A few people, hearing, laughed, and the old man laughed quietly and the people were in now, dozens of them, and the day was late, and the husband and wife shut the door and stood by it and turned and waited for this last special time when the old man might open his mouth.
The old man stood up . His audience grew very still.
The train came, rusty and loud at midnight, into a suddenly snow-filled station. Under a cruel dusting of white, the ill-washed people crowded into and through the ancient chair cars, mashing the old man along the corridor and into an empty compartment that had once been a lavatory. Soon the floor was a solid mass of bed roll on which sixteen people twisted and turned in darkness, fighting their way into sleep.
The train rushed forth to white emptiness.
The old man, thinking, Quiet, shut up, no, don’t speak, nothing, no, stay still, think, careful, cease! found himself now swayed, joggled, hurled this way and that as he half crouched against a wall.
He and just one other were upright in this monster room of dreadful sleep. A few feet away, similarly shoved against the wall, sat an eight-year-old boy with a drawn sick paleness escaping from his cheeks. Full awake, eyes bright, he seemed to watch, he did watch, the old man’s mouth. The boy gazed because he must. The train hooted, roared, swayed, yelled and ran.
Half an hour passed in a thunderous grinding passage by night under the snow-hidden moon, and the old man’s mouth was tight-nailed shut.
Another hour, and stiff boned shut. Another hour, and the muscles around his cheeks began to slacken. Another, and his lips parted to wet themselves. The boy stayed awake. The boy saw. The boy waited.
Immense sifts of silence came down the night air outside, tunneled by avalanche train. The travelers, very deep in invoiced terror, numbed by flight, slept each separate, but the boy did not take his eyes away and at last the old man leaned forward, softly. “Sh. Boy. Your name?”
“Joseph.” The train swayed and groaned in its sleep, a monster floundering through timeless dark toward a mom that could not be imagined. “Joseph.” The old man savored the word, bent forward, his eyes gentle and shining.
His face filled with pale beauty. His eyes widened until they seemed blind. He gazed at a distant and hidden thing. He cleared his throat ever so softly. “Ah … “
The train roared round a curve. The people rocked in their snowing sleep. “Well, Joseph,” whispered the old man. He lifted his fingers softly in the air. “Once upon a time… “
The end
