“Well, I just mentioning. You want to sleep, Mr. Ben Joe, and I know Brandon he wild to get back to that gin.”
“It was good seeing you,” Ben Joe said. He and Brandon stood up and shook hands, and then Brandon left and Matilda turned around to face forward again.
When he was settled back in his seat, Ben Joe leaned his head against the windowpane and closed his eyes, trying to ignore the vibration of the pane against his skin. He wished he knew what state they were passing through. The last of New Jersey, maybe. He felt unsure of his age; in New York he was small and free and too young, and in Sandhill he was old and tied down and enormous, but what age was he here?
With his eyes closed, the division between sleeping and waking became blurred and airy. He saw the sunlit front porch of his house in Sandhill floating up toward him through the darkness behind his eyelids. His father came out of the house, humming a tune beneath his breath, and began crossing the yard to the front gate.
“You come pick me up when it’s suppertime, Ben Joe,” he said, speaking to the empty air. “I’ll be in my office.”
The sun shone on his lined face, and on the top of his white hair. From somewhere far off, Ben Joe shouted, “But I’m not there! I’m over here!”
His father made a shoulder-patting motion in space. “We’ll walk home together,” he said.
Ben Joe began running, trying to be beside his father before he reached the gate, but he was too late. When he got there his father was gone, and his mother had come out on the porch holding a glass of lemonade that flashed piercingly in the sun.
“You’ve been dreaming about your father,” she said.
But Ben Joe said, “No. No, I didn’t. I never did.”
He awoke, and found that the sill of the train window had pressed a wide deep line into his cheekbone.
3
It was still very early in the morning when Ben Joe reached Sandhill. The wooden station house seemed deserted and the parking lot behind it was white and empty, with the pale sunlight glinting on the flecks of mica in the gravel. Beyond that was a thin row of trees and then, after that, Main Street, running parallel to the railroad tracks and lined with the little stores that made up the downtown section of Sandhill. From where Ben Joe was standing, beside the tracks, all he could see of Sandhill was smoking chimneys and white steeples. The town looked small and clean and perfect, as if it were one of those miniature plastic towns sitting beside a child’s electric railroad.
The only other passengers to get off at Sandhill were Brandon’s family and a tiny old snuff-chewing white man whom Ben Joe had not seen before. They all stood by the tracks in a group, motionless, soaking in the early morning sunshine and listening to the train fading away behind them. When the air was completely silent again Brandon said, “Sure do feel different from New York.”
“Sure do,” the old man said.
They turned to look at him.
“Softer, I guess,” he said. “I don’t know.”
They nodded and turned away again. Ben Joe felt as if they might almost be a family, the five of them, standing so close together and so watchful. The sleepiness and the sudden silence seemed to have left an odd gentleness, in himself and in the others, that made him reluctant to leave the station.
“Can’t see much of a change from here,” Brandon said. “See they ain’t fixed the clock on the Sand-Bottom Baptists’ steeple tower yet.”
He was holding the baby now, and in his other hand was a large striped cardboard suitcase. Beside him his wife clutched a diaper bag to her stomach. In the sunlight they both looked much younger; Brandon was bundled into a woolly-collared maroon windbreaker that a little boy might wear, and his wife had a thin brown topper on, girlishly awkward and too short-sleeved, and a simple blue dress that had faded a little. Beside them stood the little old man, also faded but still very clean and polished-looking, as if some brisk daughter-in-law had scrubbed him like an apple with a clean white cloth before she packed him on the train. He had a funny way of breathing — short and fast, with a tiny kitten’s mew at the end of each intake. Ben Joe wondered if he were the one that the curly-haired boy had said was dying.
“Anyone know where Setdown Street is?” the old man was asking.
“I do,” said Ben Joe.
“I want to find it. Be mighty obliged.”
“I’ll show you.”
A dusty black Chevrolet pulled into the parking lot. It seemed stuffed with laughing brown faces, piled three deep, and even before it had come to a complete stop, the doors had popped open and a whole wealth of brightly dressed Negroes had begun pouring out. Brandon gave a joyous hoot of laughter that was almost a shout and said, “Hey, man, hey, Matilda, look who here!” and the baby woke up and blinked her round berry eyes at Ben Joe.
“You waking Clara Sue,” Matilda said.
“It’s all of them done come, man, all of them!”
“Mr. Ben Joe,” said Matilda, turning halfway to him while she seemed still to be looking toward the Chevrolet, “won’t your family planning on meeting you? Because we’n take you in the Chevy, you know. That Brandon’s brother driving.”
“Well, I reckon my family’s not even up yet,” Ben Joe said. “But the walk’ll do me good. Thanks anyway.”
“You, sir?” she said to the old man.
“Oh, I’ll be going with him. Iffen it’s not too far.” He looked up at Ben Joe, questioning him, and Ben Joe shook his head.
“Well, good to see you,” Matilda said. She turned to catch up with Brandon and her baby. Across the chilly air voices of their relatives rang cheerfully; they were grinning and standing awkwardly in a cluster now beside their open-doored car, as if they wanted to give Brandon and Matilda time to get used to them again before they descended on them all at once. And Brandon and Matilda seemed in no hurry. They walked slowly and with careful dignity, proud to have such a large turnout for them. Over Brandon’s shoulder the baby waved both fists helplessly.
“Might as well start,” said the old man.
“I guess.”
“Sure it’s not far?”
“Sure.”
The old man picked up a large, very new suitcase and Ben Joe led the way, with his own lightweight suitcase swinging easily in his hand. “Ought to be just far enough to get you hungry for breakfast,” he called back over his shoulder.
“Good to hear that. Been traveling too long for my preference.”
They cut through the station, through the large, hot waiting room with its rows and rows of naked, dark wooden benches. Ben Joe could never figure out why Sandhill had provided space for so many passengers. The waiting room was divided in two by a slender post, with half the room reserved for white people and the other half for Negroes. Since times had changed, the wooden letters saying “White” and “Colored” had been removed, but the letters had left cleaner places on the wall that spelled out the same words still. A fat, red-haired lady sat in the ticket booth between the two halves of the waiting room; she frowned at the old man and Ben Joe and tapped a pencil against her teeth.
As soon as they were outside, going up the short gravel driveway that cut through the trees onto Main Street, the old man became talkative.
“You shouldn’t of mentioned breakfast, boy,” he said. “Lord, I’m hungry. Wonder what they’ll feed me.”
“Who?” Ben Joe asked.
“Oh, them. And you know them colored folks off the same train as us? Know what they’re doing now? Setting down to the table with their relations, partaking of buckwheat cakes and hot buttered syrup and them little link sausages. Makes me hungry just thinking of it.”