The Scent of Baby Powder
C.J. twisted the key in the pitted brass padlock until it fell open, and then he removed it from the hasp. Grasping the edge of the splintery plank door, he tugged it open and scraped a quarter-circle in the dirt before the low, rough shed. As he peered into the deep shadow, he was cautious of the skittery rattles coming from under a jumble of old furniture piled by the rusty hulk of a tractor. A breath of arid, musty air exhaled from the gloom inside the shed, and, in a single ray of sunlight that pierced the tin roof, C.J. saw a cloud of dust-motes rise and eddy.
“C.J.!” shouted his father from the back porch, “quit standing there and get a place cleared out for this stuff!”
C.J. stepped into the dimness of the shed and gingerly lifted a stack of wicker baskets from the dusty shelf of a tumbled-down bookcase. As he turned to hunt for a place to set down his load, he felt something scurry down his right forearm. C.J. tossed the baskets in the air and furiously slapped at himself with both hands.
“The heck with this,” C.J. muttered, and he scooted the fallen pile under a long table with his toe. He returned to the bookshelf and tipped a tangled coil of rope to the floor and kicked it underneath the table also. He did the same with the rest of the discarded household stuff, plastic flower pots, thin-soled work boots, boxes of his sister’s old clothes, until the space beneath the table would hold no more.
C.J. bounded out of the shed, and the mid-morning sun blinded him. He squinted and shielded his eyes with a quick salute, and he was surprised when he heard a voice as he swung himself from the top porch-rail into the shade of the veranda.
“I don’t know why your mother wants to keep this stuff,” his father gruffly remarked and then turned and vanished into the house.
C.J. suddenly felt the nagging ebb of confusion sweep over him again. It was if he were living the dream he often had when things weren’t right in the house, when his father withdrew into himself and shut out his family, the world. In C.J.’s dream, his father would be teaching him how to tie his shoes, just as he had many years before, except, in the dream, C.J. would tie a perfect bow on his first try, the loops even, the ends not too long or short, and his father would untie it and say, almost, son, try again, and his father would flash him an encouraging, hollow smile. In the dream, C.J. would tie perfect bows every time, and, every time, his father would untie it and say, almost, try again.
C.J. glanced down at the items neatly arranged on the porch, and the care with which they were placed belied his father’s stern tone. These were the baby’s things. His father had tenderly lined up the dismantled crib, the mobiles of bright, cloth clowns, the deflated walker, the johnny-jump-up, the tiny rocking chair. Beside these were a tidy row of boxes. One held bedding, another clothes. The last box in the row was full of stuffed animals. Everything was freshly washed and folded, C.J. knew, by his father. Everything smelled of the faint scent of baby powder.
“Go easy on him, C.J.” his mother said.
C.J., startled, turned to see his mother on the bottom step of the stairs. Her eyes were rimmed with red again, and she still wore her housecoat.
“This took us all by surprise, son, and we all have to accept it in our own ways,” she said, her voice trailing. “Are you okay?”
“Sure, Mom.”
C.J. removed the boxes and other things from the porch to the shed, but, this time, he carefully arranged them on the bookshelf, heedless of the spiders and the fleeing mice.
C.J. dropped his bologna sandwich when he saw his father enter the kitchen dressed in his Highway Department uniform. His father had called in sick every morning for the last three weeks, including this morning. The telephone sat on a small table in the hall outside C.J.’s bedroom, and, even though it was summer vacation, C.J. had found himself waking at six o’ clock every morning to listen for his father’s voice. The first day his father had called, he had cried on the phone as he explained to Mr. Ross what had happened. C.J., listening from under the sheet in the warm dawn, had cried too.
This was when the confusing feeling had begun. C.J. had not cried at the funeral, not because he wasn’t sad or that he didn’t hurt inside, but because he was sixteen, and his two best friends were there. C.J.’s father hadn’t cried at the funeral either. He had been a rock, grim-faced but solid as he comforted his sobbing wife and daughter. As C.J. had sat in the rickety folding chair at the grave-side, and listened to the endless monotone of the minister, the polite, stifled murmurs of grief, the drone of a plane as it had slowly crossed the sky, he had watched his father’s granite endurance, and, at that moment, he wanted to be like his father in every way.
