Fiction by Steve Wick

Porchlight is proud to continue the American tradition of serialization by offering a novella, Mr. Wilson by Steve Wick, in monthly installments, beginning with this edition. 

Steve Wick is a journalist and writer living on eastern Long Island. His stories about the last farm labor camp in the region ran as a series in Newsday, where he was a longtime reporter and editor. He shared in Newsday's Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for the newspaper’s coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800. He is the author of four works of nonfiction and one novel, The Ruins, which was published in February 2025 by Pegasus Books.

Mr. Wilson

A Novella 

While what follows is fiction, some aspects of the stories of the people and places are true, and are based on newspaper accounts, public records, family oral histories, and interviews conducted by the writer.

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” –Zora Neale Hurston

Eastern Long Island/circa 1950

He is an old man who has spent decades living in sheds or abandoned chicken coops, in squalid farm labor camps, or in shacks once home to generations of the enslaved, including his own people. He will not wake up in the morning, on any morning, well before sunrise, and greet the coming day with hope and optimism. 

On this morning, Wilson wakes up surprised he isn’t dead. For him, being alive is mostly good news, but in no way a reprieve from the past that has shadowed his day-to-day existence for decades. Nor does being alive at this moment address his life’s unanswered and unresolved questions that he knows one day he will have to face down before his life comes to an end. 

Some mornings, before his brain clears itself of all the confusion, he is so certain death has arrived that he hears the dirt clods and rocks landing on the cheap wooden coffin lined with burlap in which his rotting body has been placed. Some mornings are further tainted by the night’s nightmares: visions of his past that arrive unbidden and unwelcome when the brain is shutting down.

Rain tinkling the window behind the cast-off chair in which he sleeps every night is a good sign, since dead people don’t hear rain falling. He’s sure of that. His eyes wink open. 

I made it through another night, he thinks

He pushes the blanket off his chest and legs. He tries to stand, but dizziness strangles him. His legs have great difficulty holding him up. They’re close to useless anymore. Feet, ankles, knees, hips, they’ve all gone to hell. He falls back, letting out a groan that could he heard elsewhere in the shed if there were still people sleeping on their cots. But they are gone. He is alone.

A recent fire destroyed the farm labor camp, scattering everyone, sending them out into a world they had not been a part of, with the impossible task of finding their way back to wherever they were from. Assuming they knew.

Frank and Oliver said they were going to make their way south, to South Carolina or Georgia. Neither was sure where he was from, or if any of their people were still alive. Neither had a dollar between them, and packed whatever they had in a couple of trash bags. Clara walked away from the camp after the fire and Wilson had no idea where she went. Bea was found dead in a government apartment, murdered by a man with a knife. The local newspaper wrote it up: “A woman who spent her life in farm labor camps was found dead in her apartment. No arrests have been made.”

Pain stabs the right side of his abdomen. The pain has been there for weeks, well before the fire, doubling him over at times. He stands up again, gripping the arm of the chair until he is steady on both feet, then hobbles to the bathroom in the corner of the shed.

Standing over the toilet, he leans his head against the wall and concentrates his aim so the stream stays inside the toilet and doesn’t spill over on the floor. He groans painfully, louder. His urine is flecked with red. So be it. He’s wobbly as he zips up his pants.

Adding to his misery is anxiety over the coming days, when he will have to turn his life upside down and retrace his own history, what little he knows, and to try to answer the tangled web of unanswered questions: Who am I? Where do I belong?

Going over old ground has long been something he’s avoided, but the fire forced it on him. He has no choice but to look backwards, and to find his life back there. The South. The Deep South. 

He has lived his long life with an unresolved past. No history, personal or otherwise, has ever settled on him, guiding him as he got older when he found the challenges of life far more daunting. For him, there is no past to stand on.

What he knows is scant: there is a tiny hamlet in southern Georgia, tight to the Florida border, but that is all he knows of his beginnings. 

What he does remember is every aspect, day by day, of the trip north.

Ormond, Florida/circa 1880s

The crew boss was a foul-tempered Black man named Kemp. Wilson never knew his first name, if he ever heard it. He had a wood lot in town. Each spring he put men, women and children into the back of his truck and drove them north, dropping them off at farms that needed field work, and had sheds, chicken coops, shacks of all kinds, for them to live in while the harvest was on. That’s how he made his money.

