Poppi went somewhere. He’s not dead, I guess.

Poppi went somewhere. Just somewhere. He’s not dead. He just went somewhere. Nobody knows if he’s really not dead. Mama says he’s alive until we know he isn’t. So, of course he’s alive. Don’t you think we would know if he wasn’t? Don’t ever think of such a thing! This, she tells me as she gets out a bucket and a rag and kneels.

Poppi got on the train. I didn’t actually see him get on the train. But I know he did. I was the only one with him at the time, and there wasn’t anywhere else he could have gone. He just disappeared. I was so young back then I didn’t know it at the time but people just don’t disappear, not like I thought he did. I’ve never been so scared.

I won’t go into all the details right now about how the third train showed up way ahead of schedule by a couple of months and how the town went into a panic and how there was almost a riot and how it got out that this was the last train ever to stop here and that meant the end of the world. Maybe I’ll get to that some other time. Or maybe somebody else will get to it, somebody who knows better than I do. I just know what people told me. Oh, and they’ve told me over and over like they do around here until it didn’t matter that I was asleep in bed for most of what happened, I might as well have been there.

When the train left in the morning, the man who ran the train was mad because the stop had taken so long. All his crew had do to was pick up four box cars and add them to the two hundred and something, all empty, all going somewhere beyond the mountains to move a lot of something that needed to be moved real soon. The empty cars will be back in time to load when we needed them. Nobody liked last minute changes like what had just happened around here. We just don’t like change. Just don’t worry, the man said. But everybody did. And nothing about that has ever changed.