But Celia kept up a front, though Hetty knew she was miffed. The commission on the sale, in what everyone recognized was an extremely sluggish market, would have been more than welcome. “I didn’t know he was even interested in the property,” Celia said.
Hetty gave a wry smile. “Join the crowd.”
The following days produced more data about the proceedings on the old Stevenson property: Jesse was there every day; survey crews had started working; permits had been filed; and an EPA agent had been out.
The big news didn’t hit until a Monday, some two weeks after the initial announcement, and right after the mail had been distributed to the post office boxes. Sid and Walt came storming into the station, with Sid waving a green brochure.
“Hey, Hetty! Look at this,” Walt said.
“Wait till old Jesse finds out he’s pouring sand down a rat hole.” Sid added.
In bold black lettering, the brochure read:
TO OUR NORTH DAKOTA FRIENDS AND PATRONS
Now that the governor has signed the new gasoline tax bill into law, we can provide you with gasoline at spectacular savings. It will pay you to come across the line to fill up.
The brochure went on to describe in lengthy detail the savings a trip to Minnesota would mean for North Dakota motorists. It ended with: Elkton’s Self-Service, Where Service is King.
As she was reading the brochure, Walt commented, “I guess this isn’t exactly good news for you either.”
Before Hetty could answer, a breathless Celia came in waving a sheaf of papers. “Here’s the deed,” she announced. “He was mad as hell, but he signed it. I’m going to run it out to the county seat and record it.”
“How much did he want for it?” Hetty asked.
Celia laughed. “He wanted what he paid for it, twelve hundred. I told him he was crazy. My buyer knew what the lot was worth and wouldn’t spend a penny over five hundred for it. We finally settled for eight hundred and fifty. He was really relieved to get rid of it, believe me.”
Walt was still examining the green brochure after Celia had left.
Looking over at Hetty, he said, “Your boy’s in Minnesota, isn’t he? Seems to me I remember him owning a print shop.”
Hetty nodded. “He provides a mailing service, too.”
LAST STOP BEFORE FAYETTEVILLE
I’d spent the whole day riding in a boxcar, and I was still stiff and sore as I headed in the direction of the campfire. The smell of food was overwhelming. I’d had only a loaf of bread to eat since I left home, and I was saving the second half for emergencies. With just a few dollars in my pocket and some small change, and with the Depression making it hard to find any kind of work—especially for a kid—I was doing my best to stretch out what little food I’d taken along.
The first one to spot me was a little guy whose name I later found out was Clem, just Clem. There aren’t any last names on the road. He was thin, clean shaven—which was unusual—except for a small moustache. His clothes were a lot cleaner than what the other two were wearing, so he really looked like something of a dandy.
He waved a tin can he’d been using as a cup at me. “C’mon over. We’re having a feast, thanks to Les. More than enough to go around, and there’ll still be some left over for a late-night snack. Saw you get out of the box behind us. You probably won’t mind digging in.” Several tin cans were sitting next to the flames. It was actually warm out, but the thought of something hot to eat got me over my shyness.
Clem, who was a talker, introduced me once he caught my name. “Jack, this here is Les. Like I said, he provided us with most of tonight’s meal.”
Les was a big fellow with a long beard. I can’t remember ever seeing anyone with such a barrel chest. He grinned, and said, “Nice to meet you. The meal was nothin’. The rooster was prancin’ down the road, just askin’ to be caught. ‘Sides, Clem and Stan rustled up the potatoes and dandelion roots.”
“And the feller over there,” Clem pointed his tin can at the occupant of a log opposite the fire from him, “is Stan.” The figure on the log waved a handless arm at me as he peered over the rim of his can. Nowhere near as big as Les, he was still about six-foot tall with a leaner frame, a shorter beard, and no grin.
I sat down on the log next to Clem, reached into my duffel, pulled out what was left of Mom’s bread and handed it to Clem. It brought a cheer from Les and even provoked a smile from Stan.
