Chapter 1: Too Much Salt
The first thing your new neighbor ever said to you was "Get that goose off your porch before it kills you," and he said it from his own porch, lying face down on the boards with one arm hanging off the edge, without lifting his head.
You'd been in the district for forty minutes. You had a suitcase in each hand and a letter of appointment in your coat pocket that said STATIONMASTER in very large letters, as if the people in the new government thought you might forget. Behind you, the train you'd driven in on was ticking and cooling at the platform, the first train to come into this station in years that hadn't been carrying soldiers or coffins. In front of you, on the steps of the house the housing office had given you, stood a goose.
It was an enormous goose. It looked at you with one flat, furious eye and hissed like a burst pipe.
"Is it yours?" you called.
"Nobody owns a goose." A pause. "Yes."
"Can you call it off?"
"Sweetheart, if I could call them off, do you think I'd be lying down out here?"
You looked at him properly then. A big man gone soft at the middle, sprawled on his porch boards in the October sun with a bottle beside his hand and a shirt that had seen better weeks. His hair was the color of dirty straw going grey. He lifted his head at last, slowly, like it cost him, and looked at you across the patchy grass between your two houses, and his eyes were the grey of the Seam, red-rimmed and sharp as broken glass.
You knew who he was, of course. Everyone in Panem knew who he was. You'd seen his face on the screens every year at the reaping, slumped in the chair next to the mayor. You'd seen him fall off the stage once. You'd seen him on a train, too, though he wouldn't remember that, and you weren't going to be the one to bring it up.
"I'm your new neighbor," you said.
"My condolences."
"I'm running the depot."
"Then you can tell me when the liquor train's coming in," said Haymitch Abernathy, and put his face back down on the boards.
You put your suitcases down, took off your coat, wrapped it around your arm like a glove, and walked straight at the goose. It went for you. You caught it under the body the way your grandmother used to catch the hens in Six, pinned the wings, tucked the long neck under your arm while it screamed blue murder, and carried it across the grass and dropped it over the low fence into his yard, where it landed, shook itself, and stalked off with enormous dignity.
When you turned around, Haymitch was propped up on one elbow, watching you.
"Huh," he said.
"Thursday," you said. "The liquor train comes Thursday."
The housing office had given you the house because it was the only one left. Most of the district was still timber frames and tarpaulin, new houses going up on the black ground where the old ones had burned, and everybody who'd come home from the bunker or from the other districts was crammed four to a room. The Victors' Village had survived the firebombing. There were a dozen houses and three victors, and only one of the three was any use to anybody, according to the woman at the housing office, and she wasn't going to say which. She'd handed you the key and said, "Don't wake him up," the way you'd say, don't touch the stove.
"Wake who?"
"You'll know."
Your house was clean and enormous and smelled like nobody had ever lived in it. The kitchen had a stove the size of a locomotive boiler. You stood in front of it that first night, alone in a house built for a family of eight, with the wind coming down off the hills and the windows rattling, and you did the only thing you knew how to do when you were somewhere new, which was make too much soup.
Potato and leek. The leeks were from the market wagon by the depot, the potatoes were from your own sack, the bones were from the butcher, who'd looked at your STATIONMASTER letter and given you a deal. You made enough for eight people, because the pot was enormous. Then you stood in your enormous kitchen and looked at it.
Across the grass, his house was dark except for one window. You could see him through it, sitting at his kitchen table with his head in his hands and a bottle in front of him, not drinking it. Just looking at it.
You took the soup over at nine. You didn't knock. You left it on his porch with a dishcloth over the pot and a spoon tied to the handle with a bit of string.
In the morning, the pot was on your step, scrubbed clean, with a note folded under the lid.
Too much salt.
You read it twice. Then you laughed out loud in your doorway in your nightgown, and across the grass, a curtain twitched.
It went on like that.
Monday, potato and leek. Too much salt. Tuesday, you halved the salt and added a ham bone. Too little. Wednesday, bean and barley, with the beans soaked overnight and a bay leaf from the tree behind the Justice Building that you were fairly sure was public property. Worse. Thursday, the liquor train came in, and you signed the manifest at the depot and watched the crates go onto a wagon headed for the Village, and that night you didn't make soup at all.
On Friday the pot was on your step anyway. Empty. Clean. Your own pot, the one you hadn't filled.
The note said: Where's my soup.
You stood there holding it for a long time.
He doesn't remember you, you'd told yourself, on the long drive in from Six, with the empty coal country unrolling outside the windows of the cab. He won't remember you. Why would he? You were a face in the engine cab at the front of a very long train, and he was drunk.
That was the thing about the tribute train, the one they ran every summer from the coal district to the Capitol, with the crystal and the velvet and the Capitol food piled on silver platters for tributes who would mostly be dead in a month. The engineers rode up front. You didn't go back to the dining car. You didn't look at the tributes. You weren't allowed to and you didn't want to, and you drove that train for nine years because the job paid for your mother's medicine and the alternative was the factory, and every year you told yourself you would quit, and every year you didn't.
Only once did you go back. The fourth year. There was a coupling fault between the third and fourth cars and you went back yourself with a lantern and a wrench because the brakeman was sick, and when you opened the vestibule door, a man was sitting on the floor between the cars with his back against the wall and a bottle in his lap, and the wind was roaring through the gap in the floor plates, and he was crying.
He'd looked up at you, a big rumpled man with grey eyes, and said, "Don't tell Effie."
You hadn't. You'd sat down next to him on the floor in the roaring dark instead, and you'd fixed the coupling with him watching, and you'd talked about nothing, about trains, about the hills in Six, about how the brakes on this model were garbage, for an hour, until he fell asleep against your shoulder. In the morning you'd gone back to the cab and never seen him again except on a screen.
He doesn't remember, you told yourself. Good. Let him not remember.
On Saturday you made lamb stew, because the butcher had lamb and because it was cold. You didn't make it with dried plums, because you didn't have any. You took it over at nine and left it on his porch.
On Sunday morning, the knock came at your door.
He was standing on your step with your pot in both hands, scrubbed and gleaming. He'd shaved, badly. There was a cut on his jaw. He was wearing a clean shirt with the creases still in it from wherever he'd dug it out. His eyes were clear, or clearer, and he looked like a man who'd had a hard night and decided to have it with his hands empty for once.
He held out the pot. You took it.
"Too much rosemary," he said.
"There wasn't any rosemary."
"Then that's the problem." He didn't leave. He stood on your step with his hands in his pockets, looking past you into your enormous house, at the boxes you hadn't unpacked, at the single chair at the table. Then he looked back at you, and the sharp grey eyes went narrow.
"The brakes on that model were garbage," said Haymitch Abernathy. "You said so. You said it about nine times."
You went very still.
"Sat on the floor with me between the third and fourth cars for an hour," he said, "and told me about the hills where you grew up. Then you left. I asked the conductor about you the next morning. He said there was no woman in the engine crew. He said I must have been seeing things." He tipped his head, considering you. "I was seeing a lot of things that year. I thought you were one of them."