Robert Wilson - Julian Comstock - A Story of 22-nd Century America

Had he fought decently, with a sense of style and grace, as I did, I’m sure I would have defeated him. But Lymon Pugh wasn’t educated in the art, and he used his scarred hands and arms as if they were clubs. I had countered only a few of these windmill punches before my own arms began to numb with the impacts. Pugh’s arms were as insensible as salted hams, however, and he used them to advantage, getting through my guard twice and finally rendering a blow so ferocious that my head filled with fireworks and my legs lost all direction.

Before I could regain my senses the fight was declared a victory for Mr. Pugh, who danced in circles, and waved his hat, and hooted like an ape in his triumph.

Sam and Julian helped me to a haybale at the rear of the car, where Sam applied a handkerchief to my bleeding face.

“I let my guard down,” I said thickly. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

“On the contrary,” Sam said. “Whether you know it or not, you did exactly the right thing. As far as these people are concerned, the haughtiness has been knocked out of you―you’re no better or worse than any of them now.”

That was a bitter consolation, however, and it provided little comfort as the raucous night roared on.

11

The reveling stopped at last, once the liquor began to tell on the revelers, who slumped and dozed under the indifferent gaze of the Travel Agents. I was eventually able to sleep, although my injuries, and the cold air keening through the cracks in the car, woke me from time to time.

There is something mournful and uneasy about waking up late at night on a moving train. The wheels clicked a bony rhythm, the engine growled like a distant Leviathan, and from time to time the whistle sounded a cry so lonesome it seemed to speak for the whole wide moonless night.

But there was an exception to this monotony of sound, and I should have paid greater attention to it. I was dreaming in a disjointed fashion of Williams Ford, and of Flaxie playing by the stream on a summer afternoon, when I felt the Phantom Car lurch to a slow stop.

There followed a clanking and a rumbling, and a silence, and more clanking, until the train started up again. I wondered if I should wake Sam, who was snoring nearby, and tell him about these events. But I was afraid of seeming naive. Sam had ridden trains often before in his career, and this was probably only another coaling stop or a pause in some switching yard where a branch road intersected the main line. The Travel Agents huddling in the glow of the stove seemed unalarmed, so I put the matter out of my mind.

The next day passed as the previous one had, though the men were sullen after their indulgence of the night before, and the smell of sickness hung about the privy hole and interfered with everyone’s appetite.

I was still smarting from yesterday’s battle. I spent the morning by myself, perched on a haybale and composing a letter to my parents, though the jarring of the railroad car made my handwriting childish.

I worked at it without interruption until Lymon Pugh came and stood in front of me, his legs planted like trees in the scattered straw. I didn’t like to see him there―I feared some fresh confrontation―but all he said was, “What are you doing?”

“Writing a letter,” I said.

He lifted his hat and smoothed the unruly knot of black hair beneath it. “Well, then,” he said. “A letter.”

This wasn’t much of a conversation, and I returned my attention to the page.

Lymon Pugh cleared his throat. “Listen here… do you take back what you said last night?”

I considered my response carefully, for I was not anxious to provoke him into another battle. “I meant no insult by it.”

“You called me a thief, though.”

“No―you misunderstood me. I only meant to explain my abstinence. The ‘thief’ is liquor, do you see? I don’t drink liquor, because it steals my sensibility.”

“Your sensibility!”

“My capacity for reason. It makes me drunk, in other words.”

“That’s all you were trying to say―that liquor makes you drunk?”

“That’s it exactly.”

He gave me a scornful look. “Of course liquor makes you drunk! I learned that at an early age. You don’t need to tell me anything about it, much less make a riddle of it. What’s your name?”

“Adam Hazzard.”

“Lymon Pugh,” he said, and put out his big scarred hand, which I cautiously shook. “Where are you from, Adam Hazzard?”

“Athabaska.”

“Cascadia, me,” he said. A true Westerner―Cascadia is as far west as you can go without wetting your feet in the ocean. “What do you call that hat you’re wearing?”

“A packle hat.” (A packle hat, for readers who haven’t seen one, has a disk of stiffened wool or hemp for the crown, attached to a tube of the same fabric, the tube being rolled up to form a brim, tied in place with threads.) “That’s a strange kind of hat,” he said, though his own hat, which resembled a sailor’s watch-cap picked over by moths, was nothing to brag about. “I guess it keeps you warm?”

“Warm enough. How did you come by all those scars on your arms?”

“I was a boner,” he said; and to my blank expression he added, “In a packing plant, in the Valley―the Willamette Valley. I boned beeves. That was my job―haven’t you ever worked in a slaughterhouse?”

“No; I missed that opportunity, somehow.”

“The beeves come along a line on hooks, and the boner cuts the muscle from the bone. You have to work close and fast, for a dozen other men are doing the same job on all sides of you, and the overseer brooks no slacking. But it gets hot in the boning room, and on wet days the air fogs, and the blood slicks your grip, so the knife is bound to go wrong sooner or later. Nobody lasts too long in that trade. Blood poisoning takes ’em, or they whittle themselves down so far they can’t hold a haft any longer.”

Ben Kreel, back in Williams Ford, had occasionally lectured us about the evils of Wage Labor, as opposed to the system of Leasing and Private Indenture. He might have cited this as an example, had he ever ventured near a packing plant in the Willamette Valley. “I suppose that’s why you left?”

“Yes; but it pains me,” Lymon Pugh said.

“The job, or the leaving of it?”

“I supported my mother there. I might have stayed, but I hear the packing industry out east has boomed just recently. My idea was to get a bigger wage and send part of it home.”

“That seems sensible enough, though your fingers might be whittled off as quickly in New York as in Cascadia.”

“I might get better work than boning, with luck. Canning, say, or even overseeing. But I had to leave in a hurry, is what galls me. I had an argument with the shift boss, which left him with a broken rib, and he would have had me arrested if I hadn’t collected what I found in his pockets and bought passage east. I didn’t have time to tell my plans to my mother―for all I know she thinks I’m dead.” He shuffled his feet. “Though I guess I could write her a letter.”

“Yes; you should―that’s exactly what you should do.”

“Except but that I can’t write.”

I told him he wasn’t alone in that regard, and that it was nothing to be ashamed of; but he wasn’t consoled. He shuffled his feet again and said, “Unless I can get a person to write it out for me.”

Now I understood his object in approaching me, and it seemed a reasonable enough request―better than risking another controversy, anyhow. So I offered to take his dictation; and Lymon Pugh grinned hugely, and insisted on shaking my hand again―a habit he ought to refrain from, I told him, for his grip almost crushed my fingers, and made it difficult for me to grasp the pencil.