Perseverance

A Novel

Patrick Dearen

• Publisher: Eakin Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781681791029
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

It was 1932, the depths of the Great Depression, and thousands of desperate people rode the rails in search of jobs, homes, and hope. For some, the tracks were a road to nowhere, a dead end in a boxcar or under the wheels or in a sea of emptiness. Their fate seemed certain-until Ish Watson grabbed the rungs of a passing freight train bound for a dying relative on the Texas Gulf Coast.

He brought with him the traits bestowed by his rural upbringing?faith, conviction and dedication. But now he faced thundering wheels ready to mutilate and knife-wielding hobos restless to kill, a barreling train anxious to derail and railway "bulls" itching to shoot. Only here in life's trenches would he meet up with the dregs of society: the wayward and the runaways, the dope addicts and the prostitutes, the winos and criminals. The locomotive's black smoke drifted back down the line to cove them all like a shroud, but it was more than death they faced-for this train would not stop until it carried them all to their destinies.

And their only hope was Ish's perseverance.

This provocative novel, by a finalist for the Spur Award of Western Writers of America, may well challenge your perspective on life.

CHAPTER ONE

Alone and driven, I hugged a briary embankment below the railroad track and listened to the building thunder of an oncoming train.

The roadbed, cut back into a jutting hill and bending with it, threw the rails dangerously out over this gully—reason enough, I hoped, for the engineer to ease off the throttle. I waited until rubble began to slide down my collar, then I clambered up to face a wall of surging boxcars as big as houses. I was mere feet from the roaring wheels, driving relentlessly and clicking at rail joints. I saw the backdropped bluff in flashes with every passing coupling, and up-track I found more boxcars barreling around the curve like oil field drunks weaving down a street.

I ran with the train and passed a loose rail that screeched with the advancing tons. Still, the cars swept past, each an unbroken wall. Glancing back in hope of an open door, I suddenly feared the caboose would reel around the curve at any instant. In desperation, I singled out a ladder bearing down on me and timed a lunge. I seized a rung at eye level and the train jerked me from the ground. My legs flew back and slammed into the car’s undercarriage, and for a horrible moment I could feel the wheels at my feet and see myself beside the track with a bloody stump of a leg.

With a burst of strength and a primal cry, I righted myself, but it wasn’t until I planted my boots on the bottom rung that I felt a measure of safety.

I clung there and looked at the brushy gully hurtling by as the wind whipped my face and streamed my hair. Suddenly I remembered the railroad songs that had bonded me in a special way to my grandfather, and I felt such a sense of accomplishment that I almost forgot my worry and grief. I had hopped my first freight, and I was proud.

The boxcar rocked precariously, slamming my pack against the wall, and I climbed farther from the din of the wheels. Gaining the sloping roof, I felt the bite of cinders and tasted the black smoke that drifted down-track to settle over a long line of trailing cars. Standing to test the sway, I rocked to a sudden jerk as a coupling pulled tight. This was no place to be. I had to locate an open car, especially with those clouds boiling dark and threatening right over the locomotive’s smoke-stack.

Checking below the far rim and finding the door secured, I crept on to the rear of the car and studied the four-foot gap separating me from the trailing roof. Four feet or four inches, it wasn’t a spot to get caught off-balance, for the situation below didn’t look forgiving, not with the coupling and wheels storming over crossties blurred by speed. I took a moment to focus myself and jumped. I came down on my feet and then to a hand, a yard to the good. Brakemen may have been used to jumping cars, but I wasn’t.

I went on, finding only secured doors and making the jumps with increasing confidence, before hesitating where a roof gave way to a gap and then an open-topped gondola. Its four-foot wooden wall, trailing a dozen feet below and across that awful drop, shielded stacks of lumber, arranged so that open places waited.

At my toe was a ladder, falling away to the coupling, but I considered the blur of the track and took a deep breath before I started down. The closer I came to the union and the brake hose snaking below it, the greater the wheels clamored. Planting my feet on bottom and feeling the grate of metal, I studied the interlocking fingers swimming in one another’s grasp.

