A Moment in the Sun (18 page)

“Everywhere there’s a river in this country, there’s a railroad alongside it,” the old man would intone when the oil lamps were lit and the day’s work had bested him again. “A river feeds a man—a railroad bleeds him.” In what was left of Zarah City and in Pawnee Rock the other busted men who used to talk of Dull Knife and Little Wolf or the murderous Dalton boys or the wide-open days of Dodge could speak only of the depredations of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, spitting bitterly into the Kansas dust and elaborating on the many tentacles of the conspiracy. It wasn’t the fellas who worked on the road, no, they were just poor stiffs who risked getting scalded or run over or crushed in a pile-up for their two dollars a day, and it wasn’t the trains themselves, which made your heart race every time they came smoking past across the prairie. It was something big and dark and far off that was crushing them down, something that sent orders out that fixed the prices against you, and his father railed on about men in top hats whispering, passing bribes in the halls of power to keep the poor farmer down.

There was the cyclone one year, then that killer frost, then the Great Snow where he lost most of the livestock and always the cornworms and the chinch bugs and the birds eating your seed and the sinking recognition that this land you’d bought would bury you before it would feed you. And Mother falling into a mood the winter where the sun never come out once, barely talking, till they found her one day, Hod and his brother Zeb, or found her from the neck down, and the long stain on the rail it took a month for the passing trains to polish away.

And then the bank called in the note and the Unruhs, who were Men-nonites, bought it all at auction for half of what they’d offered their father the year before.

Rupe Heizer, who’d been in that original Kentucky colony, was with the railroad office then and offered Hod’s father a section house and a foreman job. Just supervising.

“I slit my own throat fore I work for any railroad,” the old man said at the time. They told him he was too old for the salt mine in Hutchinson and he was too proud to work for any of the farmers who would offer him a job, so he signed on at the granary and dried up and died.

The Railroad was out there somewhere, big and dark and not so far off, crushing down on them, but this, this engine, this train, this stretch of track, belonged to Hogan’s Army. It was owed to them.

Dynamite Johnny O’Brien finds Hod by the stern rail, staring out into the fog.

“You’re well clear of that Yukon mess,” says the captain. “It’s a suckers’ game.”

“You let the folks you carry up there in on that?”

O’Brien laughs. “People start thinking gold,” he says, “they don’t listen to nobody. You got plans?”

Hod shakes his head. “Just enjoying the boat ride.”

“Cause I got a little sideline, running guns to them that’s willing to pay dear for em. This deal in Cuba is heating up, and you seem like a capable young fella—”

“Not my fight.” The captain is a friendly old coot and a hell of a poker player, but not likely to be particular about which side he sells to.

“Well, keep it in mind. Always got room for a boy who don’t stall at breakin a few rules.”

Wild train from copper country.

They rolled into Livingston in the late afternoon, stopping short so the couple soldiers who had been switchmen could trot ahead and reset the rails. It was certain now that somebody was trying to side-track them, but when they eased into the station there was another crowd cheering and General Hogan begged off that he was too busy and so this young fellow, meaning Hod, would explain their quest to the multitude.

Hod stood on a pallet in front of the roundhouse and looked them over. The NP had an office here, it was their biggest train shop in the state, and he half expected to be shot at. But here were all these people smiling, eager to hear his story.

“We’re not tramps and we’re not cranks and we’re not revolutionists,” he told them. “We’re just an army of honest toilers gone to tell the government what’s right and what’s wrong. Our politicians are supposed to do that, but somehow the message gets lost on the trip—” and here there was much joking and laughter, “—or they just plain sell us away.” A cheer greeted this and a dozen fellows came up and said they were enlisting for the campaign.

“The Northern Pacific won’t carry us,” Hod told them, “cause they don’t want the truth to be known. The newspapers make fun of us, make us out as deadbeats cause it helps them sell papers. The only ones we got pulling for us,” he said, feeling like the light in their eyes would lift him clear off the ground, “is the ordinary Americans like you folks.”

More cheers then and men pumping his hand and slapping him on the back and a young girl kissed his cheek and pressed a flag into his arms and then a steam whistle blew, the boys ahold of a fresh engine, and it was time to go.

“Whatever you do, don’t stop!” shouted a man who wore the Union pin on his lapel, smiling and steering Hod through the happy, cheering crowd to the snorting Liberty Train. “We got enough men jobless in Livingston already!”

Wild train coming. Step aside and watch our smoke.

