KS Culbreth

Enchanting Light

It lay nearly two miles long and a quarter wide through the center of town. None decreed to put such an eyesore in the middle of their town and lay waste such bountiful real estate so close by the river rather than the outskirts. It’s just the way the town grew – outward concentrically from the hub that exported lumber in six routes to all major areas of the country a hundred years before, outward from the communication and transportation cicatrix that a fledgling town at the turn of the century needed in order to claim relevance amid its competitors, that those born of its womb back in the day used for loading people and supplies and unloading people and supplies, all coming from vague origins and likewise headed to unknowns.

From the mountain overlooks the iron rails scarred razored slashes across the south end of the valley just by the Willamette River not far from where it conferred with the McKenzie – both of which likewise transferred the forebears of those people and their supplies before the rails came. The mountains and valley and river of old folk songs that lied of blue skies and cloudpuffs were capped now as then with the same gray overhang of clotted clouds.

When its proud citizens referred to it as the dingy part of town, it was not a pejorative. Was not because it was the rundown or abandoned section but because the switchyard covered its surroundings with a fine black dust, the carbon from the iron rails ground by the constant wheel and because everything in the area – the asphalt and concrete and stone beds, the grassblades, shoots and leaves, every chainlink and shingle, each shedroof, awning, and kayak hull, the power lines and transformers, trashcan lids, and every pane of glass – until a hard rain came, was dusted with that black powder and the ashen cinder from the web of stone driveways through the switchyard.

Across a quiet road near where the switchyard thinned stood like dominoes a row of houses – tall, deep slivers, each with a narrow set of steps up to a small porch to the front door. The Northern Pacific built identical rows of such houses for its employees all across the country at many of their switchyards. Cheap rent. Walking distance to the start of the shift. Few workers owned any of these homes and most only stayed in the same house for a couple of years before moving on.

They’d not been designed by architects but by the rail engineers who tried their best to make each unique despite the silk-screened elevations and details. The homeowners tried to landscape the awkward patches of front yard cut at diagonals against the angled street but often found it best to let them wild or nearly so. Despite their shortcomings, even those who counted themselves fortunate to live in the newer homes to the south and east admitted that the old rail houses held an enviable character.

The residential surroundings had seen declining use for years, home buyers not wanting the noise of the cars and engines, the soot and dust, not wanting to be this far a walk in the rain to the cafés and bookshops and clothiers of downtown. But this part of town was firmly embedded in what was becoming a popular postal code. Young professionals moving into any house that came to market along the stretch taking them as starter homes and fixing them up as best they could to flip. The slivers got caught up equally in this trade.

*****

It is Sunday. A woman in her late thirties and newly relocated from Ithaca where she left behind her farewell tears for friends and family to take a position she’d long coveted is fixing up her new home. The one there all the way to the left, made of brick imported by those very rails from Georgia, bricks which had been the bright red-orange of Georgia clay but which the black dust and cinder had grimed to the dark red of dried blood over the last hundred years. That one with the steep gable over the porch and the overhanging roof to which the engineers had added anachronistically Victorian gingerbread under all the eaves, where the mortar on the front has been repointed with a bright white that is stark against the dark brick.

A wood and glass door in the center of the porch is surrounded by two tall windows. Over the roof porch on the second floor hangs three narrow windows shorter than those on the first floor, with shutters that can actually close over and protect their windows, held open with operable S-shaped holdbacks.

There was a rare March sun this morning. Though the air is still damp with the nine-month moisture of the Pacific Northwest, she’s hung clothes out on the backyard line. By afternoon they will be doused when the rains return and she will leave them there until the morrow.

She takes a folding two-step ladder from the pantry off the kitchen and carries it to the small porch and opens it. As she approaches, you see that her hair is a dull black pulled so tightly at the back of her head that it tugs the corners of her eyes and that there is a chaos of gray wires sprung crazily from that forced order. That her face is too young for so much gray.

Stepping across the threshold, she jostles hanging to the door trim a small wooden plaque she picked up at a weekend craft show and then straightens it. It is robin’s egg blue and cut in the shape of a valentine with a hand-painted cornucopia cradling the words, One heart makes it a home.

After checking the light switch inside the door, she climbs to the top step, balancing precariously above the short simple rail along the front edge of the porch. She takes a screwdriver from her hip pocket and reaches up and after some jabbing and cranking at the rusted screws lowers the hazy lightdome of frosted glass etched with a foliate design. She holds it carefully with fingers whose every nail has been gnawed to the quick, in hands that have been picked at, callused over, and picked at again. She turns it in these hands checking for a maker’s stamp.

