Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

    Years ago, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture.
    The station agent often tried a little teasing with women, especially the plain ones who seemed to appreciate it.
    “Furniture?” he said, as if nobody had ever had such an idea before. “Well. Now. What kind of furniture are we talking about?”
    A dining-room table and six chairs. A full bedroom suite, a sofa, a coffee table, end tables, a floor lamp. Also a china cabinet and a buffet.
    “Whoa there. You mean a houseful.”
    “It shouldn’t count as that much,” she said. “There’s no kitchen things and only enough for one bedroom.”
    Her teeth were crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument.
    “You’ll be needing the truck,” he said.
    “No. I want to send it on the train. It’s going out west, to Saskatchewan.”
    She spoke to him in a loud voice as if he was deaf or stupid, and there was something wrong with the way she pronounced her words. An accent. He thought of Dutch—the Dutch were moving in around here—but she didn’t have the heft of the Dutch women or the nice pink skin or the fair hair. She might have been under forty, but what did it matter? No beauty queen, ever.
    He turned all business.
    “First you’ll need the truck to get it to here from wherever you got it. And we better see if it’s a place in Saskatchewan where the train goes through. Otherways you’d have to arrange to get it picked up, say, in Regina.”
    “It’s Gdynia,” she said. “The train goes through.”
    He took down a greasy-covered directory that was hanging from a nail and asked how she would spell that. She helped herself to the pencil that was also on a string and wrote on a piece of paper from her purse: GDYNIA.
    “What kind of nationality would that be?”
    She said she didn’t know.
    He took back the pencil to follow from line to line.
    “A lot of places out there it’s all Czechs or Hungarians or Ukrainians,” he said. It came to him as he said this that she might be one of those. But so what, he was only stating a fact.
    “Here it is, all right, it’s on the line.”
    “Yes,” she said. “I want to ship it Friday—can you do that?”
    “We can ship it, but I can’t promise what day it’ll get there,” he said. “It all depends on the priorities. Somebody going to be on the lookout for it when it comes in?”
    “Yes.”
    “It’s a mixed train Friday, two-eighteen p.m. Truck picks it up Friday morning. You live here in town?“
    She nodded, writing down the address. 106 Exhibition Road.
    It was only recently that the houses in town had been numbered, and he couldn’t picture the place, though he knew where Exhibition Road was. If she’d said the name McCauley at that time he might have taken more of an interest, and things might have turned out differently. There were new houses out there, built since the war, though they were called “wartime houses.” He supposed it must be one of those.
    “Pay when you ship,” he told her.
    “Also, I want a ticket for myself on the same train. Friday afternoon.”
    “Going same place?”
    “Yes.”
    “You can travel on the same train to Toronto, but then you have to wait for the Transcontinental, goes out ten-thirty at night. You want sleeper or coach? Sleeper you get a berth, coach you sit up in the day car.”
    She said she would sit up.
    “Wait in Sudbury for the Montreal train, but you won’t get off there, they’ll just shunt you around and hitch on the Montreal cars. Then on to Port Arthur and then to Kenora. You don’t get off till Regina, and there you have to get off and catch the branch-line train.”
    She nodded as if he should just get on and give her the ticket.
    Slowing down, he said, “But I won’t promise your furniture’ll arrive when you do, I wouldn’t think it would get in till a day or two after. It’s all the priorities. Somebody coming to meet you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good. Because it won’t likely be much of a station. Towns out there, they’re not like here. They’re mostly pretty rudimentary affairs.”
    She paid for the passenger ticket now, from a roll of bills in a cloth bag in her purse. Like an old lady. She counted her change, too. But not the way an old lady would count it—she held it in her hand