Jordan squatted down on the blanket’s edge, producing a knife from somewhere. It wasn’t a switchblade or any other kind of pocketknife; it had a broad, flat blade that came to a honed point. Like a bowie knife.
He smiled at her, and began tossing the knife in front of him so that it penetrated the blanket and stuck in the soil.
“That’s the blanket I used for my dolls,” she said. Not warning him or asking him to stop. Simply giving him a nugget of partial understanding. A glimpse of her early childhood.
He continued to flip the knife expertly, so it made one revolution in the air and then stuck with the same solid chuk! in the ground beneath the blanket. The rhythmic, brutal sound, over and over, was hypnotic. Like something killing her childhood.
Jordan gazed deep into Jasmine’s eyes, holding her gaze so she couldn’t turn away.
Through an understanding smile he said, “The Bible tells us there comes a time to put away childish things.”
She knew that was true. She would have to face it someday. She fought back tears.
“I’ll be here in the morning,” Jordan said. “I’ll earn my final pay, then come evening I’ll be gone. If you’re here, we’ll leave together. A new life will be ours.”
He wiped the knife blade clean with two swipes on the side of his thigh, then slid it into a leather scabbard. She saw that it had a yellowed bone handle as he sat down on the blanket and leaned toward her, kissing her, using his tongue, teaching her how to use hers.
Still kissing her, he bent her backward and placed her gently on the blanket. He began to unbutton her blouse, her shorts. Her clothes seemed to melt from her. She gazed off to the side, like billions of women before her, and for a second or two became as much observer as participant.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not so soon. But now that it was happening, she didn’t mind. Time kept rushing toward her, past her.
She lay back, her elbows supporting her at first, then all the way back, and spread her legs, welcoming him.
Afterward, Jasmine couldn’t stop trembling. She knew what her father would think. Knew what he would tell her. It wouldn’t be about Jesus and the blood of the sacrificed. It would be about commerce. The food chain.
Every living thing required a reason to exist.
A usefulness.
“Even people?” she would ask.
“Especially people.”
“Why should that be?” she would ask.
She hadn’t yet heard a convincing answer.
40
Jordan worked hard on the farm the next day, standing near Jasmine’s father as the two of them shucked corn. Jasmine’s father, Luther, was a gangly, powerful man. He wasn’t intimidated, but he didn’t like meeting Jordan’s unconcerned gaze. Luther was smart in a direct, instinctive kind of way, and what he sensed in Jordan was a kind of darkness of the soul. An emptiness that in one way or another would have to be filled.
Luther had talked to his daughter earlier that day, and though she had told him nothing, he knew by looking at her that something had ended, and something had begun.
She could no more hide her feelings than could Luther. And Luther believed in God and demons and the reality of hell.
Side by side in the bright sunlight, the heat and humidity building, the two men shucking corn sometimes chanced to look at each other, and it was always Luther who turned away.
Jordan had a plan. Railroad dicks these days were mostly an invention of fiction. The expense of hiring so many of them just to keep freeloaders from traveling without tickets didn’t make good economic sense.
The boxcars were going north again, most of them emptied of coal and produce, jingling and jangling along the rails with their sliding doors open wide. More than half the boxcars were empty, the train’s engines so far ahead of them they were out of sight except where the rails curved.
After supper Jordan went out onto the porch, carrying a cold can of Budweiser. He was scheduled to meet Luther again in the morning and finish the bin of corn cobs. Both Luther and Jordan knew they probably wouldn’t see each other again.
The screen door slammed and reverberated in the quiet sinking light. Luther came out, carrying a can of chilled Bud like Jordan’s.
“Hot night,” he said to Jordan.
“That time of year,” Jordan said.
Luther glanced around. It was an obvious act. “Jasmine around?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Seen her go upstairs after supper,” Luther said. “Guess she’s still up there.” There was a high tension emanating from him, a crippling regret. The past was over. The future was going to change in a way that made Luther sick and afraid.
He’d known this day would come. When the cancer had gotten his wife, Jasmine’s mother, Luther was left with Jasmine and her memories. He lived with his regrets. The silent truths that both knew were left unsaid. Nothing could stop them from working their dreaded damage.
He couldn’t leave the farm, and nothing would compel Jasmine to stay in a house haunted by her mother. A family had been destroyed by death. Luther knew what quiet horror would haunt his final days, and perhaps his eternity,
He hesitated, seemed about to say something more to Jordan, then lowered his head and turned away.
“See you come sunrise,” he said.
Jordan didn’t answer. Luther didn’t look back.
The eleven o’clock American Eagle sounded its lonely trailing wail. Jordan thought it was like a wolf howl, carried on the wind.
He and Jasmine each carried a duffel bag just large enough for a change of clothes and some personal items. Jasmine had stood frozen in her bedroom before leaving, knowing it was the last time she’d see so many things, keepsakes, pictures, her mussed and longtime bed with its sheet dragging the floor.
Jordan had warned her: there was no way to move on without leaving the past behind.
Wasn’t that the truth?
The Eagle wailed again. Jordan knew it would be audible back at the farmhouse, but not loud enough to wake anyone. Especially if they were used to it, as was Luther Farr.
The mournful sound of the train whistle signaled that it would soon be part of the past, and the past would be fixed in time and place.
Carrying their bags slung over their shoulders, Jordan and Jasmine jogged so their course would cross that of the train tracks. But they wouldn’t cross the rails. They would stop at them, then wait.
Seconds became minutes, then the Eagle came at them at an angle out of the east. It started small and then grew slowly, coming at them faster and faster. They watched in the moonlight as boxcar after boxcar, most of them empty and with opened doors on each side, clanged and clattered past.
As they’d agreed, approaching the train from the side at a forty-five-degree angle, Jordan hung back so he could run alongside. Then he quickly mounted a small side ladder near the front of a boxcar’s open door. In the same smooth motion, he tossed his duffel bag in, then pulled himself up and around and into the boxcar.
He swiveled so he was on his hands and knees, looking ahead for Jasmine. For a moment a voice in his mind told him she wasn’t coming with him. What was a promise from a girl so young? To a boy not much older?
He edged closer where he was kneeling at the open boxcar door, and there she was.
Jordan watched fascinated as she followed his instructions perfectly. First she hung on to the ladder of the moving car and with her free hand tossed her duffel bag up through the gaping side door. Then she gripped the small steel ladder built into the side of the car. Made her way along the side of the bouncing, clanging car, to the open door. As Jordan had taught her, she grabbed hold of the ladder with both hands and swung out and then inside the boxcar,