Each night on the trip north, Kemp camped in woods away from towns and villages so as not to draw attention to himself and his group. They were never by themselves; the size of the group grew as they moved north and he picked up homeless stragglers or passed-out drunks half-dead in the street.

 So many men, women, teenagers, old people carrying babies, unsupervised children, were on the road, an American exodus like the Hebrews fleeing Pharoah. People camped in woods, in fields, sleeping in buses, trucks and cars, refugees all of them, so many they were small cities.

Kemp was careful not to go where his people weren’t allowed. Their proscribed world was tiny, enclosed by the high wall of the not-to-be-broken social rules. The rules were there for all to know and follow, and he followed them as if they were religious instructions and getting into heaven depended on keeping them to the letter. 

He never went into a town he didn’t know to buy food. He knew enough roadside places run by his own people where he could buy food and other supplies. Several times they stayed days in the same wooded place, shitting and pissing on the ground, while Kemp made repairs to the truck, or went off to look for drunks he could gather up and bring with him as they moved north.

One night they stayed in South Carolina in woods filled with hundreds of other people. Everyone slept on the ground, cooked on stick fires, or ate their food out of cans and greasy paper bags. The air smelled of human waste, and wet wood burning, and unwashed bodies. There were children, some as young as three or four, and babies in the arms of old women. 

The boy from Ormond who believed he was about fourteen (he’d never been sure), explained to Kemp he was alone and was trying to get to New Jersey to pick blueberries.

“Can you help me get there?” the boy asked.

“What’s your name?”

“Wilson, sir.”

“Where’s your momma?” Kemp asked.

“She’s dead,” Wilson said. 

“How about your daddy?”

“I don’t know anything about him.”

“You got food? A change of clothes?”

“I got nothin.”

Kemp turned away from the boy.

Somewhere in Virginia, Kemp stayed in a forest because his truck needed repairs. Again. They were near railroad track. One morning Wilson got up to relieve himself and as he stood there a train passed. Hundreds of ragged men stood in the open doors of the rail cars. For years, Wilson remembered that morning so well it took on a mystical quality, like seeing a ghost train.

Later in the morning Kemp went looking to buy a fuel pump. When he came back, he said some white men had come after him and told him to go back and live in the woods, you piece of shit. Another time he went into a shanty town of other refugees and returned with three drunk men who had become lost trying to get to Philadelphia. He said he’d drop them off at a farm in Delaware he knew.

He crowded them in the truck with everyone else. The old woman who sat next to Wilson under the tarp in the back of the truck on the way north said the three men had been Shanghaied. It was the first time Wilson had heard that word: Shanghaied.

“Crew bosses, they pick up men who don’t know better and can’t do nothin for themselves and drop them off at farms for a fee, money under the table,” she said. “I seen it with my own eyes.” 

She said her husband had been Shanghaied years ago in Alabama or Mississippi and ended up picking apples somewhere in upstate New York. One spring morning she buried him on the back of a farm in Maryland. She made a cross out of sticks and jammed it into the ground. Around her was a field of crude crosses and wild flowers and freshly-turned earth. A make-do graveyard that would soon be overgrown and forgotten.

“Keep goin north,” she told Wilson. “Find somethin you can live with and stick with it.”

The anxiety of leaving the shed and the work camp that went with it, after all these years, had been eating away at him. He filled a small pack, which was light enough to drape over his shoulder. Someone had dropped off the pack inside a cardboard box of donated clothing by the front door of the shed. There was a note inside he asked Bea to read: “Here are some old shirts and pants of my husband’s that people in the labor camp might find useful.”

In his pack were several changes of clothes, a pair of dropped-off boots, and some other basics for what lay ahead for Wilson. He carefully counted and recounted $660 in cash and loose change he kept in a metal box in a freezer in the back of the barn and put it in an envelope. The sum total of many years of work.

It took the better part of an hour, while it was still dark, for him to fully grasp that he was going to walk away from this place. His mind vibrated with uncertainty. All his life he had craved certainty. Certainty – of people, of places, of knowing what came next – meant he could control his life and stay away from areas where he could unknowingly or inadvertently stumble.