So, C.J. had realized, on that first morning when his father had called in to excuse himself, and the rich baritone of his voice had cracked in the stillness of the empty hallway, that the reason the back of his throat ached until he burst out with choked sobs was not that he had suppressed his grief for too long. C.J. wept because his father wept. And every morning since, as he listened to his father tersely identify himself and then simply say, Ônot yet,’ C.J. dreaded the moment when he might hear his father weep again.
“My, my, my,” C.J.’s mother said, shaking C.J. from his thoughts, “don’t we look dapper today?”
“What good is a man if he has no purpose?” his father replied and seated himself at the head of the table. “I don’t guess I was put on this earth for no reason.”
His voice caught, and he quickly turned to look out of the window. C.J. ducked his head under the table and pretended to look for bits of lettuce from his fallen sandwich. When he looked up again, he was relieved that his father busied himself with spreading mustard on a piece of rye bread.
“Ross called and said that a professor from the university is coming down to study the Manders’ crossing. Ross thought I might like to help him out, detour traffic, chase off the rubberneckers, you know, pretend like I was doing something.”
C.J.’s father smiled for the first time in months, and C.J. was doubly elated. First, it was good to see his eyes crinkle as the broad grin spread across his weathered face, and, second, anything to do with Manders’ crossing aroused C.J.’s deep curiosity. Manders’ crossing was the closest thing their town had to a famous or historic landmark. The crossing was simply a stretch of highway, no more than thirty yards long, that rose in a gentle, almost imperceptible, incline. The thing that made Manders’ crossing unique, though, was the fact that, if a vehicle were left on that stretch of road, in neutral with the emergency brake off, the car would slowly roll uphill, pushed by unseen forces. Supposedly, that thousand square yards was a vortex of unimaginable magnetic fields, or, if you listened to the more excitable gossips around town, the doorway to another dimension.
“Can I come with you, Dad?” C.J. asked.
From the way his father locked him in his steady gaze, C.J. was afraid that the request, the added responsibility of keeping a watchful eye on him, might give his father a reason to call Mr. Ross back and excuse himself once again.
“Never mind, Dad, I...” C.J. quickly added.
“It’s okay, son, I’d like you to come along.”
His father smiled again.
As C.J. and his father pulled off the highway onto the gravel shoulder that flanked Manders’ crossing, C.J. saw that the professor, and what must be an assistant, were already there. Parked beside the road was a green fleet car with the university emblem painted on the door, and behind it was a Chevy van with black plastic panels glued all the way around it from the bottom of the windows to a foot off the ground. The overall effect, C.J. thought, was that the van was wearing a black celluloid skirt, and he could not help but snicker.
“Be polite, son,” his father said curtly, “I’ll bet you end up learning something if you pay attention.”
C.J. and his father walked from their truck to where the professor was standing with his arm outstretched.
“Hello, hello, I’m Dr. Snead.” He shook both C.J.’s and his dad’s hands vigorously. “And this is Mr. Cutrall. He’s going to be helping me today.”
Mr. Cutrall nervously extended his hand, and, after shaking, snatched it back. He was lanky with a beak-like nose and a mop of wild, black hair, the opposite of Dr. Snead’s short obesity and balding white head.
“Well,” C.J.’s father said after a long pause, “what can I do to help you today?”
“We’d like to start by taking a few soil samples from both sides of the road about every ten feet. We’re going to set up some video equipment, and we’re going to put the van on the road here, sort of as a guinea pig. So, if you could block traffic on either side of the railroad tracks for about fifty yards, we would appreciate it.”
“About how long are you going to need the road blocked off? Anyone trying to get through is in for a mighty long detour.”
“Oh, we’ll be out of your way in a couple of hours. We’ve got to get back to the university before four.”
C.J.’s father walked back to his truck and swung out a pair of orange-striped saw horses from the bed and planted them in the oncoming lanes fifty yards on either side of the tracks, but there was no traffic anywhere in sight. As he walked back to the vantage point of the front seat of his truck, Dr. Snead flagged him with a frantic wave of his arm and ran toward him.
“I almost forgot,” panted Dr. Snead, “to ask you if you knew anything about the history of this place. When was the road built?”
C.J.’s father’s face went white. C.J. felt nausea tugging at the pit of his stomach because he realized why Mr. Ross had asked his father to do this.
