Unfortunately, tonight, I cannot find the photo that inspired this next piece. I’ll update and post it when I find it.

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We hadn’t ever known anything but the yard. The sun reflected off the steel cars bright in our eyes. The dust from the cinders. We had gone where the work was. Our fathers laid the track that the Northern Pacific rolled on and now we replaced the tracks and coupled the cars in the dead of night under a moonless sky. We filled the cars with lumber from the mills, coals from the mines, an dour hearts and souls.

Me and Tommy and Roy. Met back in ’38 and had been on the rails since. Me, I started work in Billings when I was caught riding the rails by the yardman there. I had caught the train from Butte and was trying to get east, to Chicago, maybe. I was sixteen then, and he told me he’d give me a job, that riding the rails was dangerous for a boy like me.

I took the job in Billings and learned how to hook up the cars. By the time I met Tommy and Roy – they were cousins – my body was hard with work and we had all three of us grown our whiskers. We worked fourteen, sixteen hour days and were glad to do it.

It was July, 1947, when Tommy left the trains to Roy and me. He holed up with some broad in Alberton for a few days, and her father put him to work at the house. He musta took a shine to her, ‘cos he never did come back to the rails.

The day I remember, though, is a hot June in ’47. We had been working since four that morning and word was that another train was coming in from Spokane, and it was a real red ball. The west siding switch at Spring Gulch had been removed, so that meant a re-route, and the kingpins always acted surprised when that happened and they got to the bowl, though it had made the invoices by the deadline. I bunged my hand up pretty good, and Tommy wrapped it in my shirt he tore up for that purpose. Tommy’s boots were hurting him, and Roy was having a hard time standing up for want of sleep, and for his blatant disregard for rule G.

We had just finished preparing the Bozeman bound rig, and the engineer was making his final checks. He gave the highball, and the sun was bright and the sky was bluer than I remember it being again after that.

The whistle howled, long and low, and I leaned on Tommy and Roy was leaning up against the car and I was tired and happy and aware of being alive.