"The Train" Summary

"The Train" is a complex story that opens with a nineteen-year-old man, Hazel Wickers, boarding a Pullman sleeper railroad car. He has never slept in a berth on a train and so has requested an upper berth. Wickers watches the white-coated porter at the end of the aisle and wonders when he will lower the berths tucked up into the ceiling from under curved panels. A woman sits across from him and talks incessantly, but Wickers finds this comforting. He remembers how his mother used to talk the same way on the Tennessee Railroad, getting to know all about other passengers, who would only be strangers temporarily. Wickers talks to himself inside his head, revealing that his mother was a Jackson and that he was raised in Eastrod, Tennessee. He tries to befriend the porter, asking inane questions, and...