The Telegram Said His Mail Order Bride Died on the Way West — She Stepped Off the Train Alive

Chapter 6

She met Clara Hartwell at the Kansas City junction.

It was the twelfth of April, near sundown, in the dining car — the cars had connected at the junction, and the through service for Denver was making up its consist, and the seat across from Alice’s had been empty for two stations and then was occupied by a woman in a gray dress with a face that had done some recent crying and was not about to pretend otherwise.

“May I?” the woman asked, with a hand on the empty seat.

“Please,” Alice said.

The woman’s name was Clara Hartwell, and she was twenty-nine, and she was a schoolteacher, and she was on her way to her brother’s place in Utah Territory. Her husband had died the winter before in Ohio — Alice understood this without being told the details, because there are things a woman’s posture tells you about her grief that her mouth never volunteers — and the school board had not renewed her contract, because there are also ways a town treats a widow, ways that make it easy to leave. She was traveling with a trunk and a small leather satchel and the careful, tidy demeanor of a person who has packed everything she owns into something that will fit in a railcar’s rack.

They talked through the evening. Clara asked where Alice was headed, and Alice told her — a town called Stone Creek, eleven miles off the branch line, a ranch at the end of a road called Cross Fork, a man she had never met and had been writing to since March.

“Six letters,” Clara said, with the approval of a schoolteacher for tidy figures.

“Six letters,” Alice said. “And if the letters are not the man, then I have lost six weeks instead of ten years, and I will know it by September.”

“That,” Clara said, “is the most sensible thing anyone on this train has said since Chicago.”

They talked until the lamps were trimmed and the car attendant began making his rounds with his oil can. Clara had been reading a novel by gaslight and had fallen asleep over it, her finger marking her place, and Alice had sat awake a while longer, watching the dark country slide past the window — dark, flat, enormous, nothing she knew. She was not afraid. That was the thing she would have told anyone who asked: she was not afraid. She was inconvenienced by the dark, the way you are inconvenienced by a coat before you have worn it, and the curiosity that had driven her from Beacon Street rode with her the whole night, patient as a passenger.

The conductor came through at ten, checking tickets, and he paused at their seat and said, mechanical, a thing he had said a thousand times: “Ladies, the car lights go out at eleven. Sleep well.”

The fourth car back from the engine was where the lamp fell.

At eleven o’clock that night, with the car dark and most of the passengers asleep, a lamp on a shelf bracket that had not been properly secured shifted when the train took a curve at speed. It came down between the cars’ partition and the curtain of the berth below it; the curtain caught; and a fire began in the fourth car so quietly that the first people to know about it were the people who smelled it.

Alice woke to the smell of burning cloth.

The seventh car was where she was — she had been in the seventh car, reading by the pale light of the car’s single lamp with her berth curtain open a hand’s breadth, as she had done every night since Chicago. The smell came through the air vents like a rumor. She sat up. There was shouting, somewhere forward through the dark, and then the train began to slow — brakes applied by a conductor who knew his cars — and then the shouting resolved itself into the ordinary panic of people who have woken to find the world is on fire in the dark.

The cars filled with people. The corridor was a press of shoulder blades and nightgowns; the conductor came through with his lantern, calling the order — to the platforms, ladies and gentlemen, to the platforms, calmly now — and Alice went with the flow of bodies toward the rear platform because everyone was going that way and because the smoke was coming from the front, and Clara Hartwell, who had slept through the first confusion and woken into the second, was in the crowd two people ahead of her.

Alice never saw Clara again after the platform door.

The night was cold, Kansas cold, the kind that comes down off the prairie in April with nothing to stop it. The train had stopped at a small station that had nothing to it but a freight platform and a ticket window and the bewildered face of a station clerk holding a lantern and a manifest. The fire had been contained in twenty minutes — the crew had done the work of the smoke in those twenty minutes, beat it down with blankets and the car’s own water — but twenty minutes had been enough for confusion, and the passengers stood in the cold in their nightclothes and their coats while the crew went through the fourth car car by berth and the injured were carried out.

The station clerk worked from a handwritten manifest in bad light with everyone talking at once.

Seven cars of passengers. Names called, names answered, a pencil moving down a page. Alice answered for herself — “Hartley,” she said, through chattering teeth, when the clerk got to her, and she saw the pencil scratch it in. She was two passengers from the end of the line when Clara’s name was called and no voice answered it.

The clerk called it twice.

The third time, he looked up the line, lantern in hand, and Alice said — she heard her own voice say it, calm as a prayer — “She was ahead of me. She went out the platform door before me.”

The clerk’s pencil found the page and hovered.

Alice stood in the Kansas cold for twenty minutes more before the all-clear was given, and in that time she saw the covered shape carried past on a crewman’s back, and she did not ask its name, because some questions are only answered by the people they are about, and Clara Hartwell was not on the platform.

She reboarded her car with the others, and when the train moved again she stood in the vestibule at the end of the seventh car with her hand pressed to her mouth, and she did not move for a long time.

She had not had the presence of mind, in the confusion at the door, to notice her own burning forearm where the car door’s edge had caught it through her sleeve as the press of bodies pushed her through — the conductor’s cloth strip had been wrapped around it somewhere between the platform and the physician’s car, and she had not felt it in the cold.

Two cars up, with the manifest open under a lantern that the clerk was still shaking in his hand, the pencil had copied Hartley with a witness beside it, and Hartwell with nobody, and the clerk had done his arithmetic the only way the dark would let him, which was wrong.