“Just the thing to go with chicken soup,” Clem said, as he tore off a piece and passed the remainder over to Les. By the time it had made the circle and come back to me, I was juggling a hot tin can with some of the nicest-smelling soup I’ve ever run into.
Clem looked at me closely for the first time. “Say, son, just how old are you?”
Between bites of the soup-saturated bread I said, “Sixteen.” I could pass for fourteen but, as I look back at it, for a twelve-year old to claim he was sixteen was stretching it quite a bit.
Clem’s eyes narrowed and he asked something I later found out you don’t ask on the road, though drifters often volunteer the information. “Where you headed for, Jack?”
“Fayetteville.”
There was a long pause, then Clem said, “Circus is there, I hear.”
Well, he’d hit it right on the nose. I’d made up my mind to join the circus when they came through Dayton in the summer. I would have run away a lot sooner, but came down with influenza and then pneumonia. The doctor said I was lucky to make it, and I was too weak to go to the mailbox—never mind climb aboard a boxcar—for more than a month.
School is what decided me.
I was never much for learning, and the first day back in class was too much. So, the next morning, I got up early—long before daylight—left a note for Mom and Dad not to worry, rolled an old blanket around the bread and a few other things, then headed for the tracks. I’d memorized the circus’s schedule, and knew I could catch up with it at Fayetteville. So all the time the train rattled southward I kept daydreaming and then dozing off and dreaming about the big top, about the aerialists, and the circus clowns, and especially about the beautiful rider who seemed to float onto the horses’ backs. Maybe I’d have to start by just taking water to the elephants, but I was convinced the circus was for me.
Clem didn’t wait for me to comment on what he’d said. Instead he went off on something else. “Riding the rails ain’t easy, but it’s especially tough when they seal up the box cars. Then you have to settle for the rods. Stan there, can tell you what it’s like.” Finishing off his soup and reaching for another can, Stan once more waved the stub of his arm at me. He laughed at what must have been a funny expression on my face. He had a real high-pitched laugh I can still remember.
“He was trying to get away from the Pinkertons. Rolled under a freight just when the engineer humped the cars. Took his hand clean off.”
It was pretty obvious Clem loved to share the lore of the road. But I wondered, at the time, why he was telling me so much about it. I found out later why.
“Now, riding the rails is an art,” he went on as the rest of us switched our empty cans for others steaming hot from being next to the fire. “What you don’t know can really hurt you. You know what those cables are for—the ones you see hanging down from cross arms along the tracks?”
I had a pretty good idea what they were for, but I figured he was getting a kick out of telling me about it so I didn’t interrupt the flow. Besides, I was too busy fishing out bits of meat from the soup to do much else besides shake my head.
“Those are ticklers. They’re there to warn anyone who’s walking on top of the cars there’s a low bridge or tunnel ahead. I was riding in one of the boxes when a railroad worker who was going back to the caboose on the B&O just outside of Cleveland didn’t duck in time. Went right over between cars. There wasn’t much left to him after the sixty car train finished running over him.”
I must have flinched at the thought, because Clem grinned, “You just have to know the ropes, and
rail hopping can be safer than traveling on the highway. If you stay down flat and between the rails, one of ‘em can run right over you and not even touch you. You do have to watch out for ore cars, though. Their hods come down quite a ways. But if you squeeze down low, you don’t have to worry—unless you got a build like Les.”
Les laughed at the remark, hunched around and lifted up his shirt to show a livid scar running the length of his back. “It happened up in Michigan didn’t it, Les?” Clem asked. Les nodded.
“Yup, he was lucky. Only one ore car, but he couldn’t scrunch down enough. That’s how you learn things—by what happens to you and what happens to others. We couldn’t survive on the road if we didn’t help each other out.”
