Estelle had just finished the novel she was reading when the trainman, dressed in black, placed a board with the notice that the Canadian National train going to Timmins would stop at Richmond Hill, Barrie, Orillia, Gravenhurst, Huntsville, Sundridge, North Bay, Timagami, Redlake, Latchford, Cobalt, Haileybury, Earlton, Englehart, Dane, Swastika, Kirkland Lake, Bourkes, Ramore, Matheson, Monteith, Porquis Junction, Pamour, Porcupine, South Porcupine, Schumacher and Timmins. Estelle had no idea that the train had to stop at so many places, and having to stop at so many places before Timmins, she concluded that Timmins must really be behind God’s back. This was her first journey on a train of any kind. She had thought the train would pull out of the station, blow its whistle twice or so, and fast “as a train” stop in Timmins, in a matter of hours. So that, in the event of emergency, depression and boredom with the north, she could hop on to another train and come back to Toronto; spend the night in Toronto, and perhaps return to Timmins early the next morning, by train.
She did not really understand why she was on this train going to see Mrs. Macmillan in Timmins anyhow. “Just to give her a chance, just a chance!” When she reached a man at a door, she asked him how far away Timmins was.
“Five-hundred-odd miles,” he told her, as if he was referring to the bus stop around the corner.
“Five hundred?” It rattled her. But the man of the train could not see the shock in his reply: he was already walking away beside the steam coming from under the belly of the train she was boarding, and he was too busy to hear. “Five hundred miles!” And she immediately thought of Barbados: it is only twenty-one miles long in the longest part, and sixteen miles broad in the broadest part. She stopped to check her arithmetic on the dust of the green train, writing with the inkless pen of her index finger. “Four hundred and seventy-nine miles I would be travelling out in the damn Atlantic Ocean, Christ! ha-ha-ha!”
She was still walking to find her coach, walking and meeting the hissing of the underbelly of the train, and meeting also a few inquisitive but not jeering faces printed at the glass windows like patterns; meeting a man, a porter, standing like a black proprietor beside a step, one flight high, near a door which was not really a door, but rather a passage between two coaches which joined them together, and through which a passenger could enter one of the coaches or fall off. Estelle didn’t want to stop and board at the first black-uniformed-conducted coach she met; so she walked on, amongst the fumes and the rattling of carts loading baggage and luggage and mail … on to the next man, a white man, and there she stopped and stepped. He took her ticket, looked at it, motioned her on, gave her back her ticket; and she walked farther along the walk, going to the noise to the front of the monstrous train, near the smells of hops and ale and beer stale on the nostrils from the nearby breweries, and into the face of the smells of the railroad yard. All the time, humid and miserable and a little tired and lost in the vast crowd of people coming and going, she was thinking of four hundred miles, or was it five hundred? … four hundred miles and seventy-nine added on, all those blasted miles to get to some place at the end of which she did not know for sure whether the woman, Mrs. Macmillan, was going to be there: for Mrs. Macmillan, whose idea it was to get her to journey to Timmins, might be a completely different person by now, Estelle thought; she was certainly no longer a next-door bed-sitting, bed-talking neighbour. She was a friend who became a friend under the special conditions of a sickbed.
Estelle selected a seat beside a window. She stood up by the seat. She looked at the other passengers, some making themselves comfortable in their nests of choice, like birds turning straw and twigs into dunlippillo mattresses for a long night; and some already reading, so they wouldn’t have to listen to the railroad history of some of their neighbours. She looked in front. And she looked behind. She found out where people put their bags — on the racks above them — and she put hers there too. And then she sat down. She must find something to do.
She got up, reached for her bag (her slip moved above her knees, and the backs of her knees were showing, and her thighs were riding up in sight too; and one man, three seats and rows behind, whistled under his breath and whinnied in a low whinny as if he had just seen heaven up her legs!), and she took her bag down. She must not lose her shaking composure. She should read Mrs. Macmillan’s letter again: she wanted to read the novel she had just finished — although she had never before read a book twice, not even a school textbook. But this new environment, this new condition, was making her uncertain of herself, uncomfortable, nervous, tense, doing things she had never done before.
She got down the bag which wasn’t cumbersome, and when it was beside her on the seat, she realized that the novel, Cannery Row, and the letter were in the handbag. Anticipating the horselaugh of her admirer behind,