Keeping a hand on a rung, I reached for the gondola ladder but never found it.

A violent jerk. The bang of iron. The coupling snapping tight and snatching away my footing. To my startled cry the sun grew blinding and I was out of control.

The coupling crashed up and slammed into my ribs. I grasped at air with flailing arms. My leg met brake hose and caught it. Suddenly I was dangling upside-down under the coupling, one foot scraping gravel and ties at thirty-five miles an hour.

Jesus! Help me!

I clutched at the linkage and kept my head from bouncing off the ground, but the charging wheels were still in my face, ready to butcher. I was about to die, but nothing seemed real—not the bedlam of those wheels or the brilliance of the sun or the hand that reached down out of it.

“Hold on!”

Something seized my wrist, and I seized back.

“Come on! You’ve got to climb up!”

The voice was real, and so was the hand tugging at my arm—on the coupling knelt a girl with a firm grip on the gondola ladder.

Fighting free of the brake hose, I hooked an arm over the coupling and the world suddenly was right-side-up again. She guided my free hand to the ladder, and with her fingers still tight on my arm, I struggled half-dazed up the rungs after her. Seconds later, I crawled over the rim and fell on my side between stacks of two-by-fours.

I lay shaking and feeling the clatter of the wheels through the sawdust and floor. Sandy hair brushed my neck and I turned to see her kneeling over me. She was in her late teens, and she had sad, blue eyes and her smudged features were ashen and drawn, as if she hadn’t smiled in a long, long time. If it had been a happy face, it would have been a pretty one.

“Are you hurt?” she asked. Her voice was subdued, and it trembled with a lot more than unhappiness—it seemed to carry fear, deep-rooted and terrible.

“I don’t know.” I brought my hand up and found a knot on my temple. My shin throbbed and blood seeped through my pants. But most of all, my ribs hurt, right where the pack of tins had slammed.

I reached for a protruding two-by-four and winced as I sat up to lean back against the stack. With quaking fingers, I unbuttoned my shirt and found an ugly welt on my rib cage.

“If you can’t breathe deep,” said the girl, as quietly as before, “it might be broke.”

I’d taken plenty of deep breaths under that coupling. “I’ll be all right.”

But I wasn’t, for as I buttoned my shirt, I shuddered and a strange chill gripped me. Over the gondola rim, I could see the high wall of the boxcar and the rungs that dropped toward the wheels, and suddenly I was awed that I had come so close to dying. But I was alive, because of her.

For a moment, I stared into nothingness. “I . . . I didn’t think I was going to make it.” Then I felt drawn to those somber eyes. “Those wheels chewing you up—what an awful way to die.”

She lifted a trembling hand to her temple. “I guess,” she whispered as she hung her head.

She looked up quickly, as if realizing she had vocalized a thought not meant for me. Her words and bearing and pensive face all told me that something was wrong, but I was just too glad to be alive right then to dwell on it.

“I could’ve pulled you under, but you didn’t let go,” I said. “You don’t know how grateful I am.”

She looked at me as if she hadn’t heard something like that from anyone in a long time, and it lifted the sagging corners of her mouth a little.

“I’m Ish Watson. How about you?”

Before she answered, she lowered her gaze. It wasn’t the action of someone with a lot of self-esteem. “Nobody calls my name anymore,” she said meekly. “Rachel.”

I inclined an ear. “A nice, pleasant-sounding name—you’d look like a Rachel, if it wasn’t for one thing.”

She looked at me with those brooding eyes.

“A Rachel ought to be smiling. Maybe you could try it.” I managed a sincere one of my own, despite all that was going on inside me.

She wasn’t quite able to smile back, but at least my efforts energized her voice a little. “I didn’t know what to think when I heard you in trouble. I didn’t expect anybody to be around.”

“I’m a little surprised myself to find a girl here.”

She looked away with a slight shake of her head. “Sometimes everything’s decided for you.”

I didn’t have to hear it from somebody else—the events of the past few days had already told me how true that was. Then my own voice grew serious. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it.”

