Murgatroyd Monaghan – “The Train”
(originally published in The Humber Literary Review)
“The Train” unfolds a story of strangers on a train who find unlikely ways to bond over their various experiences of sadness and death, with the narrator’s children igniting interactions and sparking connections in ways only children can. The children are brilliant, the dialogue crisp, the character development deftly handled. The piece cleverly incorporates the best techniques of fiction into creative nonfiction to reveal a true storyteller’s voice. Bravo.
(Comments by 2024 judge, Lisa Bird-Wilson
The Train
The first time I ever take a Via Rail train, it is a quarter to midnight in downtown Toronto, and the stars in my eyes more than compensate for the lack of them above me. To my right, my eleven-year-old is holding the hand of my seven-year-old, the latter of whom is chewing on a rubber duck on a necklace and making loud pterodactyl-like noises. He is stuffed into a neon green t-shirt emblazoned with my phone number and a warning label declaring that, yes, he is developmentally delayed, no, he can’t understand your inquiries, whether casual or panicked, and no, he shouldn’t be found alone, and if he is, to please phone the aforementioned phone number. To my left, my three-year-old is upside down. That whole period of his life, I don’t think I have a single photograph where he is right-side-up. I am pulling luggage behind me, carrying coolers over me, and wearing multiple backpacks and a very wide smile. The entire platform groans.
“I see a moose!” We have barely pulled away from the station and have probably reached a speed of about five galumphing kilometres per hour, when my youngest son declares this to be true.
My eleven-year-old makes a quick retort. “No you don’t.”
“Yes I do. We’re going across Canada. There are moosies in Canada. I saw one.”
“There aren’t any moose here. We’re still in the station.”
“Then it was a bear.”
“Nope.”
“It was! You don’t know! You don’t know anything! Hey, stop the train! I want to get off! I’m running away!”
And as I wrestle him unsuccessfully back into our little seat, the one thing they agree on:
“Momma, I am not spending five days in here with them like this.”
Oh, but she is. Every person on that train is. Five glorious days, crossing the country, Toronto to Vancouver, eating baked beans and Mr. Noodles with plastic spoons.
*
The train is packed with artists consuming melancholia in moderation and last-stand students rebelling in drunken conformity and an energetic generation of Indigenous youth whose time and hearts are split between the city and the rez. My children waltz between them, starving for the exciting attentions of strangers. Unlike other mothers who stop their children from interfering in the lives of others as a matter of habit, I relish the opportunities for my children to grow by listening to stories that only others can tell. Stories are sacred, precious possessions; preserving families, illuminating enemies, creating friends. They cannot be stolen, only gifted. And children are shameless gift-seekers.
When I open my eyes on the first morning, it is to administer a curious mixture of sedatives and amphetamines to my middle child, who, if he is not medicated into veritable oblivion, cannot regulate himself enough to even hear someone saying his name. I am not at all shocked to see him absent from his seat when I awake. The shock hits when I hear sounds floating from the very tiny bathroom closet that suggest that my son is struggling to get out of the bathroom and is being restrained from leaving. Panic pierces my groggy subconscious and electrifies my sock-feet. My heart is doing jumping jacks. I bang on the door. “Sweetie? It’s Momma…” My words are not actually directed at him, but at the other person inside. My voice doesn’t conceal the warning. I know he’s in there.
“Thank God, you’re his mom? Here-” Fingertips with lemon-yellow nail polish shove my son through a crack in the door. “He just kept opening the door on me. And the lock is busted. So sorry…” The voice is cracking broadly and the words sound like the first survivors to fall through it. Two pale knees touch each other at a sharp angle, and I smell vomit.
My son struggles to get back inside the bathroom with such effort I can barely contain him. His frantic shrieks carry the length of the train. With surprising force, his tiny hand slips in through the crack and flaps, then pumps open and closed, an invitation for the girl inside to hold it. Seeing a way to stop the sounds, she holds his hand and mumbles to me, “I don’t mind if you don’t.” With a heave comes more vomit, into a sink that is so close to her she can almost reach it while seated, and then a sound like a bowl of chunky leftovers dumped into the stainless-steel toilet. Blood spatters the edge of the seat as she leans up over the tiny sink.
“Baby now?” calls my son curiously through the crack in the door.
My breath stops in horror. The woman looks too tired to even be alive. “Yes. Baby now.”
“Yay! You did it!” My son bursts through the door so hard that I think it will bruise him and hugs the woman around her shaking middle. Large tears dyed black from the promises of yesterday’s hopeful cosmetics fall helplessly onto his head.
