John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Big Ten grunts and they step into the barn. There is a family spread out around the bunks along the wall, a hungry-looking bunch with hair bleached near white from the sun and blue eyes so clear that at first Hod thinks they’re blind. His little pile of things is already laid out on the floor on a blanket, right beside Big Ten’s.

“We had to get settled,” says the one who looks like the father, scrawny and unshaven. Some of the anti-Manifesto crowd most likely, the kind where you can’t tell if the middling-sized girls are daughters or wives. Near a dozen of them if you count the twins chasing the cat across the floor and the one nursing from his mama on the bottom bunk. “Say if there’s anything you’re missing.”

Big Ten pokes his pile with the toe of his shoe, then wraps the corners of the blanket around it to make a bundle.

“Sorry,” says the man.

“Aint none of your fault,” says Hod. Scabs back in Montana had this look, hollow-ribbed people with their bodies set tense, staring big-eyed past the militia boys protecting them. They can always find somebody hungrier to replace you.

“We come in just this morning from Tooele,” the man says, “and he told us to get settled then get on out there in the field. Sorry to touch your belongins.”

Norm has the wagon hitched when they come out with their bundles. They climb onto the bed.

“Met your cousins,” says Hod, arranging his bundle so he can sit on it.

“No relations of mine.” Norm switches and the bay mare starts ahead. Norm looks like his old man, thin and hard-mouthed, dry as the soil. “It’s just you can’t be feeding Gentiles when your own turn up needing work.”

“I aint a Gentile,” says Big Ten, stretching out to lay his head on his own bundle. “I’m a Ward of the State.”

The people in Lehi barely poke their heads around the door before they close it again. There is no work for them at the stone works or the rolling mill or from any of the farmers who stop by the lumberyard, and the sugar works won’t hire again till harvest. Hod wonders if it would be any different if he wasn’t with the Indian, but mostly if they see a lone man knocking they think you’re on the bum and pull their pies in from the window. It is late afternoon by the time Hod and Big Ten get themselves hid in the ditch just south of the railyard.

“Eastbound or westbound?”

Big Ten lifts up as if to take in the lay of the land. “How much Utah is there to get through going west?”

“Bout the same as east, only it’s all desert.”

“Colorado, then.”

The tracks above the ditch have three rails, converted from narrow gauge and polished with constant traffic. They duck down and wait while a couple little bobtails hauling local freight and an engine hauling passenger cars pass by.

“When the last time you bought a ticket?”

“Can’t say,” answers Hod after a moment’s thought. “Me and the railroad got an agreement.”

“But only you know about it.”

The men laugh. Hod has been on the bum too many times, alone and without a job, and it is no good. Bad enough when the other citizens look through you, but when you got to pinch yourself to know you’re there—

“Freight coming.” Big Ten peeks up over the edge of the ditch. “Pulling a full load.”

“What line?”

“Denver and Rio Grande.”

Hod grins. “ Through the Rockies, Not Around Them. ”

“Don’t care how they go, long as we get clear from the Land of Milk and Honey here.”

They let the engine pass, sneezing short bursts of hot steam as it picks up speed, then scramble out of the ditch, bundles tied to their arms, and run up the bank to the railbed. This part always makes his heart pound. Big Ten grabs the side ladder at the head of a boxcar and vaults up on the stirrup below it, graceful despite his size, but the train is really rolling now, thousands of rumbling tons, an avalanche on wheels that Hod sprints to keep up with till the best he can do, panicking, is catch the grab irons at the back of the car and swing his legs up off the railbed.

The moment he is borne away he knows it is folly. Unless the train slows again he is stuck, no way up, no way around to the coupling that won’t put him under the wheels. Big Ten shoots a doleful look back, then hauls himself up the ladder with one hand, the other holding his hat on his head, and disappears. Hod watches the bank fly past, hoping for a spot soft enough it won’t kill him when he lets go. It is all jagged rocks and piles of crossties this close to the yard, and the wind shifts to blow black smoke back on him from the stack, cinders clattering against the boards and stinging his face. Only question now is which and how many of his bones are going to be shattered. Hod’s arms are trembling, just about to push away, when a rope made from clothes tied together dangles down above him. He makes a snatch for it and hopes that somewhere the Indian learned how to jerk a decent knot.

Big Ten has to grab Hod’s belt to get him over the top. Hod lies on his belly hugging the wood of the roof for a moment, catching his breath.

“Where’d you learn how to nail a rattler?” Big Ten hollers over the wind.

“Haven’t tried it for a while.”

It is a long train, maybe thirty cars, but the grade is flat and straight and anyone looking ahead from the doghouse cupola will see them. Hod lays his hand on Big Ten’s shoulder to steady himself, knees still wobbly, as they cross the roofwalk to the front of the car. The access hatch is open. Hod takes a last look as the engine swings left toward the Wasatch Range looming ahead, then squeezes through and climbs down.

The hold is crammed with jute bags full of grease wool.

“Bit gamey,” says Big Ten, “but she’ll be a soft ride.”

The odor of sheep is rank in the box, which rocks gently on the long turn, rails clicking underneath. There are towns ahead where there may or may not be work. At some point there will be railroad bulls to dodge and it will be cold and Hod has only a hard lump of bread wrapped in a handkerchief and seven dollars and change in his pocket. But for now they are moving, compliments of the D&RG, rolling on company iron to the Wasatch Mountains and Hod feels a warm rush of contentment course through him. Luxury to be neither here nor there but in the neutral embrace of travel.

“Can’t beat these side-door Pullmans for comfort.”

“Yeah,” answers Big Ten, shifting huge bags of fleece to make a bed, “we’re a pair of kings.”

After dozing a few hours the sheep-stink is too much and Hod climbs the ladder to put his head out through the access hatch. The train is climbing to the top of the world. They are well above the tree line and the mountain air is a sharp jab in his lungs as he hauls out and uses a grab iron to anchor himself and look down off the edge of the boxcar. Far below them there is a river twisting through a canyon, frothing white over rocks and shoals. An eagle drifts halfway between, making a perfect floating cross in the air, the late-day sun glistening on its back.

It has been pleasant enough the few times Hod has ridden the cushions, paying his fare and drowsily rocking in his seat with the countryside rolling past, but it never felt like this — clutching the back of his own great snorting beast, master of it all, the rails opening up ahead of him, opening, always opening. He sits, pasha-like, on the roof of a train climbing to the top of the world till he is chilled to the bone and has to crawl back in.

Big Ten is awake.

“We in Colorado yet?”

“No telling. It’s just mountains.”

“Never cared for the mountains,” says the big Indian, rolling up on an elbow. “We’re lake people.”

“Paddled your canoes.”