Train Dreams

5

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.

Much that was astonishing was told of the dogs in the Panhandle and along the Kootenai River, tales of rescues, tricks, feats of supercanine intelligence and humanlike understanding. As his last job for that year, Grainier agreed to transport a man from Meadow Creek to Bonners who’d actually been shot by his own dog.

The dog-shot man was a bare acquaintance of Grainier’s, a surveyor for Spokane International who came and went in the area, name of Peterson, originally from Virginia. Peterson’s boss and comrades might have put him on the train into town the next morning if they’d waited, but they thought he might perish before then, so Grainier hauled him down the Moyea River Road wrapped in a blanket and half sitting up on a load of half a dozen sacks of wood chips bagged up just to make him comfortable.

“Are you feeling like you need anything?” Grainier said at the start.

Grainier thought Peterson had gone to sleep. Or worse. But in a minute the victim answered: “Nope. I’m perfect.”

A long thaw had come earlier in the month. The snow was melted out of the ruts. Bare earth showed off in the woods. But now, again, the weather was freezing, and Grainier hoped he wouldn’t end up bringing in a corpse dead of the cold.

For the first few miles he didn’t talk much to his passenger, because Peterson had a dented head and crazy eye, the result of some mishap in his youth, and he was hard to look at.

Grainier steeled himself to glance once in a while in the man’s direction, just to be sure he was alive. As the sun left the valley, Peterson’s crazy eye and then his entire face became invisible. If he died now, Grainier probably wouldn’t know it until they came into the light of the gas lamps either side of the doctor’s house. After they’d moved along for nearly an hour without conversation, listening only to the creaking of the wagon and the sound of the nearby river and the clop of the mares, it grew dark.

Grainier disliked the shadows, the spindly silhouettes of birch trees, and the clouds strung around the yellow half-moon. It all seemed designed to frighten the child in him. “Sir, are you dead?” he asked Peterson.

“Who? Me? Nope. Alive,” said Peterson.

“Well, I was wondering — do you feel as if you might go on?”

“You mean as if I might die?”

“Yessir,” Grainier said.

“Nope. Ain’t going to die tonight.”

“That’s good.”

“Even better for me, I’d say.”

Grainier now felt they’d chatted sufficiently that he might raise a matter of some curiosity to him. “Mrs. Stout, your boss’s wife, there. She said your dog shot you.”

“Well, she’s a very upright lady — to my way of knowing, anyways.”

“Yes, I have the same impression of her right around,” Grainier said, “and she said your dog shot you.”

Peterson was silent a minute. In a bit, he coughed and said, “Do you feel a little warm patch in the air? As if maybe last week’s warm weather turned around and might be coming back on us?”

“Not as such to me,” Grainier said. “Just holding the warm of the day the way it does before you get around this ridge.”

They continued along under the rising moon.

“Anyway,” Grainier said.

Peterson didn’t respond. Might not have heard.

“Did your dog really shoot you?”

“Yes, he did. My own dog shot me with my own gun. Ouch!” Peterson said, shifting himself gently. “Can you take your team a little more gradual over these ruts, mister?”

“I don’t mind,” Grainier said. “But you’ve got to get your medical attention, or anything could happen to you.”

“All right. Go at it like the Pony Express, then, if you want.”

“I don’t see how a dog shoots a gun.”

“Well, he did.”

“Did he use a rifle?”

“It weren’t a cannon. It weren’t a pistol. It were a rifle.”

“Well, that’s pretty mysterious, Mr. Peterson. How did that happen?”

“It was self-defense.”

Grainier waited. A full minute passed, but Peterson stayed silent.

“That just tears it then,” Grainier said, quite agitated. “I’m pulling this team up, and you can walk from here, if you want to beat around and around the bush. I’m taking you to town with a hole in you, and I ask a simple question about how your dog shot you, and you have to play like a bunkhouse lout who don’t know the answer.”

“All right!” Peterson laughed, then groaned with the pain it caused him. “My dog shot me in self-defense. I went to shoot him, at first, because of what Kootenai Bob the Indian said about him, and he slipped the rope. I had him tied for the business we were about to do.” Peterson coughed and went quiet a few seconds. “I ain’t stalling you now! I just got to get over the hurt a little bit.”

“All right. But why did you have Kootenai Bob tied up, and what has Kootenai Bob got to do with this, anyways?”

“Not Kootenai Bob! I had the dog tied up. Kootenai Bob weren’t nowhere near this scene I’m relating. He was before.”

“But the dog, I say.”

