“It’s a train,” Uncle Herbert said. “A steam train.”
“I can see that, but what’s it doing here? On a truck? So very close to my house?”
“It’s a present for Kate. And Tom, I guess, if she wants to share.” He turned to Kate and Tom. “Sharing is important.”
Uncle Herbert definitely didn’t have much experience with kids.
“Well, it’s a nice gesture,” Kate’s father said, rubbing his chin. “But couldn’t you have just sent her a toy?”
“It is a toy!”
“Well, no, Herbert, that’s not a toy. That’s a real train.”
“I suppose,” Uncle Herbert said. “But technically if she’s going to play with it, then sort of by definition it’s also a toy. If you think about it.”
Kate’s father stopped and thought about it, which was a tactical error. What he probably should have done, Kate thought, was lose his temper and call the police.
Her mother didn’t have this problem. She came tearing out of the house yelling.
“Herbert, you blazing blockhead, what the blaze do you think you’re doing? Get this thing out of here! Kids, get off the train!”
She said that last part because while all this was going on Kate and Tom had gotten up onto the flatbed truck and were starting to climb up the sides of the train. They couldn’t stop themselves. With all the pipes and knobs and spokes and whatnot it was like rock climbing.
They reluctantly got off it and retreated to a safe distance, but Kate still couldn’t stop looking at it. It was giant and black and complicated, with lots of fiddly little bits that obviously did interesting things, and a cozy little cab that you could sit in. It looked ominous and fascinating, like a sleeping dinosaur. The longer you looked at it, the more interesting it got.
And it was real. It was almost like she’d been waiting for it without knowing it. She kind of loved it.
Stenciled along the side of the tender, in small white capital letters, were the words:
That was its name. They’d written it with a long, thin arrow sticking through the letters.
2
Uncle Herbert Shows No Improvement
“IT’S NOT EVEN SILVER,” KATE’S FATHER SAID. “IT’S black. And what would you do with a silver arrow anyway?”
“Hunt werewolves,” Kate said. “Obviously.”
“And where would we even put it?” said her mother.
“Oh, I figured that out,” Uncle Herbert said. “We’ll set it up on some tracks in the backyard.”
“On some—! In the back—!” Kate’s mom was so angry she couldn’t even finish her sentences. “Herbert, you are such a blockhead!”
“We’re not putting train tracks in our backyard,” Kate’s father said. “That’s where my shade garden is going to go.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do it yourselves,” Uncle Herbert said proudly. “I’ve already done it! I got some workers to do it last night. I had them use muffled hammers so you wouldn’t wake up.”
Kate’s parents stared at Uncle Herbert. Privately Kate thought that for a guy in a banana-yellow suit he was turning out to be a pretty sharp operator. It occurred to her that this was a good practical application of something one of her heroes used to say, which is that sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.
Grace Hopper said that. She was born more than a hundred years ago, in 1906. Back then the world was way too prejudiced to allow women to be computer programmers, and computers hadn’t been invented yet anyway, but in spite of all that Grace Hopper became a computer programmer and wrote the world’s first software compiler. By the time she died, at the age of eighty-five, she was a rear admiral in the navy.
They named an aircraft carrier after her. Grace Hopper was something of a role model for Kate.
Two hours later all five of them—Kate, Tom, Mom, Dad, and Uncle Herbert—were in the backyard, staring at the steam engine. It stood on a length of track on the thin burnt-yellow grass with the tender behind it. Together the two cars took up most of the yard.
Even Kate’s mom and dad had to admit they were pretty impressive.
“We could charge people money to sit in it,” Tom said.
“No way,” Kate said. “I don’t want weird strangers sitting in my private train with their weird butts.”
“Don’t say butts,” said her father.
“Cigarette butts,” Kate said. “Ifs, ands, or buts.”
“Just don’t.”
“How old is it?” Tom asked.
“Don’t know,” Uncle Herbert said.
“How fast does it go?”
“Don’t know.”
“Could the strongest man in the world lift it?”
“Don’t—wait, no, I know the strongest man in the world, and he definitely couldn’t lift it. Want to get in?”
They sure did. It was a bit of a scramble—the train was, as previously mentioned, really big, and definitely not built for kids—but Kate and Tom were expert scramblers, and there were a couple of iron steps welded to the side of it, and a bar to grab on to.
What happened next was actually a tiny bit disappointing, if Kate was being completely honest. Being inside the cab of a steam engine isn’t like being in the driver’s seat of a car, or a truck, or an airplane. For starters there’s no windshield, because the giant barrel of the boiler is in the way, so you can’t see what’s in front of you. There are two little portholes on either side, but they’re not much help. It’s more like a little room—the engine room of a ship maybe, but a really old ship without any computers or radar or anything.
Brass and steel tubes ran everywhere like overgrown vines, sprouting valve handles and buttons and cranks and glassed-in dials and more tubes. None of them had labels. The cab smelled like old oil, like at a car mechanic’s. It was definitely real, but it was also completely incomprehensible.
There were two fold-down seats. Kate and Tom folded them down and sat.
“Now I get why train drivers are always leaning out the window,” Tom said. “It’s the only way you can see where you’re going.”
“Yeah. Too bad we’re not going anywhere.”
Kate leaned out the window.
“Hey, Uncle Herbert, it’s weird in here!”
“We don’t know what to do!” Tom said. “There isn’t even a steering wheel!”
“You don’t steer a train,” Uncle Herbert said, squinting up at them. “You just go where the tracks go.”
“Oh. Right.”
There was no brake or gas pedal either, or not that Kate could see.
“Is there a whistle?” Kate asked.
“Yes,” Uncle Herbert said. “It’s a steam whistle, though. Doesn’t work without steam.”
“Oh.”
Kate and Tom wandered around spinning wheels and pulling levers and moving anything else that moved. None of it did anything. It looked cool, but they were kind of at a loss how to play with it. They opened a kind of stove thing set into the wall. It was full of cold ashes and soot.