The Depot at Christmas

The depot smelled of coal smoke and pine resin and the particular sweetness of oranges carried a long way in cold air.

James Ah Lum stood behind the counter of his father's laundry on Commercial Row, watching the street through the front window. It was December 23, 1903, two days before Christmas, and the Southern Pacific depot across the way was busier than he had seen it in months. Passengers came off the westbound train stamping their feet and pulling their coats tight against the cold, their breath making small clouds that dissolved in the gray afternoon light. Eastbound passengers waited on the platform with their luggage, looking at their watches, looking at the sky, looking at the town the way people look at a place they are about to leave.

James was twenty-two years old. He had been born in Reno, in the two-room house behind the laundry where his father still slept, and he had never been on a train. The Chinese Exclusion Act, which had been the law for twenty-one years now, made travel complicated for a man who looked like James. His father had explained this when James was fourteen.

"If you go," his father had said, "you must be able to come back. Always be sure you can come back."

So James stayed. He worked the laundry through the mornings and spent his afternoons at the small dry goods store he was building two doors down. He sold soap and candles and lamp oil and writing paper and needles and thread. The store was narrow, barely eight feet across, with shelves his father had built from railroad salvage and a counter James had sanded smooth himself.

He was not getting rich. He was getting by. In Reno in 1903, getting by was what most people did.

The depot was the center of everything. The brick building stood at the head of Commercial Row, two stories tall, with a telegraph office and a ticket window and a waiting room heated by a cast-iron stove. James had been inside exactly once, as a boy, when his father had gone to pick up a package from a cousin in San Francisco. The waiting room had been divided. There was no sign, but everyone knew which side was which.

Now, from his window, James watched the holiday traffic and counted the trunks being unloaded from the baggage car. Seven, eight, nine. Big ones, the kind that meant someone was staying a while. He had heard the talk around town about the Eastern women who were starting to come for divorces, though in 1903 the flow was still a trickle, not the flood it would become. Nevada's six-month residency requirement was strict enough to discourage all but the most determined. The women who came were generally wealthy, generally quiet, and generally gone by the time anyone learned their names.

A man in a long coat stepped off the westbound train carrying a leather case and a newspaper. He crossed Commercial Row and came into James's store without looking at the sign, which said AH LUM DRY GOODS in black letters on a white board.

"Lamp oil?" the man said.

"Against the east wall," James said.

The man found the oil and brought a tin to the counter and paid for it without conversation. This was how most transactions went. James's customers were not interested in talking to him. They were interested in lamp oil, or soap, or whatever they had come for, and James was the person standing between them and the thing they wanted. He did not mind this. His father had taught him that a business transaction did not require friendship, only reliability.

After the man left, James wrapped a package he had been assembling on the shelf below the counter. It contained a tin of tea, a bar of soap that smelled of cedar, a pair of wool socks he had bought from a peddler in October, and a small wooden box with a hinged lid that he had made himself in the evenings after the store was closed. The box was for his father. The tea and soap were for Mrs. Fitzgerald, who still brought her husband's shirts to the laundry every Thursday, and the socks were for her son Patrick, who was now a young man of twenty-eight and a police officer and who still, occasionally, came to the laundry on Tuesday evenings to read with James's father, though they no longer used the children's grammar book.

James closed the store at four o'clock and walked through the cold to the laundry, where his father was pressing a shirt by the back window. Wei Ah Lum was sixty-nine years old. His hands were slower than they had been but his standards were the same. Every collar flat. Every cuff smooth. The shirts hung in rows on a wire that stretched the length of the room, white and orderly, like a line of paper lanterns.

"Busy today?" James asked.

"Twelve shirts. Two tablecloths. A set of curtains from the hotel."

James set the package on the counter. "For Thursday," he said. "When Mrs. Fitzgerald comes."

His father looked at the package and then at James and nodded once. Gift-giving was not something Wei discussed or deliberated over. It was something he did, or didn't do, and the doing was sufficient.

Outside, the depot was lit with gas lamps that made the brick walls glow amber in the early dark. A second train had arrived, and more passengers were spilling onto the platform, more trunks being hauled down, more breath clouds dissolving in the December air. The town had a population of roughly four thousand five hundred, and at Christmas it felt like all of them were in the streets, moving between the stores on Commercial Row, carrying packages, nodding to people they knew and ignoring people they didn't.

James stood in the doorway of the laundry and watched. He had never seen San Francisco or Sacramento or any of the cities the trains went to. He had seen Reno, every day of his twenty-two years, and he knew it the way his father knew the letters in the type case at the newspaper office where he had once studied English: by feel, by repetition, by the accumulated weight of attention paid over time.

The depot bell rang and the eastbound train began to move, slowly at first, then gathering speed, the cars rocking gently on the tracks as they passed through town and headed up the valley toward the Truckee Canyon and the long grade to the summit and the descent into California.

James watched it go. He pulled the door shut against the cold and went back inside, where his father was folding the last shirt of the day, his hands moving with the precision of a man who had done this particular thing ten thousand times and intended to do it ten thousand more.

The next morning was Christmas Eve. The depot was quiet, the platform empty. The town had pulled inward, into its houses and kitchens, into the particular privacy of a holiday spent in a place that was home because you had chosen it, or because it had chosen you, or because you had simply stayed long enough that the distinction no longer mattered.

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