by Reed Karaim
“He sat down on the tracks.” The deputy sheriff had come up beside me. “They never even saw him. They were two miles outside of town when they radioed back and said they thought they might have hit something. It took them another mile to get the train stopped. Mac’s out there now, talking to them.”
Day and night, coal trains moved through Shannon, hauling lignite from the huge open-pit mines on the edge of the badlands to Minneapolis–St. Paul and on to the furnaces and mills of Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan, the great Midwestern engine of the nation. The trains were more than a mile long and moved with the gravity and momentum of planetary systems. If you were out in the country you sometimes saw them bisecting the world, an endless string of open cars, each with a dull black hump rising at the center, as if the crust of the earth were being shuffled west to east. When they came through town they could stop traffic for ten minutes. They never slowed down more than required by law and as soon as the engines cleared city limits they sped back up, the cars in the back rattling by in blurred succession like the frames of an out-of-focus film. I could easily believe it had taken them a mile to stop. Even after hitting someone.
“Who was it?”
Rain dripped off his hat. His eyes were young and confused.
“Tom Lund.”
He could tell I’d never heard of him.
“Old guy. Retired. Think he might have a daughter or something in town.”
I walked down to the siding, feeling the stones beneath my feet, a line of low sheds or small warehouses on the far side of the tracks decomposing in the rain. The rest of Shannon had vanished, leaving this nowhere land of rock and rain and men trudging with their heads down, as if they had been sentenced to march along these glistening rails disappearing into the distance for some crime that still shamed them. One of them was Paul Strand, the senior printer at the paper, middle-aged, with gray eyes and a flat businesslike face. I knew he was some kind of officer in the volunteer fire department but I’d never seen him outside the office before. He nodded, as if it was right I was there, and went back to staring at the siding along the tracks.
He took a step and stopped. He bent down and lifted something the color and composition of day-old steak but larger, the size of a forearm. The man walking with him averted his eyes and opened a heavy green trash bag. Paul dropped the thing in the bag and looked at me. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and rain ran down his face and dripped off his chin.
“There’s pieces of him all along here.” He nodded at the tracks disappearing into the rain. “You get hit by a train . . .”
He shrugged at the absurdity of it, or the sadness, or maybe just the misery of the job. I fell in beside him as he walked with his partner along the tar-black wooden ties protruding at right angles from rails polished as bright as new coins by the trains. The siding, rising toward the tracks, was angled and uneven, the stones damp. I walked carefully, afraid of what might appear beneath my feet, trying to see each and every stone before I set a foot down.
So focused was I on where I was stepping that I didn’t see two men emerge out of the fog until they were nearly alongside us. They carried another bag between them. It swung with each step, sagging with weight. The man in front stumbled on the wet slag, cursing as the bag hit the ground.
He pulled himself erect and when he lifted his end the bag split in the middle and the shoulder and remains of an arm, severed above the elbow, slid out and landed on the siding with a sodden thud. More would have followed, but the man in the rear dropped his end of the bag in horror and the severed arm and the shoulder settled on the gravel like a half-unwrapped birthday present. Tom Lund had waited for the train to hit him dressed in a new blue and gray flannel shirt.
• • •
I HAD BEEN a journalism student. I knew what I was supposed to do. I had to get reaction. I had to call the family. The deputy sheriff radioed Mac, the police chief, who knew their name and where they lived. He said they had been told. I tried to call them from the pay phone outside the café, but the line was busy. I tried three times and then I stood beneath the café’s overhang and watched the rain fall.
He had been sad. That was what his daughter had said when Mac told her. Tom Lund had been sad since his wife had gotten sick with cancer a year and a half ago. What was there to say beyond that? What was there to ask? Did I really want to do this? It felt like I had been playing at being a journalist, covering high school sports but nothing that mattered, taking part in some sort of harmless game that had, without warning, become too real. I stood there for a while, cold and wet and uncertain, before I ran through the rain to my car.
The house was in the older part of town, a small white two-story box with concrete steps and an entry that looked like it had been added on. Two-thirds of the houses in the Great Plains look just like that. I couldn’t find a doorbell. The curtains were drawn. No one had noticed me on the step. It would be possible, still, to turn around and drive away. I could choose not to do this.
I raised my fist. For a moment it felt as if it met some invisible resistance in the air, and then it came down, surprisingly hard, on the door.
• • •
I WAS WRITING the story when Art and Louise appeared beside my desk. Art was short, slightly plump. Standing there, they made up the classic mismatched comedy duo, short and tall, fat and thin, watery and fire-eyed, the paper’s very own Abbott and Costello, united in their concern about the responsibility that had suddenly landed in the hands of their twenty-year-old sports reporter.
“You talked to the Lund family?”
Art was a printer by trade; he loved the intricacy of machines, had a knack with them. People were more difficult. He had a gentle, almost childlike voice, and when he was nervous his speech slowed down, as if he found each word a mild embarrassment. It made him sound even more hesitant than usual, and he was the kind of guy who hesitated at hello.
I nodded. I was trying to hold on to the sentence I was writing.
