John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“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.”