A CREW FOR EVERY ENGINE...

Part Four

Several weeks passed. It was now coming on midsummer, one of the best times of the year for anyone who was new to the Island of Sodor to be finding their way. Few newbies that year were as appreciative as Sodor's most recent influx of Canucks for they were still having a splendid time exploring all the ins and outs of their adoptive home and loving their new jobs and their big green locomotive. One of their favourite routine tasks was still the Kipper run. The Doyons had to get up even earlier to get Henry ready since the nights were now short, with dawn typically breaking while they were still at the Brendam Docks collecting their train. But the first part of their run, that still took place in the peaceful, predawn dark, with only the nighttime creatures and the stars to keep watch as Henry chuffed serenely along the mainline.

On this particular late night—or very, very early morning—all seemed even more tranquil than usual. The air was exceptionally mild and dry and was permeated at intervals by the smell of fresh-cut grass. The haying season had begun and the weather had been almost perfect, nothing but sunny skies interspersed with the odd spate of brief local showers which always formed slowly enough that everyone could see them coming in time to throw protective tarps over the curing haystacks if necessary. Then would come the hurried, clear, dewless nights, one of which Henry and his crew were currently enjoying. It was hard, at least for the humans, to think of such runs as work. The opportunity to experience such a perfect night from the cab of a fine, willing steam engine, the effortless movement of the living machine bearing them towards a no-doubt lovely dawn…it seemed far too pleasurable a thing to be considered any sort of onerous toil.

Denise was in a wonderful mood. A recent fortuitous coincidence had led to a real breakthrough with their engine and, ironically, it had all been sparked by Henry's perennial dislike of rain. A week ago to the day, the three of them had begun their Kipper run during one of those foggy, drizzly, intermittently rainy predawn mornings beloved by gardeners and farmers with young plants to water, but hated with a passion by their green Black Five. He was still looking so glum when they parked him under the canopy at one of the Vicarstown platforms for his break that Pierre had gone forward to try and cheer him up.

"Henri! Why so sad, eh? Don' you know dat rain is good for you engines?"

Henry regarded his fireman with disbelief.

"Good? How can it be good?"

"Because it wash you nice an' clean so your colours shine, dat's why," Pierre maintained. He reached up and ran a hand over the edge of Henry's running board. "See? Red like de rose an' white like snow. An' de rest of you, like a fresh leaf. Wid dew on it. A ver' beautiful sight, non?"

"If you say so, sir," Henry replied, still obviously dubious. Pierre just chuckled and patted him again before leaving. At least he'd put the idea in the engine's mind.

It was raining more steadily when the engine and his crew began their trek back to Knapford and halfway through their journey, the dense overcast finally seemed to rain itself out. The fog lifted and the cloud layers began to thin. By the time they pulled in at their Knapford platform, the sun was showing though now and then, looking like a big white coin in the still overcast sky. The mid-morning light brightened every time it appeared.

Sir Topham Hatt, holding a cup of tea, came out of his office as Henry pulled in to observe the improving weather conditions for himself. He happened to glance over at his big green Stanier just as the sun reappeared again, throwing down a shaft of light, and did a classic double-take.

"My goodness, Henry!" he exclaimed. "Did you just get repainted?"

Henry regarded his owner with surprise.

"Er, no, sir."

"You're just so bright," Sir Topham said. He approached to inspect his engine more closely. "Why, you're positively glowing!"

"I—I think that's my crew, sir. They've been rubbing my paintwork a lot,"

"Is that so? Well, you look splendid. Keep it up, Henry!"

The Fat Controller moved on and Henry heard him complimenting the humans still in his cab in turn. Pride began to swell within the engine, replacing his surprise. Sir Topham himself had praised him and was now praising his crew—it delighted Henry. For the first time, he felt a real connection with his crew, the sense that they were a true team, and he basked in their good fortune as well as his own as a result. He remained unusually happy for the rest of his workday and the skies soon cleared and the sunshine began streaming down by the early afternoon as if in celebration.

