Status Updates From Pelican Road

"The gods gave you a new chance every day, he thought. Trouble was, you pulled the old days behind you like a long freight train."

On The Southern Literary trail- DEC

From the backyards came a crowd of women all in black, heads bowed, their hands clasped before them, all silent but for their slippered feet: white women, colored women, old and young. Mister Dunn could not move. The women flowed around him, and as each one passed, she raised her head and spoke a man’s name. Mister Dunn knew them for the names of the dead, though he did not know them all, there were so many.

“I would ask a delicate question, sir. I would not ask it if it were not important.
“All right,” said the conductor.
Artemus paused a moment, collecting his words. At last he said, “All those years together, you and Miss Rebekah. Were they worth what you are feeling now?”
“Yes,” said the conductor.
“Thank you, sir,” said Artemus.

Frank slips out the window and down the drainpipe. He has a blanket, a wedge of cheese, a tin of sardines, a box of Lucifer matches, and a Barlow knife. He believes this to be all a man needs to get out to the Territories

They would all be sorry, he thinks, when they read about his exploits in the Hattiesburg paper, how he is made a chief of the Cheyenne and leads them to his death against the cavalry.

"And late on a moonless night, when the lamplit windows of houses winked across the fields, and the whistle of the striding locomotive drifted back from some nameless crossing, Artemus thought of himself and his comrades as the last tragic heroes, traveling forever into the darkness, forever apart, with nothing for their passage but a hint of coal smoke borne away by the wind..."

What a master of descriptive prose!
"As the storm diminishes, he watches from an archway that drips rain like a beaded curtain, flanked by the heavy, lashing fronds of banana trees. The courtyard is filled with the sound of water. Gray-green light suffuses from the stippled pool in the center where bright fish live."

I can feel, smell and see the rain. If I stick out my tongue, I might even taste it.

Bobby had not seen New York City, but he hoped to during his adventures in the U.S. Navy. He wanted to go to Europe, to Italy and France especially, and walk among the stuccoed, sunwashed villages of the Mediterranean. He wanted to steam across the blue waters of the Pacific and visit islands where coconut palms thrashed in the offshore breeze, where girls with naked bosoms cavorted in grass skirts and flowers.

“You are not false to me,” she said.

“Until the sun don’t rise, baby,” he said, and then he was gone.

The truth was never easy, and it was never simple, and it had a way of breaking your heart. Thus men chose its imitation whenever possible and made the world fit the shape that suited them best. Smith had long ago decided that most people got along as best they could, trying to be brave, trying to be good, trying to subdue the terrors of life with whatever expectations lay easiest to hand.

Artemus felt only a deep reverence, as though he were on the brink of the Great Mystery itself. It was a darkness like no other, and Artemus came to believe that if he could only reach the heart of it, he would find there the answers to love and Possibility, to why you lived and what happened when you died. Artemus Kane relished the crossing of Lake Ponchartrain as he had the crossing of the sea.

There was a road, then, storied and ancient, worn deep by the passage of generations of men, and before them the elk and deer and foxes. Their stories were forgotten, their blood long since raised to heaven in the sap of pines and sycamores, the old road itself swallowed by the vast wilderness it once defied. Only the name remained, and no one could say who first attached it to the railway.

draws the reader slowly into the lives of crews manning two different trains headed toward one another on the old Southern Railroad Christmas 1940. A miracle or a tragedy in the offing? A novel rich in characterization and a masterful setting. Take a ride on the old Pelican Road.