Farnsworth - A Train through Time

Copyright 2017 by Elizabeth Farnsworth

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

eISBN 978-1-61902-898-2

Cover design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc.

Interior design by Megan Jones Design

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my husband, Charles Farnsworth, and our family

Jenny and Chris Fellows

Colter, Monique and Heath

Sam Farnsworth and Charlotte Hamilton

Gilbert, Daisy and Thomas

What is a self when riding along clackety-clack, in the rain?

(Grieving intensity, it is a fire egg...

A wishbone cave in a book on the history of flame.)

F ROM B RENDA H ILLMANS
A H ALTING P ROBABILITY, ON A T RAIN
( F ROM S EASONAL W ORKS WITH L ETTERS ON F IRE )

S EVERAL YEARS AGO , at Skywalker Ranch in northern California, the child I used to be appeared out of nowhere and asked a haunting question that I couldnt answer and cant forget.

It happened in the Technical Building among old movie posters and other treasures from George Lucass collection. I was overseeing the audio mix of a documentary film I had codirected. We had already labored for three ten-hour days, and I was tired and worried that wed miss the deadline for the San Francisco Film Festival. Editor Blair Gershkow and sound mixer Pete Horner were making most of the decisions. I didnt trust my judgment anymore.

Pete cleaned up the audio of an exhumation on a farm in southern Chile. I heard grains of dirt shaken through a sieve. On screen, Judge Juan Guzmn, the subject of the film, watched as a forensic anthropologist looked for pieces of bone and other evidence of violent murder thirty years earlier.

She picked something small and dirty out of the sieve and exclaimed, Mira! Look! Its part of a cheekbone.

Guzmn said, Could you pass it to me?

Its the lower part of the bone.

So the cranium must be here?

Yes, these are human remains.

The judge held the bone gently in his hand. In 1973 he had toasted General Augusto Pinochets bloody coup with champagne. Now he was investigating Pinochets crimes.

A door opened nearby, and I heard laughter. They were mixing a comedy.

Lucky them.

Pete replayed the exhumation scene over and over, sweetening the sound.

I bolted from the dark room and ran down the stairs, past a poster for Paths of Glory, to a large atrium where a copper-colored man stood among ficus and ferns. I had seen him many times before and knew who he was, but now he stood in a pool of radiance streaming from the skylight above, which caught my eye. I stopped to look at him more closely.

He was about three feet tall and had a fat belly, big mustache, and eyes the color of emeralds. He was Tik-tok, Dorothy Gales mechanical friend from Walter Murchs 1985 film Return to Oz.

I heard the voice of Judge Guzmn: So the cranium is here? I must have left the mixing room door open.

Stepping over a protective barrier and brushing plants aside, I kneeled in front of Tik-tok and hugged him. Then, time did something I cant explain. I felt a jolt, like electricity, and saw myself as the girl who had loved the Oz books half a century before.

That girl asked, What sent you on a path through death and destruction?

Minutes passed. Memories flashed through my mind like film in a projector.

A green snake, thin as a pencil, rising from an altar in Cambodia.

A plain wooden file drawer with 3 x 5 cards for each of the desaparecidos in Chile. Randomly, I take out a card and read the nameJorge M ller, a friend.

A man on a bridge across the Euphrates, haloed by the setting sun.

We finished the mix at Skywalker Ranch, and The Judge and the General screened successfully in festivals and on public television. After that, still haunted by the childs question, I began to fit memories together, like bones from an exhumation.

I woke up in the dark that morning as the whooshing sound drew near and prayed that whatever it was would stay outside.

I had seen it oncea dark shape hovering above the bed, bellowing whooooshhh whooooshhh. When I told Mother, she called it the monkey with a motor on its tail.

Nothing to fear, she said.

I tried to call for help, but fright stole my voice away.

Suddenlythe ring of an alarm clock, and I was saved, at least on this morning. My father came in the room. Its time, Elizabeth. Todays the day.

I dressed in new blue jeans, grabbed my overnight bag and teddy bear, and waited at the top of the stairs. I had recently turned nine. My sister, Marcia, who was fifteen, and our dog, Cindy, had gone to an aunts house, where they would stay while my father and I were away.

I waited for several minutes before looking into my parents bedroom to see why Daddy hadnt come. He stood in front of Mothers dresser, staring at her hand mirror as if hed never seen it before. Then he packed it under a sweater in his suitcase and turned and saw me waiting.

I could tell he didnt want to leave. I couldnt wait to go.

Outside, an icy wind almost knocked me down. My grandfather had arrived earlya familiar trait in our railroad familyto take us to the station. We drove across the flatness of Topeka, weaving through neighborhoods so dark that I could hardly see the houses, passed my sisters high school with its brightly lit tower, and crossed the river on the Kansas Avenue Bridge. I waited for my father to tell a story about these placeshe liked historybut neither he nor my grandfather spoke.

At the Union Pacific Station, our train, the Portland Rose, was late, and I sat on a wooden bench in the huge waiting room, watching people walk up and down, their voices echoing off the high walls. Somewhere down the track, a steam engine was switching cars whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. The labored breathing sounded like the monster at home in the night.

A gust of wind shook windows behind me, and thenthe deep rumble of a diesel engine. We walked outside and watched as it approached, brakes squealing, headlight probing the dark.

This train will take us to another worldlike Dorothys tornado I thought.

A porter took our bags and showed us to our bedroom, which he called a compartment. He had made up the berths so we could go back to sleep. It was five oclock in the morning.