The Twelfth Child (Serendipity #1)(29)
In the back of the car a group of men were having a heated discussion about a game of cards they’d been playing. “I ain’t never cheated in my life,” the skinny one argued; the others seemed pretty adamant about the fact that he had.
“Pipe down back there!” the woman sitting in front of them called over her shoulder, then she went back to clacking a pair of knitting needles and counting aloud, “Knit one, pearl two, knit one…”
Abigail looked down the row of seats. She had hoped to sit beside a window and watch as the Shenandoah Valley gave way to new places, but the passengers had scattered themselves about like isolated towns; solemn-faced people each one taking up a space alongside of a window. No one looked as if they might welcome the thought of someone sitting down beside them. These weren’t anything like the folks Abigail had imagined—a narrow nosed man reading a newspaper, several more sleeping and one of those snoring loudly, a red-faced woman banging on the window and trying to cuss it open—all of them people who seemed exasperated to be in such a hot place. Halfway down the aisle, there was an empty seat alongside a pleasant looking woman with a fast-asleep baby in her arms. Abigail made her way through the aisle, stopped alongside of the woman and hoisted the largest of her suitcases onto the overhead rack, the satchel she placed on the floor beneath the seat.
“I’d clean that seat ‘fore I sat down,” the woman said. “Isaac here, spit up a bit.”
“Oh my,” Abigail said and pulled Livonia’s good lace hanky from her purse.
“It wasn’t much,” the woman said, “…hardly worth mentioning.”
Abigail swished her hanky over the velour seat then sat down.
“The soot; now that’s way worse than any mouthful of milk. That soot settles into things; turns them black as coal. These seats is covered with soot.”
Abigail checked her hanky and saw a residue of black dust. “My goodness!”
“Crying shame folks has to sit in a dirty seat! They ought to do something!”
As she was wondering who would be the one to do something, the conductor came through the car hollering “Tickets, please!” so Abigail fished in her purse and pulled her one-way ticket from Miss Ida Jean Meredith’s pink envelope.
When the conductor stopped alongside Abigail, the woman leaned forward and said, “These seats have soot on them! A body ought not pay full fare for seats with soot.”
The conductor looked at Abigail and said, “Ticket?”
Abigail handed it to him and asked, “How long ‘till Richmond?”
“Richmond? Well, that’s quite a ways.” The conductor swiped at his face, which was shiny with perspiration, then punched three holes in Abigail’s ticket. “Eight hours, give or take.” He smiled and moved on to the next passenger.
A few seconds later the whistle blew and the train started to rumble along the tracks. Isaac stirred a bit and twisted deeper into his mama’s arms, but when the whistle blew a second and third time he started screaming like he was being killed. “Oh, mercy,” the woman moaned; she shifted the baby onto her chest and started rocking back and forth. “That noise woke him.”
“Maybe he’ll go back to sleep,” Abigail suggested.
“Isaac? Go back to sleep? Uh-uh. He’s got the colic!” The woman moved the baby to her lap and jiggled him up and down. “Now, now, darlin’,” she said in the most soothing voice, but Isaac just screamed all the louder.
After about an hour, the conductor, who’d already taken a dislike to Isaac’s mama because of what she’d said about soot on the seats, came through calling out, “Next stop, Hampton Crossing,” but he had to shout it three times before folks could catch the name of the station above Isaac’s wailing.
The baby carried on that way through MillertonCounty and halfway through Somerset. At times, Isaac would wail so hard you’d swear the mama was pinching him, but of course she wasn’t. Abigail knew if that baby belonged to her papa, he’d have gotten a royal slap on the rear end; but Isaac’s mama kept rocking him back and forth no matter how hard he screamed. Twice Isaac fell asleep; then the minute the train whistle blasted, he woke up screaming louder than ever. At Bogbottom, which is at the far end of Somerset County, a peddler climbed aboard and shuffled through the aisle selling sandwiches and little bitty containers of milk at twice what the price should have been. Abigail, who by now had grown weary of listening to the crying, suggested that maybe Isaac was hungry. The woman paused for a moment and looked at the peddler like she was thinking of feeding the baby an overpriced cheese sandwich; then she shook her head and went back to rocking.
Halfway through BuckinghamCounty, Abigail was certain she should have sat next to the snoring man. She closed her eyes and tipped her head back, hoping to close out the sound; but she started picturing Will’s back as he walked away from the Lynchburg station. The louder Isaac screamed, the more she missed her brother. Abigail tried to call to mind Will’s face; the crooked way he’d grin, or how he’d pinch the tip of his nose when he was studying a problem. She even tried remembering the pleased look that settled on his face when Papa bragged about how his boy was becoming a fine farmer; but all she could picture was her brother’s back.
Abigail bent down, reached into her satchel and pulled out the snow globe. It was heavy in her hand, not at all a practical thing to pack, especially since she’d had to decide between carrying the snow globe or a history book Miss Troy had given her. She shook the globe and watched the snow fall around the fair-haired girl.