They left the station with the new engine and a few more boxcars with red-white-and-blue bunting draped on them, the boxcar doors open and men sitting up on the roofs like a horde of scruffy baronets surveying their domain. They waved their hats to the crowd waiting when they rolled through Big Timber at dusk, then a few miles past had to stop and dig out another section of track, this time a mess of big rocks that must have been dynamited down.

There
were
tramps among them, despite what he’d told the people in Livingston. He’d noticed them before, maybe a dozen or so men who stood in the shadows till the food was passed around and seemed to have their own secret language together, the ones who were off relieving themselves in the bushes or just looking on like spectators as the rest wrestled boulders off the track. You looked them in the eye and could see that they belonged to no place, to no one. Hod was not like them, he thought, not just along for the ride. He was going places. First to Washington, and then—well, wherever they had a road needed building. And somehow, though the exact strategy was unclear in his head, he would make enough jack, save enough, to stop chasing the next piece of bread and make his stand. Find a girl. It wouldn’t be farming, though—he’d seen enough of that quagmire—or digging rocks out of a hole. It would be—something else.

There was no liquor allowed on the train and the men had been good about that. Cursing was discouraged. One of the soldiers had been a barber, a Greek named Diomedes, and he gave shaves every morning in the lead boxcar. Hod always climbed forward, only just sprouting whiskers then, to be among the first. He’d seen fear in the eyes of small children more than once when he’d approached a house looking for work. There were dogs trained to attack men like him. The line between a man out of work with nowhere to call home and a tramp out after a handout was thin enough for most people to ignore, and there’d been times when he wanted to just throw it all in and either beg or steal, but he wasn’t a thief and he wasn’t a tramp.

He was a soldier in Hogan’s Army.

The track was cleared and the train rolled forward again, headlight cutting through darkness now, stopping at the jerkwater towns where there was suddenly no water to jerk, the tanks emptied by whoever the company had sent ahead of them, going slower and slower till finally Jim Harmon had to stop the train and uncouple the boxcars.

“Can’t make steam without water,” he said. “And we’re boiling it off fast pulling this load.”

Hod joined the twenty men who climbed onto the engine to scout ahead, and it wasn’t much more than a mile when they found the next tank, emptied. They piled out then and searched around till Idaho Shorty, who’d been a hoist operator for Amalgamated, found a pond and they set up a bucket brigade, all of them aware of the time lost to the deputy train as the mossy water sloshed from hand to hand. They climbed on again and backed up and recoupled, the men in the boxcars cheering, but now they had to go easy, hoping the boilerful would last them all the way to Billings. Hod stayed in the engine compartment, spelling the fireman, heaving coal into the scorching maw of the furnace.

The deputy train caught up outside Columbus, just where the rail cut over the Yellowstone River, yanking off a series of three short warning whistles maybe a mile behind them. Jim Harmon slowed to a stop, pulled off a long warning burst to tell the boys to stay put, then backed them up so the last boxcar was slap in the middle of the bridge. Hod jumped down, the engine still huffing wetly beside him, the river roaring below, walking to join the others hopping down from the boxcars and moving back to spill out on the bridge behind their train, facing the headlight of the posse’s locomotive as it slowed and stopped a hundred yards short.

Men with bayonets climbed out of the cabooses then and walked toward them, backlit, uncertain, seemingly leaderless. Orrin Wheatley had the Stars and Stripes the young girl give Hod and the boys spread it out and they got the Butte Miners’ Union flag out as well and began to discourse with the deputies.

“Go ahead and shoot,” they called. “We got nothing to shoot back with.”

“Man have to be yellow scum to shoot through the American flag.”

“Hope you fellas can swim,” the armed men called back, “cause we get holt of you it’s over the side.”

“You step near with them frogstickers, you gone end up sittin on em.”

The silhouettes shifted around before them, breaking into tentative knots of men who wavered forward and back, while Bill Hogan lined the boys up in three lines of attack.

“They start to fire, I suppose we’ll have to rush them,” he said, looking grim and very tired. “What’s your name, son?”

He was looking right at Hod. “Hod, sir. Hod Brackenridge.”

“Well, Sergeant Brackenridge, I need you to lead this first line.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But only if they fire.”

“Yes sir.”

“Surrender!” called one of the silhouettes.

“Surrender to who?” called Hogan after the jeers of his men had died down. Heated discussion in front of the posse’s headlight.

“We got a U.S. Marshal here,” called another voice.

