by Howard Bahr
On this Christmas Eve morning, the timber crews had all gone back to the mill in Hattiesburg for the holiday. The interchange yard was empty, and the Shay locomotives brooded in the engine shed with their fires out. The sleet sifted down, the pines sighed in the wind, a gang of crows muttered to one another from their perches. Donny wondered what they spoke of, high in the cold solitude of the trees.
Donny Luttrell had not come to the railroad by choice. He originally set out to be a University Man and a Captain of Finance like his father Jacob. Unlike his father, however, Donny spent his first year of college carousing with his fraternity brothers in Memphis and Jackson. In the spring semester, when he realized he was failing all his courses, Donny took comfort in the arms of a girl he met at the spring mixer. Her name was Rosamond Lake, a Chi Omega from a good Greenville family. One night in early May, she sat crying under a streetlamp and told Donny that she had “missed her time.” She had to explain to him what that meant. The same night, Donny went home on the midnight train, leaving all his possessions in the boarding house room he had taken a month before.
His father fixed it, of course, for he was a man who knew how to get things done. Mr. Luttrell arranged for the procedure and made sure the young woman had recompense for her pain and discretion. Then, to get Donny out of the picture a while, he had a conversation with an old Shrine brother who happened to be the superintendent of the Crescent Division of the Southern Railway. The superintendent was interested that the boy knew telegraphy, even if it was only from a Boy Scout merit badge. Before Donny knew it, he was an operator on the extra board of the Crescent Division. Furthermore, with the serendipity that follows the rich, the job at Talowah, so lonesome and remote that nobody ever bid on it, was open. The superintendent worked it with the telegraphers’ union so that Donny could be posted there as long as he needed to be. The job was mostly checking the yard, inspecting loads, taking wait orders for the siding, and keeping the depot swept out, and it was unlikely Donny would get into any trouble down there.
Donny had a few days’ breaking-in at Meridian, then went down to Talowah like a doomed man. When the local passenger train dropped him off, he stood in the hot sunlight with his suitcases and a bag of rations beside him and a horsefly buzzing around his head, and his only thought was, I can’t do this. It would be easy enough to run away, for, along with a switch key and cipher and rule book, the railroad had issued him a pass good on any second-class passenger train on the Southern system. That meant New York, Washington, New Orleans. The trouble was, old Jacob controlled his bank account; worse, most of his railroad salary, when he started drawing, was already garnished to the old man, who expected Donny to pay back the medical and discretionary fees resulting from the one damp spring afternoon when God had allowed him to know Rosamond Lake.
A half-dozen men in the log yard had stopped work and were staring at him, so he went inside. No one had been at Talowah for three months—in that time, the siding and interchange had been controlled out of Purvis—and the place was in shambles. Every corner of the ceiling had a big nest thick with wasps who began to dip and dive around the moment the door was opened. The floor was covered with leaves and rat pellets. The desiccated body of a squirrel lay on the desk. Mice had pulled the stuffing from the cot mattress to line their home in the stove and had chewed the semaphore ropes in two. Donny looked around and said aloud, “I can’t do this.” He took his telegraph key from his suitcase and plugged it into the wire with shaking hands. This is Talowah, he tapped out. Send janitor immediately. A long silence followed on the line, then the sounder buzzed to life: 19. 19. 110, copy two.
Donny jumped back as if the sounder were a rattlesnake. He had caught the message all right, but he could not think of what it meant. Ah—“nineteen” meant to clear the line for orders. “One hundred ten” was the call sign for Talowah. In a panic, he rummaged through the desk until he found the order tablets and carbons and stylus. Everything he had learned at Meridian fled away like birds, and his hand trembled as he reached for the key. Ready to copy, he sent, slowly and painfully, for he could not remember the code nor the cipher.
After several false starts, during which the sounder seemed magically to communicate the dispatcher’s annoyance, Donny was able to copy a wait order for a train that even now was approaching. He found a pad of clearance cards and filled one out as he had been taught. Now what? he thought, and remembered. He would have to hand up the orders to the engineer and conductor of the passing train.