“You got a picture?” Louise asked. “We need a picture.”
I nodded toward the Polaroid sitting on the right side of my typewriter. An old man stood behind a wheelchair occupied by his wife. He had a burr of white hair and a weathered face earned through a life of outdoor work. His arms were rope-thin, his spine as straight as a hammered-in fence post. He was leaning forward and his hands were on the shoulders of his wife, whose body had collapsed into the shape of an aged newborn. She sat crumpled and sideways in the voluminous wheelchair, her sunken, birdlike face averted from the camera.
“It’s the last one they have of him.” I saw the horror in both their eyes; obituaries were supposed to be a fresh linen draped over a life, not a police Polaroid that allowed you to see all the wounds.
“I also got this.” I slid the photo over to uncover a younger Thomas Lund sitting in a fishing boat along a dock, an uncomplicated smile on his face.
Art nodded with relief, but Louise was considering me with interest.
“You like the first one, Ricky?”
“I think so . . . yeah.”
“Why?”
It was a fair question. Why did I want people to see this?
“He sat down on the railroad tracks and let himself get run over by a coal train. He did it after spending three hours with his wife. Theresa, her name is Theresa. She’s dying of pancratic cancer. They were married forty-eight years ago last week . . .”
I looked at the paper in my typewriter. I had a page and a half written and another page or so to go. The piece wasn’t going to be long, but I knew it was the first meaningful thing I had written in my life, and I wanted to get it right. I wanted it to come together. I wasn’t going to tie everything up neatly, as if one thing explained the next, but if I could just lay it out properly—the anniversary celebration at the hospital, the new drugs for her pain that weren’t working, the hours by her side, the unmade bed in the attic room where Thomas Lund was staying with his daughter, and then the tracks, the rain, the fog, the fac
t no one had noticed him, not even the train’s engineers, until it was too late—if I could just work through this in the right order and say it properly, I thought there might be understanding and, if nothing else, at least the small dignity of having your story told for Thomas Lund, whom I had never heard of before this day.
“I just think it’s part of the story.”
Art rubbed his nervous hands together and looked at Louise, whose fiery eye was burning a hole through my forehead. She nodded and smiled.
“You’re the editor, Ricky . . . Wheee.”
They disappeared out the front door together. Maybe, I thought. For now. All I really knew was how much I wanted to finish the story and get it right. I was lost in the words on the page again when I felt a presence at my shoulder.
“Pan-creat-ic,” Anna said, so only I could hear. “Not pan-crat-ic. Pancreatic cancer.”
Chapter 4
SO OFTEN WE DON’T SEE THE THINGS that matter to the people who matter to us until too late. Anna had two children, a twelve-year-old boy and a younger girl, beautiful children I never paid any real attention to at the time. They lived on the frayed edge of Shannon on a street that ended on a bluff above a weed-choked ravine usually festooned with yellowing newspapers and other stray garbage. The Farmers Home Administration was, then, the federal agency that provided low-interest home loans to qualified—meaning poor—rural Americans. FmHA houses had a sameness about them, small ranch homes without adornment or grace. They were approved and built individually, but clustered, for some reason having to do with real estate values, in certain parts of town.
In Shannon they were on the north side of town, which was the direction of the prevailing wind and had a wild, Scottish moors feel about it. In winter the snow piled up shoulder-high against exposed walls. In the summer the dust blew in unimpeded for two hundred miles and the leaves on the trees had a gritty sheen.
I drove up there many times, several because Anna’s old Buick was always breaking down and she needed a ride (I would never have known if Christina, a waitress at the café and Anna’s friend, hadn’t told me about her car problems one day during lunch) and once because of the only party Anna ever threw—but that comes later.
What always struck me when I drove up was how desolate it was and how the homes felt more connected to the country than the town. At some point I learned Anna was from out there, the far western reaches of the state, where the land grows even more empty and harsh, the badlands with their bare-assed buttes and seamed-and-cracked terrain like some unpopulated backwater of the Greek underworld.
The windows in her kitchen, where I imagine her starting every day, looked backward toward her past, with nothing in between her and the place she had fled. I think about that now, and I admire, more than I had sense to at the time, how she walked out of her house with the quiet, chin-up determination I still remember, all these years later.
She didn’t have enough money, of course. None of us did. The newspaper came close to paying us with grocery coupons. But there wasn’t much to spend money on in Shannon, anyway. The best thing about the small, perpetually dying towns dotting the forgotten middle of the nation might be that it’s still possible to be poor in them with some dignity. Not that any of that registered at the time. I’d dropped out of school, was living in an abandoned dentist’s office without a fridge, driving a five-year-old Camaro, had barely enough spare change for pizza and beer, and was trying to believe, with the anxious and arrogant blindness of youth, that it signaled absolutely nothing about my future prospects.
And here was this woman, raising two children on no more than I was making. It had to be a life where every dime counted, where every choice had to be measured, and I never gave it the thought I should have. But then, there were a lot of things I should have paid more attention to that year.
