Train Dreams: A Novella Read online

  Billy’s jobs were to keep the double drum’s engine watered and lubricated and to watch the cables for wear. This was easy work, old man’s work. The outfit’s real grease monkey was a boy, twelve-year-old Harold, the captain’s son, who moved along before the teams of horses with a bucket of dogfish oil, slathering it across the skids with a swab of burlap to keep the huge logs sliding. One morning, Wednesday morning, just two days after Arn Peeples’s death and burial, young Harold himself took a dizzy spell and fell over onto his work, and the horses shied and nearly overturned the load, trying to keep from trampling him. The boy was saved from a mutilated death by the lucky presence of Grainier himself, who happened to be standing aside waiting to cross the skid road and hauled the boy out of the way by the leg of his pants. The captain watched over his son all afternoon, bathing his forehead with spring water. The youth was feverish and crazy, and it was this malady that had laid him out in front of the big animals.

  That night old Billy also took a chill and lay pitching from side to side on his cot and steadily raving until well past midnight. Except for his remarks at his friend’s graveside, Billy probably hadn’t let go of two or three words the whole time the men had known him, but now he kept the nearest ones awake, and those sleeping farther away in the camp later reported hearing from him in their dreams that night, mostly calling out his own name—“Who is it? Who’s there?” he called. “Billy? Billy? Is that you, Billy?”

  Harold’s fever broke, but Billy’s lingered. The captain acted like a man full of haunts, wandering the camp and bothering the men, catching one whenever he could and poking his joints, thumbing back his eyelids and prying apart his jaws like a buyer of livestock. “We’re finished for the summer,” he told the men Friday night as they lined up for supper. He’d calculated each man’s payoff—Grainier had sent money home all summer and still had four hundred dollars coming to him.

  By Sunday night they had the job shut up and the last logs down the mountain, and six more men had come over with chills. Monday morning the captain gave each of his workers a four-dollar bonus and said, “Get out of this place, boys.” By this time Billy, too, had survived the crisis of his illness. But the captain said he feared an influenza epidemic like the one in 1897. He himself had been orphaned then, his entire family of thirteen siblings dead in a single week. Grainier felt pity for his boss. The captain had been a strong leader and a fair one, a blue-eyed, middle-aged man who trafficked little with anybody but his son Harold, and he’d never told anyone he’d grown up without any family.

  This was Grainier’s first summer in the woods, and the Robinson Gorge was the first of several railroad bridges he worked on. Years later, many decades later, in fact, in 1962 or 1963, he watched young ironworkers on a trestle where U.S. Highway 2 crossed the Moyea River’s deepest gorge, every bit as long and deep as the Robinson. The old highway took a long detour to cross at a shallow place; the new highway shot straight across the chasm, several hundred feet above the river. Grainier marveled at the youngsters swiping each other’s hard hats and tossing them down onto the safety net thirty or forty feet below, jumping down after them to bounce crazily in the netting, clambering up its strands back to the wooden catwalk. He’d been a regular chimpanzee on the girders himself, but now he couldn’t get up on a high stool without feeling just a little queasy. As he watched them, it occurred to him that he’d lived almost eighty years and had seen the world turn and turn.

  Some years earlier, in the mid-1950s, Grainier had paid ten cents to view the World’s Fattest Man, who rested on a divan in a trailer that took him from town to town. To get the World’s Fattest Man onto this divan they’d had to take the trailer’s roof off and lower him down with a crane. He weighed in at just over a thousand pounds. There he sat, immense and dripping sweat, with a mustache and goatee and one gold earring like a pirate’s, wearing shiny gold short pants and nothing else, his flesh rolling out on either side of him from one end of the divan to the other and spilling over and dangling toward the floor like an arrested waterfall, while out of this big pile of himself poked his head and arms and legs. People waited in line to stand at the open doorway and look in. He told each one to buy a picture of him from a stack by the window there for a dime.