A telegrapher up at Meridian had shown him how to fix an order hoop and warned him that he had to get close to the train. Get in close and don’t miss, said the man. Everything depends on it, he said. Then he said it again: You have to get in close. Unfortunately, in the rush to bury Donny Luttrell and his sins at Talowah, the boy never got a chance to practice or observe. No matter, he thought. He had seen trains all his life, had even stood next to them waiting to board—and where was the difficulty? Besides, the matter of handing up orders was just one among a thousand things he did not know and did not plan to know.
Now he fixed the hoops all right, and stepped out on the cinders and stood close by the track as he had been instructed. The approaching train was no more than a headlight gleam to the north, and Donny waited, thinking I can’t do this, and Why do I have to do this? and the train coming closer all the while, rails creaking, the engine whistling for signals over and over, which made no impression on Donny since he had forgotten all about whistle signals. He shut his eyes and willed the sound away, willed himself away, back to school, back to the last possible moment when he could have kept his pecker in his pants—
And all at once, the engine loomed over him, its bell tolling, tolling doom. The earth shook, and the very air seemed pushed out of shape as if by a towering storm. The engine erased the sky, extinguished the sun, filled all the universe with darkness and spitting steam, moving fast, the drive rods like great mechanical arms reaching for him, the white-trimmed wheels higher than his head, the long boiler higher than God almighty himself.
Donny was stunned by this apparition. He cried out and flung himself backward, the order hoop forgotten. He heard voices, saw the blur of faces, then the brakes began to squeal and after an eternity, the train ground to a halt in a cloud of dust.
He waited. The train stood before him like a great wall, brake cylinders groaning, wheels tick-ticking with heat. He waited a long time for something else to happen, long enough to think about how much he had fucked up, long enough to unravel the order from the hoop and contemplate the ways in which a little square of waxy paper could alter the nature of existence. Then the engineer, whom Donny would come to know as Mister Cuthbert Streiff, appeared.
Mister Streiff—who must stop his train, put out the flags front and rear, and walk back twenty car lengths to get his order—had the face and build and posture of a dangerous bulldog. Donny watched him approach, saw him stumble in the ballast, watched him pause to stamp out a grass fire kindled by the sparking brakes. Donny noticed that the smoke from other fires was beginning to weave its way among the cars.
Only when Mister Streiff stepped onto the cinder apron did his eyes fix on Donny Luttrell. They narrowed to little slits under the black brim of his cap and never left the boy’s face. Mister Streiff came closer. The crickets sawed in the grass, and a mockingbird sang from the signal pole, and Donny felt as he did when he stood before his father: an emptiness where his heart should be, a readiness to embrace whatever guilt the old man assigned him so long as this moment could be over. When the engineer stopped, he was so close that Donny could read the label on his overalls. The man seemed incapable of speech. The veins in his neck were swollen thick as pencils, and a sinister purple blotch crawled out of his collar and up his throat. Then he shut his eyes and gathered himself, and when he spoke at last, his words were calm and deliberate.
Who are you? he asked, and the boy told him.
The engineer plucked the order from Donny’s hand and read
it. Then his eyes raised again, and Donny could not look away. Are you a coward? asked Mister Streiff.
In Donny’s mind, a sudden image took shape: Rosamond Lake on an iron bench, under a streetlamp, crying. Yes, he said.
Yes, sir, said the engineer.
Yes, sir.
Let us be clear, said the engineer. Are you a coward, or were you only afraid?
When the boy gave no answer, Mister Streiff took off his cap and drew a starched sleeve across his brow. He said, Find somebody to teach you the difference. You can be afraid out here, but you cannot be a coward.
The engineer turned then and was almost to the grass when he stopped and spoke, his back to the boy. If I have to do this again, he said, you best light out for the woods. Then he was gone.
Donny Luttrell was left still waiting to be made small, but the man who should do it was walking off. Donny waited, half-expecting the man to return, but in a moment he was alone. After that, Donny didn’t know what to wait for.