“Let’s get her some tea, okay?” I manage, feeling terribly undercaffeinated myself. With new purpose, my son sloppily kisses both of the woman’s bare knees, and then hurries along by my side. The door closes behind us so quickly that I can barely hear the muffled sobs.
*
When the light breaks in through the windows, eight lemon-yellow fingertips are visible around a large Styrofoam cup. Steam rolls gently over its rim. The knees are no longer bare, but are pulled up to the chest, and covered by a red and white ski jacket.
“Should I get them to call a doctor for you?” I ask, overwhelmed. I have not experienced miscarriage. I am not sure of protocol. I feel suddenly self-conscious – even ashamed – of all my live children running around. The woman doesn’t answer me. God, this is awkward. “My son was born with a genetic condition,” I press on, apologetic. “He cares about people. I’m sorry he kept bothering you when-”
The woman interrupts hurriedly. “You tell him thanks. And no, I’ll make it home okay, they’ll probably do a D&C there. I can wait. I know my body. Anyway, condition or not, at least he was born. Mine never manage that.” The interruption doesn’t seem prompted by irritation at me so much as by admiration for my son, but I assume the former anyway and feel embarrassed.
“How many babies did you have?” My daughter’s eyes are wide.
“Four.” The woman smiles.
“What were their names?”
I cringe. Little children give names to everything. Naming each doll or toy is of utmost importance when you are small. By the time I was eight, I had chosen the names of my future children, and had names and nicknames selected for each Beanie Baby, backpack, and even pencil that I owned. In retrospect, that is what hurt. When a pencil was broken, it was not a broken pencil. It was a broken spirit, a death, something that could not be reclaimed or forgiven. Adults tend to avoid this sort of pain. We know of impermanence, and we depersonalize everything possible, accordingly.
“Nita.” The woman surprises me. “This one was Nita. And there was Jasper, Tilly, and Damon.”
“Woah.” I see my daughter adding names to her mental list. “Is Nita the only baby who was born on a train?”
The woman’s fingers whiten against the Styrofoam and her eyes fall through a space in my daughter’s chest into another dimension, perhaps one where Nita is alive and sitting where my daughter is now. “Yes,” she says. “She was.”
*
One boy has bet another boy a mickey that he can teach my youngest son to write his name. Both boys are college aged. My three-year-old is sitting between them, riveted by the appearance of a phone in his hands. The boy plans to teach him to type the letters of his name. My son has only cooperated on the condition that the boys use the names that he has given to each of the persons on the train. The names he has given them are names of fruit. The boy trying to teach him is Banana. The boy who bets he can’t, is Blueberry.
Banana begins by showing my son the keyboard. A beer sits in front of both boys on trays. My youngest son thinks this is hilarious. “You’re drinking Uncle Hog!” he cries, laughing. It takes the boys several tries to realize that this is how my son is saying “alcohol”.
“He knows about alcohol!” roars Blueberry. “Oh man! What do you know about Uncle Hog, little buddy?”
“That’s why we are on this train,” he says, and nods wisely. “Because of Uncle Hog.” The boys think this is hilarious. They press on.
“Yeah? You want to be here for the Uncle Hog, eh, little man?”
“No. We want to be here for NOT the Uncle Hog.”
Sitting across the aisle, playing chess with my daughter, I feel her stiffen. She wonders what her little brother will say next. I rotate a bag of candies to face her, inviting her to sweeten her memories.
But the moment has passed. The boys are talking about booze and back-home and my daughter has made her move. “Check”, she says. I don’t know how I didn’t see this coming.
*
Blueberry and Banana are drunk by noon. There isn’t much else to do, to be fair. My toddler has fallen asleep on the seat beside them. The boys have covered him up with a large, plaid scarf.
The ski jacket that covered the pale woman’s knees yesterday is slung across the seat beside me. I see a man there that I didn’t notice before, writing furiously. I stare at him just a moment too long, and he looks up; a raccoon in headlights, dark circles around his sunken eyes.
I make a wrong assumption, because of the jacket. “How’s she doing today?”
“Who?”
I backtrack as quickly as I can. “So sorry– I thought you must have known the girl. You know, the jacket– maybe you lent it to her.”
“Oh. Her. Yes. She didn’t want to keep it.”
There doesn’t seem to be anything else to say, so I say, “Oh.”
“Do you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Do you want to keep my jacket?”
I am not expecting this. I don’t want to offend, because I am Canadian. But rather than decline, I find myself simply asking, “Why don’t you want it?”
“It’s my last worldly possession,” the man says smartly. “My journey is finished. I don’t have a use for it anymore.”
“You’ll never need a coat again?” I laugh, good-naturedly.
