If Zeke could have come I could have at least insured that it was loaded on, but the Negroes are free now and they are not to help. I don’t know how I will get our valise on. People begin to push to the edge of the platform, hauling their bags and worldly goods. It is said that the engine was built to be used by President Lincoln, but since the assassination attempt he is too infirm to travel. Under the dust it is a dark claret in color. It is an old, badly used thing, but I can see that once it was a model of chaste and beautiful workmanship. The train comes down the track, chuffing, coming slow. My mother’s infirmity is her trial, and it is also mine. The only way to be true is to be true from the inside and I am not. I don’t even try to curb my feelings and I know that they rise up to my face. I am trying to be a Christian daughter, and I remind myself that it is not her fault that the war turned her into an old woman, or that her mind is full of holes and everything new drains out. And again and again, through this long, long train ride to St. “When are we going home?” my mother says.īut she won’t remember and in a moment she’ll ask again. Something is being bent, like a bow, bending and bending and bending. There is a feeling inside me, an anger, that I can’t even speak. Now I only try to keep it from my face, try to keep my outer self disciplined. When I was younger I used to try to school my unruly self in Christian charity. If I am not sharp with her, she will keep on it. My mother blinks and touches her sprig of lilac uncertainly. Julia is married and living in Tennessee. I’m Clara, my sister Julia is eleven years older than me. “We’ve come to catch the train,” I say, very sharp. “Julia Adelaide,” my mother says, “I think we should go home.” I check my bag with our water and provisions. She has been poorly since the winter of ’62. They say we will walk, but I don’t know how my mother will do that. Louis, from whence we will leave for the Oklahoma territories. On the train platform we are all in mourning. I want to go home, but that house is not ours anymore. I can smell the lilac, and the smell of too many people crowded together, and a faint taste of cinders on the air. I can smell it, even in the crush of these people all waiting for the train. My mother wears a sprig pinned to her dress under her cameo. If I stand right, the edges of my bonnet are like blinders and I can’t see the soldiers at all. They are General Dodge’s soldiers, keeping the tracks maintained for the Lincoln Train. Along with Clara, we wait for the Lincoln train to take us to an unknown future. One or two paragraphs into the story and we are already standing on the dock inside Clara’s skin, smelling the scents, feeling the urgency, the tension and the dread, experiencing the confusion of a girl who is merely attempting to be a good person in a time and under circumstances in which it is no longer very clear what that means. What remains the same are the people (McHugh tends to focus on the women), and their difficulties and existential dilemmas, which McHugh excels in capturing in all of her stories, and in this story in particular. Somehow the slight deviation turns into a type of crack through which we peek at our regular reality and perceive it in a way that is simultaneously vague and heightened, as it occurs at times when we run a high fever and everything is experienced both from up-close and also slightly from a distance, sharp and piercing but also blurry and opaque. McHugh’s stories go beyond the realia only in a minor fashion, which grants them the quality of something between a thought experiment and an illusion. McHugh’s refined approach to science fiction and fantasy writing. This story is a wonderful demonstration of Maureen F. The story is told from the point of view of Clara, a seventeen-year-old girl who’s driven out of her town along with her mother. Subsequently, Andrew Johnson never replaces him as president, and instead, Secretary of State William Henry Seward governs the United States, and orders, among other things, to banish slave owners who had not emancipated their slaves-a type of internal population transfer. In the reality of the story, which takes place sometime after April 14, 1865, Lincoln didn’t die from John Wilkes Booth’s gunshot, but rather slipped into a coma from which he did not wake up. “The Lincoln Train” is a story of alternate history, but its deviation from the historical narrative is very slight.
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