Bet it’s original.

For a moment she thinks how much it would go for in an antique store. She rolls it between her hands and admires the plain artistry then looks back up at the socket.

I guess no bulb at all would explain it. Who the hell would take the dome down, remove the bulb, and then put the dome back? Idiots.

She climbs down and cleans the dome with ammonia and a rag then climbs back up and brushes cobwebs from the light fixture with a whisk broom and with an old toothbrush cleans spider cocoons from the inside of the socket. Still balancing, she untucks her tee shirt and carefully removes from the inside of its folds a ceramic light bulb. She screws it in to the socket and climbs down, stands in the door frame and flicks the light switch. A pale pink glow washes along the inside of the white ceiling.

She mounts the steps and replaces the dome then leans against the door jamb admiring the pink light through the frosted glass. The phone rings and she hurries back and answers it, pinches it between her ear and shoulder.

“Are you serious?” she says. “With two directors and half a dozen managers, you’re telling me not one of my fifty direct reports can resolve this issue?”

She sits behind a monitor set up amid piles of folders and papers at her dining room table and begins tacking quickly at a keyboard.

*****

He came out of Coldwater, Michigan where he’d been committed to what he scoffed as the old folks’ home by no power of attorney and no family because they had neither. He and Eleanor left their home of forty years and admitted themselves under their own recognizance having no others to care for them when they would no longer be able and yes, none other to bury them.

She cried when they locked their front door but he was happy to leave that house he called the albatross. He’d have been content in their one-bedroom apartment over DeSoto’s Trattoria not wanting the burden of a home and because his work kept him rambling through all corners of the country most of the year. But after several years of her pleading he conceded and made the purchase.

She needed a firm embrace after they dropped their house keys in the mailbox by the door. He offered only a pat on her back as they walked the stumblestones toward the waiting cab.

It was early Saturday morning when he woke up deep in the brush along the rails just south of Billings.

Town’s grown, he thought, looking at the town in first light. He roughened his face with dried hands to awaken himself. Remember when it was half this size.

There was the acridity of burnt rubber from the refineries mixed with the amoniac putridity of the cattle urine and the heavy, cloying sweetness of the sugar beets at the canneries. He’d been camped since yestereve and was becoming dismayed he’d not been able to catch an empty box car in twelve hours of rail shifts that know no sleep.

He’d known the routes and the lines and the schedules by heart but they’d changed since 77 when he took his pension.

Felt old then, some fifteen years ago that. When did I become the crazy old hobo I used to boot off the flatcars? Or have I always been?

Being a brakeman on the lines, jack of all despised trades on the rails, could have broken his body as it did so many others but it did not. His entire being had become hardened like mended bone at the point of fracture. But a long career of it had doused his enthusiasm for anything he did often enough to become routine.

Sure as hell wish the schedules hadn’t changed. Leaves me waiting more than riding. The idleness I can’t abide.

He gathered his bindle and set out to walk the rails ten miles to the southern end of the main switchyard there at Laurel.

What’s his hurry, you might ask and would be right to. Is he not done with duty and obligation and now riding the rails for his own bemusement, fulfillment of boyhood dreams? Bemusement indeed.

He stops before long, his eye catching what appears to be a loose spike. He taps it with his steeltoe boot. It is where the butt ends of two rails meet and he looks down at the jointure for some time.

They were still out there in remote areas and we’d find them the hard way. Not often, but often enough.

He stomps the spikehead with his heel but it does not budge.

The old track where they cut the ends diagonally and joined them one lapped over the other. The thinned edge of the topmost would become sprung by the rolling wheels and rise up eventually, curling high enough for a wheel to catch its underside. With the speed of the train, that rail would splinter up through the floor of the car and impale against the ceiling anything in its path. Some called it a snake fang when it happened. We never lost a passenger. But seeing a snake fang curled up all through the car and piercing through the roof…well you never had complete faith that all the old rails had been replaced.

At Laurel he supped from a canteen and palmed the cork back into its mouth. He skulked toward the small yard and waited, ducking around a shed of spares and tools full aware how much railmen hate carhoppers.

When he started he had no problem convincing the railmen that he’d been a brakeman and they’d let him ride. All he had to do was explain some of the more technical side of his responsibilities and show the hand with three missing fingers. But the new guys, even if they believed you, didn’t care about the camaraderie of a shared vocation and would not let you ride. They played by the rules as far as that went, not for the sake of the railway or for the sake of rules, but because they didn’t want any disciplinary action to risk their climb up the company ladder.

