A Lasting Impression Read Online Free PDF Page B

vowing to repay his kindness. She didn’t know how or when, but someday, she would do something kind for someone else, the way he’d done for her.
    She leaned her head against the window, the rhythm of steel wheels against iron rails lulling her to rest. She wondered how her father was, all while wishing her ticket could take her far, far away from both him and  Uncle Antoine, though it was difficult to even think of him as such anymore. She touched her cheek, a spike of anger returning. With each passing minute, as the distance separating her from them mounted, so did her resolve to stand up to them both, and to make a fresh start for herself.
    She withdrew her mother’s locket watch and checked the time, then touched the miniature likeness of her mother’s face. So pretty . . . She’d always liked it when people had said how much they favored each other.
    The rocking of the train gradually conspired with her full belly until her eyes slipped closed. “God be with you, ma’am . . .” She hoped what the proprietor had said was true. That God was with her. But even more, that He knew where she was headed.
    She wished she’d thought to pack the Bible she’d read from to her mother during those last days, the one she’d been issued at boarding school. But she hadn’t even thought about it. Until now. Although she couldn’t remember the Scriptures themselves, she remembered how the words, the promises, had comforted her mother. And her too.
    Sleep swam toward her, and as the waves of drifting consciousness carried her farther out, she found herself wanting to trust that remembered peace, wanting to believe that the Author of Life had a plan for hers.
    And the following afternoon, when she stepped onto the station platform in Nashville, she wanted to believe it more than anything else in the world.

3
     
    C laire followed the flow of passengers outside onto the train platform, pausing only after she’d picked her way through the crowded station. A late-day September sun hung hazy in the west, and a breeze wonderfully absent of smoke and soot brushed warm against her neck. Without a doubt, every speck of sand and dirt between Louisiana and Tennessee was now embedded into the pores of her skin. Either that, or layering her bedraggled curls.
    Every inch of her itched, and ached, and felt utterly and completely spent. She was relieved to have finally arrived, and yet—staring out across the city of Nashville—she wasn’t.
    Surely this must have been a beautiful city, even charming, before the war. Yet she couldn’t escape the sense of loss and defeat. Rows of buildings, constructed mostly of brick but with a few clapboard thrown in, huddled the narrow streets. The majority of structures were vacant, windows boarded up. Those not were cracked and broken, long since abandoned, by the looks of them. Some blocks away, a church steeple, barren of decorative touch and lonely on the horizon, rose like a bewildered beacon.
    Street signs, what few there were, leaned to one side, bent and stooped beneath an invisible weight. And where trees had once flourished—she could imagine stately poplar and sycamore dotting the nondescript streets even now—the dirt sprouted burned-out stumps and piles of rubble and debris. And the people . . .
    Their expressions mirrored their surroundings.
    Soldiers still clad in the uniform of a once-proud army stood in clusters of two or three, the gray woolen fabric now tattered and threadbare, coats hanging limp on their too-thin shoulders. Negroes populated the streets—far more than in New Orleans—yet not one of them wore the exuberant smiles of recently freed men and women. On the contrary, their countenances mirrored the same despondency as those of the broken men who had fought—at least in part—to keep them enslaved.
    Only a month ago, she’d read in the New Orleans Picayune that the state of Tennessee had finally been readmitted into the Union, over a year after the war