I heard they took the Dreadnought out of play, said the boy as he went back to discarding his papers. I heard they took it back north, or maybe east, to feed another cracker line. Maybe they wont come no closer, not without their big old engine to beef em up.
She said, Dreadnought . Thats the engine they used to move the walker, aint it?
The magazine man said, Yeah, they use it to tote around their biggest war toys. He sat on the back of the cart, dipping it lower on its axle. You see, miss, what they done is, they built themselves the biggest, meanest engine they could imagine, and then they trussed it up with enough armor and artillery to be a real war machine. Ready to go from place to place, easy as anything else that rolls along a line. He made a little gesture, like a man playing with a childs cars on a carpet railway.
Its a monster, said the boy.
Its a fine piece of engineering, the man countered. But its only an engine-and just one engine, at that. Even if they brought it here, to Fort Chattanooga, and used it to try and rout the lot of us straight back across the Georgia state line, it wouldnt do no good.
Mercy asked, And why is that?
He pointed a finger at her and said, Because I dont give two pebbles of squirrel shit how awesome the Dreadnought is. This-here is the proper rail exchange for everything east of Houston and north of Tallahassee. We got enough engines here to run it out on a rail. He chuckled at his own joke. It cant take on all of us, not all at once. Not here. This-here city is made of rails, miss. Its made of steel, and coal, and sweat, and no one train is going to come here and change nothing . Sides, he added. Monster or no, it cant run across the street, or waltz up a rock wall and bust a line into a mountain.
Thats what the walkers are for, the boy chimed in.
Yeah, well. The man spit a gob of tobacco into the street. They only got a handful of those, and after last night, theyre down one. We got half a dozen, and ours are pushed by Texas crude, not by old-fashioned steam. Its the way of the future! he assured Mercy. This city, right here. This is where the future puts its feet on the ground and starts kicking Yankee ass. Right here, he emphasized, and waggled his rear end off the edge of the cart. He hit the ground with a whump, and reached for the last pile or two of papers. He pointed his finger back at her one more time and said, But for now, I think ladies ought to find their way out of the city limits. Things might get worse before they line up again.
Then he brought the gate up on the cart with a satisfied slam, tipped his hat in salutation, and took the reins of the mule who was hitched up to it, leading the whole setup away.
Mercy wandered back toward the St. George and thanked the man at the desk when he indicated that supper was well under way. She settled for what she found there, then returned to the safety of her room.
Once there, she took inventory of what she had left, stacking her money in discrete piles. Lord Almighty, she said aloud. This is going to be one hell of a mess, Daddy.
The word startled her. Shed never called her stepfather anything but Father, and she could hardly remember Jeremiah Granville Swakhammer, except from her mothers disappointment. In the years since hed left them both, shed heard more about him than shed ever personally experienced-and what shed heard had run the gamut, depending on the speaker.
She knew he was a big man, and uncommonly strong, and not terribly well educated-but none too stupid, either. She knew he was funny sometimes. She remembered laughing. Vividly, it hijacked her. Just a flash, a tiny moment of being a child, and seeing something hilarious, coming from her father. The feeling of warmth, the knee-high grass tickling her legs under her dress, and the primroses shed tied together and stuck in her hair with a bobby pin. He was showing her something, and making a game of it.
But the game eluded her. The memory stayed sharp, but contained few details.
And it wasnt enough to tell her why she was doing this. Not really.
Itd been a hard enough crawl already, just from Richmond to the bottommost side of Tennessee; and the trip had hardly begun. What on earth was she doing, crossing a whole world by herself to see a man she could barely recall?
I dont know, she said to the small piles of money, and the new stockings and gloves and toiletries laid out across the bed, I guess now that Phillips gone, I just dont have anywhere
to go. Or, at least, she amended the sentiment with a catch in her throat, I dont have anywhere Ive gotta be .
She repacked everything, rolling the cloth items tightly and arranging the rest carefully, cramming it all into the medical satchel that she hadnt let out of her sight since leaving the hospital. Then she went downstairs and left a note asking to be roused for breakfast, and settled down for a badly needed night of sleep.
She dreamed of Phillips corpse, friendly and waving a handkerchief from the train platform, seeing her off as she left him for parts unknown. And she awoke in the night with a sob, clutching her chest, her face covered in tears.