“No. I have to give everything away. That’s the last part of my journey.”
I realize, with alarm, that the man is either contemplating suicide, or planning his winter very poorly. I start to talk, because the alternative is not talking, and that doesn’t seem like a good idea right now.
“Hey, uh… you okay?”
The man dodges my curiosity. “Thanks for asking. I think I’m going to lie down for a bit.”
Everything is very quiet. My daughter has been reading a book to my middle son, but most of the train car is listening. My littlest one is awake again and sitting on Blueberry’s lap. They are sharing the scarf as a blanket.
The pale woman is curled up in the corner seat, listening, and Banana comes back with a beer for her as well. He asks if I want one. My toddler’s eyes go wide. “Don’t do it, Mommy, it has Uncle Hog in it!”
“Don’t worry!” laughs Banana. “Your Mommy’s a big girl. She’s allowed to have Uncle Hog”.
“Later.” I smile at the offer and take my son up in my arms. “I don’t want this little guy to worry.”
*
The kids are sleeping, finally, except for my daughter, who I can tell is only pretending. I’m on my second beer, and I’m listening to Blueberry speak.
“It’s bullshit, man. I go down to work in Toronto for the summer, then I come back, and more cousins dead. It’s bullshit. Every year.”
We sip, and nod. Banana is from Germany. He wants to travel the world. But his world doesn’t include the world Blueberry is from. “Dead?”
“Yeah, man. Dead. And the fucking white people don’t care. They send us more drugs and hope we’ll just keep killing ourselves, get rid of their problem, one Indian at a fucking time.”
“What do you do when they die?” Lemon-Yellow is speaking so quietly it’s as if she has hiccupped into her sleeve.
“Do? What do you mean what do I do?”
“Never mind.” Tears begin.
“Nah, it’s fine. What do I do. I get mad. That’s what I do. I drink, and I bitch about it.”
“Oh.”
“You look like you’ve never been mad in your life. That’s why you’re so sad. You’ve gotta get mad. Mad stops the sad. It works. And liquor works too. Here.” He pushes her an almost-full beer.
“But then- how do you stop the mad?” This voice is my daughter’s. She’s been found out, and she tiptoes over to sit in the centre of the adult chit-chat.
“The mad? You don’t. You don’t ever stop the mad. Mad is what keeps you going, little one. One day you’ll understand, eh?” Blueberry chuckles.
“My daddy understands.” I would normally be inclined to stop her from speaking further to veritable strangers, but this time, I am not. Something has happened to all of us on this train. I can’t explain it. Secrets feel somehow safe here. “My Daddy stopped his sad. He got real mad and drank way too much. He stopped feeling sad, even when he hurt us. And now we are on a train, running away from him.”
Blueberry is listening, but there is a lump in his throat. It is not a smooth lump. It is sharp, like a five-pointed star drawn by a child, the kind that overlaps sloppily at the tips and has an overinflated sense of its own importance. The star cuts at his words as they emerge from his chest. “Hey. My daddy too.”
Banana feels like he is in another world, a world he did not bargain for. He has not seen death, but the fear of it is what moves him. He tells us he has cystic fibrosis. This train is an item on a bucket list he felt forced to write. He knows he will die, but he has never felt sad or mad about this, only driven by a helpless positivity that has been thrust upon him by well-meaning people. It is Banana that wants to know the answer to the question Lemon-Yellow has asked before, but with a twist. He elbows Blueberry and clears his throat. “Hey man, uh – when they die, you know, what does your community do?”
“Um…” Blueberry is far away. He finishes the mickey. “Well, we burn sage over them. We do a service kind of. And then, you know, we take them up to our family’s trapline, and we do the same thing. And before we bury them, we put a cigarette on their chest, and anything else we want to send with them to make them comfortable. You know, and then we cry.”
Lemon-Yellow is crying. She can’t stop the sad. My daughter sees this. She knows what happened yesterday. The whole train car knows. My daughter says, “We can burn sage and give a cigarette to Nita.”
The Boreal forests are passing into the plains, and the stars’ pitiful reflections beat themselves sadly against the Plexiglas skylight. The train wails obscene songs of loss into the darkened sky as it picks up speed, urged onwards by tracks it didn’t lay, and none of us flinch. We are half-drunk and half-sad and both of these halves need a purpose to be complete.
Blueberry offers the sage, and Banana gives the cigarette, which my daughter drops down the toilet. I offer a prayer, and we wait for Lemon-Yellow to flush.
When she does, we are different. The racoon-eyed man drapes the ski jacket around the woman’s shoulders. “Keep this.”
This time she accepts.