Chapter 2: The Signal Lamp
"You could have said something," he told you, that Sunday, sitting at your kitchen table in your one chair while you sat on an unopened crate of dishes. "When you walked over with the goose."
"I didn't think you'd want to be reminded."
"Of what? Crying on a train?" He turned the cup of tea you'd given him around in his hands. He'd looked at it like it was poison when you'd put it in front of him, then wrapped his fingers around it anyway. "Sweetheart, I've fallen off a stage on live television. I threw up on a Capitol official's shoes in front of an entire ballroom. There's not a lot of dignity left over to protect."
"You were sad. That's different from embarrassing."
He looked up at you, and something moved behind his eyes, quick and wary, and then he looked back at his tea.
"Nine years," he said. "You drove that train nine years."
"Yes."
"Every one of my tributes, then. All of them. Up front, while they were eating cake in the back."
You didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say. You'd spent a long time not saying it, to yourself, in the dark.
He drank his tea. He set the cup down. He stood up, and you thought, here it comes, here's where he walks out across the grass and never comes back, and you'll deserve it.
"Well," Haymitch said. "I rode in the back and drank their wine. So I guess we were both on the train." He put his hands back in his pockets. "Potato and leek's my favorite, by the way. In case you were keeping track. I'll still tell you there's too much salt."
After that, the soup stopped going onto the porch. It went into his kitchen, because he left the door unlocked, and then it went onto his table, because he was sitting there when you brought it, and then on a Tuesday in November it went into two bowls, because he'd set two places and didn't mention it.
You learned things. That he really did sleep with a knife, and that Katniss had once woken him by throwing a bucket of water over him and he'd come up swinging. That he had stopped drinking from the bottle before noon, and was very proud of this, and would deny it if asked. That the geese had names, and the names were all the Capitol officials he'd hated most, and that the big one who'd tried to kill you on your first day was called Plutarch.
He learned that you hated waste and loved the sound of a steam whistle in the hills. That your mother had died the year before the war and you'd finally quit the tribute line the week after. That you'd driven a supply train for the rebels out of Six with your headlamp off on mountain switchbacks, and that you couldn't sleep without the sound of wheels and had bought a clock that ticked loud enough to fool you.
"That's sad," he said, when you told him that.
"You sleep with a knife."
"That's practical."
He came to the depot sometimes, too. He told you it was to check on the liquor shipments. He would stand on the platform with his hands in his pockets and watch the freight go in and out, the timber and the cement and the crates of medical supplies for the factory, and complain about all of it, and somewhere around the second week you noticed he never once asked about the liquor.
In December the new government decided there would be a memorial.
You got the telegram at the depot on a Monday. A special train, carrying officials and journalists and a camera crew from the Capitol, to dedicate a stone in the square to the people of the district who'd died in the firebombing. Arriving at noon on Friday. Departing at four. And at the ceremony, a few words from the district's own victor.
"No," said Haymitch.
"It's not a request. It's on the telegram. Look." You held it out across his kitchen table. He didn't look. "They want you to speak."
"They want me to get up in front of a camera crew in the square, where I stood every reaping day for twenty-five years and watched them pull names out of a glass ball, and say something nice about the people Snow burned alive." His voice was perfectly flat. "Katniss can do it."
"Katniss says she'd rather eat a goose."
"Peeta, then."
"Peeta says it should be you. He says you knew them longest."
That landed. You saw it land. He pushed his chair back and got up and went to the cupboard over the sink, the one where you both knew the bottle was, and he opened it and stood there with his hand on the shelf.
You didn't say anything. You'd learned that much. You sat at the table and waited.
After a long time he closed the cupboard without taking anything out of it, and turned around.
"I'll be drunk," he said. "You know that. I can't do it sober. I'll get up there and I'll be drunk and I'll fall off something and it'll be on every screen in Panem by supper."
"Then don't do it sober," you said. "Do it busy."
He stared at you.
On Friday the special train came in at eleven fifty-eight, two minutes early, because you'd driven the last stretch of it yourself from the junction. It was a Capitol train, sleek and silver, and the officials who got off it were pale and nervous and kept looking at the burned ground beyond the depot like it might reach up and grab their ankles.
Haymitch was waiting on the platform. He was wearing a dark coat you'd brushed for him and a shirt Peeta had ironed. He had his hands behind his back.
In them was a signal lamp.
It was the old kind, brass and red glass, the kind the switchmen used in the yards before the electric signals. You'd found it in a crate at the back of the depot office and polished it up, and you'd spent three evenings that week teaching him the old lamp signals at your kitchen table: proceed, slow, stop, back up, all clear. You'd told him that you needed a man on the platform to wave the special train in, because the electric signals at the junction were unreliable and you couldn't trust anyone else. It wasn't true. The signals were fine. He knew that. He'd learned the codes anyway, frowning and swearing and practicing with the lamp at your window until the geese came over to watch.
When the special train came around the bend, there he was at the end of the platform, swinging the red lamp in a slow steady arc. Slow. Slow. Stop. And when you brought her in and she hissed to a halt exactly where he'd told her to, you leaned out of the cab, and across the platform, through the steam, he looked at you, and lifted the lamp, and swung it once side to side.
All clear.
He didn't fall off anything.
He stood up in the square in front of the new stone and the camera crew and two hundred people in borrowed coats, and he took a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket, and he looked at it, and then he put it away again.
"I'm not good at this," he said. "Never have been. You all know that. You've watched me not be good at it every year since I was a lot younger than I am now." A ripple went through the crowd. Not quite laughter. "I stood up here every reaping day and I watched them take your sons and daughters, and I took them to the Capitol, and I brought two of them home. Two. In twenty-five years." He looked down at the stone. "Snow burned this place down because the two I brought home wouldn't play his game. I'd like to say I was proud of them. I was. I still am. But I'm standing here looking at a lot of names, and I'm not going to pretend it was worth it, because I don't know that, and neither do you."
The square had gone very quiet.
"What I know," Haymitch said, "is that there's a train at the depot that's carrying cement instead of tributes. And a woman who drives it who used to drive the other one. And a factory going up where the mines were. And I know there's a lot of you who came home, and I didn't think you would. So." He cleared his throat. "That's what I've got. That's it. That's the speech."
He stepped down. The silence lasted one more second. Then Peeta started clapping, and Katniss, and then the whole square, and the camera crew swung around wildly trying to catch all of it.
Haymitch walked straight through the crowd to where you were standing at the back by the depot wagon, and stopped in front of you, and you saw that his hands were shaking very badly.
"I need you to give me something to do," he said quietly, "right now, or I'm going home to that cupboard."
You handed him the signal lamp.
He held onto it with both hands, white-knuckled, and stood next to you for the rest of the ceremony without saying a word, and when it was over, he walked you back to the depot and waved the special train out at four o'clock exactly, slow, slow, proceed, until it was gone around the bend into the hills.
It was dark by the time you got back to your house. There was an envelope pushed under your door. Government seal. Transport Ministry, District Six.
You read it standing in your enormous empty hall with your coat still on. It was very polite. It thanked you for your service. It noted that the coal district depot was now fully operational, and that a permanent stationmaster from the local population had been selected and would take up the post at the new year.
It said your transfer home to Six had been approved. It said the train would leave on the second of January.