He washed his face in the sink. There was no hot water; the camp owners had turned it off after the fire destroyed the big barn where everyone worked. How do homeless people, people that history has lost, move on and reclaim something – anything – that would guide them forward? That was now his one task.

That he would do it without Margaret raised his emotions to the surface. His face wet with cold water, he heard her voice on the day they were married: “Whatever we do, wherever we go, we stay together no matter what.”

In the kitchen, he stood by the gas stove. Lucky for him, he had hardboiled his last egg before the gas was turned off. He took it from a bowl on the counter, peeled it, and ate it. There was no salt or pepper to sprinkle on it. 

At the back door he put on his coat even though the day promised to be warm. The pack went over his shoulder, and he stepped out the door. For more than a minute, he stood in place, not looking back. Moving was impossible, as if a stroke had taken his body from him. A muttered “Dear God,” was all he could come up with as he found the strength to move forward, and away from all he had known for the past seven decades.

He began a plodding walk down Depot Lane towards the state highway where he could catch the bus to New York City.

When it came, there were less than a dozen people on the bus. He took a seat in the front. Before he’d left Georgia, Uncle Richard had warned him about busses and where a boy who looked like him could sit and not get in trouble. Yet here he was seated near the front of the bus because that’s the seat he fell into when he got onboard. This was the North, anyway.

It was late morning when the bus arrived on the west side of Manhattan. The last time he was in the city was to see the cancer doctor treating Margaret. That wasn’t a good memory. The doctor’s words had spiraled him to the floor. Margaret had controlled her emotions; he could not control his. They returned on the bus to the work camp, knowing what lay ahead for her.

Inside the bus station, Wilson waited in a line to speak to the ticket man. He told him he wanted to get to Exmore, Virginia, on the Eastern Shore. The man consulted a map and after a few minutes explained that Wilson could take a bus to Dover, Delaware, and from there catch another bus that would take him down the length of the shore to Exmore.

“You’ll have to wait for the Delaware bus,” the man explained, pointing to the spread-out map on the counter. He looked at Wilson in a way that suggested he was far too old to make such a journey. “From there it’ll be another few hours before the bus leaves to go south. Do you understand?”

Wilson slid dollar bills over the counter and said, “What time do I leave this afternoon?”

The man looked at the schedule. “That’ll be 4:30,” he said.

Wilson felt overwhelmed by all the details he would need to keep straight. He found a seat in a corner of the waiting room. As was his habit, he did not make eye contact with anyone. He looked down or out the windows to the street. The last thing he wanted was to talk to someone. 

He did notice the man asleep on a bench by the side door. The man’s head was covered with some sort of wool hat that was shredded along the edges. On one foot was a blackened sneaker; the other food was bare, not even a sock or an excuse for a sock.

The big clock on the wall over the ticket booth marked a few minutes past noon. Wilson didn’t have a watch, had never owned one. He would pay close attention to the clock and listen for announcements over the PA system. Still, he fell asleep in the chair.

Opening his eyes, he saw it was nearly 2 o’clock. He needed to find the bathroom. In a rush, he pushed off the seat and looked around the room and saw a man going into a bathroom in a far corner. He went in, relieved himself without groaning loudly, saw his piss was tinged red, washed his hands with warm water in the sink, and returned to his seat.

He didn’t notice the woman in the seat nearest his. She had come out of nowhere. It was her voice that drew him to make eye contact.

“Where are you going, if I might ask?” she said.

Lacking an answer he wanted to give, he remained silent. He’d always found small talk, or anything in which he was asked personal questions, deeply off-putting. She was well dressed; a handsome hat, carefully placed, sat gracefully atop her head, a wool coat draped over her shoulders. A silver brooch pinned to the front of her dress shined in the overhead light.

“My name is Edith,” she said, reaching out to shake Wilson’s hand.

“Edith?” he said. 

He remembered an Edith, who had come north with him from Ormond, Florida., and died the hour that the truck arrived in Exmore, Virginia.

“And you?”

“Wilson,” he said.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Wilson,” she said. “Where are you trying to get to?”

He hadn’t had this much conversation in a long time and he found in difficult to think through a decent response.

“You’re going south, I take it?” she said.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“All the way south?”

“Eventually,” he said.

“Where you were born?”

He avoided answering that one.

