“Eighty cents, ma’am. Eighty little pieces of copper.”
“No sir,” the mother said. She turned to the children and said, “No, sir. You wait, chirren, we’ll get us something in Efram. In Efram, we’ll see.”
“Eighty cents,” the man said.
“No sir.” She reached out to straighten the collar of the smaller child, the girl, and then gave her a soft pat on the shoulder and smiled at her.
“How about you?” the man said to Ben Joe.
“No.”
“No kiddies at home?”
“No.”
“Ah, well.”
The man moved on. At the back of the car it began to be noisier; that was where the men sat. Some of them were apparently the women’s husbands, and others — the younger, more carelessly dressed ones, slouching in their seats and tipping hip flasks — belonged to no one. They offered swigs to the married men now and their conversation became gayer and louder. Up front, the women clicked their tongues at each other.
“Lemuel Barnes, I coming back there after you if you don’t hush!” one called.
“You watch it now, you men, you watch it!”
That was the woman ahead of Ben Joe, a young, plump woman with a baby whose head rested on its mother’s shoulder like a little brown mushroom button. She was sitting alone, but she had been talking steadily ever since she boarded the train, calling to her husband at the rear and soothing her baby and carrying on conversations with the other women passengers. Now she stood up and faced the rear, with the baby still over her shoulder, and shouted in a piercing voice:
“You all going to wake the baby, Brandon, you hear? Going to wake up Clara Sue. You want me come back and check on you?”
She started into the aisle, obviously not meaning to go through with it, and stopped when Brandon shouted back, “Aw, Matilda, this Jackie boy the one. He stirring all the trouble up.”
The other women chuckled.
“That Jackie, he become a pest afore we even got out of the station.”
“Brought him two bottles. Say no one bottle’d do him.”
“Need a wife to keep him still, that boy.”
“Hoo, Lord.”
Matilda smiled down at them and sat down slowly. “Going to make that Brandon come up here he don’t behave,” she said loudly to the window. “I mean it, now.”
Ben Joe tried smiling at the children across the aisle, stretching his mouth farther than it wanted to go, but the children stared soberly back at him with little worried frowns. Ahead of them, their mother opened a paper sack and handed back two pieces of fried chicken. The children accepted them automatically, their eyes still fixed on Ben Joe.
“When I get home,” their mother said to the woman beside her, “I going to have me a mess of collard greens.”
“You got you a good idea there,” Matilda called.
The woman turned back and nodded gravely. “They don’t feed you right in New York,” she said. “Don’t know how a person keep himself alive, in New York.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
They were quiet a minute, picturing home. For a minute Ben Joe pictured it with them, knowing almost for a certainty exactly what their homes were like. Who could be that definite about where he came from? A hundred years ago, maybe, you could look at a Carolina white man and know what he would have for supper that night, in what kind of house and with what sort of family sitting around him. But not any more — not in his case, at least. He felt suddenly pale and plain, going back to a big pale frame house that no one could tell was his. He looked at his reflection in the black windowpane and frowned, seeing only the flat planes of his cheeks and the worried hollows of his eyes.
“The way they does their chicken in New York,” called Matilda, “they puts it in the oven stark nekkid and let it lay awhile. I seen it done that way. With a cut-up frying chicken I seen it.”
“That’s so, I know. That’s so.”
“Ticket, please.”
Ben Joe looked up at the conductor, standing stolidly beside him and smiling down over a huge stomach. He handed him his ticket, already a little frayed, and the conductor tore off one section of it.
“Won’t have to change,” he said. He gave the rest of the ticket back and swayed on to the next passenger.
Someone sat down beside him, so suddenly that Ben Joe was almost frightened for a minute by the jounce in the springs. He turned from the window and found himself no more than three inches from the pointy nose of a curly-haired boy, who was leaning so closely toward him in order to see his face that he was practically lying on his side against Ben Joe.
“Pardon me,” the boy said. He sat up straight again, folded his coat in his lap, and stared ahead of him at Matilda’s baby.
Ben Joe settled back more firmly on his side of the seat and examined the boy’s face. He would judge him to be about fifteen, but a New York fifteen; he was very self-assured and his face, except for that one moment of inquisitiveness, was tightly closed and smooth. When he became aware of Ben Joe’s stare, he turned toward him again and said, explaining himself, “Just wanted to see what you looked like. See you didn’t talk a lot or weren’t drunk or nothing.”
“I don’t talk and I’m not drunk,” Ben Joe snapped.
“Okay, okay. But I was sitting with this old man, see, and he was talking all the time. Made me nervous. All these guys make me nervous.”
“That’s your problem,” Ben Joe said.
“The old man’s dying.”
Ben Joe looked around, alarmed. “Which one?” he asked.
“White fellow, sitting way back. Can’t see him from here.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before? What—”
“Relax. He’s only dying slowly, of old age.”
“But—”
“He’s okay, see.”
Ben Joe sat back and stared out the window. The rushing sound of the train and the deep blackness outside made everything seem dreamy and unreal. It was hard to believe that the train was going anywhere at all; it was only standing still and swaying slightly, against a moving screen of darkness and the occasional pinpoints of lights. He told himself that he was finally going home, after all that worrying about his family and wanting desperately to see them again. He told himself what was even more real than that: that when he got there he would immediately feel sad and confused again, the way he always did. But no, Joanne was back. Joanne could change things; just by smiling that smile of hers she could make everything seem safe and in its right place. He closed his eyes, picturing home. He pictured his house as another kind of train, lighted also, floating through darkness. But with the sound of his own train in his ears he couldn’t hear their voices; he stood outside his family’s windows and watched their movements without hearing a single sound.
His mother would be moving rapidly around the house, pursing her lips tight and flouncing her hair because Ben Joe couldn’t come home, she wouldn’t have it, and then going off to put clean sheets on his bed. His grandmother would be standing on a counter in the kitchen to see what Ben Joe might like from her special private stock of food on the top shelf. And in the ruffly, perfumey closed circles of their worlds, his sisters would hear Ben Joe was returning and then forget again until his return was an actuality and they could get briefly excited over it. Joanne would laugh. She would look at her feet, propped bare on their father’s leather hassock, and laugh easily for no reason at all.
(Only would she? It was seven years now since he’d seen Joanne; why couldn’t he ever realize the happening of a thing? Surely she’d be different now — calmer and more even-tempered. Or did she wear a low-necked, swinging red dress when she took the baby for a stroll? And toss her hair and flash that teasing smile when she ironed her husband’s shirt for him?)