“There been a federal crime committed?”

More heated discussion.

“There sure as hell been
some
thing committed!”

Mocking laughter now, soldiers calling the men with the bayonets a pack of sorry jailbirds and worse.

“You gone give up?” The first voice again.

“Sure are,” called Bill Hogan, stepping out in front. If they started shooting, Hod thought, Hogan would be the first to get it. And he would be the next. “We’re gonna turn ourselves in to the government. In
Wash
ington.”

A huge cheer from the working men then, and if there’d been rail ballast on the bridge to throw they’d have thrown it, so full of the Army and the rightness of their cause they could burst. There was yet more heated words from next to the deputy train and then the silhouettes began to melt away.

“Go back to Butte and starve to death, you yellow sonsabitches!”

“Dogs know when they’re whipped, all right!”

“Tell the NP they can pick up their train in Washington!”

But the posse’s engine just sat there blowing steam like the boss bull in a pasture, headlight glaring in their faces.

“Better load up, fellas,” said Bill Hogan. “This aint over.”

They piled back into the boxcars and called roll and set out, at a snail’s pace to conserve on water, followed at a not-so-respectful distance by the deputy train.

“If I known we be going this slow,” said Hack Tuttle, glumly watching the moonlit hills crawl by, “I’d of
mailed
myself to Washington.”

Hod isn’t sure how long the little man has been by his elbow, standing at the back rail of the ship, the little man whose face is a worse sight than his own.

“It was the dogs what done it,” says the little man, though Hod hasn’t asked. “There was a team carrying us up to Dawson. You seen how they run em—”

“I’ve seen a bit,” says Hod. “But I never traveled with them.”

“There’s a lead dog and he’s the boss. Run em all day for a scrap of salt fish that look like shoe leather. Only what they do is just throw it one piece at a time into the pack after they’ve unhitched em, and that boss dog he got to bully all the others off it, scarf it down quick without the others getting any, or else he’s not the boss dog no more. ‘Keeps em
keen
,’ says this English fella that runs the teams.”

“Dogs’ll fight over food,” says Hod.

“But it aint just the food,” says the little man. Deep scars pucker the side of his face, his lip split in two at the corner, one eye milky white. “It’s that they hate that sumbitch boss dog. Got the whip behind em and this dog they want to kill, that they’re all afraid of, in front where all they can think about is takin a bite outta his hind end.”

“But they run as a pack.”

The little man shakes his head. “It’s just red murder tied into traces. We was asleep by the fire when these two younger dogs went after the boss—they gang up like that sometimes, kill the old boss and then fight each other—and the scrap brung em right on top of us. I tried to push em away and one turned on me, like to chewed half my face off before I rolled him into the fire.”

Hod lets it sit for a long moment.

“Hard life up there,” he says finally. There are plenty other guys the little man could have picked to talk to. Like the bunch who brought their whiskey aboard and have stayed below dosing themselves with it ever since the steamer pulled out from Skaguay, the ones you figure in a year will be living from drink to drink. But no, he picked Hod, smelled something on him.

“Them gold fields run me good,” muses the little man, his dead eye toward Hod. “But didn’t nobody throw me a scrap of
nothing
at the end of it.”

The mayor was there with the crowd to greet the Wild Train steaming alone into the yard the next morning. The people had flags and food and there were Kodak bugs taking photographs of the historic moment, the Commonweal soldiers waiting for the mayor to finish his welcome speech. But when he got to the part about how Billings had been named for a fella that was President of the Northern Pacific Railroad somebody started shooting, and a couple deputies who’d snuck forward jumped onto the engine to grab Hogan and Jim Harmon. There were townspeople screaming and running and a couple hit who fell down and it was Hod, not thinking about what might happen, who led the counterattack. There was plenty lying around to throw—rocks and bricks and iron coupling pins—and with half the men from the town joining them it wasn’t long before the deputies give up their hostages and made a run to hole up in the NP roundhouse. The mayor had his sheriff arrest the couple of them that had been snatched by the crowd to keep them from being tore apart and then there was a rush to find another engine, as their last one was a sorry sight from the fusillade. It was like the whole town was in with them, men running home to get their rifles to make sure nobody else chanced in from the deputy train and women bringing a stew and the baker cleaning his shop out of loaves and this was a town that lived off the railroad, a town built by the railroad, and when it was discovered the water tanks here had been emptied too didn’t they ring the fire bell and set their pumper company to filling the new engine’s empty tender.