The Lincoln Highway (30 page)

FitzWilliams shook his head.

—Well, you know Harry. After a few drinks, it’s hard to tell where Shakespeare ends and Harry begins. So when the boy would come through the door, Harry would stand up from his stool, make an elaborate flourish, and say,
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, the Duchess of Alba
. And the next time it would be
the Duchess of Kent
, or
the Duchess of Tripoli
. Pretty soon some of the others began calling the boy Duchess. Then we all called him Duchess. Every last one of us. To the point where no one could even remember his given name.

FitzWilliams raised his glass again, this time taking a good, long drink. When he set the glass down, Emmett was startled to see that the old performer had begun to cry—letting the tears roll down his cheeks without bothering to wipe them away.

FitzWilliams gestured to the bottle.

—He gave me that, you know. Duchess, I mean. Despite everything. Despite all of it, last night he came here and bought me a brand-new bottle of my favorite whiskey. Just like that.

FitzWilliams took a deep breath.

—He was sent away to a work camp in Kansas, you know. At the age of sixteen.

—Yes, said Emmett. That’s where we met.

—Ah. I see. But in all your time together, did he ever tell you . . . did he ever tell you how he came to be there?

—No, said Emmett. He never did.

Then after taking the liberty of pouring a little more of the old man’s whiskey into both of their glasses, Emmett waited.

T
hough the boy had
already read the story once from beginning to end, Ulysses asked him to read it again.

Shortly after ten—with the sun having set, the moon yet to rise, and the others retreating to their tents—Billy had taken out his book and asked if Ulysses would like to hear the story of Ishmael, a young sailor who joined a one-legged captain on his hunt for a great white whale. Though Ulysses had never heard the story of Ishmael, he had no doubt it would be a good one. Each of the boy’s stories had been good. But when Billy had offered to read this new adventure, with a touch of embarrassment Ulysses had asked if he would read the story of his namesake instead.

The boy hadn’t hesitated. By the waning light of Stew’s fire, he had turned to the back of his book and illuminated the page with his flashlight beam—a circle of light within a circle of light within a sea of darkness.

As Billy began, Ulysses felt a moment of worry that having read the story once before, the boy might paraphrase or skip over passages, but Billy seemed to understand that if the story was worth reading again, it was worth reading word for word.

Yes, the boy read the story exactly as he had in the boxcar, but Ulysses didn’t hear it the same way. For this time, he knew what was to come. He knew now to look forward to some parts and dread others—to look forward to how Ulysses bested the Cyclops by hiding his men under the pelts of sheep, and to dread the moment when the covetous
crew unleashed the winds of Aeolus, setting their captain’s ship off course at the very moment that his homeland had come into view.

When the story was over, and Billy had closed his book and switched off his light, and Ulysses had taken up Stew’s shovel to cover the embers, Billy asked if he would tell a story.

Ulysses looked down with a smile.

—I don’t have any storybooks, Billy.

—You don’t have to tell a story from a book, Billy replied. You could tell a story from yourself. Like one from the war overseas. Do you have any of those?

Ulysses turned the shovel in his hand.

Did he have any stories from the war? Of course, he did. More than he cared to remember. For his stories had not been softened by the mists of time or brightened by the tropes of a poet. They remained vivid and severe. So vivid and severe that whenever one happened to surface in his mind, Ulysses would bury it—just as he had been about to bury the embers of this fire. If Ulysses couldn’t stomach the sharing of the memories with himself, he certainly wasn’t going to share them with an eight-year-old boy.

But Billy’s request was a fair one. Generously, he had opened the pages of his book and told the stories of Sinbad and Jason and Achilles, and of Ulysses’s namesake twice. He had certainly earned a telling in return. So setting the shovel aside, Ulysses threw another log on the fire and resumed his seat on the railroad tie.

—I have a story for you, he said. A story about my own encounter with the king of the winds.

—When you were sailing across the wine-dark sea?

—No, said Ulysses. When I was walking across the dry and dusty land.

The story began on a rural road in Iowa in the summer of 1952.

A few days before, Ulysses had boarded a train in Utah, intending to travel over the Rockies and across the plains to Chicago. But halfway
through Iowa, the boxcar in which he was traveling was shunted onto a siding in order to wait for a different locomotive, which was scheduled to arrive who knew when. Forty miles away was the junction in Des Moines, where he could easily catch another train headed east, or one headed north toward the Lakes, or south to New Orleans. With that in mind, Ulysses had disembarked and begun working his way across the countryside on foot.