“Exmore, Virginia, for now,” Wilson said.

“I’m going there, too. We can keep each other company on the bus.”

“You said your name’s Edith?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Did you know anyone by that name?”

Eastern Virginia

The group spent four days in a pine forest not far from the ferry that would take them across Chesapeake Bay to the Eastern Shore. Drunk men fought each other nearly every day. Wilson stayed away from them. One pulled a knife and threatened to kill another man. There was shouting and Kemp got a shotgun out of the cab of the truck. He told the man with the knife he’d kill him right there and no one would give a shit.

Wilson was wary of the older men when they stopped. He watched them drink themselves into a stupor and fight. He depended on Kemp for protection and to pass out food when they stopped at night to camp.  

Once he walked with Kemp to a restaurant in a little town in Virginia, and they stood at the back door to buy food. He watched as Kemp groveled to the man at the door:  yes, sir, thank you, sir.  

“Now you listen: Don’t go where you shouldn’t be, that’s how I take care a that,” Kemp said while they waited for their food. “You just a boy. Stay away from trouble. Men do you nothin but harm. The white man will read you a rule, tell you it was broken, and hang you from a tree and go to church on Sunday and feel good about himself. You keep out a trouble by not gettin in trouble in the first place.

“Don’t go where you ain’t supposed to be. People like us fall through a hole in the ground faster than anyone. Boy, you understand what I’m sayin? And always remember this: you only responsible for yourself. No one else. You drown if you think you can help someone else swim to shore. You both go under. Rule one: save yourself. You better understand that or you’ll end up under a cross in some woods somewhere as forgotten as a dead dog.”

Certainly, Wilson knew to follow the rules, every one of them down to the smallest detail. In their many talks when Miss Julia was not around, his great uncle Richard Bradley had certainly told him that, over and over. He had gone down the long list of rules, ticking them off on his fingers.

The two of them, Julia Wilson and her brother, knew every rule imposed on them down to the last letter. Every rule. Obediently followed. Bradley didn’t challenge any rules, never made eye contact with a white woman, never talked in any fashion to any white person, or for that matter even initiated a conversation out of fear of being portrayed as uppity. Mr. Bradley told the boy “walkin in the gutter’s better than hangin from a tree.”  

It was a Saturday night near midnight when the truck arrived in Exmore on the Eastern Shore. Kemp had left behind the drunk men and picked up two others standing by the side of the road. The back of his truck was shoulder to shoulder, reeking of alcohol, vomit, and body odor. A bucket overflowed with piss and a day’s worth of shit. 

Wilson had never seen a grown man drop his pants in front of people and sit his ass over a bucket. The smell made Wilson so sick he wanted to jump out. The road was dark, but Kemp knew his way along a sandy path to the back edge of a farm, where he told everyone to hurry and go find a shack to sleep in or you’ll be sleeping on the ground and you don’t want that.

Under a bright moon Wilson could see a long line of shacks no bigger than pig pens. They sat in a line between the tilled edge of a farm field and a stand of tall pine trees that stretched away for what looked like mile after mile. Wind shivered the tree tops; the air smelled sweetly of pine sap. 

Many of the shacks were occupied. Gas lights glowed. Work clothes, pants and shirts, suspenders, underwear and socks, hung from lines strung between trees. A screen door opened and a woman stepped out to see what was going on. 

“You better come in here,” she said to Wilson, pushing the door open. “There won’t be a bed nowhere by tomorrow mornin. And you just a child. All them trucks and busses been comin in all hours. From all over. Mississippi. ‘bama. Georgia. One man was from Louisiana, another from Arkansas. All the way from Arkansas to put potatoes in a bag for a few pennies and a bowl of chitlins.”

He stepped inside the screen door. One room, a sink and a rusty wood-burning stove on the left, two small beds on the right. The beds consisted of blankets wrapped around straw bales set on cedar posts. The air held the familiar smell of pig intestines in a pot of boiling water on the stove. As he turned towards the bed, the blanket on top of it moved, and a young girl sat up, startled.

“Momma,” she said. “What’s wrong?”\

“Just another boy in the camp,” the woman said. “A child, looking at him. You any older than twelve?”