He heard that familiar iron squeal and clacking of the couplers. He made like he paid it no mind in case someone was hawking him from the switch house. By the sprouting pine there by the ditch he lay himself back and put his head atop his bindle. After it came to a stop and the loading and unloading began, he ambled upstream a ways and checked which track it was on and farther ahead how the switches had been set. It would not be long. They did not shut the engines.

He continued upstream as fast as his octogenarian carriage could wheel him and made it to the trestle over a small creek and here he waited with a renewed calm. He slept until the freight had done its loading and unloading. It was dark and late when he climbed the three rungs of a coal hopper as it chugged away. He worked his way to the back of the deck and lay down on the serrated plank grating nestling up under the belly of the hopper. He pulled the bottom of his long wool coat about his legs and clasped the collar at his throat and hoped for sleep but it did not come. If he thought too long about not sleeping, it would never come. So he planned the final day of his route.

Freight’s headed through Spokane to Seattle, he thought. Detrain at Yakima lest it spur to Walla Walla. With its state pen there where they still hang the condemned, they’ll check the cars thoroughly coming and going.

It was March and the air cold and damp. He tried hard to sleep wanting the night to be gone and for daybreak to thaw his tendrils but only managed to find that halfway twilight between sleep and awake where the mind races scene to scene like microfiched stories of an old newspaper blurring across the viewer.

His maimed hand ached as it always did in the damp chill and the ghost feeling of the missing fingers tingled until he tucked his hand up into his armpit. He tried to steer his memory from that hungover morning but when the association arose there was no stopping it and no diverting from it.

They’d warned him about not being hypnotized by the routine and thereby losing focus. But he was young and of course invincible so he ignored them. They’d warned him about having a clear mind at all times on-site but his hungover brain couldn’t stop thinking about the plans he and the others had made to go to the Rose House that night for a coupling of a different sort.

He’d been on the rails for over ten years and married to Eleanor most of that time. Though he tried to convince himself that theirs was not that kind of arrangement, was not to have a soulmate or even romance, but simply to have another, to be un-alone, a bit of guilt always nagged him when he made those plans.

Each has their own private motive when they punch the time clock, he remembered thinking all those years ago, a favorite vice that is the secret but true beacon of their quest. One’s as bad as another, makes no difference which you choose.

That morning, his mind was on the doorway of Rose’s old craftsman home with the rafters under the low eaves, the doorway with the pale red light.

They passed over a canyon and the cold, damp air from the river below shivered him back to the ghostly haunting of missing fingers.

It wasn’t as you’d think it would be. You do not feel the prolonged agony of crushing. You do not feel some molten pain that sinks in deeper and deeper as the minutes of horror unfold. You do not feel the slow slicing of shears through flesh and bone.

It was more like a dandelion bloom when you flicked it to the breeze with your thumb singing, Momma had a baby and its head popped off. Or when you pressed a hard thumbnail through the soft green vine of a snap-pea bush to make the other vines stouter.

That’s what the coupler did when he leaned forward on it to steady himself while reaching for the air hose, his thoughts on adolescent play he had in store for the night. It did not sever or cut or crush the pinkie, ring finger and half the middle finger of his left hand. It simply pinched them off.

The headlines rushed past.

When those movin picher men needed scenes, long back, before the actors spoke, they come around the switchyard askin the old timers. I was just young but had as many stories as the elders and jumped at the chance. Of course they started in with all that about the peckin order but that was my chance to shine and I would not step aside. The picher men scribbled many notes but mine was the one what went up on the big screen.

The one when the airbrakes failed because of all the sleet, damn your eyes Mr. Westinghouse, and goin down that grade with how deep the snow was the engine couldn’t slow the cars. They didn’t want me goin down the aisles covered in slop and makin the riders hysterical, so it was up to me runnin along the tops of the cars and slidin down the ladders to throw the manual brakes on each set of trucks. The hand brakes didn’t fail. And I didn’t fail. So they throwed that scene in.

And we went one night a group of us and watched the actor with the pancake flour all over his face with his too dark eyes and too dark lips and we laughed at the women and children screamin without a sound, laughed because there was no screamin since none the riders knew how close they come to the misty edge that night.

His eyes opened then and he watched the tall, pointed cedars and firs blackened by night but silhouetted by the lighter blue-gray of the moonlit sky beyond — watched them slipping by quickly and steadily.