  Later in his long life Grainier confused the chronology of the past and felt certain that the day he’d viewed the World’s Fattest Man—that evening—was the very same day he stood on Fourth Street in Troy, Montana, twenty-six miles east of the bridge, and looked at a railway car carrying the strange young hillbilly entertainer Elvis Presley. Presley’s private train had stopped for some reason, maybe for repairs, here in this little town that didn’t even merit its own station. The famous youth had appeared in a window briefly and raised his hand in greeting, but Grainier had come out of the barbershop across the street too late to see this. He’d only had it told to him by the townspeople standing in the late dusk, strung along the street beside the deep bass of the idling diesel, speaking very low if speaking at all, staring into the mystery and grandeur of a boy so high and solitary.

  Grainier had also once seen a wonder horse, and a wolf-boy, and he’d flown in the air in a biplane in 1927. He’d started his life story on a train ride he couldn’t remember, and ended up standing around outside a train with Elvis Presley in it.

  3

  When a child, Grainier had been sent by himself to Idaho. From precisely where he’d been sent he didn’t know, because his eldest cousin said one thing and his second-eldest another, and he himself couldn’t remember. His second-eldest cousin also claimed not to be his cousin at all, while the first said yes, they were cousins—their mother, whom Grainier thought of as his own mother as much as theirs, was actually his aunt, the sister of his father. All three of his cousins agreed Grainier had come on a train. How had he lost his original parents? Nobody ever told him.

  When he disembarked in the town of Fry, Idaho, he was six—or possibly seven, as it seemed a long time since his last birthday and he thought he may have missed the date, and couldn’t say, anyhow, where it fell. As far as he could ever fix it, he’d been born sometime in 1886, either in Utah or in Canada, and had found his way to his new family on the Great Northern Railroad, the building of which had been completed in 1893. He arrived after several days on the train with his destination pinned to his chest on the back of a store receipt. He’d eaten all of his food the first day of his travels, but various conductors had kept him fed along the way. The whole adventure made him forget things as soon as they happened, and he very soon misplaced this earliest part of his life entirely. His eldest cousin, a girl, said he’d come from northeast Canada and had spoken only French when they’d first seen him, and they’d had to whip the French out of him to get room for the English tongue. The other two cousins, both boys, said he was a Mormon from Utah. At so early an age it never occurred to him to find out from his aunt and uncle who he was. By the time he thought to ask them, many years had passed and they’d long since died, both of them.

  His earliest memory was that of standing beside his uncle Robert Grainier, the First, standing no higher than the elbow of this smoky-smelling man he’d quickly got to calling Father, in the mud street of Fry within sight of the Kootenai River, observing the mass deportation of a hundred or more Chinese families from the town. Down at the street’s end, at the Bonner Lumber Company’s railroad yard, men with axes, pistols, and shotguns in their hands stood by saying very little while the strange people clambered onto three flatcars, jabbering like birds and herding their children into the midst of themselves, away from the edges of the open cars. The small, flat-faced men sat on the outside of the three groups, their knees drawn up and their hands locked around their shins, as the train left Fry and headed away to someplace it didn’t occur to Grainier to wonder about until decades later, when he was a grown man and had come very near killing a Chinaman—had wanted to kill him. Most had ended up thirty or so miles west, in Montana, between the towns of Troy and Libby, in a place
beside the Kootenai River that came to be called China Basin. By the time Grainier was working on bridges, the community had dispersed, and only a few lived here and there in the area, and nobody was afraid of them anymore.

  The Kootenai River flowed past Fry as well. Grainier had patchy memories of a week when the water broke over its banks and flooded the lower portion of Fry. A few of the frailest structures washed away and broke apart downstream. The post office was undermined and carried off, and Grainier remembered being lifted up by somebody, maybe his father, and surfacing above the heads of a large crowd of townspeople to watch the building sail away on the flood. Afterward some Canadians found the post office stranded on the lowlands one hundred miles downriver in British Columbia.

  Robert and his new family lived in town. Only two doors away a bald man, always in a denim oversuit, always hatless—a large man, with very small, strong hands—kept a shop where he mended boots. Sometimes when he was out of sight little Robert or one of his cousins liked to nip in and rake out a gob of beeswax from the mason jar of it on his workbench. The mender used it to wax his thread when he sewed on tough leather, but the children sucked at it like candy.

