The general was understandably angry. A flurry of outraged letters between Virginia and Connecticut followed. Another front of the war might have erupted between those two states had not a curious reporter at the Hartford Courant gotten wind of the dispute and poked around, asking questions, nicknaming it in one story he wrote “The Mysterious Under Graham Railroad Box Car Set,” a cruel play off the name of the general’s son and the manner in which the train made its way north, reportedly one train riding the other. Thus the train got its name and withdrew to a silent place in history, for the threat of additional publicity caused both sides to scramble to their corners immediately. If Smith & Wesson was discovered even discussing the business of selling weapons to the South—or cooperated with that idea in any manner—Horace Smith would have faced a firing squad. Conversely, had Davis’s government admitted it rested the Confederacy’s military strategy in part on the fate of a toy train stolen by a Negro who had absconded to New York City via the Underground Railroad, it would be the laughingstock of Europe, from whom it needed to borrow money to finance the war effort.
With these points hanging in the air, both sides clammed up, and the matter died down. History did the rest. The war ended. The general passed away, and in 1893 Horace Smith died as well.
The train then vanished from history, never to be seen again. Stories of its existence popped up from time to time. A French toymaker in 1923 claimed he’d procured it, but it turned out to be a fraud. In 1945, a Negro seamstress from Baltimore swore her grandmother had it and produced a picture, but that, too, turned out to be a fake. There had not been one credible sighting of the Under Graham Railroad Box Car Set in over 130 years.
That is, until that balmy afternoon in 1992 when I sat in my office and found myself staring at an old photograph in the weather-beaten portfolio of the Reverend Spurgeon T. Hart.
• • •
I WAS SO STUNNED I sat in my chair for several minutes, staring at the photograph. I got up, collected myself, stumbled into my kitchen, and shoved a shot of bourbon and a spoonful of peanut butter down my throat, a combination that usually dulls my nerves. It tasted like sand. Still, when I sat down at my desk again to review the photograph, I could feel my racing heart slowing, and my fast, shallow breathing deepening. I again stared at the picture.
Finally I swung into action. I turned on my computer, scanned the photo onto my hard drive, and compared the photo with the sketches available on a private-access toy website. When they matched, I canceled all of my appointments for the following week. I called in both my assistants, then telephoned a fellow toy collector who sent over two more helpers. With this army in place, I laid out my war plans.
I sent one assistant to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to check its files. I sent another to Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, where Lee served as president, to procure a copy of a drawing of the train made by General Lee himself. I dispatched my top assistant to Norwalk, Connecticut, to check the Smith & Wesson archives of Horace Smith’s descriptions and early working sketches of the train. Then I sat down and studied the photo again.
I studied it for a full day. It was of a dark-skinned, African-American boy, perhaps six or seven, seated next to a barren, beaten Christmas tree. He was wearing tattered pants and a tattered button-up shirt. He sat with his legs crossed Indian style, staring up at the camera. In front of him, in a neat row, lying on their sides so the photographer could catch them more clearly, were the three passenger cars, the famed coal car, and the locomotive engine of the Under Graham Railroad Box Car Set.
I sat staring at that photograph a long while. Then I placed it on my bookshelf just above the desk where I could stare at it. It was nearly midnight when I finally went to bed. I fell asleep dreaming of trains, and frauds, and fools who chased millions. I slept not like a log but rather like a frog, with my eyes open.
The next morning I rose and took the image to a well-known photography expert I know to have it analyzed. He took less than two hours to confirm that the photo was real and warranted further study, which required a series of tests. I hastily agreed.
A day later he called me to say that, given the age of the photo paper and the sparse furnishings around the child—part of a chair was the only furniture that could be seen, and the narrow wall behind him—the picture was most likely taken in an uninsulated structure, perhaps a cabin of some kind. Using a magnifying glass, he identified several detectable slivers of light seeping into the home from the wall behind the child, which appeared to be slats of wood.
“My guess,” he said, “given the type of wood construction, composition of the floor, and light angle, is that this was taken in the South sometime in the late 1930s.” He based this on several equations using a ruler, a spreadsheet, an astrology table showing the position of the sun and the moon at various times during the year, and a cheap dime store calculator, which he also used to tally up his fee, which was impressive.
All told, during those first two weeks, I spent several thousand dollars on the Under Graham Railroad Box Car Set—a healthy sum, but a pittance if the train proved to be real, which I was certain it was.
With that evidence in tow, I set out to contact Reverend Spurgeon Hart, the owner of the photograph, whose address was procured from the portfolio. I telephoned first to break the ice and deliver the good news. I got Mrs. Hart on the line. I was delighted to learn that her husband was alive and well. I identified myself as a friend of the firm that held her husband’s portfolio and asked if I might drop by.
“For what?” she said. She seemed suspicious.
“I am a toy collector and am interested in the toy train that is pictured in your husband’s portfolio.”
“Oh, that thing,” she said.
I nearly fainted, my heart was pounding so hard.
“Does your husband still have it?” I managed to gurgle out.