I do wonder what they did with their lives no doubt extended because of what I done. Who may have known and whether they ever had any gratitude. What I know is not a one come back to check on me in the caboose coughing up blood after my boot slipped off an ice slicked rung and I smashed three ribs on the iron rail. That part they did not put in the picher.

He may have slept. Or his eyes closed and his thoughts rested. When he opened them again, it was the same sideways rush of firs and cedars, the occasional break where a stream crossed, the rhythm of the wheels constant through the night.

After they paid out enough in hospital bills and disability, they finally saw the wisdom of setting down some safety rules. They hired a young guy to write that book. What did he know, straight from some state college. He was stumped until someone told him to get on out of the office and go talk to those who know. So he come around to me and I outlined much of that book for him and wrote the chapters on manual braking, coupling, disconnecting an air hose without it flying back and claiming an eye. But what book was my name ever writ upon? None. He got it all, big bonus and award dinner to boot. And that’s when I decided never again. If I didn’t get the money, I’d get the glory. If I didn’t get the glory, I’d get the money. I’d never give up both ever again. That was my motto from then on.

He did sleep then for some hours. They passed the mountains and the pines and had reached the desserts of eastern Washington. The air had dried but it had cooled and now he shivered himself awake. The cynical irony had passed, replaced by another blurred vision, a frequent haunt.

Every year a new crop of boys would hide in the brush just past the junction. They’d hop the reefers or the coalies or the tankers and ride above the Bogie trucks as far as they cared. We tried hard to keep them off. For their own sake.

Because every so often some boy would fall, not when we were at speed but after we’d slowed some. Maybe the train jolted more at slow speed. Maybe they got overconfident and let go their grip. No matter. When they fell and got caught under wheel, at that speed then it was like a giant shears cutting through flesh and bone as it took a leg clean off. The boy’d bleed out before any of us even knew he’d hitched a ride and fallen. What is it about the young thinkin they’re invincible? That fatal flaw when one thinks that such horrors happen to others, unable to see himself as the other to all others, that horror is as much his own inheritance as another’s. It bothered me to no end at first but I got used even to that, considering it some part of natural selection.

When he awoke it was morning and the train was clacking to a stop approaching Yakima. The air was dry and the sky clear as it usually was this side of the Cascades. He gathered his bindle and when the train had slowed but was still on the outskirts and so moving much faster than he was able, he hung apelike from the rail lowering himself as close to the ballast as he could then dropped and rolled awkwardly down the embankment coming to rest facedown and spread eagle in the tall dry grass.

One more hitch will take me to the switchyard there by the river, where I’ll determine where I’m headed.

Blessing at Yakima. After wandering that small cowboy town all morning, buying a can of pork and beans and heating it over a trashcan fire by himself, early afternoon he found a boxcar unlocked and only he wanting to ride. He rode it through the day and slept a couple of hours and woke up hungry with nightfall approaching.

In the last light through the single rail door rolled back, he untied a leather thong holding the corners of the worn wool laprobe together and opened it on the boxcar floor. He found a package of jerky wrapped in waxed paper and opened it and tore pieces away with his blunt teeth. He drank from his canteen to swell the dry meat in his hungry belly.

As he chewed, he pushed his finger through the small collection of treasures that he carried with him. A packet of photographs with curled and chipped edges bound by rubber bands and concealing his folded cash. Some bandages and medicines. Expired driver’s license and passport. Small bundle of letters from Eleanor spanning fifty years. Social security card. Pad and short pencil lifted from a church pew. A plastic bag with matches. An old Bulova tank watch that they gave him when he took his pension and which he wound once at the retirement banquet to listen to its mechanism tick-tick-ticking and never rewound. He looked at the italic numbers behind the crystal and the nickel trim.

Banquet. Hardly. Just another night bowling. But it was a good time that. Except for a few it was really just the fellas. Even still, maybe I should’ve let Eleanor come.

The wrist strap threaded a smooth and shiny wedding band. He told her he could not wear it at work for safety reasons and so it was pristine. He lifted the watch and pinched the ring gently edgewise and rolled it slowly back and forth, his eyes barely able to distinguish in the dim light some forgotten phrase inscribed in its smooth underbelly.

She left in 83 to strike out on her own. How angry she was. “Finally, after all these years,” she hollered, “you leaving me by my lonesome while you went carousing with those bounders that were no good for a married man. I wouldn’t have minded if you’d given me a child. Like you promised at first. But you refused because you wanted nothing to keep you off the rails.” How flaming angry she was. I guess I can’t blame her for that.

