The Unwritten Book by Samantha Hunt

Author:Samantha Hunt [Hunt, Samantha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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My grandparents were high school sweethearts. He went to college a year before she did. My grandma writes:

Walter entered Ames that fall … The dreadful flu epidemic of 1918 where thousands died was at its height and he almost immediately contracted the dreaded disease—The huge gym at the college was made into an overflow hospital … his family was called. Mother Hunt decided she must go to his side immediately and I asked to go with her! Everyone agreed for we were all terribly worried. I’ll never forget that trip from Logan to Ames on the local train for at every stop we would watch them unload caskets of the victims. A heart rending sight. As we pulled into the Ames station Mother Hunt was being paged with the news that under no circumstances would she be allowed to come to the campus to visit Walter because of the strict quarantine rules. However he was still alive. We could do nothing but board another train for home.

I live near the tracks. I hear the trains at night and wonder why they are louder in the dark. I wonder where they are going and who is living in those terminal lands.

Frog has gone to battle with Worm, large as a locomotive; “with all different kinds of hatred he has absorbed and stored inside himself over the years, his heart and body have swollen to gargantuan proportions.” And Frog, dying from his wounds, recalls his beloved Anna Karenina. “My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me. Inside me is the un-me. My brain is growing muddy. The locomotive is coming.”

From Shipley:

locomotive, See mute.

(L. movere, whence move.) (L. loco, from a place to a place. Emotion.)

loco, See yokel.

(Sp. loco, stupid, from It. locco, a fool, from alocco, an owl.)

Was Ella cold on the train? Was she beyond cold? Where was she heading? Had she read Anna Karenina? The first English edition was published four years before her death. Was she a reader? Was Ella’s journey hopeful or was she fearful as the pioneer woman who needs companionship to sleep at night? Or did Ella find freedom on that freighter? Riding with her un-me? Her history becomes mine to imagine, so I do. I see Ella breathing the air that grew fresher and more foreign with each inch of journey gained. She makes up her own definitions for what she is doing. She finds new words as the train moves her into a place where one definition indicates many things. Ella, like the ones who mean to get away, listens to the sound of that train, so loud it makes silence, makes room for all, riding forever, each car its own narrow house, linked to the others, a locomotive without end, a thousand deaths and even more.

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