Eventually the train jerked into motion, the slack running out bam-bam-bam. All manner of cars marched endlessly by, rolling faster and faster, until at last Donny saw the outstretched arm of the conductor on the caboose. Donny crept timidly to the track and held up the order hoop, and the conductor, in crisp overalls and spectacles and fedora, reached far out to snag it. He did not look at Donny, but only shook his head in disgust.
When the train had passed, Donny began to stamp out fires in the tall grass. It didn’t take long for the flames to get away from him, and some of the loggers came running with shovels and axes and swing blades. They shoved the boy aside and set about putting out the fires, then went back to their work without saying a word to Donny Luttrell, who stood amid the stink of ashes with tears of anger running down his face.
* * *
The mice were easy to evict from the stove, but the wasps were a different matter. He finally had to close the damper and fill the stove with journal box waste to smoke them out, which meant that his first night was spent sleeping in the engine shed on a pile of tow sacks among a cloud of mosquitoes. The next day, he found a broom and figured out how to sweep and, after many trials, how to make coffee, eggs, bacon, beans. He learned about chiggers and ticks, though not how to keep them off. He memorized the railroad cipher and built up his speed on the key—anything to make the time pass. Donny was nineteen years old. It would be two years before he could get out of Talowah, and until then he would be stuck with the ignorant peckerwood loggers and railroad men he had to deal with, who could hardly write, and who, he believed, had never entertained a thought either coming in or going out that wasn’t about “backtime, overtime, or pussy.”
His resentment of them was matched by ample resentment of their own, a reverse snobbery that had conditioned them all their lives to look down on the educated and privileged, on those who were unlikely to be crushed beneath a fallen tree or die under the wheels, who would not end up broken and stooped and drawing a pension barely enough to keep them in whiskey. The College Boy, as they called him, no doubt had connections in high places. He would do a little time in the Piney Woods, then move up in the company. As a superintendent or vice president, he would return to that unimaginable world of comfort and accommodation, perhaps to roll past one day in the parlor of the Silver Star and say to himself, Now this seems familiar—but no, how could it? then turn back to his Cuban cigar and his newspaper.
The summer, languid and hot and rainless, passed slowly. The pines were loud with the serenade of cicadas, the logs on the cars whirred and ticked with secret life, and every evening the sun grew round and orange and seemed to hang forever just above the trees. The solitude was almost palpable, made of dust and resin. It was interrupted only by the narrow-gauge log trains crawling out of the woods, or the passing of the big trains on the Southern main line. Now and then, one of these would stop to pick up cars or drop off empties, and Donny might speak perfunctorily with a trainman. Other times, he went to the yard and pretended to inspect loads that had been transferred from the narrow gauge. In fact, he had no idea what he was doing. The loggers spoke to him not at all, but sat under a shade tree and watched him.
Donny got better at copying orders, but he could not make himself stand close to moving trains. He had to shut his eyes and hold up the order hoop and hope that the engineer caught it, then wait for the cars to pass and shut his eyes again and hold up the hoop for the conductor.
Sometimes, sitting in the open boxcar door on a hot night, Donny would think of Rosamond Lake and wonder if she knew of his fate, if she knew how much of a failure he was, cuckolded by his own cowardice and his father’s purse. Whenever he took the local to Lumberton or Purvis for supplies, Donny used the depot telephone to call her, but Rosamond was always out. He had written a dozen letters, but tore them all up. What could he say to her, after all? Why didn’t you ask me first? Why did you take the money? Did you think I was without honor, Rosamond?
He was, of course. It was he who left on the midnight train and proved himself a coward. Honor, indeed. The word mocked him even as it crept into his consciousness. As an idea, it formed slowly, for he was used to thinking himself above it. His father always said that honor was for fools not interested in making their way in the world. Honorable men were those who did not know that you had to take what you got, no matter the means. Honor! his father shouted when Donny had offered the possibility. It was his father’s final lecture before Donny left for Talowah, held in the office of the Merchants and Farmers Bank, of which Mister Luttrell was chief officer. Honor! the old man cried. Are you so stupid that you hide behind an illusion? The girl is gone. She has forgotten you, and what you call honor will not cause her to remember, only to despise you more. She is no longer an object of your desire. She is beyond your concern. Look to yourself, boy, for I assure you no one else will.
