Warday

PART FIVE Returning Home

You cross with ease at 80 the state line and the state you are entering always treated you well.

—Richard Hugo, “Goodbye, Iowa”

The Children’s Train

Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia was an astonishing sight as we walked in, weary from the long bus ride that had brought us here from White Plains. We were planning to catch the Southern Crescent to Meridian, and from there take the bus to Dallas.

There must have been a thousand children in the station. We had just been to Independence Park and put our hands on the Liberty Bell, which you can do now, and stood before Independence Hall, seeking to renew our hope. There were hundreds of people there, including a doubled family, where a man had taken on his neighbor’s children when the parents died. Such mixing is much more common in this part of the country than in Texas, where we tend to focus down on the unit rather than look to our neighbors.

The spirit of the frontier, perhaps, still influences our habits.

There is at Independence Hall a daily schedule of recitations of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Gettysburg Address. This is a program developed by the Philadelphia school system, and the speakers are children.

We listened with the rest of the crowd to the hasty voice of a girl reciting the Bill of Rights. Her eyes darted as she spoke. She was as frail as a bird, and her tone was high and thin, but something in her delivery came from deep within her, and set the breathless, mumbled words to ringing.

I had been thinking long thoughts of children as we walked through Philadelphia’s quiet streets.

Now, here in the station, I was surrounded by children who had not gotten the chance to double up. Quiet children, sitting in rows on the floor. Here and there, one slept in another’s lap. Older kids attended babies. The cries of babies echoed in the huge waiting room. A supervisor moved among the rows.

There was none of the hubbub of childhood among these kids.

Their situation was serious, and they knew it.

They were all dressed identically, in white T-shirts and jeans, girls and boys alike. On the back of their shirts were stenciled their names, years of birth, blood types, TB susceptibilities, and Pennsylvania ID numbers. I began noting down a sampling of their names, but stopped when I saw the way Jim was leaning against the wall. We’d both dreaded getting sick on our journey. We were exhausted from too many nights in trains and too much third- rate food. Stepping between the rows of kids, I went to him.

“I’m sorry. I’m nauseated. I’ve got to lie down.”

“No—let’s go outside. You’ll be better.”

I did not say it, but I knew what had happened to him. The over-powering odor of unwashed people was stifling in that station. Out on the street he began to feel better.

“Jim—”

He stared off into the darkness. We both understood the stakes here. This scene was being repeated commonly all over the country. How many orphans are there? What are the support programs like? What are we doing to protect the future?

We did not speak, not until long afterward, when we were on the train. The children were jammed into eight passenger cars behind us. We were in the through-car. Ahead of us were three “state cars” for people planning to leave the train in resident-only states, such as Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia.

“I want to find out about the kids,” Jim said.

“You mean why they’re on the train?”

“Why they’re on the train.”

Their presence worried him too. It must be an enormous undertaking to move so many children. Why was it being done?

We started moving back toward their cars. When we opened the door we saw dim lights and hard seats, and smelled their odor again. These were not the normal Amtrak cars, but old commuters with ceiling fans and dim bulbs, obviously put on at the last moment. They rattled and swayed. The night wind bellowed in the windows. The trainmen were giving out blankets and sheets, which the children made into beds on the seats and the floor. There was a gravity among them that was deeply unsettling, as if this bedmaking were the most important thing in the world, and these blankets were valuable beyond price.

Other passengers were coming back too, bringing food and water bags and whatever else they could spare. Soon the cooks appeared, bearing what later proved to be every scrap of Amtrak food in the train. But there were so many of them, and I know that the great majority must have gone hungry that night.

Jim found one of the adult supervisors at the rear of the car.

She could have been thirty years old, or fifty, it was hard to tell. A little boy slept with his head in her lap, a girl of twelve with her head on her shoulder. She held a baby in her arms. Another baby lay in the girl’s arms. “We’re writing a book,” Jim said. “Can we talk to you?”

She smiled. “I guess so, if you don’t wake anybody up. I got some mighty tired kids on this train.”

“Are you the only supervisor?”

“Lord, no! I’d be dead! There are ten of us with this group, one for every hundred kids.”

“How did you get your job?”

“Well, I have my Master’s in early-childhood education from Bank Street, and I have a degree in child psychology. But I didn’t get the job on qualifications. I was with the State Department of Social Work before the war. Afterward we found ourselves with tremendous numbers of orphans. It was natural that anybody in the Welfare Department who knew anything at all about kids, or just liked them, would end up doing what I’m doing.”

“Why are they on the train?”

She smiled again. “These children are being transferred to an institution in Alabama. We’ve been informed by the Department of Agriculture that there’s going to be another grain emergency by April, so we’re evacuating them to a better-fed area. We do not want to go through another famine the way we went through the last one. My unit buried an awful lot of children. That will not happen again, not if there is any way on God’s earth to prevent it.”

We returned to our own car. An hour passed. For a while I stared at my own reflection in the window. Haggard, thin, cadaverous even. I hadn’t shaved since I was at Quinn’s, in California. I was greasy and grungy and totally exhausted.

Jim read the Philadelphia Inquirer and then slept I felt frightened, as if the delicate balance of the future were swaying and trembling with the movement of the train.

When I was twenty-two I went this way in a Volkswagen, on my way home from New York to San Antonio for a family reunion.

Years later I went in my Mercedes, through the Smokies and across the back of the South, through the piney woods of Arkansas and the hot plains of northeast Texas.

I went also in a bus, broke, hungry, too. And work one year when it was too long between checks from publishers.

My life has been punctuated by journeys between Texas and New York.

I can remember coming this way with my father, and seeing barefoot children with fishing poles in the Cumberland Valley and longing from my luxurious Pullman drawing room to be one of them.

To be a child.

I am tired of trains, tired of travel. Now that it’s almost finished, I wonder what will become of this new