She went and stayed with her sister in Sarasota and before he could ever know for sure why she’d kept her anger a secret for so long, he received a Western Union from his sister-in-law regarding Eleanor’s sudden death by stroke.

He took a train to Sarasota to see to the arrangements and the service and that ride relit some ember that had been dying in his breast since retiring.

When he returned he sold their house of forty years, the house they’d turned into rental property, checked out of the old folks’ home, and put what he had in the bank only for emergencies. He’d managed to panhandle ever since and only stopped in to the bank when he was in a bind and he was happy that it had been so infrequent. May be the last of his kind for all he knew.

He was not unhappy now, had lived and was continuing to live as he desired. There was only the nagging wonder of what next, which became maddening and suffocating at times after so many years. No family left and no responsibilities. Freedom and yet, to such an end that there was no longer purpose other than living as he desired each moment of every day with commitment to no other, there was not much meaning. He would be first to confess these last years were not about relighting a fire but of trying to reclaim what had slipped away.

After dusk they crossed the river and then peeled away from it and stopped in that switchyard he’d always considered the most serene, surrounded by its gardens and terraces, the gateways to graveyards and its lighted houses set against the dark backdrop of the mountains. There had been a good mission there on Bethel that was ministered by a retired boatswain and behind the mission a small plot filled with the bones of those who had none to claim them.

Many times when he stayed the night at the boarding house there among the slivers, he would sleep with his window open, a stranger by his side, that hollow in his heart, only the harmonies of the hymns from the mission able to lull him to sleep.

*****

A mile of train cars that started in Chicago and coupled and decoupled and coupled again as it rolled across a third of the country loading and unloading and at some point unknowingly picking up an itinerant vagrant comes to rest. They shut the engines.

The thunder of the engines, which travels along the rails and through every wheel, through the trucks and iron trusses and along the floors to resonate through every boxcar like a bell chamber, finally stills and the sudden quiet wakes him from a light sleep. He hears the psst of the drain valves letting out the excess air in the reservoir tanks. He leans out the boxcar door on the side away from the switch house, sees no one, climbs the ladder and hurries as best he can across ten sets of tracks and slides down the stone embankment.

He slumps back against the gravel and notices the dampness from an earlier rain but rests for a few minutes then tries to orient himself in this place from his distant past. He palms his eyes and rubs his head and turns and looks across the switchyard careful lest they see him scouting over the embankment.

I see my error clearly now. I expected it to have changed so much I would not recognize it. And because of that anticipation, I did not recognize it because it looks much as it did those many decades back.

He crab crawls down the embankment to the edge of weeds, puts his sack on the ground, lays his head upon it and pulls the wool coat about him to resume his unfinished sleep.

Train’ll be here till morning. Daybreak I’ll decide, Sacramento or Salem. Yes, Sacramento or Salem.

But in two hours there is the sharp wish of the air brakes releasing and then the low roar of the engine and the clatter of the couplers pulling together. It takes a minute before it rousts him from his slumber and he scurries to the top of the embankment and sees the train pulling away, several of the cars having been decoupled and run off to the spurs.

I’ll be damned. Thought I had all night.

He thinks about returning to his bed in the weeds but feels too exposed with the wall of cars having rolled away, so he gathers his sack and begins walking the long stretch of rails northward.

It isn’t until the train pulls out of sight at nearly eleven o’clock on a Sunday and leaves him there in the middle of the vast switchyard with its dingy order that he longs for a home, does he wish that Eleanor were somewhere waiting for him as she always had.

She was good for that, being my anchor, always there to return home to when the time came.

There is the row of houses on the road beyond the switch house and the houses on the far side of the switchyard beyond the twolane expressway. They look like homes now, most of them, no longer the temporary stays of the crew. He scans the skyline. Downtown is behind him and farther than he cares to walk in the wrong direction.

He continues his trek thinking it might be nice to have someone there to tell his stories to, and thinking back sees them as random and chaotic despite the order of the railway industry. He suspects but cannot voice what he had long denied, that at some level the countless separate scenes are bound each to each with a thread of some origin divine. And that may be something the preacher at the mission could explain. At the end of his musing he circles back to where he most often found himself, there being nothing worth telling.

All right then. There’s plenty to tell. Probably more than the average life. But what is worthy of being told? And to what end?

Yes, to what end.