He watched as she stood up. She wore a yellow print dress and a dark sweater torn at both elbows and ragged at the wrists. Her eyes, clear and intense, caught Wilson’s attention. On the wood floor next to the bed stood a stack of brightly-colored children’s books.

She looked at him and stepped closer to her mother, who reached towards her to pluck a piece of straw from her hair. 

“This is Margaret,” the woman said. “She had a birthday last week while on the road comin here to find work. Her daddy’s workin in the fields. What’s your name?”

Wilson stepped towards the door. It felt funny to give away his name, so he held onto it.

“You can see Margaret likes books,” the woman said as Wilson pushed the screen door open. “You can take one if you like.” 

She picked one off the stack and held it out to him. “You see, Margaret’s goin to do better and not live like this. She’ll be somethin, I can tell you that. She will be somethin!”

When Wilson did not take the book, the woman handed it to her daughter.

“It’s about a family living in a cabin in some woods,” Margaret said. Her voice, soft and clear, caught Wilson’s attention. “They’re all by themselves. Momma got it for me in one of the little towns we went through.”

Loud voices erupted outside, and Wilson pushed out the door and ran back up the dark path to Kemp’s truck.

“I think she’s dead,” Kemp said.

Kemp stood stiffly in the back of his truck looking down at the old woman. She was on her back, both arms sticking up straight like she’d been pleading with God to spare her life. A crowd gathered around the truck.

“You best call the police,” one man said. 

He was tall and thin, with long arms and snow-white hair. “A man died two days ago in the field under the hot sun. Police come and talk to everyone ‘fore they take the body away.”

“This ain’t my fault,” Kemp said.

“Nobody’s fault the man died in the field, either. But he’s still dead.”

“I don’t want no trouble,” Kemp added.

“Nobody wants trouble,” the man said. “But the police don’t care about an old woman dyin in quarters any more than they care about that old man dead in the field dragging a burlap bag behind him. People get killed here in knife fights or just die drunk. All the police do is talk to a few people, pretend they doin somethin, take the body away. They don’t care ‘bout nobody in here, don’t care at all.

“Half these people never wanna be here in the first place. Picked up off the street by a boss man and thrown in the back of a bus and sold like cows. Place catch on fire! You think anybody come to put it out? No, sir. They’d let us all die in here ‘fore they waste their water on us. And they ain’t gonna put up no fuss about an old, dead woman in the back of yo’ truck.”

“I come here every year on my way north,” Kemp said. “This the first time anybody die on me.”

“First time for everythin,” the man said. “Where she from?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I found her in northern Florida.”

“Dear Jesus!” the man shouted. “Just like that? Standin by the side of the road? Beggin you to pick her up so she could pick cotton in Carolina and ‘tatoes out of the dirt in Virginia? That right? Ain’t that somethin? Old woman like that. All she been through. My lord. Ain’t that just an awful thing.”

“You don’t know what you talkin about,” Kemp said. “She was standin there waitin on me to come by. I was helping her. If you must know! A woman with nothin at all. She grateful for the chance to work anywhere. That’s my view of it, anyway.”

“Tell that to Jesus when he walks up to you and you on the ground, and people looking down on you knowin you dead as a pile of dirt. He’ll get a hoot out of that. ‘She grateful for the chance to work anywhere.’ Hah! What old woman wouldn’t want to dig ‘tatoes out of the ground for a few pennies a day under a hot sun? You even bother to get her name?”

“I never asked her.”

“You never asked her name? What you say to her, ‘Hey, old woman?’ You probably had to carry her into your truck. Tell me, how old is she?”

“I sure don’t know her age if I don’t know her name,” Kemp said.

“She got people somewhere. They ain’t never gonna see her again.”

“That would be the truth,” Kemp said. “Ain’t no money to bury her, I’ll tell you. All the things I planned for with what little money I got, one of ‘em wasn’t buryin someone who turned up dead in my truck.”

“Police come, they got an undertaker to take her,” the man said. “Bury her in the back of the woods, that’s what they’ll do. Woods all over the South filled with unmarked, grown over cemeteries. Centuries of buried folks. No one knows all them places. No one knows all the names. Now another one put in the ground. She got nothin at all. She forgotten before anyone even know who she was.”