Henry's cheerfulness lasted right into his grooming session that day and he became uncommonly chatty, almost playful when Denise began drying off his face after she'd washed him. His driver grinned at that and encouraged him by running her towel all the way down his chiseled nose in one long sweep, which made him giggle. She knew that most engines had a childish side, despite their adult capacity for hard work, and was glad to see it finally emerging in Henry.

"Like that, do you? Dare I hope that I've just found your ticklish spot?" she teased.

"I'm not ticklish!" Henry exclaimed, then ruined his assertion by laughing again when she ran the towel down the length of his nose a second time. Denise was very glad to hear him laugh. Henry tended towards introspection, and although he would relax completely and lower his safeguards when groomed and maintained, he still didn't interact with her or Pierre on a personal level as much as she would like.

Today, however, was different. Sir Topham's unintentional vindication of what Pierre had said to Henry up at Vicarstown seemed to have upped the Doyons' esteem in the engine's eyes to the point of his wanting to make friendly overtures. Denise was determined to take advantage of her engine's effusive mood while it lasted.

"Heh heh, I think that laugh of yours begs to differ," she retorted, chuckling herself. "And a very cute laugh it is, too. Infectious even. I'll have to see what I can do so Pierre and I can hear it more often." She tenderly wiped over one of Henry's cheeks. "You had a good day today, didn't you, sweetie? Despite that nasty old rain."

Now the big stylized alloy face was positively beaming back at her.

"I did," Henry said in a soft little voice. "And thanks. Thanks for taking care of me, ma'am."

"Oh, you're more than welcome. Didn't I tell you when we started working with you that Pierre had a thing about having the shiniest engine in the shed? Now you know for sure it's true."

"Yeah…" And then, because Henry had felt his fireman working his way along his left-hand driving array and injecting oil into his undercarriage even as they'd been speaking, added even more shyly, "Mister Doyon? Thank you."

"De rien, Henri," the unseen Mister in question called back. "Dat's you're welcome, eh? Togedder we make you de best-looking an' best engine on Sodor, you wait an' see."

"That's right. Best engine ever…"

The woman finished with her drying and began just stroking the loco's forehead and smoothening his eyebrows into place, using her bare hand. He still looked very happy.

"Henry…we're getting to be kind of friends, right?" she asked him.

Henry felt his heart thump, hard. "I—I hope so."

"Good. And now that we are friends, I was thinking…you really ought to have another, less formal way to address us. It's quite all right if you call us Denise and Pierre anytime we're alone like this or even out on the rails as long as no one else of any authority is around. We'd like it if you called us by our first—"

She jolted to a halt. Henry's expression had flipped from happy to horrified in an instant.

"I can't do that!" he cried.

Denise regarded her engine with surprise. That British reserve, she thought. It's ground in too deep in this one…

"Not at all?" she asked, her voice faint and a little astonished.

"Nooo," Henry maintained, sounding miserable. His expression turned beseeching, pleading with her not to be angry with him. Denise just kept looking back at him in a kindly neutral way as she considered alternatives.

"Well…you still ought to have something else you can call us. Maybe…Missus Denise? No, sounds dumb… Um, Miss Denise? Oh! I know! How about Miz Denise? That's still a little formal, but friendly too. Could you manage that?"

Pierre, still down on the ground by Henry's drivers, snorted. "An' you can call me Mister Rhett."

"Quiet, you. So how about it, Henry? Would you like to call us Miz Denise and Mister Pierre? When we're alone like this, just being friends?"

Henry turned the names over in his mind in turn, already appearing relieved.

"Maybe…yes…Miz Denise." He looked surprised himself, then began smiling again. "Yes, I like that. Miz Denise. And Mister Pierre!"

"Dat's me," the man's voice floated up.