  The mender, for his part, chewed tobacco like many folks. One day he caught the three neighbor children as they passed his door. “Look here,” he said. He bent over and expectorated half a mouthful into a glass canning jar nestled up against the leg of his table. He picked up this receptacle and swirled the couple inches of murky spit it held. “You children want a little taste out of this?”

  They didn’t answer.

  “Go ahead and have a drink!—if you think you’d like to,” he said.

  They didn’t answer.

  He poured the horrible liquid into his jar of beeswax and glopped it all around with a finger and held the finger out toward their faces and hollered, “Take some anytime you’d like!” He laughed and laughed. He rocked in his chair, wiping his tiny fingers on his denim lap. A vague disappointment shone in his eyes as he looked around and found nobody there to tell about his maneuver.

  In 1899 the towns of Fry and Eatonville were combined under the name of Bonners Ferry. Grainier got his reading and numbers at the Bonners Ferry schoolhouse. He was never a scholar, but he learned to decipher writing on a page, and it helped him to get along in the world. In his teens he lived with his eldest cousin Suzanne and her family after she married, this following the death of their parents, his aunt and uncle Helen and Robert Grainier.

  He quit attending school in his early teens and, without parents to fuss at him, became a layabout. Fishing by himself along the Kootenai one day, just a mile or so upriver from town, he came on an itinerant bum, a “boomer,” as his sort was known, holed up among some birches in a sloppy camp, nursing an injured leg. “Come on up here. Please, young feller,” the boomer called. “Please—please! I’m cut through the cords of my knee, and I want you to know a few things.”

  Young Robert wound in his line and laid the pole aside. He climbed the bank and stopped ten feet from where the man sat up against a tree with his legs out straight, barefoot, the left leg resting over a pallet of evergreen limbs. The man’s old shoes lay one on either side of him. He was bearded and streaked with dust, and bits of the woods clung to him everywhere. “Rest your gaze on a murdered man,” he said.

  “I ain’t even going to ask you to bring me a drink of water,” the man said. “I’m dry as boots, but I’m going to die, so I don’t think I need any favors.” Robert was paralyzed. He had the impression of a mouth hole moving in a stack of leaves and rags and matted brown hair. “I’ve got just one or two things that must be said, or they’ll go to my grave …

  “That’s right,” he said. “I been cut behind the knee by this one feller they call Big-Ear Al. And I have to say, I know he’s killed me. That’s the first thing. Take that news to your sheriff, son. William Coswell Haley, from St. Louis, Missouri, has been robbed, cut in the leg, and murdered by the boomer they call Big-Ear Al. He snatched my roll of fourteen dollars off me whilst I slept, and he cut the strings back of my knee so’s I wouldn’t chase after him. My leg’s stinking,” he said, “because I’ve laid up here so long the rot’s set in. You know how that’ll do. That rot will travel till I’m dead right up to my eyes. Till I’m a corpse able to see things. Able to think its thoughts. Then about the fourth day I’ll be all the way dead. I don’t know what happens to us then—if we can think our thoughts in the grave, or we fly to Heaven, or get taken to the Devil. But here’s what I have to say, just in case:

  “I am William Coswell Haley, forty-two years old. I was a good man with jobs and prospects in St. Louis, Missouri, until a bit more than four years ago. At that time my niece Susan Haley became about twelve years of age, and, as I was living in my brother’s house in those days, I started to get around her in her bed at night. I couldn’t sleep—it got that way, I couldn’t stop my heart from running and racing—until I’d got up from my pallet and snuck to the girl’s room and got around her bed, and just stood there quiet. Well, she never woke. Not even one night when I rustled her covers. Another night I touched her face and she never woke, grabbed at her foot and didn’t get a rise. Another night I pulled at her covers, and she was the same as dead. I touched her, lifted her shift, did every little thing I wanted. Every little thing. And she never woke.

  “And that got to be my way. Night after night. Every little thing. She never woke.