“Oh, Spurgeon’s got that old thing laying ’round someplace,” she said.
At the words “laying ’round someplace,” I felt dizzy.
“Do you happen to know where it would be right now?”
“Course I do.”
“May I come see it?”
“You got to ask Spurgeon. I’m sure he don’t care.”
“May I speak to him?” I asked.
“He ain’t here, mister.”
“And when may he be in?” I asked, willing myself to sound calm. I was scared. Afraid of disappointment, I think. I had begun to dream high. Was it wrong of me to believe that I’d stumbled onto every vintage toy collector’s dream? I had no children. No wife. No dog. At fifty-seven, I had become my father. I even walked like him, with a kind of drifting, wandering look, my pants always loose around my stomach, my face configured into a puzzled, bemused, locked-in grin. I’d become my worst fears: a drafty, ancient-looking geezer, motoring around lovely Bucks County, Pa., in a newly leased Mercedes-Benz that lives in front of my converted 1726 barn, which like its owner looks bountiful and prosperous from the outside but on the inside is hollow, worn, unsound, and filled with useless old things. I wanted a cause. A purpose. And a decent pension, too, for God’s sake. And for the first time in my life, I was circling the door to all those things and more, and this woman on the line held the key.
I heard a crash in the background and two dogs barking. “Hold on,” she said. I heard a lot of yelling and some cursing, then more barking. After a few moments she got back on the line.
“Now what do you want again?” she asked. She seemed flustered.
“About the train,” I said.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Well, I ain’t got time to talk about it just now. My dog is whipping up on the neighbor’s dog. You know a Rottweiler ain’t worth two cents? You ever own a Rottweiler?”
I confessed I hadn’t. “About the toy. Could you mention to your husband that I want to see it?”
??
?Mister, you want to talk to Spurgeon ’bout that old piece of junk, you better put your foot in the road and come here yourself. Myself, I ain’t got time to chat about some toy.”
“Can I come today?”
“Come anytime you want.”
“When will he be home? Your husband, I mean.”
“Can’t tell you. Old Spurg is hard to catch. He’s always on the job. Working for the boss, like they say.”
I could feel beads of sweat forming on my neck. “Who’s his boss?”
“The Son of Man.”
She hung up.
• • •
IT’S A FOUR-HOUR DRIVE from my gentleman’s farm in Bucks County to Springfield Gardens, Queens, where the Reverend Hart lives. I made it in three. I would’ve made it in less, but I had to get my stage props in order. I tossed aside my usual absentminded professor getup in favor of a tailored suit, tie, shiny shoes, my Mercedes, of course, and $90,000 stuffed into a briefcase in carefully packed wads of $9,000 held together with rubber bands. It was all the cash I could muster quickly. Also, I’m told by an accountant friend that any bank deposit under $10,000 will not draw IRS attention. I assumed there would be some negotiation and depositing of accounts on the Harts’ part. By starting with 9K, then increasing my bid by the same increment, I could draw $9,000 clips out of my suitcase without mistakenly drawing more or less, and at the sale’s end advise the Harts about the wisdom of making their deposits at a clip of $9,000 per deposit, thus keeping them off the IRS radar and convincing them at the same time that I had their best interests at heart. I also brought a release form. I meant business.
I drove to the Reverend’s address and parked out in front of the Hart home. It was a tiny red house that sat at the edge of a pack of small, claptrap houses, which but for the grace of God and the airport designer’s pen would have sat dead along the middle of Runway 12 at Kennedy Airport had there been a need for more tarmac space. The sight of massive 757s just three blocks away, the giant logos of the airlines that owned them gleaming in the sun as they made their final turns just beyond the airport fence, gunning up to takeoff speed, added an unnerving roar to everything. Talk about bad location. The place was fresh out of a real estate agent’s listings garbage pile.
I approached the house and noticed a sign atop the front door that read “The Lord is listening to your junk!”
As I climbed the rotted, beaten steps to the front door, I glanced behind me and noticed my Benz suddenly had suitors. Several young men who when I pulled up had been lounging on a battered stoop across the street, listening to the infernal racket of rap music from a giant boom box, now had risen to their feet and were slinking toward the car, nodding approval and gazing at it admiringly. I ignored them, aware that I was carrying what amounted to my life savings in cash in my briefcase, and focused on the door. I knocked loudly.
After a moment an enormous creature answered. Six feet, six inches tall if she were a foot, a towering figure and nearly as wide as the door. After a moment, I guessed it to be a woman. She was clad in spandex pants, which were tight enough to reveal the dates on the coins in her pockets, had there been any, which I suspect there were not. Her hips were wide enough to nearly touch both sides of the doorway, and her rear end seemed to stretch into the yawning darkness of the room behind her. She was wearing a sweatshirt that said “Kill the noise! Turn up Jesus!” Her hair was clipped short, lathered tightly to her scalp in neat waves like the rippling rivers of a pond and dyed blond—which is why, I suspect, I had trouble guessing her gender at first. Overall, she was an impressive sight, for her face was gentle and pleasant, and not unattractive. She was a most bizarre amazon.