• • •
THE FIRST TIME I picked Anna up at her home we drove past a little girl on a tricycle circling the concrete slab for a house that had never been built. She was wearing a stained pink jacket and a knit stocking cap, even though it was spring, and her long, pale hair flew sideways. There seemed to be no one watching over her.
“What does your family do, Eric?” Anna asked, staring out the window at the girl accelerating in an ever-tightening spiral.
“My parents are teachers. University professors. And yours, what do they do?”
“They pretend to ranch.”
“Ah,” I said because I decided it was some kind of joke. “Unicorns.”
“Something like that.”
We drove on down the hill and had nearly reached Main Street when Anna said, “We need to go back.”
“You forgot something?”
“The little girl. We need to go back. There was no one around, and I’ve never seen her before. We need to go back.”
I looked at her and, for the first time, it really registered how pretty she was. Very, very old to a twenty-year-old, of course, quite possibly older than thirty, and with children—odd little creatures she had given birth to with, I imagined, some western-cowboy-type-guy in the distant past—but definitely pretty, maybe even beautiful, oval face, dark, liquid eyes framed by the twin arches of heavy but not oppressive brows. She was slim and small, but not too small, not one of those china-doll women, not fragile, but self-contained and somehow sturdy, despite her size. Her hair was a lustrous mahogany that went coal-black in the sun and her skin had a faintly olive tone, a shadow of Mediterranean color that marked her off from the vanilla-skinned Scandinavians that clogged the local gene pool. Her eyes were the thing you noticed, but her lips were also unusually dark, the color of spilled wine.
Still, she was much older, and my coworker, and I had an overly developed sense of propriety about these things, so I put her lips and all the rest out of my mind.
We drove back up the hill and the little girl was gone. Anna stood on the abandoned concrete slab and turned slowly in a circle, as if she might spot her in the distance.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. “She just went home.”
“I never saw her before. My kids play with the other kids.”
“She’s probably just visiting.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then they’re new.”
“Maybe.”
I had a chamber of commerce story to write and I wanted to get to the office, but there was something about the way Anna stood there on that godforsaken abandoned slab.
“We can knock on some doors, if you want.”
It was cold. She had her arms crossed, hugging herself, and I noticed the sleeves of her blouse were too long; she held the end of each one in place in the palm of her hand so they didn’t slide back.
“It’s okay,” she said, as if we had failed somehow. “We tried.”
Now I felt stubborn.
“No, we can check. We’re reporters.”
Anna smiled the distant and quietly sad smile I would come to know so well, the one that felt as if she weren’t smiling at you, but at some slightly awkward joke she remembered from long ago.
“People don’t care that much, Eric. Not really. It’s unicorn ranching. And I have retired. It was just silly. I’m sure she’s fine.”
She led the way back to the car, and so much of everything I needed to understand about her was right there.
• • •
I WAS YOUNG. This will be my reoccurring excuse, and here I offer an additional defense: my thoughts, at the time, were elsewhere. I had agreed to take over a small newspaper, without any real idea what that meant.
What it meant was several things, but small newspapers, first and foremost, are about gossip. The social notes, a record of the most mundane small-town comings and goings—Mildred Olson visited Loraine Lillehaugen Sunday at the Shady Acres Home for the Retired . . . The regular meeting of the Busy Bees Quilting Society met at Colleen Polka’s Tuesday—were handled by Edith Swenson, a tall, older woman with iron-gray hair and fiercely square shoulders,
who showed up on Tuesdays, a couple of days before we went to press, and sorted through the handwritten scraps of paper that had been dropped off at the front desk. Edith had lived in Shannon since the days of wild bison wandering the prairie and seemed to know much of the social news in advance, as if by osmosis. Most importantly, she knew the correct spelling of every single family name in the county.
Next to The Family Circus, the social notes were the most popular thing in the paper and filled up one of the back pages. The front page and the jump page were the editor’s—now my—responsibility. Sports generally had one page. That left the middle pages, largely filled with the routine events—rotary club meetings, fund-raising breakfasts, high school award winners—that small-town papers pretend are news. Depending on my desperation, any of these items could be elevated to the front, but in general they filled up the inside.
Those were Anna’s pages and she tended to them as she had before I took over, writing short, simple, straightforward stories. To be honest, at first I don’t think it really occurred to me that she worked for me. Later, I would get her to write longer features about local events and oddball characters, always a plentiful resource in backwater towns, and the unaffected nature of her prose would come through. She wrote clearly and precisely, and these are no small things. I wish now I had told her that more forcefully. She was invisible inside her own stories, so no one paid them much mind, but they were good. She had an unclouded eye. Nobody gives a shit anymore in America about the people quietly paying attention, but that was Anna.
Of course, part of the reason nobody noticed might have been that so much of what we did was so mind-numbingly boring that paying close attention was akin to sensory deprivation. Chronicling life in Shannon was a lot like waiting for the seasons to change in Antarctica. The penguins might notice it’s warmer, but, really, it’s cold, it’s white, and that glacier off to the north looks pretty much the way it has for the last ten thousand years.