“And say I also, the dog. He’s the one I ties. He’s the one slips the rope, and I couldn’t get near him — he’d just back off a step for every step I took in his direction. He knew I had his end in mind, which I decided to do on account of what Kootenai Bob said about him. That dog knew things — because of what happened to him, which is what Kootenai Bob the Indian told me about him — that animal all of a sudden knew things. So I swung the rifle by the barrel and butt-ended that old pup to stop his sass, and wham! I’m sitting on my very own butt end pretty quick. Then I’m laying back, and the sky is traveling away from me in the wrong direction. Mr. Grainier, I’d been shot! Right here!” Peterson pointed to the bandages around his left shoulder and chest. “By my own dog!”

Peterson continued: “I believe he did it because he’d been confabulating with that wolf-girl person. If she is a person. Or I don’t know. A creature is what you can call her, if ever she was created. But there are some creatures on this earth that God didn’t create.”

“Confabulating?”

“Yes. I let that dog in the house one night last summer because he got so yappy and wouldn’t quit. I wanted him right by me where I could beat him with a kindling should he irritate me one more time. Well, next morning he got up the wall and out through the window like a bear clawing up a tree, and he started working that porch, back and forth. Then he started working that yard, back and forth, back and forth, and off he goes, and down to the woods, and I didn’t see him for thirteen days. All right. All right — Kootenai Bob stopped by the place one day a while after that. Do you know him? His name is Bobcat such and such, Bobcat Ate a Mountain or one of those rooty-toot Indian names. He wants to beg you for a little money, wants a pinch of snuff, little drink of water, stops around twice in every season or so. Tells me — you can guess what: Tells me the wolf-girl has been spotted around. I showed him my dog and says this animal was gone thirteen days and come back just about wild and hardly knew me. Bob looks him in the face, getting down very close, you see, and says, ‘I am goddamned if you hadn’t better shoot this dog. I can see that girl’s picture on the black of this dog’s eyes. This dog has been with the wolves, Mr. Peterson. Yes, you better shoot this dog before you get a full moon again, or he’ll call that wolf-girl person right into your home, and you’ll be meat for wolves, and your blood will be her drink like whiskey.’ Do you think I was scared? Well, I was. ‘She’ll be blood-drunk and running along the roads talking in your own voice, Mr. Peterson,’ is what he says to me. ‘In your own voice she’ll go to the window of every person you did a dirty to, and tell them what you did.’ Well, I know about the girl. That wolf-girl was first seen many years back, leading a pack. Stout’s cousin visiting from Seattle last Christmas saw her, and he said she had a bloody mess hanging down between her legs.”

“A bloody mess?” Grainier asked, terrified in his soul.

“Don’t ask me what it was. A bloody mess is all. But Bob the Kootenai feller said some of them want to believe it was the afterbirth or some part of a wolfchild torn out of her womb. You know they believe in Christ.”

“What? Who?”

“The Kootenais — in Christ, and angels, devils, and creatures God didn’t create, like half-wolves. They believe just about anything funny or witchy or religious they hear about. The Kootenais call animals to be people. ‘Coyote-person,’ ‘Bear-person,’ and such a way of talking.”

Grainier watched the darkness on the road ahead, afraid of seeing the wolf-girl. “Dear God,” he said. “I don’t know where I’ll get the strength to take this road at night anymore.”

“And what do you think? — I can’t sleep through the night, myself,” Peterson said.

“God’ll give me the strength, I guess.”

Peterson snorted. “This wolf-girl is a creature God didn’t create. She was made out of wolves and a man of unnatural desires. Did you ever get with some boys and jigger yourselves a cow?”

“What!”

“When you was a boy, did you ever get on a stump and love a cow? They all did it over where I’m from. It’s not unnatural down around that way.”

“Are you saying you could make a baby with a cow, or make a baby with a wolf? You? Me? A person?”

Peterson’s voice sounded wet from fear and passion. “I’m saying it gets dark, and the moon gets full, and there’s creatures God did not create.” He made a strangling sound. “God! — this hole in me hurts when I cough. But I’m glad I don’t have to try and sleep through the night, waiting on that wolf-girl and her pack to come after me.”

“But did you do like the Indian told you to? Did you shoot your dog?”

“No! He shot me.”

“Oh,” Grainier said. Mixed up and afraid, he’d entirely forgotten that part of it. He continued to watch the woods on either side, but that night no spawn of unnatural unions showed herself.

For a while the rumors circulated. The sheriff had examined the few witnesses claiming to have seen the creature and had determined them to be frank and sober men. By their accounts, the sheriff judged her to be a female. People feared she’d whelp more hybrid pups, more wolf-people, more monsters who eventually, logically, would attract the lust of the Devil himself and bring down over the region all manner of evil influence. The Kootenais, wedded as they were known to be to pagan and superstitious practice, would fall prey completely to Satan. Before the matter ended, only fire and blood would purge the valley …

But these were the malicious speculations of idle minds, and, when the election season came, the demons of the silver standard and the railroad land snatch took their attention, and the mysteries in the hills around the Moyea Valley were forgotten for a while.