Always October. C. E. Edmonson

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СКАЧАТЬ it. The top of my head came to about halfway up the driving wheel and when I leaned back, the engineer in his cab might have been perched atop Eddie’s barn.

      The engine’s smokestack was even higher, and it was blowin’ out steam in little pulses. Behind the engineer, a fireman shoveled coal from the coal car into the engine. I watched him for a moment—his face was black with coal dust—and was reminded of the Beckmeyers. The man’s labor was that regular. Then a face appeared at the front of the passengers’ car, a pleasant face with dark skin and a wide grin. The man was dressed in a navy-blue suit with a shiny-brimmed cap that positively glowed. A watch chain ran across his chest and he consulted his timepiece as he lowered the steps.

      “Howdy, folks,” he said. “Goin’ my way?”

      Nobody got off and we were the only Louristan residents getting on, so he must’ve been talkin’ to us. Only I was too flummoxed to recognize the fact. I looked down the tracks, at a line of boxcars that ran behind the trees. The world had just gotten a whole lot bigger and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I’d been doin’ pretty good where I was.

      * * *

      We changed trains in St. Cloud, a real city even back then. I didn’t get to see much of it, though. We pulled into the depot a little before midnight and left an hour later. Our new train was pulled by a Baldwin locomotive that dwarfed the one before. This was a passenger train and speed was how the passenger lines attracted riders. Now I’ve been told there’s a train in Japan that goes two hundred miles an hour. By comparison, the train we were on didn’t approach the speed of a turtle. But to me and Eddie, sitting across the aisle from my parents and Annie, that locomotive might’ve been pulling us at the speed of light. The car rattled and shook on the straightaways. Its wheels screamed goin’ around the curves. The roar of the engine was with us every minute, and a plume of gray-black smoke trailed overhead like the mane of a flying horse.

      The closer we came to Chicago, the bigger the world got. We saw factories first—mills would be my guess—out on the prairie, their smokestacks pouring black smoke into the sky. We didn’t think it was pollution—back then nobody thought about it that way. This was progress, the progress of America. Our country had declared war on the Germans in April, but the horrors had yet to affect us. At seven years old, I believed in the glory of war, the glory of America, the glory of Minnesota, the glory of Louristan, the glory of a world that got bigger and bigger and bigger until we finally reached the Chicago and Northwestern railway station. Then it pretty much exploded.

      I don’t recall speaking a word as we paraded through the terminal with its chandeliers and its green-marble columns arranged in pairs to form a colonnade. The ceiling above me—high, high above me—was curved, which I found downright peculiar, but the interior was nothin’ compared to the outside. In the noon sun, the white columns across the front and the limestone blocks shone like a castle in one of Annie’s picture books. The one the fairy princess lived in. The columns alone were taller than any building in Louristan.

      What I’m describing here are my impressions. I didn’t have time to think much on what I was seeing because the surprises just kept coming. There were no horses, for the first thing, only automobiles and trucks zipping up and down the streets, horns blaring, everybody with someplace they had to be right that minute. The stink of their exhausts and the stink of the factories crowded into my nose, but even here I made no judgment. The immensity held me mute, even inside my mind. Eddie, too, though I do recall him muttering his favorite expression: “Holy horseflies.”

      Grand sights in Chicago were about as common as horseflies, and I could go on forever about the city, but I’ve got a main point I’m comin’ to so I’ll run fast through that first day, the day me and Eddie spent with Momma and Annie.

      I saw buildings that were twenty stories high and we took an elevator and an escalator—moving stairs, imagine such a thing—to the top of one whose name I can’t recall for the life of me. What I do remember is a view so vast I kept looking out there for my own house, as if I could see all the way to Minnesota.

      We strolled along State Street for a time after we came down. The street was lined with shops offering the latest in everything from clothes to all kinds of food to chinaware. Mom didn’t take us shopping, though she and Annie stopped occasionally to gaze through the showroom windows. Instead she took us to White City. Nobody remembers Chicago’s White City any more. The park was demolished a generation ago. But in its heyday, it was one of a chain of White City amusement parks that rivaled Dreamland and Steeplechase Park in Coney Island.

      Admission to the park was free—you bought tickets for the various rides and shows as you went along. If you wanted you could spend the day gawking at the sights, and there was plenty to gawk at, especially if you were two young sprouts from Minnesota. The buildings along White City’s central promenade were milky white and lit with enough light bulbs to illuminate the town of Louristan for a century. Covered entirely in electric lights, a white tower at the end of the promenade rose three hundred feet in the air. The effect was made even more dazzling by the aeronautics show going on overhead. I’d only seen an airplane once before in my life, and then from a window in school. Now there were five in the air at one time, doing rolls and turns, dives and climbs, twisting, turning, now flying in formation, now veering off. They were red and blue and white and yellow and black. Flying so low I could make out the features of their pilots.

      We all stood there, motionless, deafened by the noise—even my beloved sister, who found herself without anything to say for the first time in her life. Nobody was moving. The crowd on the promenade might have been a collection of statues in a museum. Then, all at once, as the planes drifted away from the park, everyone came to life and I saw ahead of me the park’s enormous, wooden roller coaster.

      The cars were on their way up the first climb when I finally caught sight of them, the gears ratcheting away. Clank, clank, clank, clank, foot by foot by foot until the first car tumbled over, then the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth, faster and faster and faster, whipping into a sharp curve to the left, another to the right, then up another climb. The riders screamed like their seats were on fire.

      I was impressed alright, but more than that, when I considered the potential of my being a passenger on that roller coaster, my stomach knotted up tighter than a trussed turkey. I looked over at Eddie. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes conveyed his appreciation of the challenge. If asked, could he refuse? Could I? Then Annie spoke up.

      “I want to ride the roller coaster,” she announced.

      “Alright. Eddie and Lucas, you stay close now.” Mom led us across a broad plaza, toward the roller coaster. My heart shrank with every step. Then she suddenly stopped and pointed to a sign. “That says ‘no children under nine years old.’ I’m sorry, boys, but you can’t ride.”

      “Doggone,” Eddie said. “I really wanted to give her a try.”

      “Me too,” I returned. “It sure looks like a hoot.”

      The both of us lived to regret our boastful tones a few minutes later. White City also had a Ferris wheel, which was nearly as high as the skyscraper we’d just left—a Ferris wheel with no age restrictions. And sure enough, Annie just had to take a ride.

      “How about you, Lucas?” Mom asked. “Do you think you’re old enough? That wheel’s awful high.”

      I looked at Eddie, at his corn-shock hair, which seemed to be standing on end. But I’d already committed myself to riding the roller coaster. I couldn’t say no to the Ferris wheel, not directly, and I threw what later came to be called a Hail Mary pass.

      “If Eddie wants to ride, I’ll ride too.”

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