Ashes by Anthology Page A

tours, as if the rail’s not good enough for them. O’ course, they went and took up the rails some years back, hear they made this into some sort of state park. No appreciation for the Iron Horse, these modern folk.
    I don’t get out much, so I don’t know the ways of the world, and I ain’t got a lick of sense for time. Some days it seems I just opened my eyes after the train snipped me in half, when I looked toward the east mouth of the tunnel and saw a couple bits of myself being drug off by the undercarriage of the caboose, dribbling red everywhere. Other days it seems like I been here since the world was born, before these Appalachian hills rose up from the belly of the Earth and then settled down to the long, slow business of erosion. But maybe all days are the same anyway, when you get down to it.
    I used to think so. And then she came along.
    Pretty little thing, dressed up in her evening gown. You can see right though it, and if I wasn’t old enough to nearly be her grandpap, I’d probably look more often. But you can see right through her as well, so I reckon there’s nothing ungentlemanly in letting my eyes linger now and then. Even dead, a man’s still a man.
    She happened during one of the wars, I reckon. The wars all got mixed up for me, because all I remember is the real one, when the Yanks and Rebs went at it and Virginia got split up by Lincoln . I stayed out of that one, I was out in Missouri territory at the time, where the rail was just starting to catch on and Chinamen and Irish were dying by the dozens laying steel and spiking ties. I came back when the B & O line was booming, working the firebox and generally trying not to get tied down with women, card debts, and such, because I figured on heading to the Pacific Coast eventually. And I stayed clear of the women just fine until this latest one.
    Well, I didn’t really choose her like you might do a wife. And her gown ain’t rightly a wedding dress, neither. For one thing, it’s not white, it’s sort of green like the leaves of a chestnut tree in April. At least when it has color. In the tunnel, color comes and goes, at least to folks like me and her.
    That’s a little peculiar, but you get used to it after awhile . And—
    Tarnation. Here she comes now, so I reckon I’d best see what she wants.
    “Have you seen my head?” she asks.
    It’s in ghost words, ‘cause her lips don’t move but her voice is in my ears. Maybe that’s why normal folk, them still alive, never hear us when they walk through the tunnel. Some of them shiver and hoof it just a little faster, some look around at the slick masonry walls like they expect some secret message to be wrote in the slime.
    “I done told you a thousand times, your head’s on top of your shoulders where it belongs.” She has a fine set of shoulders, smooth as rounded marble and the color of cream skimmed right off the top of the butter churn. Her head ain’t no less a marvel, with her hair swooped up in a fancy bundle that only ladies in companion houses wore back in my day. During her time, though, it might have passed for normal ladylike dress-up.
    She reaches up to touch her hair, and I can’t really tell where her fingers end and the curly locks begin. Still, it’s fetching as all get out. “I can’t do a thing with it,” she says.
    I nod. I know my part so well that I don’t really have to think it through. I’m like a stage actor or maybe the bass in a barbershop quartet, just delivering lines the way I ought. “You look just fine,” I say, though the motion makes me lick my lips. Damned dry lips, what they wouldn’t give for a touch of barrel-mash whiskey.
    “They’ll be coming soon,” she says.
    “They always do.”
    You’d think after all these years I’d know how to dress for the occasion. I never had a worry over it before she came along. I’d just hoof it around in my old wool pants and cotton shirt. The holes in my clothes never troubled me none, because