Henry heaved a huge sigh, mellowing out once more now that his brief crisis had been averted. Denise went back to stroking his forehead, still looking quite thoughtful. He's so eager to please, she was thinking. Anxious, really. And a little afraid of us, all of us…not the best combination. Then she brightened again over how readily he'd accepted her recommendations about the naming issue. Maybe it was time to kick it up and lay it on even thicker…

Pierre and Denise did. And Henry, much to their pleasure, had continued to respond to their attentions in a very positive manner, growing ever more extroverted and lively, looking forward to their days together with increasing zest, becoming a fine companion as well as a hard-working locomotive.

All of which was why it was such a shock to his crew on that fine predawn morning when Henry suddenly slammed on his brakes and tried to stop dead.

Denise did have some warning, although she would find it hard to describe how afterwards. The closest she could come was to say it felt like taking one's foot off the gas of a fast-moving car; the momentum continued, yet something was missing. "Brace!" she'd shouted at Pierre in French, their agreed-upon signal, and both had done so a split second before the throttle had slapped out of the woman's hand and the brake lever engaged on its own. The lot of them screeched to a squealing halt, faster than the emergency braking Henry's new crew had practiced with him the day they'd first driven him, but not too much faster.

The humans' first instinct was to look out at the track on ahead. Yet they could see nothing, nothing at all. Pierre jumped out, a few seconds before the cab floor beneath the woman's feet began to shudder in waves. Denise looked down in wonder. Scared to death, she thought. What is this?

Henry was indeed terrified. The only reason he was still sitting still at all was because he was trying to decide whether to run backwards or bolt forward right past the ghost in the tree. He was still sitting there and shaking when Pierre got up next to his front axel.

"Henri! W'ad's wrong, eh? You see somet'ing dat scare you?"

The engine started violently, so much so that Denise was jostled in his cab. The last thing he'd expected was for one of his crew to disembark and join him. And it put him in a terrible quandary, torn now between his desperate desire to get away and his ingrained need to not leave the man behind to fend for himself. Henry began to pant in his fright and confusion. Mister Pierre had a big flashlight with him and was starting to pan it around, still looking for something on the rails.

"W'ad you see, Henri? Why you stop, eh?"

Poor Henry couldn't help stuttering as he answered. "There's a g-ghost," he whispered. "I-in the tree."

"Tree? W'ad tree? Dat big bush dere?"

He swung his light on a large hazel shrub growing all by itself in the meadow next to the tracks, only meters away. Henry continued to quake miserably, especially when his fireman stepped away from him and off into the long grass and started approaching the ghost.

"Please be careful!" the engine warned, although it came out as such a breathless little squeak that it was barely audible.

"I'll be okay, Henri," Pierre assured him. He continued running his light over the bush. "Hmm, you know, dere is somet'ing dere," he said more loudly. "Somet'ing white an' misty."

"The ghost," Henry moaned.

"What's that, Henry?" Denise, leaning way out of his cab, asked. "You think you saw a ghost?"

"No, 'e didn't," her husband interjected. He went forward a few more steps to more carefully examine the filmy hazel branches. "Oh, it's spiders! Araignees."

"Spiders?" Henry yelped. He was so startled by his fireman's pronouncement that he forgot to be frightened. "How can it be spiders?!"

"Liddle baby spiders. T'ousands and t'ousands of dem. Denise! It start to rain 'ere yesterday before lunch, non?"

"It must have. We were watching it come in from the southwest when we were still up at Crovan's Gate, remember?"

"Yes…" Pierre started to grin. When he turned his head to look at Henry, the light from the big loco's headlamp made the man's teeth flash whitely beneath his black mustache. "Henri! Dis ghost is just spider webs. De babies, dey all spin dere liddle webs togedder to make a shelter from de rain yesterday. We only see it because dere are so very many of dem."

"There are?" Henry exclaimed. "I can't see any spiders!"

"Dat's because dey are still tiny, like de heads of pins. Just babies, fresh out of de egg sac. Dey probably all hatch early yesterday morning an' climb up in de bush to try an', um… Denise, cheri? What you call dat in English, what spiders do when de float away?"

"Ballooning," the woman supplied helpfully. She was still hanging out of the cab window, mainly because she no longer had any sense that Henry was on the verge of bolting away. In fact, he didn't even seem all that scared anymore; he was too embroiled in what his fireman was saying to him. "Can you actually see any of them?" she called to Pierre. "They must be clustered up for the night."