As he said that, he fished a piece of chalk out of his pocket and held it up for my inspection. By then the fire had died down, and only Clem hadn’t eaten his fill, so the rest of us were sitting back relaxing and listening to him talk away. “See this? Most important piece of equipment you can carry. That’s how you let the other rail riders know what the folks are like along the road. Find a gatepost or fence post, and down near the bottom you put a mark, if you don’t find one there already.
“X means you might as well skip it. The owner ain’t about to give you a handout. Waste of time. O means trouble.”
Les broke in. “O means the front end of a shotgun. Never seen no one use one, but I had one or two waved at me. Ain’t no need to take chances. There’s always ‘nother house down the road.”
Illustrating with the chalk in the air, Clem said, “A V means you can get a handout, maybe a sandwich, even. Sometimes the folks there might be poorer than you, but they’re willing to share what they have.”
Les and Stan were nodding in agreement, and Stan said, “Even in soft-coal country where there ain’t no one workin’ anymore, they’ll share their bulldog gravy with you.”
“Bulldog gravy?” I asked.
“Flour, lard and water,” Stan explained. “I knew a family there where they ate nothin’ but it ‘n grass for greens for almost a month ‘n not much else for months before that. Two of their younguns died. But when I came to the door, they ladled out some of what they had for me.”
There was a long silence before Clem picked up the story again. “A V standing up and another upside down on top of it is mighty rare. The combination means people who might give you a real meal. Might ask you to chop a little wood or something like that, but you know you’re welcome. There may even be a warm barn for an overnight out of the weather.”
Les and Stan joined in with stories of wonderful places bearing the double V mark, and both agreed such stops were rare indeed.
It was a long, lazy, pleasant day. The train, which Clem explained had developed a “hot box” and therefore was awaiting a repair crew, showed no signs of moving on. So, as the sun moved overhead, we found some shade, and I did most of the listening as the three of them reminisced about their years on the road.
A recurring topic was the Pinkertons. “They’re railroad cops,” Clem explained. “They’re hired to patrol the yards and to see no one swipes stuff from the freights.”
Les snorted. “Hired to bust heads, that’s what. It’s all they know how to do. Hell, we ain’t hurtin’ nothin’ by sleepin’ in empty boxcars or ridin’ the rods, but soon as they see us they roust us out and club everyone in sight.”
Stan giggled. “Saw ‘em once beat up a brakeman by mistake. Engineer came out of his cab ‘n caught one across the side of the head with a lug wrench. Pinkerton’s probably still in the hospital.
“Regular train crews don’t like ‘em any better than we do,” he added. “Most of the crews will look the other way when you climb aboard, but not them Pinkertons. If you ever see one of ‘em, don’t stop to ask questions. Run like hell.”
The reheated soup around nightfall was every bit as good as it had been earlier, and there was still enough of the bread left for one hunk apiece. The next order of business was finding a comfortable place to sleep. I stayed close to Clem because he seemed to want to tell me more about road life, and I admit I was kind of fascinated. So much so that, after we’d found a soft spot and stretched out, I asked him why he was telling me all this. I must have been dozing off about then, because I only half remember what he said.
By moonlight I could see the far away look in Clem’s eyes as he answered me. “I was thirteen when I decided to join the circus. Worked my tail off and got nothing much more than kicked around for what I did. About then it went bust. I’ve tried other big tops and carnies, but the road keeps calling. Once you get started, it’s hard to stop. Maybe that’s why I’m telling you all this. You may get started, if you don’t watch out. Just in case you do, it don’t hurt to be prepared.”
I couldn’t make too much sense out of what he said, but I could still remember the smell and taste of the soup and the kind of numb pleasantness listening to the three of them talk about riding the rails. And now, there I was in a nice comfortable spot under a warm blanket looking up at the stars I could see in spite of the moon making the night almost like daylight.
I kept drifting in and out of sleep as Clem went on, but I caught most of what he was saying. “The road can get to be like booze. I’ve tried to quit a couple of times. Tried to settle down. But soon as I hear the trains roaring by, I know it’s going somewhere, and I just have to go there too. Maybe some day I’ll stop moving, but it will have to be a place far enough from the railroad so I won’t be able to hear the sound of the whistle.”
