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In those days, right after the close of the second world war, the northern boundary of our town was marked by four sets of rails on which, day and night, thundered the last of the great steam trains, each one laying a pallor of coal smoke over the town’s four blocks. Sometimes Albert and I would sit close up under the trestle over Turtle Creek, feel our guts quiver as the giants thundered overhead, and then collect the cooling iron clinkers thrown from the smoking stacks to use as ammunition for our homemade slingshots. He told me his dad would be coming back home on that train some day.
There were two Alberts in the Butterfield family, the father and young Albert, an only child, known as Kid. They weren’t the poorest family in town, but they were close. Providing for a wife, sick most of the time after the birth, had the elder Albert always trolling for the elusive dollar. Close in his wake, from the time he could walk, followed his son. The kid was as sturdy as his mother was frail; he had a paper route, mowed lawns, shoveled snow, weeded gardens. After his father left, whenever the freight signaled it’s afternoon approach, the Kid tended to drop whatever he was doing, captured by the rise and the fade of the whistle.
When the Kid was nine, in the early summer of the first year of the Korean War, his mother died. When my grandmother gently broke the news, he got up from the table where Grandma was making him a baloney sandwich with mustard and onion, the Kid’s favorite, and without a word, went off toward the tracks. She put the sandwich away for his return and went about setting Mrs. Butterfield’s house in order for the funeral. The rest of us followed the usual meanderings of a small town on a hot summer afternoon.
No one noticed that out on the trestle, on the tracks used by the afternoon westbound freight, Albert was stacking his red newspaper delivery wagon, three rusty tin buckets half-filled with roofing tar, a broken sawhorse, six empty cardboard cartons, three sectioned railroad ties, two bundles of old newspapers, three cement blocks, a bag of oily rags, and a dead limb torn from an oak tree. On the top branch, he tied his blue T-shirt so it flapped in the wind like a flag. Then he set the whole thing afire.
To the engineer, barreling into the sun’s glare at a mile a minute with a hundred and nine loaded flatcars, boxcars, coalcars, and a caboose rolling fast and hot behind two locomotives in full steam, the black smoke roiling up from the Kid’s blockade must have looked like the mouth of Hell. He dropped his hand from the deadman switch and yanked the throttle into full reverse.
Brakes clamped down on the whole long line of rolling stock. The screech and scream of breaching steam and tortured steel bounded across town in a fearsome, quavering wave. By the time the train shuddered to a stop, steam pouring from every vent, brake boxes smoking, the lead locomotive’s prow twenty yards short of the Kid’s oily blaze, the event had the attention of most all of the town.
A couple of brakemen shoveled sand on the smoking mess and dragged it off the tracks. The conductor jogged up the line to the town depot and telegraphed ahead. In an hour, two big railroad detectives in suits were asking questions. But by that time the Kid was out of sight in my grandmother’s kitchen finishing his sandwich. My grandfather talked earnestly to the men in the suits and finally they all shook hands.
The town drifted back to shady porches and interrupted chores. The detectives kicked at the smoldering debris, scribbled some notes, and climbed aboard the caboose. The fireman stoked up the idling engines, the engineer opened the throttle, and the freight slowly rumbled on west, two hours late, a few brake shoes still hot enough to smoke.
In different times, in another place, Kid Albert — parentless, penniless, homeless — would have been shipped off to an orphanage. Instead, we held a funeral and buried the Kid’s mother in a pine coffin and a donated cemetery plot. Summer wore into fall and the Kid was situated with my grandparents and then with my unmarried aunt. No one felt inclined to contact any social service agency. No one from any such place ever showed up asking about Albert, Jr.
The years passed and the Kid moved a few more times, welcomed into whichever of our town’s families had the charity and the room to give him a home. He worked his paper route, ran a muskrat trap line and sold his catch for two dollars a skin, hired out to local farmers in summer, helped stock shelves in my grandfather’s store on Saturdays. Folks liked the Kid and helped him past his sadness and guided him through his childhood.
Following high school, he joined the Marines. The year he made sergeant, he came home in his dress uniform for Thanksgiving and the town welcomed him with a big turkey dinner at the community hall. He was beginning his second tour of duty in a place he called the Nam, but he didn’t like to talk about it much. Around Christmas, the news suddenly was full of big battles won and lost. The turn of the new year brought us word the Kid was killed in action in a place called Hue.
After the honor guard slung their rifles and the flag covering the coffin was ceremonially folded, the town that raised him welcomed the Kid home one last time to rest beside his mother on the edge of a small town where a distant whistle still conjures up memories of a singular summer afternoon, a kid named Albert, and the rumble of a smoky freight train bound for somewhere just beyond a setting sun.
Copyright ©1997 by Russ Moritz. All rights reserved
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