Free The Christmas Train by Rexanne Becnel

“How long did it take to get from your house to there? Was it a regular hospital? Did you know anybody when you got there?” She was curious about Miss Eva’s story. She’d never known anyone who’d had to be that brave.
    â€œHow long?” Miss Eva sighed and her gaze seemed to peer back into her past. “I look on the map one time. It is five hundred fifty kilometers. In America we say three hundred and six miles.”
    Anna’s mouth gaped open. “Three hundred six miles? You walked three hundred six miles in the snow, and only your ankle boots on?” Though she couldn’t exactly imagine how far three hundred six miles was, she knew it must be like walking all the way across Arkansas. “How long did it take?”
    â€œI’m not sure. I lost track of time, you see. Over a month, I think. But it is not a hospital where I am fixed up. No, it is a farmhouse with a nice lady. I get there—” She shook her head, breathing heavily. “I am so hungry. Nearly frozen. My feet, I don’t feel them, they are so cold. I stand on a little hill, hidden in the trees, and I see this lady digging, digging. She is trying to dig, but the ground is too hard and she does not have the strength.”
    A shudder ripped through her, so strong that Anna saw it. It was as if Miss Eva was on that hill again, frozen with the cold, and with fear.
    â€œI am afraid,” she continued, her voice faint now. “But I am too hungry to stay away. And her little house, it looks so snug and warm with a big tree by the door, and smoke coming from the chimney. So I go down the hill. She doesn’t see me. But I see she is crying and still the digging.” Miss Eva gestured with both her hands. “So I ask her what is wrong? Why does she cry? And dig?
    â€œBut I know already. In my heart I know someone she loves has died and she tries to dig the grave.”
    â€œA grave?” Anna is transfixed. “Who died?”
    A ghost of a smile flits over Miss Eva’s face. “Her daughter. Her daughter who is simple, but who is all the lady had left. Her husband is dead; she tells me this later. Dead somewhere near Dijon. And now her child is gone. She wants to be dead, too. But she is alive. And she takes me in and makes me be alive again.”
    â€œYou mean she cured you of pneumonia?”
    â€œ Ja . And she tells the people in the village and on the little farms around her that I am her cousin’s daughter come from Berlin to help her with the farm. And so I stay with her until the war is over.”
    â€œShe took care of you.” Anna is so relieved that Miss Eva’s story has a happy ending.
    Miss Eva nodded. “She was a good woman, Hilda, but a sad woman. When there is war, you try so hard to live, just to live until it is over. But then . . . then it is over. But it is never the same. Never the way it was before the war comes. They killed the Madman. But it didn’t make everything better. Too many people are dead. Too many places are gone, blown up or burned down and gone forever.” She paused, struggling for breath. “Hilda, too. After the war is over and we are safe at last . . . that’s when she died. I think she wanted to go, to be with her husband and her girl. She was tired of this . . . this life.”
    She closed her eyes, and in her weary, sunken face Anna saw the frailty no longer disguised by animation. Fear stabbed through her, sharp and cold. Miss Eva was old, her brain didn’t work right anymore, and she was going to die, just like Nana Rose had, lost in the past and forgetting all about the people that were around her here in the present.
    Anna turned away, fighting back sudden tears. She didn’t hardly know this lady. Why should she cry about her and what happened to her such a long, long time ago, before Anna was even born?
    But she wasn’t crying just for Miss Eva, or for Nana Rose,