But Donny could not forget Rosamond Lake, no matter if she gave up their child, no matter if she took money for her silence. He was, after all, the one who ran away. Every morning through the summer, he sat on the edge of his bunk and thought of blonde Rosamond and her heart-shaped face, her full, hard breasts and strong legs. Rosamond would be soft asleep that early, nestled in her room in the old home place in Greenville near where the great River flowed. Their secret would be vanished now, put away like a bundle of clothes you would give the housemaid, just as his father had said—and later (he could see this clearly) Rosamond and her mother would dress in hats and gloves, and walk into the streets to shop for her return to school in the fall, to call on neighbors for tea, and give no thought to Donny Luttrell.
As the summer drew on, he began to understand how honor could be the property of those who had striven and lost, yet did not regret the loss. Donny was sorry he had not striven harder, but he was striving now, in spite of himself. The knowledge of what is right and true will come in its own time, he thought, even if it’s a hot, stinking morning in the wasteland of the Piney Woods.
This understanding came in solitude, and with it another gift. Slowly, imperceptibly, his father’s voice began to die away, and his mother’s returned. It had been years since he’d heard her, but there she was in the static of the wires, the creaking of the steel rails, in the little sighs and whispers of the woods at night.
He was seven years old when he stood watching the sexton shovel dirt into her grave, when he heard the clods striking the box far below. He remembered coming home to the quiet house that still smelled of her, full of the things she had touched, the plates she had eaten from, the mirrors, empty now, that had borne her image in fleeting glances. Nevertheless, she stayed long with him in the night, in the air around him, like the pale query of the moon through his bedroom windows. Then she had faded quietly as he grew older and his father’s voice argued louder and louder against the dreaming, the reading of books that were not true, the boy’s effeminate love of gardens and poetry. In the end, it took the military academy at Port Gibson to break Donny of all that. After four years, he came
home prepared to demonstrate what he had been taught, by fistfights and scorn, about what it meant to be a man. The next fall he entered the university, and now here he was.
His mother’s voice returned when he most needed it. She asked him to forgive her for leaving him, and he did, though he thought it unnecessary. She asked him to forgive his father, too, and he could do that. Then he understood that he could forgive even himself, for he knew somehow that forgiveness was only an act of admission, of looking in the mirror and seeing your own true face. Maybe he had learned that in college. Maybe he had learned it because he was afraid not to. In any case, his mother’s voice comforted him, and in time, his father’s voice ceased altogether. After that, he dared to look around him once more at the things he had allowed himself to forget. The woods around the station were full of light and shadow. He listened once more to the call of birds, saw their colors, hearkened to the secret stirrings of the hot nights. He marveled at the season’s dying as though seeing it for the first time.
Nevertheless, the engineer’s question remained: Are you a coward, or are you merely afraid? To find the answer, Donny began to push himself into the trains. He ran straight at them, tempting vertigo, forcing himself through his fear into a zone so dangerous, so insane, that all his nerves and muscles screamed in protest. In a little while, his fear began to wear away. Eventually, he could stand an arm’s length from the engine, the rocking cars. He began to enjoy the danger, the rush of air, the brush of drive rods in his face and the sudden heat of steam. He found himself looking forward to the smell of friction and steel and grease, the clatter over the rail joints, the heralds and slogans of the craft: Southern Serves the South; L&N, The Old Reliable; Illinois Central, Main Line of Mid-America; Cotton Belt Blue Streak; Lackawanna, Route of Phoebe Snow; Southern Pacific; Missouri Pacific; the Great Northern goat; Katy, the Bluebonnet Route. He began to see how all these powerful roads were connected in a single net of commerce, and that he, Donny Luttrell, the lowly operator at Talowah, was part of it. Getting in close. Moving freight. Moving trains, never mind the time and weather. It was the first time in his life Donny understood himself to be part of something larger than he was. Not even the Methodist Sunday School had taught him that.
