That the daughter whose attentions most aggravated his affliction was the person he least wanted to be seen by in the grip of this affliction was the sort of Devil’s logic that confirmed a man’s pessimism.
“I’ll leave you alone for a minute,” Denise said, “while I get the lunch going.”
He closed his eyes and thanked her. As if waiting for a break in a downpour so that he could run from his car into a grocery store, he waited for a lull in his tremor so that he could reach out and safely eat what she’d brought him.
His affliction offended his sense of ownership. These shaking hands belonged to nobody but him, and yet they refused to obey him. They were like bad children. Unreasoning two-year-olds in a tantrum of selfish misery. The more sternly he gave orders, the less they listened and the more miserable and out of control they got. He’d always been vulnerable to a child’s recalcitrance and refusal to behave like an adult. Irresponsibility and undiscipline were the bane of his existence, and it was another instance of that Devil’s logic that his own untimely affliction should consist of his body’s refusal to obey him.
If thy right hand offend thee, Jesus said, cut it off.
As he waited for the tremor to abate — as he watched his hands’ jerking rowing motions impotently, as if he were in a nursery with screaming misbehaving infants and had lost his voice and couldn’t make them quiet down — Alfred took pleasure in the imagination of chopping his hand off with a hatchet: of letting the transgressing limb know how deeply he was angry with it, how little he loved it if it insisted on disobeying him. It brought a kind of ecstasy to imagine the first deep bite of the hatchet’s blade in the bone and muscle of his offending wrist; but along with the ecstasy, right beside it, was an inclination to weep for this hand that was his, that he loved and wished the best for, that he’d known all its life.
He was thinking about Chip again without noticing it.
He wondered where Chip had gone. How he’d driven Chip away again.
Denise’s voice and Enid’s voice in the kitchen were like a larger bee and a smaller bee trapped behind a window screen. And his moment came, the lull that he’d been waiting for. Leaning forward and steadying his taking hand with his supporting hand, he grasped the butter-sailed schooner and got it off the plate, bore it aloft without capsizing it, and then, as it floated and bobbed, he opened his mouth and chased it down and got it. Got it. Got it. The crust cut his gums, but he kept the whole thing in his mouth and chewed carefully, giving his sluggish tongue wide berth. The sweet butter melting, the feminine softness of baked leavened wheat. There were chapters in Hedgpeth’s booklets that even Alfred, fatalist and man of discipline that he was, couldn’t bring himself to read. Chapters devoted to the problems of swallowing; to the late torments of the tongue; to the final breakdown of the signal system …
The betrayal had begun in Signals.
The Midland Pacific Railroad, where for the last decade of his career he’d run the Engineering Department (and where, when he’d given an order, it was carried out, Mr. Lambert, right away, sir), had served hundreds of one-elevator towns in west Kansas and west and central Nebraska, towns of the kind that Alfred and his fellow executives had grown up in or near, towns that in their old age seemed the sicker for the excellent health of the Midpac tracks running through them. Although the railroad’s first responsibility was to its stockholders, its Kansan and Missourian officers (including Mark Jamborets, the corporation counsel) had persuaded the Board of Managers that because a railroad was a pure monopoly in many hinterland towns, it had a civic duty to maintain service on its branches and spurs. Alfred personally had no illusions about the economic future of prairie towns where the median age was fifty-plus, but he believed in rail and he hated trucks, and he knew firsthand what scheduled service meant to a town’s civic pride, how the whistle of a train could raise the spirits on a February morning at 41°N 101°W; and in his battles with the EPA and various DOTs he’d learned to appreciate rural state legislators who could intercede on your behalf when you needed more time to clean up your waste-oil tanks in the Kansas City yards, or when some goddamned bureaucrat was insisting that you pay for forty percent of a needless grade-separation project at Country Road H. Years after the Soo Line and Great Northern and Rock Island had stranded dead and dying towns all across the northern Plains, then, the Midpac had persisted in running short semiweekly or even biweekly trains through places like Alvin and Pisgah Creek, New Chartres and West Centerville.
Unfortunately, this program had attracted predators. In the early 1980s, as Alfred neared retirement, the Midpac was known as a regional carrier that despite outstanding management and lush profit margins on its long-haul lines had very ordinary earnings. The Midpac had already repulsed one unwelcome suitor when it came under the acquisitive gaze of Hillard and Chauncy Wroth, fraternal twin brothers from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who had expanded a family meat-packing business into an empire of the dollar. Their company, the Orfic Group, included a chain of hotels, a bank in Atlanta, an oil company, and the Arkansas Southern Railroad. The Wroths had lopsided faces and dirty hair and no discernible desires or interests apart from making money; Oak Ridge Raiders, the financial press called them. At an early exploratory meeting that Alfred attended, Chauncy Wroth persisted in addressing the Midpac’s CEO as “Dad”: I’m well aware it don’t seem like “fair play” to you, DAD … Well, DAD, why don’t you and your lawyers go ahead and have that little chat right now … Gosh, and here Hillard and myself was under the impression, DAD, that you’re operating a business, not a charity … This kind of anti-paternalism played well with the railroad’s unionized workforce, which after months of arduous negotiations voted to offer the Wroths a package of wage and work-rule concessions worth almost $200 million; with these prospective savings in hand, plus twenty-seven percent of the railroad’s stock, plus limitless junk financing, the Wroths made an irresistible tender offer and bought the railroad outright. A former Tennessee highway commissioner, Fenton Creel, was hired to merge the railroad with the Arkansas Southern. Creel shut down the Midpac’s headquarters in St. Jude, fired or retired a third of its employees, and moved the rest to Little Rock.
Alfred retired two months before his sixty-fifth birthday. He was at home watching Good Morning America in his new blue chair when Mark Jamborets, the Midpac’s retired corporation counsel, called with the news that a sheriff in New Chartres (pronounced “Charters”), Kansas, had had himself arrested for shooting an employee of Orfic Midland. “The sheriff’s name is Bryce Halstrom,” Jamborets told Alfred. “He got a call that some roughnecks were trashing Midpac signal wires. He went over to the siding and saw three fellows ripping down the wire, smashing signal boxes, coiling up anything copper. One of them took a county bullet in his hip before the others made Halstrom understand they were working for the Midpac. Hired for copper salvage at sixty cents a pound.”
“But that’s a good new system,” Alfred said. “It’s not three years since we upgraded the whole New Chartres spur.”
“The Wroths are scrapping everything but the trunk lines,” Jamborets said. “They’re junking the Glendora cutoff! You think the Atchison, Topeka wouldn’t make a bid on that?”