He had walked about ten miles down an old dirt road when he began to sense that something was amiss.

The first sign was the birds. Or rather, the absence of them. When you’re traveling back and forth across the country, Ulysses explained, the one great constant is the companionship of birds. On your way from Miami to Seattle or Boston to San Diego, the landscape is always changing. But wherever you go, the birds are there. The pigeons or buzzards, condors or cardinals, blue jays or blackbirds. Living on the road, you wake to the sound of their singing at dawn, and you lay yourself down to their chatter at dusk.

And yet . . .

As Ulysses walked along this rural road, there wasn’t a bird to be seen, not circling over the fields or perched upon the telephone wires.

The second sign was the caravan of cars. While throughout the morning Ulysses had been passed by the occasional pickup or sedan moving along at forty miles an hour, suddenly he saw an assortment of fifteen cars, including a black limousine, speeding in his direction. The vehicles were driving so fast, he had to step off the shoulder in order to shield himself from the gravel that was kicked up by their tires.

After watching them race past, Ulysses turned back to look in the direction from which they’d come. That’s when he saw that the sky in the east was turning from blue to green. Which in that part of the country, as Billy well knew, could only mean one thing.

Behind Ulysses was nothing but knee-high corn for as far as the eye could see, but half a mile ahead was a farmhouse. With the sky growing darker by the minute, Ulysses began to run.

As he drew closer, Ulysses could see that the farmhouse had already been battened down, its doors and shutters closed. He could see the owner securing the barn, then dashing to the hatch of his shelter, where his wife and children waited. And when the farmer reached his family, Ulysses could see the young boy pointing in his direction.

As the four looked his way, Ulysses slowed from a run to a walk with his hands at his side.

The farmer instructed his wife and children to go into the shelter—first the wife so that she could help the children, then the daughter, and then the little boy, who continued to look at Ulysses right up until the moment he disappeared from sight.

Ulysses expected the father to follow his family down the ladder, but leaning over to say one last thing, he closed the hatch, turned toward Ulysses, and waited for his approach. Maybe there was no lock on the shelter’s hatch, thought Ulysses, and the farmer figured if there was going to be a confrontation then better to have it now, while still aboveground. Or maybe he felt if one man intends to refuse harbor to another, he should do so face-to-face.

As a sign of respect, Ulysses came to a stop six paces away, close enough to be heard, but far enough to pose no threat.

The two men studied each other as the wind began to lift the dust around their feet.

—I’m not from around these parts, Ulysses said after a moment. I’m just a Christian working my way to Des Moines so I can catch a train.

The farmer nodded. He nodded in a manner that said he believed Ulysses was a Christian and that he was on his way to catch a train, but that under the circumstances neither of those things mattered.

—I don’t know you, he said simply.

—No, you don’t, agreed Ulysses.

For a moment, Ulysses considered helping the man come to know him—by telling him his name, telling him that he’d been raised in Tennessee and that he was a veteran, that he’d once had a wife and child of his own. But even as these thoughts passed through Ulysses’s mind, he knew that the telling of them wouldn’t matter either. And he knew it without resentment.

For were the positions reversed, were Ulysses about to climb down into a shelter, a windowless space beneath the ground that he had dug with his own hands for the safety of his family, and were a six-foot-tall white man suddenly to appear, he wouldn’t have welcomed him either. He would have sent him on his way.

After all, what was a man in the prime of his life doing crossing the country on foot with nothing but a canvas bag slung over his shoulder? A man like that must have made certain choices. He had chosen to abandon his family, his township, his church, in pursuit of something different. In pursuit of a life unhindered, unanswered, and alone. Well, if that’s what he had worked so hard to become, then why in a moment like this should he expect to be treated as anything different?

—I understand, said Ulysses, though the man had not explained himself.

The farmer looked at Ulysses for a moment, then turning to his right, he pointed to a thin white spire rising from a grove of trees.

—The Unitarian church is a little less than a mile. It’s got a basement. And you’ve got a good chance of making it, if you run.

—Thank you, said Ulysses.

As they stood facing each other, Ulysses knew that the farmer had been right. Any chance he had of making it to the church in time was predicated on his going as quickly as he could. But Ulysses had no
intention of breaking into a run in front of another man, however good his advice. It was a matter of dignity.

After waiting, the farmer seemed to understand this, and with a shake of the head that laid no blame on anyone, including himself, he opened his hatch and joined his family.

