The boy thought to himself, then took another step forward.
—Did you leave a wife and son behind?
Ulysses, who stepped back from no man, stepped back from the child. He stepped back so abruptly it would have appeared to an observer that the boy had touched a raw wire to the surface of his skin.
—Do we know each other? he asked, shaken.
—No. We don’t know each other. But I think I know who you are named for.
—Everyone knows who I’m named for: Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union Army, the unwavering sword in Mr. Lincoln’s hand.
—No, said the boy, shaking his head. No, it wasn’t that Ulysses.
—I should think I would know.
The boy continued to shake his head, though not in a contrary way. He shook his head in the manner of patience and kinship.
—No, he said again. You must have been named for the Great Ulysses.
Ulysses looked at the boy with feelings of growing uncertainty, as one who has suddenly found himself in the presence of the unworldly.
For a moment the boy turned his gaze to the ceiling of the boxcar. When he looked back at Ulysses his eyes were opened wide as if he’d been struck by a notion.
—I can show you, he said.
Sitting down on the floor, he opened the flap of his knapsack and withdrew a large red book. He flipped to a page near the back and began to read:
Sing to me, Oh Muse, of the great and wily wanderer
Odysseus, or Ulysses by name
One tall in stature and supple in mind
Who having shown his courage on the field of battle
Was doomed to travel this way and that
From one strange land to the next . . .
It was Ulysses who took a step forward now.
—It’s all here, said the boy, without looking up from his book. In ancient times, with utmost reluctance, the Great Ulysses left his wife and son and sailed across the sea to fight in the Trojan War. But once the Greeks were victorious, Ulysses set out for home in the company of his comrades, only to have his ship blown off course time and again.
The boy looked up.
—This must be who you were named for, Ulysses.
And though Ulysses had heard his name spoken ten thousand times before, to hear it spoken by this boy in this moment—in this boxcar somewhere west of where he was headed and east of where he had been—it was as if he were hearing it for the very first time.
The boy tilted the book so that Ulysses could see it more clearly. Then he shifted a little to his right, as one does when making room for another on a bench. And Ulysses found himself sitting beside the boy and listening to him read, as if the boy were the seasoned traveler hardened by war, and he, Ulysses, were the child.
In the minutes that followed, the boy—this Billy Watson—read of how the Great Ulysses, having trimmed his sails and trained his tiller homeward, angered the god Poseidon by blinding his one-eyed son, the Cyclops, and thus was cursed to wander unforgiving seas. He read of how Ulysses was given a bag by Aeolus, the Keeper of the Winds, to speed his progress, only to have his crewmen, who were suspicious that he was hiding gold, untie the bag, unleash the winds, and set Ulysses’s ship a thousand leagues off course—at the very moment that the shores of his longed-for homeland had come into view.
And as Ulysses listened, for the first time in memory he wept. He wept for his namesake and his namesake’s crew. He wept for Penelope and Telemachus. He wept for his own comrades-in-arms who had been slain on the field of battle, and for his own wife and son, whom he had left behind. But most of all, he wept for himself.
* * *
When Ulysses met Macie in the summer of 1939, they were alone in the world. In the depths of the Depression, they both had buried their parents, they both had left the states of their birth—she Alabama and he Tennessee—for the city of St. Louis. Upon arriving, they both had shifted from rooming house to rooming house and job to job without companions or kin. Such that by the time they chanced to be standing side by side at the bar near the back of the Starlight Ballroom—both more prone to listen than to dance—they had come to believe that a life of aloneness was all the heavens held in store for the likes of them.
With what joy they came to find otherwise. Talking to each other that night, how they laughed—as two who not only knew each other’s foibles, but who had watched each other fashion them willfully out of their own dreams and vanities and foolhardy ways. And once he had worked up the courage to ask her to dance, she joined him on the dance floor in a manner never to be undone. Three months later, when he was hired as a lineman at the phone company making twenty dollars a week, they were married and moved into a two-room flat on Fourteenth Street, where from dawn till dusk, and a few hours more, their inseparable dance continued.