Crickets scream a warning, but no one listens. The train doesn't arrive. The rails lounge in the summer sun waiting to serve a purpose; like me. We are lost here somewhere in Mississippi; the rails and I. The swamp threatens to consume us, silently creeping up at the edges of my vision.
The boards of the platform under my feet are old and worn; splintered at the ends like the frayed sleeves of the ancient tramp napping toothless on the bench next to me.
I had direction once. I was going somewhere. I sold my steamer trunk a week ago to a man in a gabardine suit to get here from Atlanta. He said he was a collector.
Why here? I can't really remember. I think I liked the name of the place on the map; Satartia. It sounded mysterious. I left home centuries ago.
A rusty light fixture above the sleeping tramp buzzes and the clear bulb flickers to life for a moment in the sun of high noon. Its moment gone, it is extinguished forever.
I wonder if they miss me; if they remember my eyes, my face, my name. Time and capacity leave solitude and amnesia.
A pre-Columbian Pepsi machine beckons to me from inside the decrepit depot. It hums with mechanical life. I put in my nickel expecting nothing, but the door opens freely in my hand and the bottle pulls loose of its prison. I pop off the cap on the side of the machine and feel the exquisite burn as the cold liquid slides eagerly down my throat.
"Spare a nickel young feller?" The risen tramp is at my elbow. I smile cordially and drop another coin in the slot.
A corroded fan blows scorching humid air from one side of the room to the other. On the wall are photos of railroad workers. They look like pictures of my great-grandfather; like pictures of a thousand other men in a thousand history books. It must be ten or two or four. The tramp tilts a Dr Pepper into his head and smiles an empty perfect smile as he returns to his bench home on the platform.
Satartia. There must have been a purpose for coming. A line of ants marches from the thick grass at the edge of the sidewalk into the depot, across the grimy checkerboard tile, and onto a discarded ham sandwich in the corner near the defunct water fountain. The balance in this place between decay and preservation is delicate.
I rejoin my comrade at the bench outside. "When is the train due?" I venture. My throat feels like I haven't spoken in years.
He opens his eyes and regards me with bemused wonder. "When you're ready." Cryptic, but apropos.
I can't remember my father's face or the sound of his encouragements. I don't see his smile or hear his laughter. I'm not certain I even had one. I breathe deep the scents and sounds in the still damp air. There's a skunk nearby, somewhere hidden in the dense thicket of Chinese Privet along the right of way. "Ligustrum sinense" I mumble absently.
"What's that you say?" His voice is dusty and deep like John Carradine's.
"Chinese Privet. Its genus and species are Ligustrum sinense. Most folks around here consider it a nuisance shrub." I can't remember how I know that.
"Well, it smells real pretty in the spring" he says.
I wonder what he meant about the train, but we've used up our words for now so I lean back and wait. Somewhere in sleep I see my mother. She stands on a cliff smiling down into the creek far below. She's wearing that ratty old nightgown she's had forever and the wind playfully flips her hair into her face. Summer sunset in the desert is the perfect time in the perfect place. The earth and bare rock still radiate the warmth of the day, but the air has begun to cool. The fading light lounges across the reefs and hoodoos bringing their blood delicately to the surface.
As the last sunlight drops below the horizon, my mother turns to me. She's crying now. With no words I can't tell if she's moved by sorrow or the raw beauty of the place. I open my eyes as this other sunset is taking a last opportunity to scorch the kudzu wrapped depot. The antique light bulb above stutters tentatively to life.
"I thought that thing was dead for good" I say absently.
The hollow voice next to me says "Eternity ain't what it used to be." My neighbor stares into my eyes again with that same bemused expression.
I stand and stretch, pacing up and down the platform once. The cicadas have begun their nightly chant; challenge, reply, challenge, reply. Their debate will go on past midnight as they discuss the eventual coming of winter or the scarcity of food or the meaning of life. I turn back to the tramp, now awake and alert.
"What did you mean earlier about the train?"
"Just what I said." His reply is almost a taunt.
"But you said it would get here when I was ready for it."
"Did I?"
"Yes. You said it would get here when I was ready."
"Then that's what I meant."