With a glance at the steeple, Ulysses could tell that the shortest route to the church was directly across the fields rather than by way of the road, so that’s the way he went, running as the crow would fly. It didn’t take long for him to realize that this was a mistake. Though the corn was only a foot and a half high and the farmer’s rows were wide and well kept, the ground itself was soft and uneven, making for cumbersome work. Given all the fields he’d slogged across in Italy, he should have known better. But it seemed too late to switch back to the road now, so with his eye on the steeple he pressed ahead as best he could.

When he was halfway to the church, the twister appeared in the distance at two o’clock, a dark black finger reaching down from the sky—the inversion of the steeple both in color and intent.

With every step now, Ulysses’s progress was slowing. There was so much debris kicking up from the ground that he had to advance with a hand in front of his face to protect his eyes. Then he was holding up both hands with his gaze partly averted, as he stumbled onward toward the upward and downward spires.

Through the gaps in his fingers and the veil of the unsettled dust, Ulysses became aware of rectangular shadows rising from the ground around him, shadows that looked at once orderly and in disarray. Dropping his hands for a second, he realized he had entered a graveyard and he could hear the bell in the steeple beginning to toll, as if rung by an invisible hand. He couldn’t have been more than fifty yards from the church.

But in all likelihood, it was fifty yards too far.

For the twister was turning counterclockwise and its winds were pushing Ulysses away from his goal rather than toward it. As hail began raining down upon him, he prepared for one final push.
I can make it
, he told himself. Then running with all his might, he began closing the distance between himself and the sanctuary—only to stumble over a low-lying gravestone and come crashing to the ground with the bitter resignation of the abandoned.

—Abandoned by who? asked Billy, with his book gripped in his lap and his eyes open wide.

Ulysses smiled.

—I don’t know, Billy. By fortune, by fate, by my own good sense. But mostly by God.

The boy began shaking his head.

—You don’t mean that, Ulysses. You don’t mean that you were abandoned by God.

—But that’s exactly what I mean, Billy. If I learned anything in the war, it’s that the point of utter abandonment—that moment at which you realize no one will be coming to your aid, not even your Maker—is the very moment in which you may discover the strength required to carry on. The Good Lord does not call you to your feet with hymns from the cherubim and Gabriel blowing his horn. He calls you to your feet by making you feel alone and forgotten. For only when you have seen that you are
truly
forsaken will you embrace the fact that what happens next rests in your hands, and your hands alone.

Lying on the ground of that graveyard, feeling the old abandonment and knowing it for what it was, Ulysses reached up and took hold of the top of the nearest gravestone. As he hoisted himself upward, he realized the stone he was pushing on was not weathered or worn. Even through the maelstrom of dust and debris he could see it had the dark gray luminescence of a stone that had just been planted. Rising to his full height, Ulysses found himself looking over the shoulders of the
marker down into a freshly dug grave, at the bottom of which was the shiny black top of a casket.

This is where the caravan of cars had been coming from, realized Ulysses. They must have been right in the middle of the interment when they received warning of the tornado’s approach. The reverend must have hurried through whatever verses would suffice to commit the soul of the deceased to Heaven, and then everyone had dashed for their cars.

From the look of the coffin, it must have been for a man of some wealth. For this was no pine box. It was polished mahogany with handles of solid brass. On the lid of the coffin was a matching brass plaque with the dead man’s name: Noah Benjamin Elias.

Sliding down into the narrow gap between the coffin and the wall of the grave, Ulysses bent over to unscrew the clasps and open the coffin’s lid. Inside was Mr. Elias lying in state, dressed in a three-piece suit with his hands crossed neatly on his chest. His shoes were as black and shiny as his coffin, and curving across his vest was the thin gold chain of a watch. Though only about five foot six, Mr. Elias must have weighed over two hundred pounds—having dined in a manner suited to his station.

What was the nature of Mr. Elias’s earthly success? Was he the owner of a bank or lumberyard? Was he a man of grit and determination, or of greed and deceit? Whichever he was, he was no longer. And all that mattered to Ulysses was that this man who was only five foot six had had a big enough sense of himself to be buried in a coffin that was six feet long.

Reaching down, Ulysses took hold of Elias by the lapels, just as you would when you intended to shake some sense into someone. Pulling him up out of the coffin, Ulysses hoisted him into a standing position so that they were almost face-to-face. Ulysses could see now that the mortician had applied rouge on the dead man’s cheeks and scented
him with gardenia, giving him the unsettling semblance of a harlot. Bending his knees in order to get under the weight of the cadaver, Ulysses raised him up out of his resting place and dumped him at the side of the grave.