“Daddy?” A child’s voice; my daughters’ faces.
I walked on, faster.
The rear of the depot looked out on a meadow green from spring rains and bordered by a row of tall sycamores. Near the edge of the platform wild clover exploded in bursts of pinks and whites. From their midst a cacophony of buzzings and dronings suggested that life was indeed very pleasant. If you were a bug.
A wave of dizziness passed over me. I shut my eyes for a moment, a mistake.
“Won’t you live with us anymore?” Hope asks, her voice quavering. “Mommy says you won’t.” I look down at her helplessly. “Daddy?” she urges. Behind her, Susy stares with huge round eyes. “Don’t go, Daddy!” she cries suddenly, and rushes to me. I press her in my arms, feel her small shoulders trembling. I struggle to find words that will tell her I don’t want to go—never wanted to go.
My eyes burned. For a long moment I didn’t know where I was. Shapes moved in a pattern before me. I blinked. Circling in the middle distance, blackbirds played tag in the slanting light, their scarlet wing patches flashing like epaulets as they wheeled and darted over the field.
. . . light glowing on the sallow face . . .
“No!”
I must have said it out loud. The sound reverberated in the evening stillness. My head pulsated. I pressed my hands to my temples and leaned against the depot wall.
“Why do you have to go, Daddy?”
Did he think about me?
“Are you coming home, Daddy?”
I reached into the pocket where the bottle had been. My fingers closed around my watch. I pulled it out and pressed the hidden latch that opened the silveroid case, eyes fixed on it, trying to drive the milkiness back.
Years after losing Grandpa’s railroad watch I’d found this one in an antique store. The name P. S. Bartlett inscribed on the works identified it as a model first made in 1857, and its serial number dated it in late ’60 or early ’61. The seventy-five-dollar price was steep, considering it lacked the key for winding and setting. I paid a locksmith fifty dollars to make a replacement; it came out too modern-looking but did the job. With brass polish I buffed the case to a high sheen and took pleasure that the watch kept perfect time.
But now the hands said six-thirty. Hadn’t it been nearly eight before I got off the train? I saw the secondhand not moving in its tiny inset. Funny, I’d wound it that morning. Pulling the key from its hole on the top—where stems were fixed in later models—I fitted it over the winding knob.
At the edge of my vision was a fluttering. Two redwing blackbirds landed on the dock a few yards away. Their wings beat the air, one squawked while touching down, and their feet scratched nervously on the platform.
They were real, not my imagination.
When their wing markings began to vanish, I shook my head to clear my vision, although every detail was registering: the yellow borders of the patches slowly disappeared, then the red centers, leaving both birds completely black.
I stared at them.
Then, soundlessly, still hopping about on the platform, the birds themselves began to grow hazy. They didn’t fade, exactly, or dissolve, but seemed to fill and overflow with pale light until the spaces containing them held only the light and nothing more.
The milkiness climbed around me.
Another bird materialized and flew very near my face, a dark fluttering form flashing before me, wings thrashing. It shot past. Then, for a distinct instant, emerging from the white light, I saw a human figure. It was draped in a uniform coat—military, or some kind of conductor’s, long and faded, with parallel rows of brass buttons—and one arm was stretched toward me. I thought it was moving, as if in flight, but I couldn’t tell whether approaching or receding. In the background, on a hill across a stream or narrow river, a group of people stood in hazy tableau, looking at me.
The world tilted. The sycamores grew smaller. Beyond them the dusk light bronzed and the sky shrank to a narrow band. I clutched at the depot wall but couldn’t hang on. The platform rose abruptly and crashed against my face. Blackness engulfed me.
The next thing I knew, pain was pulsing behind my eyes and I couldn’t see. I tried to climb to my feet, reaching one knee and falling back again, nauseated. A loud, insistent hissing probed the air somewhere inside or outside my brain. Groping on the platform, my hand encountered the watch and returned it to its pocket.
Gradually the depot wall reappeared, blurred and grainy. I made out the two blackbirds on the platform where they had been, their wing-markings again visible. I took a deep breath and touched my face where it felt swollen. My fingers came away bloody.
Moments later I was mystified by the sight of cordwood around me. It was split in three-foot lengths and stacked neatly against the depot, the sawed ends looking fresh cut. Nearby, a loading cart rested on enormous iron-rimmed wheels. Where had that come from? I turned and peered at the wall. The peeling yellow paint was gone, replaced by whitewash. Was I in the same place? I scanned the field. It seemed unchanged. Then I looked again. Had those cornstalks been there? That rail fence? The puddle of water in the foreground?
Suddenly the shapes of the trees looked different and the heat felt stickier.
Then I heard the hissing again, loud and shrill, cutting the air, and I realized with a start that it came from the opposite side of the station.
Christ, I’d forgotten my train!
I struggled to my feet and