I dozed off finally and couldn’t have been asleep more than a couple of hours, when I woke to hear the sound of a train braking. Clem sat up, then lay back down. “It’s the work crew, most likely, coming to finally fix the hot box. We better get up early to catch the freight out.”
Before I could go back to sleep the sound of yelling brought both of us bolt upright. In a matter of minutes, two figures came up the low hill toward us. I could make out two men, one with blood streaming down his face, the other with one arm hanging loosely down by his side. He was the one who hollered at us. “Pinkertons! They’re on a rampage.”
Clem and I didn’t wait to argue. We ran off through the brambles, me following in his wake and thankful he was breaking a path for me. We could hear the curses of at least a couple of men who had stumbled across our dead campfire.
I heard one yell, “They went way.” For a moment I wasn’t sure whether they were talking about us or about the two wounded men who had warned us. Or maybe they were following Stan and Les.
It wasn’t any of the others. It was us!
I could hear them crashing through the brush behind us, and we suddenly found ourselves trapped in a shallow dead-end gully full of rock fall. We stumbled along, trying to do it quietly, but the moonlight betrayed us. Clem pushed me toward an overhanging rock. “Get under there, kid. Quick!”
“What about you?” I asked.
“I can take care of myself. They’ll follow me and won’t bother to come looking for you.”
In a way, he was right. I’d barely snuggled down, making myself as small as possible, way back under the ledge, when I heard the Pinkertons pounding over the rocks. Clem must have stumbled, because the next voice I heard said, “Got ‘im, the bastard.”
I held my breath, then there was a deafening noise.
A voice followed. “You damn fool, why did you do that?”
“You saw him. You saw him. He was about to throw a rock at us.”
“What do you think your club is for? How you going to account to the boss for the missing cartridge? Damn it all to hell! You can split their skulls and get away with it, but a bullet hole is going to make the cops ask questions. And you know how the boss loves that.”
“I’ll tell him I shot a rattler.”
“Tell him whatever you want, I’m getting the hell out of here.”
Even though I could hear them leaving, it took long minutes before I could get up the courage to creep out to see what had
happened. And, while I’d never seen a corpse before, I knew Clem was dead—a hole in his forehead was oozing blood. I’m not sure how long I stood there looking down at someone who just a few minutes before had been alive, when I heard more noise behind me. At first I thought it was the Pinkertons returning. If it had been, I wouldn’t have been able to move. It was Stan and Les.
Stan was the one who insisted we take the body into town. “You can’t leave him here for the buzzards. He deserves a decent burial just like anyone else.”
We took my blanket, which was the only one sturdy enough for the job, rolled Clem onto it and started the three-mile trek to town. Les held the corners at one end while Stan and I shared the other two corners. I was surprised at how little Clem weighed. Even so, we tired pretty quickly, at least Stan and I did. I knew his doing it all with one hand had to be awfully tough. Les didn’t even seem to be winded when we finally got there, in front of a church at the outskirts of town—Our Lady of Pity, the billboard in the churchyard announced.
It was getting to be daylight as we went around to the cemetery behind the church, and Stan took off to find someone who could okay the burial. It seemed like a long time before he came back with the priest, who was wearing a long robe-like thing, which was just about dragging on the ground.
“Was he a Catholic?” the priest asked. He was an old man—must have been in his seventies…stoop shouldered, gray haired—what hair he had—and funny blue eyes looking right through a person.
“Does it make any difference, Reverend?” Stan asked in return.
“Yes, it does. This is consecrated ground. I can only approve the burial of Catholics here.”
Stan looked over at Les. They both shrugged.
“Seems to me it wouldn’t hurt for him to have his own place,” Stan said. “It wouldn’t take up much room. Maybe with a small marker. We’ll dig the grave.”
Expect the Unexpected Page 18
