Thrown-away Child

felt like clobbering a priest.
    “Listen to me, Inspector. Kowalski’s not the only one foaming at the mouth. He’s not the only cop making things dirty for the rest of us. For the love of God, can’t somebody besides me see that? You do not crap where you eat. You do not let anybody else crap there either ...”
    So that is how I left the inspector, not to mention Davy Mogaill. With no decision about my future. Like I said, that was yesterday.
     

TWO

     
    Today, I am riding an Amtrak train. The Cresent line, from New York City way down yonder to my wife Ruby’s hometown of New Orleans. And I am thinking how good it is to be out of town a little while.
    Ruby wanted us to go by train, a journey of twenty-eight hours. This was to impress upon me exactly how far she had to travel all those years ago when she left home. I am only happy she did not choose to impress upon me the discomforts of her original means of transport: the Greyhound bus.
    It is midmorning and we have returned from a meal in the dining car. Eggs scrambled with mushrooms and peppers and onions, toast and blueberry jam and coffee that was not too bad. The cots are folded back up into the wall of our sleeper compartment so that now w e have couches. Which we are sitting on, drinking Post-breakfast coffee in paper cups and staring out the window at blue-green pines high up in the Great Smoky Mountains.
    “Will you look at all those trees? Christmas is coming.” This Ruby says with a dream in her voice. She has been dreaming and talking of home and the South and the past for a long time. Not all her dreams have been sugarplums.
    We have talked, ever since pulling out of Penn Station back in Manhattan, about the years not so long ago when our marriage was a crime in most states; about the first time somebody called her “nigger,” when she was a little girl walking down the street with her braids and schoolbooks; about why she had not been home in all the years since leaving for New York, and telephone arguments about that with her mother; about certain delicate problems some of the family might have with my face, which is as fair as County Dublin.
    There is one thing we have not discussed, though. That would be how close our short marriage has come to collapse due to the pressures of my job, and also due to my boozing.
    No matter, Ruby slips her arm into mine as she ¡ looks at the trees rushing by. I consider myself lucky beyond measure. I have no doubt that Ruby has days she is sorry she ever took up with me. I have no doubt she would do it all over again.
    “I remember the Christmas my daddy got sick for good and there wasn’t any money,” Ruby says, sort of absently. “Mama had to tell us there wouldn’t be any toys that year.”
    We ride along for maybe twenty minutes without a word passing between us. Every so often, Ruby daubs her hazel eyes and her caramel brown cheeks with Kleenex. But there are no tears to wipe. I believe she is trying to cry, or that maybe what is inside her head at the moment is so sad she naturally thinks she has j been crying.
    Ruby has been like his for a week or so, on the edge of some raw emotion I cannot read—something I am guessing to be peculiarly feminine.
    She starts singing after awhile, very softly as we watch the miles and miles of timberline. Her voice is low and sweet, and this surprises me. I have never heard her sing before. Ruby was an actress for a lot of years, but she never said anything about musicals. Her song is like the best songs of all, beautiful and mournful at once:
     
    “Toyland... toyland, little girl and boyland;
    While you dwell within it,
    You are always healthy there.
    Childhood, joyland, mystic merry toyland;
    Once you pass its borders
    You may ne’er return again. ”
     
    “Are you all right?” I ask her, now that she has finished singing.
    “Of course I’m all right. I’m on my way home to see my Mama, and the rest of my family. It’s going to be wonderful. Oh, it is, I promise. Everybody’s going to love you . . Ruby is speaking very fast, as if trying to persuade herself of something. “Just you watch your waist line, Irish. They’re all going to want to feed you. And you’re going to be fed the very best meals you ever had in your life. You’re going to eat food cooked by colored people, with love.”
    Ruby does not look at me as she says the last of this. And her voice trails off, but the Christmas trees do not.
    Anybody can tell that memory is