Dogland | Page 2

smile while staring happily into the eyes of the woman. She'd glance at him, glance away, then glance back, then glance away again. She was nervous, not afraid that her husband would find her but merely embarrassed to be so obviously the object of the young man's love. She feared he expected too much of her and would be disappointed once they'd lived together. She loved him as much as he loved her, and she could not believe two people could be so perfectly created for each other.
"He caught up with them, didn't he, Pa?"
"Right in the train, right?"
"That's right." The passenger car's interior was like the train in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, only in color: seats of plush green velvet, heavy drapes by the windows, walls paneled in red oak. Happy people in Sunday clothes waited to depart. Men had moustaches that waggled in easy grins above their cigars. Women carried parasols and wore long dresses. The conductor looked like Captain Kangaroo with his plump belly and his white walrus moustache. He talked to a tiny old woman with sugar-white hair coiled on her head who wore square wire-rimmed glasses with lenses no bigger than cough drops, and no less thick.
"He managed to follow them. Left his farm as if he didn't plan to come back. Came after them with a Bible and a shotgun."
"Oooh."
"He caught up with them on the train." The conductor felt someone brush by him, saw someone dressed wrong for traveling by train. He turned away from the old woman, called, Hey, you! The man, the Nix, my ancestor, stopped to look back. The conductor stared at him. The old Nix wore a stiff black jacket over faded overalls. He carried a shotgun at his side. The conductor said, You can't bring that gun in here. The old man looked at the conductor, looked at the shotgun, looked back at the conductor, said, It's for hunting. He walked on.
The young couple did not see or hear the old Nix. The other people in the car did not notice the old Nix. He was an eccentric farmer, nothing more. The old man walked up behind the couple and called the young man's name.
The young man in the plaid suit turned; he had never seen his beloved's husband. He said, Yes? Beside him, the young woman turned, too. She raised her hand to her mouth, but in that moment, no words could come from her lips. The old man never looked at her.
"He said, 'You sure you're so-and-so?' asking the fellow's name again to be safe."
The young man smiled as he nodded. The young woman spoke a word then, perhaps the young man's name, perhaps my ancestor's. As the young man looked toward her, the old man raised the gun--
"--blew the man's brains out, right there in the train."
The shotgun's explosion was loud, but the young woman's scream may have been louder. The old woman covered her wrinkled mouth with a white lace glove. The conductor's eyelids opened wide as if he could not get enough light to his pupils to see what had really happened.
"Then what? Huh, Pa? Then what?"
"Nothing, really. They locked him up. He didn't try to get away or anything. He'd done what he had to do."
"An' then?"
"He hung himself in the jail cell." The old man dangled from his belt (I never wondered why my ancestor wore both overalls and a belt) which had become long enough to tie to a convenient wooden beam. The walls of the cell had been built with blocks of gray stone. The old man spun slowly. His boots had holes in them. Sunlight shone obliquely between the bars of the single window. The shadows stretched across the floor, across the old man's faded, battered boots.
"Oooooh."
I learned my personal history from Ma. She told me about my birth in 1955 on an army base in South Carolina, and about the Mexico trip when everyone smiled at the happy gringo baby with curly red hair, and how proud Pa was. She told me that after they brought Little Bit home to the farm in Minnesota, they'd hear her cry and rush into the room to find me already there, patting her head and saying, "Don't cry, baby, don't cry." It took them several weeks to realize that I would pinch her when we were alone, then comfort her as the adults arrived. That story always made me laugh.
I liked the old stories because they changed a little with each telling. Sometimes an old story inspired a new one that I had never heard, a story that told me about something I hadn't suspected I hadn't known. That was how I learned about the drunken man at the hospital when I was born.
Ma told me that story