  “Well, I came home one day, and I’d been working at the candle factory, which was an easy job to acquire when a feller had no other. Mostly old gals working there, but they’d take anybody on. When I got to the house, my sister-in-law Alice Haley was sitting in the yard on a wet winter’s day, sitting on the greasy grass. Just plunked there. Bawling like a baby.

  “‘What is it, Alice?’

  “‘My husband’s took a stick to our little daughter Susan! My husband’s took a stick to her! A stick!’

  “‘Good God, is she hurt,’ I said, ‘or is it just her feelings?’

  “‘Hurt? Hurt?’ she cries at me—‘My little girl is dead!’

  “I didn’t even go into the house. Left whatever-all I owned and walked to the railway and got on a flatcar, and I’ve never been a hundred yards from these train tracks ever since. Been all over this country. Canada, too. Never a hundred yards from these rails and ties.

  “Little young Susan had a child in her, is what her mother told me. And her father beat on her to drive that poor child out of her belly. Beat on her till he’d killed her.”

  For a few minutes the dying man stopped talking. He grabbed at breaths, put his hands to the ground either side of him and seemed to want to shift his posture, but had no strength. He couldn’t seem to get a decent breath in his lungs, panting and wheezing. “I’ll take that drink of water now.” He closed his eyes and ceased struggling for air. When Robert got near, certain the man had died, William Haley spoke without opening his eyes: “Just bring it to me in that old shoe.”

  4

  The boy never told anyone about William Coswell Haley. Not the sheriff, or his cousin Suzanne, or anyone else. He brought the man one swallow of water in the man’s own boot, and left William Haley to die alone. It was the most cowardly and selfish of the many omissions that might have been counted against him in his early years. But maybe the incident affected him in a way nobody could have traced, because Robert Grainier settled in and worked through the rest of his youth as one of the labor pool around town, hiring out to the railroad or to the entrepreneurial families of the area, the Eatons, the Frys, or the Bonners, finding work on the crews pretty well whenever he needed, because he stayed away from drink or anything unseemly and was known as a steady man.

  He worked around town right through his twenties—a man of whom it might have been said, but nothing was ever said of him, that he had little to interest him. At thirty-one he still chopped firewood, loaded trucks, served among various gangs formed up by more enterprising men for brief jobs here and there.


  Then he met Gladys Olding. One of his cousins, later he couldn’t remember which one to thank, took him to church with the Methodists, and there she was, a small girl just across the aisle from him, who sang softly during the hymns in a voice he picked out without any trouble. A session of lemonade and pastries followed the service, and there in the courtyard she introduced herself to him casually, with an easy smile, as if girls did things like that every day, and maybe they did—Robert Grainier didn’t know, as Robert Grainier stayed away from girls. Gladys looked much older than her years, having grown up, she explained to him, in a house in a sunny pasture, and having spent too much time in the summer light. Her hands were as rough as any fifty-year-old man’s.

  They saw each other frequently, Grainier forced, by the nature of their friendship, to seek her out almost always at the Methodist Sunday services and at the Wednesday night prayer group. When the summer was full-on, Grainier took her by the River Road to show her the acre he’d acquired on the short bluff above the Moyea. He’d bought it from young Glenwood Fry, who had wanted an automobile and who eventually got one by selling many small parcels of land to other young people. He told her he’d try some gardening here. The nicest place for a cabin lay just down a path from a sparsely overgrown knoll he could easily level by moving around the stones it was composed of. He could clear a bigger area cutting logs for a cabin, and pulling at stumps wouldn’t be urgent, as he’d just garden among them, to start. A half-mile path through a thick woods led into a meadow cleared some years back by Willis Grossling, now deceased. Grossling’s daughter had said Grainier could graze a few animals there as long as he didn’t run a real herd over the place. Anyway he didn’t want more than a couple sheep and a couple goats. Maybe a milk cow. Grainier explained all this to Gladys without explaining why he was explaining. He hoped she guessed. He thought she must, because for this outing she’d put on the same dress she usually wore to church.