"Dey are. Wait, I point dem out wid de torch. Henri? Do you want to see some liddle babies? If you come up closer, next to de bush, you maybe see dem."

"Go ahead, Henry," Denise encouraged. "It's okay if you drive yourself, just for now. You can go only as far as you want, whatever makes you comfortable."

The big green Stanier was torn again. He was still on high alert and primed to run, yet his fireman was standing right next to the ghost by now and looked completely unafraid. Henry decided to trust his judgement and his claim that the sheen of white was just webbing. He crept forward, wheel turn by wheel turn.

"Dere you go," Pierre said to him when he had gotten as close as the tracks would let him get. "You see dem now?"

Henry peered closely at the hazel shrub. Now that everything was better illuminated by his headlamp and Pierre's torch, he had to admit to himself that the white film did look an awful lot like fine spider webbing and here and there amongst the silken strands hung what looked almost like misshapen plums. Pierre told him that the shapes were actually the spiderlings, huddling together by the hundreds in each cluster for safety.

"If I touch dem, dey would break apart, all the babies running ever' which way. But we just look. We let dem sleep, eh?"

Henry said nothing. He was starting to feel very foolish.

His fireman went back to his cab after that and Denise hopped out in turn to have a quick look for herself. After that, his crew took charge again and sent him on…it was getting too dangerous to let him sit idle on the mainline any longer, despite the early hour. Henry went about his job of picking up the Kipper and taking it up to Vicarstown nervously, in a state of hypervigilance, anxious to once again make up for his lapse. Both humans could feel that he'd regressed back to how he'd behaved for them during their first few days of getting to know each other and it saddened them.

Denise already knew that there'd be a train of empties waiting for them to ferry back down to the docks and so parked Henry at a service platform just outside the station proper that day once the Kipper had been delivered. When she went forward to speak with the engine before leaving for a while with Pierre, he regarded her apprehensively.

The instant their eyes met, Henry stammered, "I-I'm sorry."

Denise responded with a kind and tolerant smile.

"Sorry for what? For stopping? Henry, it's natural to be afraid of things you don't understand and to want to get away from them if they seem dangerous. We humans are just as susceptible to being frightened as any engine too. The thing is, most scary-seeming stuff isn't scary at all if you stay and check it out instead of running away. In fact, you can miss out on some really wonderful things if you don't wait, like that ghostly-looking giant web spun by all those tiny orb weaver spiders we just saw, more baby spiders together in one place all at once than Pierre and I have ever seen before…more than we'll likely ever see again in our lifetimes. So, there's that to consider. There's almost always a good explanation for what at first seems inexplicable and sometimes what you discover is pretty amazing. But you'll never know unless you wait and check it out.

"The other thing I want you to know, Henry, is that if you ever do see some actual danger on the tracks, or things just feel wrong to you for whatever reason, Pierre and I are perfectly all right with you taking the initiative and stopping on your own. A loco we drove back in Canada saved our lives once one night by stopping dead and backing up some—I'll tell you about that sometime, you'll like it. Anyway, all we ask should you want or need to stop in the future is that you wait and tell us what's wrong or simply let us go and check things out for you. That's just part of our half of the job, to investigate and then decide what to do. Does that sound like a good plan to you, Henry? That the next time you're scared or worried about something, that you let us help you out?"

The engine stared back at her, his eyes huge. Nobody but nobody had ever wanted to discuss his fears with him so frankly. His other crews had mostly tried to ignore his misbehaviours or had humoured him, and the odd person had gotten angry with him. But talk to him about it afterwards? Only if they wanted to admonish him. Yet what Denise had just said to him didn't sound like an admonishment at all. It sounded like they wanted to work with him in how to handle it.

"Okay," he finally said.

"Good. See you in a bit," Denise said, and off she went.

Henry watched her go, his expression still sober and pensive. He had a lot to think about.

to be continued...