Kemp jumped off the back of the truck. His face stiff with fear of what lay ahead. Wilson stepped away from him. He wanted no part of this. He’d sat next to her for days. She’d leaned against him, falling asleep when she told him she felt sick and weak. On a dark, back road she’d bought him a paper bag of food.  

In the distance up the dirt lane towards the highway, car headlights danced on the uneven road. As it got closer, Wilson stepped back towards the shack where the woman had invited him in.

“Her name is Miss Edith,” Wilson called out to Kemp, who had his back turned to him. Louder, he said, “Mr. Kemp! Her name was Miss Edith.”

The white-haired man stepped towards Wilson.

“What’s your name, boy?” he asked. “You, what? Twelve, thirteen years old.” He repeated the question.

“Wilson,” he said. 

“Where you going?”

“North,” Wilson said.

“North’s a big place. What part of it you tryin to get to?”

“South Jersey to pick blueberries. Next year, farther north to eastern Long Island. There’s a camp I was told about as far out as you can go. A bed. Three meals a day. That’s where I’m goin.”

“Be prepared for the same old shit.”

Kemp carried the body out of the back of the truck as a police car pulled up next to it. A uniformed officer stepped out, a shotgun in his right hand. Everyone moved away in an all at once motion. 

Sadness and fear for what lay ahead struck Wilson and forced him to fall to his knees. All he knew of the woman was what he’d learned sitting next to her in back of a truck filled with people. She was gone now. 

“Her name was Edith,” Wilson whispered.

“Edith Harper. I’m from the Deep South. Alabama or Mississippi. I went to Exmore to live in a work camp.” When Wilson kept his silence, she said, “I’m older than you, Mr. Wilson. I’d appreciate the company.”

The loud PA announcement rattled Wilson. He gathered up his pack and followed Edith out the side door, where the driver helped her step up into the bus. She found a seat in the front, and waved a gloved hand at Wilson for him to sit next to her. He couldn’t picture himself seated next to her and having to talk the whole way to Delaware. Small talk, anything at all about himself, was like being sick to your stomach but unable to throw up, so you suffered in the misery of the moment.

Edith began talking before the bus reached the Lincoln Tunnel and pushed out to New Jersey. It was not as if he was intentionally not listening, but in a way he was, his  mind preoccupied with the journey ahead. He picked up something about “Alabama;” something about going north on a crew boss’s beat-up old school bus to pick strawberries somewhere, and deciding to stay in New York City, where she went to a school to learn accounting.

He spoke up when she asked the same question several times and wouldn’t settle for a non-answer: “Why are you going to Exmore, Virginia?”

With the fewest words he could manage, he said he’d gone there as a young boy. He didn’t go much beyond that, said it several times hoping she’d give up on asking for details, and Edith didn’t press him.

“When I first told you my name, Mr. Wilson, you acted like you knew it,” she said.

He nodded. “There was an Edith on the back of the truck that brought me north to Exmore,” he said. 

“What became of her?”

“She died when we arrived,” he said.

It was dark when they crossed the Delaware River and turned south towards Highway 13, a road that ran down the spine of the Eastern Shore straight to the Chesapeake. Wilson looked out the window at the passing landscape but it was too dark to pick out anything along the road; besides, it had been decades since he’d been on this highway.

They passed through Delaware, through Maryland, and most of the way down the Eastern Shore, they crossed into Virginia. Wilson saw the “Welcome To…” sign and knew what it meant.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, he felt different. He tried to describe what he was feeling, but he came up short. 

“It’s followed me,” he muttered, loud enough for Edith to hear him.

“What’s followed you, Mr. Wilson?” she asked.

He looked at her, confused, before he said, “I was just thinking to myself.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Edith said. “But, tell me: what’s following you?”

“I don’t know,” Wilson said.

“Oh, yes, you do, Mr. Wilson. You can tell me if you like.”

He fell silent, wanted no more questions. An hour later the bus reached Exmore. Wilson had fallen asleep again and woke up as the brakes hissed when the bus came to a stop. They were in front of the bus station. The bus driver pulled open the door and shouted, “We’re going to stay here a half hour or so before proceeding.”

“Are you getting off the bus, Mr. Wilson?” she asked.

Why did she ask so many questions? He couldn’t keep them all straight. 

“Mr. Wilson,” she said, insisting. “Are you getting off the bus here?”