She looked at me as though she was surprised anyone would care. “Nothing that anybody can do anything about,” she said quietly. Crossing her arms as if suddenly cold, she hung her head yet again and slunk away to the deep-throated roll of thunder.

I noted her graceful figure as she disappeared around a stack of plywood. She seemed so broken and without hope, yet she had put herself in harm’s way for no other reason than to help a total stranger. Following her to the side of the car, I found her staring at the passing oaks and shivering, despite those folded arms.

“Say,” I said, rummaging in my pack. “I bet you could use a square meal.”

She looked at me. “I wouldn’t want to impose.” But I noticed that she studied the bread and tin of beans I withdrew.

“Where I come from,” I said, setting to work with my pocketknife, “if dinner’s on the stove and somebody drops by, you invite them in. Here, I’ve got plenty.”

A little reluctantly, she accepted. “It’s . . . nice of you to offer.”

I took out another tin for myself. “Sure.”

As the miles sped by and bright sunlight faded into shade, and shade into a dark curtain, we leaned against a lumber stack and ate. The bread quickly hardened in the wind, and we had to pour the beans down for want of silverware, but I hadn’t enjoyed a meal so much since my grandfather had last returned thanks at the dinner table. The truth was, I liked being near this girl, whose old work shirt and trousers couldn’t hide her femininity. Too, she was well-mannered, eating almost daintily despite her obvious hunger. I doubted that she’d learned such politeness wandering from pillar to post like a hobo. I wondered if, like me, she just had a case of the “shorts” and couldn’t afford a ticket right now.

“Where you headed?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Just . . . away.” She lowered her eyes. “Doesn’t matter much where. I was thinking maybe Houston.”

“Hey, I’m going to Galveston myself, just the other side of Houston. Left out from my folks’ over by Comanche. Where’s home base for you?”

She only shook her head.

“How about your folks?”

A glare came to her eyes and the tremble in her voice grew stronger. “That’s nobody’s business,” she said curtly.

A little embarrassed at being chastised, I quieted down and turned away. Then I felt her hand on my arm, and I looked around to find emotion wrenching her features.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to snap at you that way.”

I shrugged it off. “Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to explain yourself to anybody.”

She lowered the can and her head sank. “I . . . I had a . . . ” She swallowed hard. “My father, he’s dead now.”

I thought of my grandfather and mother, and understood. “I’m sorry, Rachel. I asked the wrong question.”

It was the first time I’d called her by name, and we searched one another’s eyes. For just a moment, there seemed to be communion between two scared and lonely people.

“You’re having a tough time, aren’t you,” I said.

She lowered her head again. “What do you care,” she whispered cynically.

With my own emotions on edge, I drew back, a little hurt. I looked away, thinking of those wheels and the hand that had pulled me from them. I would have died. I should have died. She was my link between everything that had gone before in my life and whatever would come after.

Turning, I suddenly felt a powerful and lasting bond with this troubled girl I didn’t even know. “I know how much losing somebody tears you up,” I said somberly.

Bitterness filled her eyes. “If they ever care about you, they die—the rest either hurt you or use you.”

I looked at her and didn’t know what to do or say. I didn’t even know if I had the right to say anything, considering how sheltered I had always been. Suddenly, I even felt a little guilty that I’d been so nurtured while she and others hadn’t.

But I went ahead and said something anyway. “The right kind of friend wouldn’t do you wrong.”

“I never had a friend like that,” she snapped as she looked away.

“You never know where you might meet up with one; it might even be under a moving tr—”

She whirled on me, as if unleashing anger and frustration long pent-up.

“I don’t need anybody! Not you or anybody else!”

Her words took me aback, and I could only stand there looking at her chin quiver and her face splotch red. Again, I didn’t know what to say, or how to say it.

“I—”

“Can’t you just leave me alone?” Then her voice dropped to that trembling whisper, only this time there was a sob in it. “Will you please just . . . go away?”

With a hand to her face, she turned away and seemed to grapple with her emotions. Then without another word, she crawled across lumber stacks to the trailing end of the gondola and dropped into an open space so that I could no longer see her.

I had upset her. She was a troubled girl who had risked her life to save me, and all I h...