At a Crossroads

This story is by Alison Lloyd and won the Grand Prize in our 2024 Spring Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

Alison Lloyd writes thoughtful, immersive historical fiction, often about finding goodness and meaning in life’s everyday challenges. Several of her children’s novels and histories, published by Penguin Australia, have been shortlisted for awards. She’s now working on her first novel for adults. Find more of her writing at www.alisonlloydauthor.com.

It wasn’t the pram wheels that got stuck when they crossed the trainline, although that was what she worried about. The iron wheel rims always wedged in ruts. You can’t carry a baby everywhere, not when you have another child as well. The three-year-old liked to be out. Even as a baby, he’d worm an arm free from the blanket and wave his fist to the world. You couldn’t swaddle his independence, not the way she wrapped the baby girl’s sweet, paddling limbs. He ran so fast, flying his wooden train engine on invisible tracks of imagination, catching her own heart up into flights of joy, and fear. She couldn’t tell where he might run. She watched him, but not like the hawk that wheeled above the railway crossing. A hawk only had to watch one thing at once, to track its prey, whereas she had both the boy and the baby. Today the babe was fussing, a broken hiccupping snuffle, after a broken night’s sleep. The mother swatted at the fly sticking to the baby’s mouth. The walk would send the child to sleep soon, she knew it would. And it would keep the boy busy, so he wouldn’t poke his sister with his toy… Where was the boy?

*

The train’s rattle shuddered under the fireman’s feet and drove through his skull. The bloody kid had squalled all night. The fireman’s head felt like a great knob vibrating at high pitch, about to splinter. He loved the little terror well enough in the daylight. Medical bills weren’t the kid’s fault. Only some nights he wanted to walk out, go on the road, sleep under the peace of the stars. Not shut himself in this iron cab. Bloody boiler always hungry to be fed. He wiped his face in the crook of his elbow and closed his eyes for a moment of dark and rest. The driver elbowed him, and landed a few choice words on his ears. The fireman clanged open the door of the firebox. He heaved in another round of coals. Neither of them noticed that in pulling up his fireman, the driver forgot to pull the whistle.

*

The youth on the dray let the draught horse amble to the crossing. He was thinking about the dance – whether the girl from the store might go. He’d known her in school, but now she’d let her skirts down, which was a pity, although it embarrassed him to think about it. She had a peachiness he wanted to touch. He was scared to speak to her, but he liked to think about her. No need to rush the crossing because the train whistle hadn’t sounded yet. But that missus from the place around the corner, was stopped, stooped over in the middle of the tracks, and if she didn’t hop it, the 2.30’s whistle was going to blow, and he was going to be stuck on the wrong side when it came, and he wouldn’t be in time to pick up the goods from the siding like he’d been told.

‘Oy lady,’ he called. ‘Comin’ through.’

*

She heaved the pram up and down over the rails, tilting one wheel along a sleeper to get across the crushed stone ballast, which was sharp as black diamonds through the soles of her boots. All that tipping back and forth astonished the baby into not crying and by the time the pram was across she’d closed her eyes. Then the mother looked for her three-year-old. She saw him squatting in the middle of the track, his bony butt grazing a sleeper, running his toy train with deep concentration along the shining rail. The moment of stillness seemed sacred, being so rare and so calm. She felt the little boy had touched the purity of being alive in a way she often forgot, a simplicity of moving on clean straight parallel lines that went for ever and ever not touching.

‘Come on,’ she called, reluctantly. ‘You can’t stay there.’

The little boy shifted his bottom slightly, as if to block her voice with his rounded back. In the pram, the baby’s eyes were still blessedly shut. Her snuffle had eased to a wet catch in her breathing. The mother pushed the pram off the road and jammed a stone under one wheel. The boy still hadn’t come. She had to fetch him. She wished it wasn’t her job to spoil his fun. If the baby kept sleeping they could watch until the afternoon train went through and then she could sit in the shade while the boy played to his heart’s content. She hobbled over the stone ballast and touched her son on the arm. He jerked away.

‘The engine is stuck,’ he said.

‘Let’s see.’

‘Oy lady!’

A half-laden dray was trundling along the road. The youth in the driver’s seat was waving one arm at her to move. He didn’t want to stop. She hugged her son to her as the dray bumped and groaned over the railway tracks. She felt the track shudder. The little boy kicked against her, trying to get to his bright red engine, quivering on the railway line, but she held tight. The dray wheels passed; the engine was fine. Her son burst from her arms and almost fell on his toy. He tugged fiercely, but it wouldn’t come free.

‘Gentle,’ she warned. She reached to wiggle it loose. It was quivering, still, and the rail buzzed against it.

*

The steam engine came round the bend, half a mile before the township. The driver and the fireman leaned out their windows, one each side of the cab. The fireman let the sun shut his eyelids. Until the driver let off a long stream of useless curses, that were carried away in the smoke and chuffing of the engine. He ducked in, reached for the whistle lever and yanked.

*

The young man couldn’t say why he looked back over his shoulder at the crossing, except that the flow of the woman’s skirt as she bent reminded him of the girl at the store. He wanted to look again at the way she put her arm over the little boy’s tummy, despite his kicking. The youth was trying to understand how it touched him too, somewhere deep in his belly, when the whistle shrieked. So he saw the woman panic and trip, because her son began thrashing and yelling how he wanted the train. The youth didn’t even rein in the horse, but leapt in an arc off the dray’s side, and ran back. He ran past the woman picking herself up, and ran for the little boy, who was making a bee line for the rail where they’d been moments before. He scooped his arm around the child and hoisted him as if he were a stray lamb. He felt the boy’s stomach warm and heaving against his forearm. He held him there, feeling their pulses meld, as the steam train rushed past, growling and tooting and gnashing the rails, unable to stop. He couldn’t hear what the boy was saying until the whole length of the carriages had passed.

‘My train. My train.’ The little boy was sobbing.

‘Hey fella, there’ll be another one tomorrow,’ he said to the boy. But he could feel in the boy’s heaving and his own pulsing heart that there wouldn’t be, not like this. And he thought that if he asked the girl at the store for a dance, he would tell her about this train crossing, and see if she understood why it mattered, even though no harm had been done.

*

The mother was sure she heard a terrible crack before the smoke and grit of the train’s passing blew at her. She shielded her eyes with her hand and forced herself to look toward the black storm of its wheels. But her son was safe, caught by the lad from the dray. She felt a giddy moment of relief, before the wind of the train’s passing tugged at her hat and her dress with rough, despoiling hands, and she thought of the prim little pram, parked on the far side of the track, with barely more than a pebble to secure it.

‘Oh God!’ she said. She couldn’t save either of her children. The long line of the carriages separated her from her baby and scored tracks across her heart.

*

The train rushed over the crossing. The fireman looked back from his cab. He saw a gently rocking pram beside the tracks. He pulled his head in and called across the cab, ‘No strike’.

Then he wiped his sweating face on his blackened sleeve again. He never did like crossings. People were unreliable. He promised himself that when he got home, he would kiss his kid and hold his wife, even if he was covered in coal dust.