Denis Johnson - Train Dreams

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.