“Well, you heard wrong,” she barks. She’s always masked her deceits with outrage—it’s a trick her father taught her. “The only infant currently on these premises is standing right in front of me. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t harass my workers and spook my animals just because some old drunks thought they saw a baby. I’ll be lucky if my hens lay again after all this commotion.”
McSorley brings his burning pop-eyes up close to hers. Humid, eggy breath. Spittle scumming his mouth’s corners. And in an instant, the reports of him throwing hobos under the wheels of running trains seem dead accurate. “Temple, you know I’m the only reason you’re still operating here? I took pity on you, living with no husband in this godforsaken place. But today I’m afraid my desire to shield you from the more judgmental citizens of Estevan has expired.”
“I’ve got it,” she says, softening her tone, trying a bit of charm, anything to buy time. “The child those idiots saw was probably my sister’s. I’m caring for her daughter while she’s off looking for work.”
His face relaxes, if only slightly. “That so. Well, I’ll still need to see her.”
“You can’t.”
“And why’s that?”
“She’s at the doctor’s in Estevan. She’s got a cough. It’s the dust.”
They lock eyes.
“But you’re welcome to drop by and see her in a few days,” she adds warmly. “I’m sure she’ll have recovered by then. I could even get Gertie to fix a picnic basket for us.”
McSorley’s cheeks flush with blood. “I would enjoy that picnic, Miss Temple,” he says, examining her skeptically. Then he removes his hat so that his oily hair whips about in a dozen black tentacles. He directs his gaze to the horizon, where a bank of cast-iron clouds tumble in the far distance. “But you’d be smart to get that baby home and keep her down in your storm cellar for the next while. Cyclones were reported in the Dakotas just over the border yesterday. Should be here by tomorrow. And your sister will never forgive you if you let that poor child of hers go flying off on you.”
“I’ll do that, Detective,” Temple says, taking his elbow to ease him in the direction of his automobile. “Straight away.”
But McSorley slips himself free of her grip and turns back to his men. “You know what?” he says, replacing his hat with a grimace. “I think we’d better do charitable Miss Temple here a favour and make sure that little baby girl of her sister’s wasn’t misplaced somewhere here on the farm. Search the house first. Then the barn. Then that goddamned library.”
INTO THE MOUNTAINS
“I KNEW THIS was a poor idea,” Gertie says at the kitchen window, as she and Everett watch the cars slide to a halt at the barn. Everett gathers Pod up from her high chair without even wiping the porridge from her face. Outside, he sees Temple hurry over to approach a stocky policeman. “There,” Gertie says, “Miss Temple will handle Detective McSorley. Now you two cut around back and hide in the old storm cellar beneath the library.”
Everett has just tied his boots when McSorley shakes loose from Temple’s grip and shouts some orders at his men, who start toward the house. Without stopping to grab his things or even his envelope of pay from the spare room, Everett bolts with Pod through the back door, dashing out into the dust-swirled field behind the house. He sprints in the direction of the railway until the farm disappears. Then he sets Pod down in a drainage ditch and crawls snake-wise back to the library near the property’s perimeter. The men are searching the barn now, so Everett rushes inside the library and finds the journal among the teetering shelves of books. He sets it on the table and takes up a blunt pencil. Inside the front cover, facing the first page, he frantically scrawls PROPERTY OF—the spelling of which he only guesses at. With that part done, he writes a name, first then last, as legibly as his unpractised hand can muster. It’s a name he invents during the very act of setting it down, a name he hasn’t a clue how to spell, though he writes it anyway. It’s the name he’ll give Pod after their circumstances become decent and permanent. A name, he imagines, befitting the fine woman she’ll someday become.
When he’s finished he shoves the book back onto the shelf, memorizing its location for the day he returns. For a moment he considers scribbling a farewell message for Temple, but it could give them away. So instead he finds the Odyssey, the entirety of which they’d read together during those nights after tree planting, and opens it to the first page, leaving it there on the table, hoping it will be enough.
“There you are,” Everett says when he returns to the drainage ditch, stepping on the head of a hoop snake that’s just two feet away from where Pod lies. He takes her up and gallops, lungs wheezing, to the rail junction at Estevan, then hops the first northbound train he sees, a passenger rig of about twenty coaches. With the crew lurking about, Everett ties Pod to his chest with his bootlaces, then climbs a ladder onto the car’s slick roof, where he lashes his belt to the service handles in case he nods off or the train banks sharply.
They ride all day into Alberta, watching the treeless prairie submit to plateaus of grassland. To the right of the tracks bison stand flicking their tails, a hundred monoliths against the drought-yellowed grass.
Though they’re hungry, the ride in open country hypnotizes Pod and keeps her from complaint. Falcons dogfight and turn high circles as the train passes over deep gorges upon steel trestles, and the cars arc before them, each one the nodule of a spine, a great iron dragon flying low over the land.
They abandon the passenger train at Calgary, because even in late summer they’ll freeze in the Rockies riding topside. Everett traversed the mountains frequently in his hoboing days, and though he was mostly drunk, he recalls a slow climb between icy crags and granite faces, where big-horned sheep picked their way across blue glaciers. He finds some tin cans and fills them at a rain barrel, stuffs his pockets with some wild turnip he digs up near the tracks, then hops the second-to-last caboose of a long freight. The door is padlocked, so he crawls down through its cupola. Inside, he and Pod conceal themselves beneath the little table where the crew eats their meals. He feeds her raw, chewed-up turnip as the train wends up among the shoulders of cloud-draped mountains, its wheels shrieking on the frosty tracks. Darkness falls and stars blaze into the caboose’s windows. Everett gives Pod a piece of cedar kindling to chew when her gums start troubling her, as they’ve been doing more and more lately.
In the high mountains the sky appears closer, though he knows it must be a trick of the mind. Five hours into the ride, the windows blacken with a wash of snowflakes. The temperature plummets and the train grows louder in the cold. From a footlocker Everett fishes out a coat, which he drapes over them, and a watch cap, which he pulls down over Pod’s head. He ignores the coal stove in the corner, which would invite detection.
They ride for hours in the clawing cold, his body sore from shivers. Pod grows listless, her nose scarlet even after he blows on it, recalling the same catatonia in which he’d first found her. When her lips turn blue he gives in and lights the stove. After it catches, he adds three small lumps of coal and props Pod before the growing flicker. In a few minutes she perks up, just as a bang comes at the door.