen, weathered brown, older than its years, with twenty years of rivers on it.
“You shouted,” she heard herself say. Her voice did not sound like her own.
It sounded younger. “Across the yard. The man had you by the collar, and your cap came off. You shouted to me, and the wind took half of it. And I put up my hand. I put my hand up high as it would go, so you’d find me, and you found me.
You looked at me the way… the way you looked when you broke the bread, and I believed you. I believed you the whole...”
Her breath ran out. The room swam. One thing was left in the flood, rising, the last of it, the piece that had waited longest of all.
A small girl in a dark car, leaning against a boy’s shoulder.
She was being given, before the story, before the bread even, the one thing nobody thought a six-year-old would keep.
His name. Said low, next to her ear, where no other soul could take it.
She had held it those three last days like the last thing she owned.
She had whispered it into her pillow in a strange clean house until sleep took the sound of it.
Then the years took the rest, and it was gone, gone with everything, gone under twenty winters.
It was not gone. Nothing, it turned out, had ever been gone.
“Toby,” Ada said.
The word came up out of her whole, in the voice of a six-year-old, from the bottom of twenty years.
It did to the man in the doorway what her name had done to her.
She watched it strike. He had spoken the name Nora steady as a preacher, this man who was steady in wrecks.
Level he had held, through every terrible minute of this morning.
Now his hat dropped out of his hands.
“You called it me the last night,” she said.
She was weeping at last, both hands against her mouth, the words coming anyway, through her fingers.
“There in the dark. You gave it me like a secret, so no soul could take it. And I kept it, Toby. I kept it and kept it, not even knowing I was keeping it. It was you. All summer, all those evenings, the voice, the stories, the way, oh, the way you watched me. It was you at my table every night. I felt it, and I never knew. You looked for me twenty years, and I never knew. You came back.”
“I promised,” Louie said.
It was all he could get out, and it did not matter.
There was no more to say that could be said with a room between them.
They came together in the middle of her kitchen, and neither could say afterward who had moved first. The settled widow held on to the rootless river man, and he to her.
Just as two children had once held on, in the dark of a westbound train.
He was shaking as hard as she was. She could feel twenty years going out of him in great silent breaks, like ice leaving a river. Her own face was wrecked against his coat. Neither one of them could stop, and neither one of them tried.
Over his shoulder, through the window, the sun was coming up the valley. It laid the water over with light, the whole long river running gold from here to everywhere.
Twenty years, falling away at dawn.
“You found me,” she said into his coat, over and over, the way a story says what it was always trying to say. “You found me. After everything, you found me.”
In the next room, with her ear pressed shamelessly to the door, a six-year-old clutched her doll. She understood one thing only, but that one thoroughly. Nobody was leaving on any boat.