“I can’t reach.”

She slid up his body a bit, and then his hand was on her stomach and he tried to go lower but she gripped his wrist.

“Feel it.”

“I’m feeling it.”

“That’s what else is going to be waiting in Greenwood.”

“Your stomach?”

She kissed his chin.

“No, fool. Your child.”

They took the train from Columbus on the first of October, crossed eight hundred miles of country where the summer fields had traded their gold for furrows of night frost that melted in the morning and dripped over the dirt like cake icing. The sky was the blue of metal that’d just come off the press. Blocks of hay sat in dun-colored fields, and Luther saw a pack of horses in Missouri run for a full mile, their bodies as gray as their breath. And the train streamed through it all, shaking the ground, screaming at the sky, and Luther huffed his breath into the glass and doodled with his finger, drew baseballs, drew bats, drew a child with a head too big for its body.

Lila looked at it and laughed. “That’s what our boy gonna look like? Big old head like his daddy? Long skinny body?”

“Nah,” Luther said, “gonna look like you.”

And he gave the child breasts the size of circus balloons and Lila giggled and swatted his hand and rubbed the child off the window.

The trip took two days and Luther lost some money in a card game with some porters the first night, and Lila stayed mad about that well into the next morning, but otherwise Luther was hard-pressed coming up with a time he’d cherished more in his life. There’d been a few plays here and there on the diamond, and he’d once gone to Memphis when he was seventeen with his cousin, Sweet George, and they’d had themselves a time on Beale Street that he’d never forget, but riding in that train car with Lila, knowing his child lived in her body—her body no longer a singular life, but more like a life-and-a-half—and that they were, as he’d so often dreamed, out in the world, drunk on the speed of their crossing, he felt a lessening of the anxious throb that had lived in his chest since he was a boy. He’d never known where that throb came from, only that it had always been there and he’d tried to work it away and play it away and drink it away and fuck it away and sleep it away his whole life. But now, sitting on a seat with his feet on a floor that was bolted to a steel underbelly that was strapped to wheels that locked onto rails and hurtled through time and distance as if time and distance weren’t nothing at all, he loved his life and he loved Lila and he loved their child and he knew, as he always had, that he loved speed, because things that possessed it could not be tethered, and so, they couldn’t be sold.