“Look at them,” she said, nodding over my shoulder at the boys with the boom box who were approaching my car. “That’s all they do. Piping garbage into their minds. What you want, mister? You a Jehovah Witness? We gave at the office.”
“I’m the toy collector.”
“Who?”
“The man who called about the train. From Pennsylvania.”
She drew her head back and laughed, unbelieving, and by God, she seemed seven feet tall then, towering over me, her head thrown upward in laughter, giving me a clear view of an enormous mouth full of sparkling white teeth. She then looked at me again, took in my suit, my silver Benz parked behind me, which the youths had surrounded and were peering into its tinted glass windows.
“You came all the way here from Pennsylvania? For that old train?”
“Yes, I did,” I said.
“You’s a tad bit old for toys, ain’t you?”
She motioned me inside. As we moved into the hallway, I heard the snarl of a dog and suddenly a huge pit bull burst out of a doorway and rushed me. “Buster!” she snapped. She stepped forward, picked him up by the collar, and tossed him into a bedroom, slamming the door tight. Behind the door, the dog howled. She led me back into the kitchen and motioned that I should sit.
“You sure you all right, mister? You got the right house?”
“Yes, I am,” I said. I looked around and took in the kitchen.
I have a habit—call it professional instinct if you will—of sizing up a person’s net worth at a glance. It’s more ritual than anything else. I suppose this morbid curiosity is rooted in the fact that while most of my clients are worth millions, some toy collectors live like dogs. It’s not my business, and God knows a lot of them live better than I do. But from what I could see, the Harts’ entire estate, complete with interior house decorations, furniture, dog, home exterior paint job, and location, was worth about half the $90,000 I had in my briefcase.
The kitchen table where we sat was one of those giant wooden spools that hold telephone wire that crews carry to sites and abandon after the wire has been removed. Around it stood three folding chairs. The straw placemats on the table were chewed at the edges. The gas stove looked to be from the 1950s and was something you’d find in an antiques store in my part of Bucks County—as an antique. It required matches to light. A bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling. Dangling at the end of the light switch was a glow-in-the-dark crucifix of Jesus hanging off the cross with blood oozing out of his wounds. Pictures of Jesus in various states of repose and torture hung around the entire room: Jesus with his mother, Mary; Jesus being kicked; Jesus stuck on the cross; Jesus bleeding from his head and suffering every possible outrage.
She was seated with me at the table and got up to open the refrigerator, removing a large pie. “You want some sweet potato pie?” she asked.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Don’t be trifling,” she said. “It’s bad to miss eating.” She produced a butter knife, cut a large piece, and set the pie before me. “Bible says man got to eat and be merry. Unless you got a ram in the bush,” she said. “You got a ram in the bush?”
“No, but I have a cat.”
She eyed me warily. “This is a sanctified house,” she said solemnly. “There ain’t no cats in the bush.” She said it as a kind of warning.
“I’m sorry. I’ve come to talk to your husband about the train.”
“He ain’t here. He’s out working.”
“Will he be home soon?”
“God knows.”
“Where does he work?”
“Everywhere.”
“Well, who does he work for?”
She looked at me oddly. “He works for the King of Kings, mister.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Jesus,” she said. “Jesus is his boss. You got Jesus in your soul?”
I didn’t want to tell her, but I’m a Jew who hasn’t been to temple in fourteen years, not since my mother died. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur sometimes make it onto my calendar. Once in a blue moon Hanukkah and Passover make the grade. Shavuot and Sukkoth, however, are more problematic. I mean, I sell toys. I need money. Who has time?
So instead of spea
king out, I simply gave in and ate some pie to calm things. It tasted terrible.
“Wonderful pie,” I said.
“Thank you, mister.”
“So did your husband leave the train for me to see?”
“That thing?” she laughed. “Spurgeon be glad for you to have it.”
“He will?”
She chuckled. “Men and their toys. Finish your pie first.” She cut a piece for herself, gobbled it while I nibbled at mine, barely able to swallow.
My eyes watered with each bite. The pie tasted like mush and old goat cheese. I took a forkful and then another, wiping my eyes with my handkerchief.
“Spurgeon never did like toys,” she said.
“Well, I’ll relieve him of it. And pay him for it. I really want it. It’s . . . I think it’s worth quite a bit.”
“Save your dimes, mister. Spurgeon called after you did and when I told him you called, he said you could have it.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “But I’ve come to buy it,” I said. “Doesn’t he want to discuss price?”
“He ain’t interested. What you wanna buy it for anyway? You ain’t even seen it.”
“I’m a toy collector, and I’ll pay a lot if it’s what I think it is. I love old toys.”
“Spurge said give it to you. I can’t take no money if he said give it.”
“Do you have any kids, Mrs. Hart?” I asked.
“Just one,” she said. “Junior’s off at choir practice.” She went to the refrigerator, removed some milk, poured a generous amount into an old mayonnaise jar, and placed the glass on the table in front of me. “Have some buttermilk. It’ll wash that pie down good.”