You were my home, my family. I found my purpose through you and denied all others in order to belong to you foremost. While I deluded myself that I was special, served some function for you that only I and no other could fulfill, that when we parted you would still be there for me and that, after I left, it would leave some hole in your being that you could never fill. But when it was time for us to go each our own way, you catered a dinner at the Empire Lanes, shook my hand, gave me a watch, and promptly replaced me.

He scans the structures along Bethel looking for the mission.

I could do for a night on a cot. And mayhaps I could talk to the preacher there. Sort out some arguments I keep having with myself.

But the mission has long since been torn down. All that remains is a small iron fence around unnamed graves.

His eyes scan the slivers along the tracks and something catches his attention that ignites a small flame in his fraying nerves. He continues northward but after he passes a safe distance beyond the switch house diagonals across the tracks toward Bethel.

Yes, one of the porches there.

He shades his eyes from the harsh halogen lights of the switch yard and squints until he is sure. He moves toward the reddish glow as he did so many times before, forgetting all else but his own private motive, mindless as a moth toward the flame.

At the foot of the steps he waits and tries to see through the lace curtain of the front door. There is neither movement nor sound. But there is a white glow coming from what must be the room where the boarders eat. The white glow flickers. He squints and sees it is one of those work monitors like a television that they used at the front desk of the old folks’ home. He shades his eyes against the porch light and sees hands above a keyboard typing quickly.

A woman rises from the table, goes to the kitchen and returns with a mug of ice cream. She leaves the light on in the kitchen and returns to sit in the dark dining room.

She must be the concierge. But why so formal, so businesslike.

He is yet uncertain but so filled with hope that he convinces himself it is a bounteous blessing and climbs the steps to the front door. In the glass a man stooped, a face encircled with long white hair spraying out from beneath a beaten watchcap. Unshaven and whiskers albino white. The face a grayish pink and the bones sharp through the draping flesh. In the glass he could see his eyes, bloodshot and weary, a look of dulled surprise. What could he do here anyway, at his age, with so little vitality? Ah, to sleep, perchance to dream.

Indeed. Would that not be the perfect ending?

He can barely see her in the darkness of the dining room. When she sits forward to study something on the monitor, her face glows in the white light. She reads intently, mesmerized, her thoughts perhaps a thousand miles away, then types frantically. Her face disappears as she sits back.

When he knocks, the hands recoil from the keyboard in two tight fists and hang there. He knocks again and the hands retreat below the table. She presses a button and the monitor goes black.

She stands and he sees her lean forward, silhouetted by the light from the kitchen, trying to look out through the front door. She ducks back out of view, into the darkness of the dining room.

The old man hears a timid voice say, “Who is it.”

He doesn’t answer. The silhouette of the woman moves closer to the door. She stands inside the locked door and pushes the curtain aside.

“What do you want?” she says raising her voice through the glass.

“I was wondering,” the old man says, “are you open?”

“Am I what?”

“Do you have a room to let?”

“What do you mean? We live here. We don’t take boarders.”

“You don’t take boarders. Of any kind?”

“No. We live here. My husband’s coming downstairs now.”

“I misunderstood,” the old man says. “I was just looking for a place to stay. Sorry to disturb you.”

He moves toward the steps but stops and turns back toward the door. She is still standing there watching him, holding the lace curtain aside.

“You may want to change that light,” he says pointing with his mangled hand.

“It’s working fine,” she says.

“That’s not what I mean.”

He can see his image in the glass and he can see her through and over that image, that defensive look on her face, her fist choking a handful of curtain. He knows there is no one else inside and that he is frightening her.

“Sorry to have troubled you.”

He goes along the tracks until he is north of town and camps in a small grove of cedars. Leaning back and breathing the sharp cold aromatic air and wishing that he would hear music faintly, far off, but only silence comes. He watches the blue-black clouds swirling slowly overhead until they break and in the break he sees stars that are not bright but muted by moonlight beyond the clouds. He thinks this may indicate good weather for the morrow.

It may be clear and it may not. One can never tell in these parts. But it does not matter whether the sky is clear or overcast, whether it rains. It does not matter.

In the morning I’ll catch a train to Salem. Or maybe I’ll just walk the expressway beside the tracks to Junction City and Harrisburg and Albany and finally…finally to Salem.

Salem, he thinks, settling back, old Indian town. The Calapooya called it Chemeketa. Salem.

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance or similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental. The author bears no responsibility for any damages that may occur to actual persons based upon this writing.]