Denis Johnson - Train Dreams

At just about the time Grainier discovered a rhythm to his seasons — summers in Washington, spring and fall at his cabin, winters boarding in Bonners Ferry — he began to see he couldn’t make it last. This was some four years into his residence in the second cabin.

His summer wages gave him enough to live on all year, but he wasn’t built for logging. First he became aware how much he needed the winter to rest and mend; then he suspected the winter wasn’t long enough to mend him. Both his knees ached. His elbows cracked loudly when he straightened his arms, and something hitched and snapped in his right shoulder when he moved it the wrong way; a general stiffness of his frame worked itself out by halves through most mornings, and he labored like an engine through the afternoons, but he was well past thirty-five years, closer now to forty, and he really wasn’t much good in the woods anymore.

When the month of April arrived in 1925, he didn’t leave for Washington. These days there was plenty of work in town for anybody willing to get around after it. He felt like staying closer to home, and he’d come into possession of a pair of horses and a wagon — by a sad circumstance, however. The wagon had been owned by Mr. and Mrs. Pinkham, who ran a machine shop on Highway 2. He’d agreed to help their grandson Henry, known as Hank, an enormous youth in his late teens, certainly no older than his early twenties, to load sacks of cornmeal aboard the Pinkhams’ wagon; this favor a result of Grainier’s having stopped in briefly to get some screws for a saw handle. They’d only loaded the first two sacks when Hank sloughed the third one from his shoulder onto the dirt floor of the barn and said, “I am as dizzy as anything today,” sat on the pile of sacks, removed his hat, flopped over sideways, and died.

His grandfather hastened from the house when Grainier called him and went to the boy right away, saying, “Oh. Oh. Oh.” He was open-mouthed with uncomprehension. “He’s not gone, is he?”

“I don’t know, sir. I just couldn’t say. He sat down and fell over. I don’t even think he said anything to complain,” Grainier told him.

“We’ve got to send you for help,” Mr. Pinkham said.

“Where should I go?”

“I’ve got to get Mother,” Pinkham said, looking at Grainier with terror on his face. “She’s inside the house.”

Grainier remained with the dead boy but didn’t look at him while they were alone.

Old Mrs. Pinkham came into the barn flapping her hands and said, “Hank? Hank?” and bent close, taking her grandson’s face in her hands. “Are you gone?”

“He’s gone, isn’t he?” her husband said.

“He’s gone! He’s gone!”

“He’s gone, Pearl.”

“God has him now,” Mrs. Pinkham said.

“Dear Lord, take this boy to your bosom …”

“You could seen this coming ever since!” the old woman cried.

“His heart wasn’t strong,” Mr. Pinkham explained. “You could see that about him. We always knew that much.”

“His heart was his fate,” Mrs. Pinkham said. “You could looked right at him anytime you wanted and seen this.”

“Yes,” Mr. Pinkham agreed.

“He was that sweet and good,” Mrs. Pinkham said. “Still in his youth. Still in his youth!” She stood up angrily and marched from the barn and over to the edge of the roadway — U.S. Highway 2—and stopped.

Grainier had seen people dead, but he’d never seen anybody die. He didn’t know what to say or do. He felt he should leave, and he felt he shouldn’t leave.

Mr. Pinkham asked Grainier a favor, standing in the shadow of the house while his wife waited in the yard under a wild mixture of clouds and sunshine, looking amazed and, from this distance, as young as a child, and also very beautiful, it seemed to Grainier. “Would you take him down to Helmer’s?” Helmer was in charge of the cemetery and, with Smithson the barber’s help, often prepared corpses for the ground. “We’ll get poor young Hank in the wagon. We’ll get him in the wagon, and you’ll go ahead and take him for me, won’t you? So I can tend to his grandmother. She’s gone out of her mind.”

Together they wrestled the heavy dead boy aboard the wagon, resorting after much struggle to the use of two long boards. They inclined them against the wagon’s bed and flopped the corpse up and over, up and over, until it rested in the conveyance. “Oh — oh — oh — oh—” exclaimed the grandfather with each and every nudge. As for Grainier, he hadn’t touched another person in several years, and even apart from the strangeness of this situation, the experience was something to remark on and remember. He giddyapped Pinkham’s pair of old mares, and they pulled young dead Hank Pinkham to Helmer’s cemetery.

Helmer, too, had a favor to ask of Grainier, once he’d taken the body off his hands. “If you’ll deliver a coffin over to the jail in Troy and pick up a load of lumber for me at the yard on Main, then take the lumber to Leona for me, I’ll pay you rates for both jobs separate. Two for the price of one. Or come to think of it,” he said, “one job for the price of two, that’s what it would be, ain’t it, sir?”

“I don’t mind,” Grainier told him.

“I’ll give you a nickel for every mile of it.”

“I’d have to stop at Pinkham’s and bargain a rate from them. I’d need twenty cents a mile before I saw a profit.”

“All right then. Ten cents and it’s done.”

“I’d need a bit more.”

“Six dollars entire.”

“I’ll need a pencil and a paper. I don’t know my numbers without a pencil and a paper.”

The little undertaker brought him what he needed, and together they decided that six and a half dollars was fair.

For the rest of the fall and even a ways into winter, Grainier leased the pair and wagon from the Pinkhams, boarding the mares with their owners, and kept himself busy as a freighter of sorts. Most of his jobs took him east and west along Highway 2, among the small communities there that had no close access to the railways.

Some of these errands took him down along the Kootenai River, and traveling beside it always brought into his mind the image of William Coswell Haley, the dying boomer. Rather than wearing away, Grainier’s regret at not having helped the man had grown much keener as the years had passed. Sometimes he thought also of the Chinese railroad hand he’d almost helped to kill. The thought paralyzed his heart. He was certain the man had taken his revenge by calling down a curse that had incinerated Kate and Gladys. He believed the punishment was too great.

But the hauling itself was better work than any he’d undertaken, a ticket to a kind of show, to an entertainment composed of the follies and endeavors of his neighbors. Grainier was having the time of his life. He contracted with the Pinkhams to buy the horses and wagon in installments for three hundred dollars.

By the time he’d made this decision, the region had seen more than a foot of snow, but he continued a couple more weeks in the freight business. It didn’t seem a particularly bad winter down below, but the higher country had frozen through, and one of Grainier’s last jobs was to get up the Yaak River Road to the saloon at the logging village of Sylvanite, in the hills above which a lone prospector had blown himself up in his shack while trying to thaw out frozen dynamite on his stove. The man lay out on the bartop, alive and talking, sipping free whiskey and praising his dog. His dog’s going for help had saved him. For half a day the animal had made such a nuisance of himself around the saloon that one of the patrons had finally noosed him and dragged him home and found his master extensively lacerated and raving from exposure in what remained of his shack.