Ax and Train

Wait in the attic till they sleep. They’ll sleep heavily from the day, a children’s day at the Presbyterian church. Smoke; there’s plenty of time, so smoke another until night falls. Lock their front door at midnight. Close the curtains. Cover the mirrors with their clothing, you must not see. It’s time to use the axe you borrowed. The sharp side for daddy so he will not have a face. The blunt side for mummy. Six more, 5 7 8 10 11 12, blunt side for all. Ascending order. Kerosene lamp at the bedfoot to watch the soul as it leaves with the skull bits. Paul and Arthur and Ina Mae and Mary and Herman: the newspaper names them later. Lena is oldest and pretty; do what you will with her. Give her head extra strokes because she fought. They have bacon in the larder. Make yourself a plate. The train will come at four.

It is a horror story. It is my story, and I have inhabited it. I did not know it was my story until I was nine and reading a book I should not have been given.

“Have you heard of Villisca?” I asked, and Grandma hissed, “What are you reading?” and howled and threw it in the fire, and I could never return to that library. But she died and I made a family tree at school two years after, and Grandma’s maiden name was Stillinger. She used to live in Villisca.

“Come to Daytona!” my roommate said, “We’ll party all break!” but I went to Villisca, the hamlet in the Iowa corn. I saw the house.

“You didn’t get too crazy on the beach there,” Father teased. “You’re not going to be in one of those wild girl videos, are you?”

“No daddy,” I said, “I won’t.” You cannot go topless in Villisca.

Graduate and live and work and read and sometimes go to places people go, until the shares rise high enough, and then I keep my money and I work on my machine for Grandma.

“I’ll help you, Grandma,” I tell her, “I’ll go back in my machine and I will find the man who murders Great Aunt Ina Mae, and I will make his skull and brains a paste before he harms her.”

James, Bill and Rachel McCarthy James. The Man from the Train. New York: Scribner, 2017.

James and James find other murders. There are always axes and lumber areas and nearby trains. They write about Paul Muller, itinerant lumberjack. Police could not find Paul Muller when his employing family was slaughtered with an axe. West Brookfield, Massachusetts, 1897, a town by a train.

I read to Grandma. “This book is almost entirely about people who lived in small towns a hundred years ago. As much about how they died as about how they lived. But the flash of death illuminated the lives the victims have lived.”

Grandma hisses, “What are you reading?”

My machine is finished and takes me to Massachusetts. It is 1897 and Paul Muller is in the field and looks just like James and James wrote.

“I know what you will do.”

“What?” Paul Muller says.

“I know what you will do in Villisca.”

“What the hell?” Paul Muller says, and then he bleeds from his head. The blunt side of the axe pounds and pounds and the cavity feels warm like summer. But when I return in my machine the book has not changed, so history and Villisca have not changed, and I know the book was wrong. I ready my axe and machine and I return to the library. There are many suspects and many books, and Grandma still hisses and howls.