Tom Mathews’s Reviews > Pelican Road > Status Update

“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.

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.