“It opened October thirteenth, nineteen-sixty-three,” C.J.’s father replied softly, staring past Dr. Snead at a distant point on the horizon.
“That’s quite a memory you’ve got there,” Dr. Snead with a grin, “can you tell me how many cars have been over since then?”
“It was his birthday,” C.J.’s father whispered, “his tenth birthday.”
“Whose birthday? What are you talking about?” Dr. Snead’s grin had vanished, and he was flushed all the way to the top of his bald head. Mr. Cutrall wandered up just then, holding a jar of dirt.
“My older brother’s birthday. I was home sick that day. I made him a slingshot from a stick, and strips of an old inner tube, and a piece of the tongue of Dad’s old work boot,” C.J.’s father continued in a monotone, looking at no one.
“What’s up? What is this all about?” blurted Mr. Cutrall.
The interruption snapped C.J.’s father from his distraction. He looked squarely at both of the men and resumed, this time in his strong, official Highway Department voice.
“On October thirteenth, nineteen-sixty-three, the afternoon of the opening of this railroad crossing, a school bus stalled on the tracks and was hit by the three-fifteen Southern Pacific from Dunsville. There were no survivors.”
“Well,” Mr. Cutrall chortled, “I guess things haven’t always rolled off of the tracks by themselves.”
Dr. Snead whirled on him and snatched the jar from his grasp. He caught hold of his bony arm and spun him around, motivating him toward the van with a thick forefinger insistently prodding his spine.
“My apologies,” Dr. Snead said over his shoulder, “we’ll hurry and get out of your way.”
For an awful moment, C.J. was afraid his father was going to cry, and he looked away. But, when he could not help but look back, his father pulled his cap low over his eyes and exhaled slowly through pursed lips.
“Let’s wait in the cab, son. I think these fellows are on a goose chase.”
C.J. and his father watched the professor and his helper through the windshield of the truck as they scurried about, pulled up plugs of earth through the gravel, positioned video cameras on tripods, wrote in fluttering spiral notebooks. A car pulled up to the barricade, and the driver honked the horn and poked his head out of the window. C.J. and his father ambled over, and C.J.’s father explained the detour. His hand sliced left and right through the air as he described the proper route. The driver slowly nodded and, with C.J.’s father’s assistance, backed up, turned around and vanished down the road.
As C.J. and his father crossed the tracks on their way back to the truck, Dr. Snead stopped the van alongside them and heaved himself out.
“What are those black sheets for?” asked C.J.
“Oh, well...they’re, well, it would take a while to explain, son,” Dr. Snead muttered and looked sheepishly at C.J.’s father.
“They are for studying magnetic fields,” Mr. Cutrall chimed in, appearing from the other side of the van.
C.J. looked expectantly at his father. He stopped at the back of the van and half turned, his arms folded.
“We think that this phenomenon is caused by some sort of magnetic field caused by, perhaps, the confluence of these metal rails with the minerals in the ground. This field then reacts to the metal in a vehicle. We are going to dust these black sheets with a white powder mixed with fine steel particles. If there is some magnetic field causing the van to move, then, hopefully, the video cameras will record the movements of these fields as they reveal themselves by the patterns formed in the steel particles mixed with the white powder.”
With that explanation spat out, Mr. Cutrall furiously rubbed the plastic sheets, which charged them with static electricity, then generously powdered them with an old flour sifter. He continued in this manic fashion until he circled the van and finished by C.J.’s side again.
“There. Let’s see what happens.”
But nothing happened. The three of them, C.J., Mr. Cutrall and Dr. Snead, stood shoulder to shoulder at the side of the van, while C.J.’s father watched them from off of the tracks. They waited for long minutes, but the van stood motionless. The still air was filled with the scent of baby powder.
Then, far off, and very faintly, they heard the plaintive wail of a train whistle. The van, at that instant, rocked forward and slowly rolled up the hill. C.J., shocked, turned to his father, and his father stared at the powdered sheets on the back of the van. Tears streamed down his face. He was smiling.
The automatic zooms of the video cameras slowly turned in unison as the van crept past C.J., and he saw, on the back panels, the disruption of the white powder in the shape of small hand prints, thirty, forty of them rise dark out of the white powder, the hand prints of children.