He pushed up from the seat. “I don’t know exactly where I am,” he said without looking at her. “It’s dark. I’m not sure. I’m easily confused.”

“We’re both old,” she said. 

He nodded, looking out the bus’s windows as if searching for a familiar landmark, something that would anchor him to this place.

“You lived here before?”

“When I was very young,” he said.

“Now you’re back,” she said.

“I will go in the station for a few minutes.” 

His pack was on the rack above the seat. He pulled it down and slipped it over his right shoulder.

The driver had gone inside. Holding the railing, Wilson gingerly stepped down two steps to the street. A fall here would bring his journey south to a halt. 

He held on to the side of the bus and looked around. This station was unchanged from when he was first here. Or so it seemed. Shabby, drab, with dirty windows; it held desperation and loneliness the way a room holds smoke long after the fire has gone out.

Inside, a man and a young boy were asleep in their seats, waiting on something, or perhaps they were just lost and a bus station beside a rural Virginia highway was their way station. He saw the COLORED ONLY sign above a bathroom door. 

Seeing the sign brought him up short. Away from the South for a long time, he stopped and stared at it. After a moment, he pushed the door open and found a man seated on the toilet, the remains of what once had been a halfway decent pair of pants pulled down to his ankles, the door wide open. 

Why don’t you shut the door? Wilson thought. He averted his gaze. He pissed into the urinal, his urine bright red. He rinsed his hands in the sink, and, looking up, saw himself in the mirror, the image crooked and uneven because of the greasy smears. 

In front of him was the man he was at this moment in this place. His past, the boy he once was, was a blur in time, a compounded mystery that had plagued him for as long as he could remember. He forgot the man on the toilet, who was now standing up, pulling up his pants, and leaving the bathroom without coming near the sink to wash up. Wilson did not hear the door opening or closing; he was focused on his face, the skin under his eyes tired and worn. The man in the mirror stared back at him as if he were a stranger.

His past took control of his present. He saw images of Bea, and Frank, Oliver, and Clara. The morning after the fire had destroyed the packing barn, ending their livelihoods and their home in the camp building, they had walked away. To what, he could not imagine. 

He’d known all of them for years, in one camp or another. Clara was the most focused on somehow grabbing hold of a better life; Frank knew nothing, about himself or where he came from; Oliver only knew he was from somewhere in rural Georgia and his mother was named Ida Mae, but that was all he knew; Bea was too lost to help herself.

A white farmer had stopped by the remains of the barn to gape at the damage and found Wilson sitting in his battered truck, the tires of which had melted off in the searing heat. He was the last person remaining.

“I heard Bea found some housing in Riverhead and someone broke in and killed her with a knife,” the man told Wilson. “You hear that?”

Bea murdered? My God, no. Where are the others?

He ran the water until it was warm, splashing his face. There were no clean paper towels. He ran the sleeve of his coat over the dampness on his face. When he returned to the waiting room, the man and the boy who had been asleep on their chairs were gone. The bus idled at the curb. He walked out the doors and found the driver smoking a cigarette by the front of the bus.

“Are you getting off here?” the driver asked.

Wilson climbed up one step of the bus and looked inside. Edith was gone.

“The woman,” Wilson said. “I was sitting with her. She got off?”

“I guess so,” the driver said. “I must have been inside. I didn’t see her.”

Wilson looked up and down the street. If she were out there somewhere he could not see her. It seemed impossible that a woman her age, in a short period of time, could have either walked off by herself. Was she picked up?

“Did she say anything to you?” Wilson asked the driver.

“As I said, I didn’t see her. Her ticket was to Exmore, as is yours. If you’re going on to Cape Charles, you’ll need another ticket. That’s not my bus.”

The driver dropped the butt of his cigarette and ground it into the dirt with his boot. “We’re going,” he said without looking at Wilson. “I got a schedule to keep.”

Back inside the station, he walked to a seat in the corner, placed his pack on the floor and sat down with a loud groan. Closing his eyes, he could hear a man’s voice behind the ticket counter, which had a sign on it: WE OPEN AT 6 AM.  

He would wait until then and ask the attendant for some help, although as sleep approached in a hurry, sweeping over him like an army on the march, he didn’t know exactly what he would ask.