There must be a schedule inside the depot. I clop my boots across the hollow wood of the platform and into the hollow heat still moving from left to right and back again. The ticket window is closed and seems to have been that way for years. In the elegant sweeping curves of the Palmer Method the schedule next to the window reads simply "Trains Daily" in pencil on age-yellowed crumbling paper. My grandmother would be proud of me for recognizing the writing style she toiled to master as a small child in depression era Illinois.
"She was a fine woman, your gramma" comes the raised voice from out on the platform. I look sideways out the door to see that toothless grin looking back at me.
Now how did he know I was thinking about my grandmother? "Who the hell are you?"
He laughs the kind of deep belly laugh I dimly recall some long lost family member having when I was a child of five. "I ain't nobody" he finally says; the laugh dropping from his voice. "Or maybe," he adds with practiced dramatic pause. "Maybe I'm everybody." He turns away from me, closing his eyes, and quietly begins singing in a dusty broken baritone.
"Rock of Ages, cleft for me..."
I think it was my uncle. He brought back a dog from a meat market in Korea when he left the army; sneaked it on the plane under his jacket. He had one of those laughs.
"...Let me hide myself in thee..."
He was blessed with a gloriously wasted youth that eventually caught up with him. Like most in my family, he died long before he turned sixty.
"...Let the water and the blood..."
It broke my gramma's heart when he died. She so wanted to go first. Well, at least she went second.
"...from thy wounded side which flowed..."
The cicadas have stopped their discourse. They are listening closely to the ancient ebony hobo. There's not a sound in the world except his song.
"...be of sin the double cure..."
Beyond the small halo of light thrown by the Resurrected light bulb, the world is dimming. I'm still standing in the depot, but I can scarcely make out any details other than the door frame. I need to get back onto the platform, but my feet are so heavy. He turns back to me and opens his eyes. There's something familiar about the set of his features.
"...save from wrath and make me pure."
How did I even get to this place? I know I sold the trunk to buy the ticket, and I remember buying the ticket, but I don't remember the ride. I don't know where I've been. I can't say what I've seen. If Satartia was my destination, why am I still at the station waiting for the train?
"Why am I here?"
His eyes light up at the sound of it. "Ah. Now that's the question, ain't it?" He stands and dances a little jig with the exuberance of a child. The world beyond the range of the light bulb has completely fallen away. We are marooned on the platform, a thousand lifetimes from Satartia. "Why do you think you are here?"
"I'm dead." The words come unbidden and after I've spoken them I wish I could call them back. It's preposterous.
"It ain't preposterous." He's looking at me with no bemused expression. A single tear creeps down the wizened and weather cracked surface of his cheek. I just stare at him for a long time. I don't want to believe it, but somehow I do. I vaguely remember a bright light right after I bought the ticket and then a long sleep.
"What happened?"
"Hypertensive, intra cerebral hemorrhage." His accent has dropped away like the world around.
"So I'm dead."
"Not quite. You've been in a coma for the past two months."
That's hopeful news. Maybe I can still get back home.
"You are home. They had you transferred to the hospital in Satartia when you stabilized."
Christ, that's right. I'm from Satartia. Why didn't I remember that? After my gramma died I lost my way. Two years of aimless wandering later I was finally going home. He waits silently for me to understand. I finally look up at him. I have to know.
"So I'm dying now?"
He closes his eyes again and a few more tears sneak out, silently meandering under the force of gravity to his chin. He sits on the bench and pats me on the back, letting his hand rest there. "These are your final moments. This place is of your choosing. Everything else is fading." I understand now. Most of this place is from stories my grandmother told me when I was very young. There haven't been any nickel Pepsi machines in my lifetime or old style train depots like this one.
"You loved her stories."
"Am I going to see her?"
"I don't know, son."
I'm getting sleepy again. "It's time for the train."
"Yes it is."
"Is it really taking me somewhere or is it just a metaphor I've conjured up?"
"I honestly don't know."
I stand unsteadily and shuffle to the edge of the platform. I lift my foot and climb slowly onto the first step of the Pullman green sleeper car with the name 'Rambler Rose' beautifully stenciled in gold on the side. I turn back to him.
"Who are you?"
He smiles that toothless smile and his expression softens again. As the train begins moving into the warm night air he holds out an arthritic hand in a fond wave and starts to speak, but it's lost in the chorus of cicadas and the whistle of the train.
