13
WHETHER IT WAS SIX months after that or longer I couldn’t be sure, but it might have been a year, because I was catching one out of Chattanooga for the South, and that looks like winter coming on. A guy on the road, he goes plenty of places most of the time, but when the leaves begin to fall he heads for the Gulf. Anyway, there they were, about two hundred dirty buzzards squatting on the ties, spaced out along the Atlanta Division of the Southern, just outside the yards, waiting to hop on. Hardly anything was moving then, so it was the first through freight in a week, and they meant to get out of there. Nowadays they’d thumb the highways, and if a few ride the trains the crews hardly bother them at all, so they can hop one in the yards. But then the country was crawling with hobos, and nobody would give them a lift, let them on a train, or give them a break of any kind. If they wanted out, they hopped a moving train, so that’s why they were there, waiting. Not much was said. Hobos don’t mix, they don’t look at each other, and they don’t talk, something I didn’t understand at first, but was to get a clear idea of, later.
Pretty soon, from the yards, came the cough of an engine, then three more, spaced out slow, then a string of quick barks that meant she was spinning her wheels, starting a heavy train. The coughs and the barks kept on, and then there she was, pulling hard, showing the two green flags of a through train, the one we wanted. Everybody got up. She began going by and they began going aboard, on tanks, gonds, or whatever they could grab. Some refrigerators went by, or reefers, as the hobos call them, and six or eight guys made a dive, because the ice compartment is a pretty good place to ride. But then they began dropping off again, on other guys’ feet, and it was like cats fell on monkeys. A hobo, he grabs the front end of the car, because if he gets slammed, it’s against the side and there’s no great harm done. But on the rear if he get slammed it’s against the thin air between cars, and he’s almost certain to pitch down under the wheels, which isn’t so good. It was just dark enough that these guys hadn’t noticed the reefers were coupled with the ladder at rear, so they had no way to get topside to go down the hatch. So they had to pile on all over again, somewhere else. Me, I generally picked a flat, and that’s what I did now. It’s easy to board and easy to leave, and if it’s a little open to the breeze you can help that a little with newspapers, and at least nobody’s penning you in. I hated it, that I would have a system for such a miserable thing as life on the road, with a canteen on my hip, papers under my arm, and blue jeans over what was left of my clothes, but if you get cold enough, you’ll do what you have to do to get warm, whether you hate it or you don’t hate it.
I took the front end, where there was a little quiet air, and spread my papers out, two or three on top of each other so they were thick, and lay down on one edge. Then I rolled a little, so they were around me, and then I was warmer. Then, on my head, I felt something cold. Then I felt it again. Then I knew it was rain, and cussed myself out for not grabbing a reefer too. There wasn’t but one thing to do. Ahead was a tank car, so I rolled my papers up, stepped over, slipped under the tank, and lay there trying to keep as dry as I could.
Then, after some little time, the train checked speed. Then, away up front some place, I heard somebody yell. Then there was more yelling. Then it got closer, and I could tell it was guys on the right of way. Then we began to go by them, while they stood there and yelled curses, out there in the rain, the worst you could ever think of, at the train crew, at the railroad, at the country, even at God. And then I knew what the reason was: They had taken it up, here in the East, what they were already doing on Western roads, letting the mob hop on, as they pretty well had to, unless they were going to hire a private army to keep it off, but then, after they’d run a little way, cutting the speed of the train, so it was slow enough for guys to drop off, but too fast for them to climb back on. Then the bull would start at the tender, and come back doing his stuff. Maybe you don’t believe it, that they’d drop two or three hundred men off in the rain, with no place to go and no way to get there. Well, they did it just the same. It made your blood run cold, the things that were said, and your stomach turn sick, to realize why they were said, but however it made you feel, it was no great help when it came your turn to drop. I lay low, but the bull flashed his light, and when I didn’t answer his “hey” he got tough: “It’s O.K., Bud, if you want to lie there, but I’m telling you to get up and get off, because it would be just too bad if I decided you were some kind of a critter and began popping at you with this gun...
When my feet quit stinging from hitting the dirt, I stood there and cursed too. By now, I guess you know I’m not the yelling type, and in fact it might be better for me if I didn’t keep things bottled in me so tight. But there come times when you’ve taken all you can take. By the water that was running off my nose, by the hunger that was gnawing at my belly, by cold that was creeping into me, I knew I couldn’t get lower than I was that night. I was a human coffee ground, washing down the sink.
Pretty soon the yelling died down, and guys began pushing past me, slogging back to Chattanooga, some of them sobbing as they went. I started back with them, but then after a few steps I began to dope things out, and turned around. As well as I could figure, we were nearer Dalton by several miles than we were to Chattanooga, and I was taking a chance on it. It was just a small place, but it looked like, if I kept my mouth shut so I didn’t bring any gang with me, I might do as well, at least for something to eat and a place to flop, as in a bigger place.
The train, I guess, rolled nearly a mile while the bull was throwing the guys off to where he came to me, so the boss and I were passing each other for at least twenty minutes. Sometimes we’d bump, and they’d cuss, and maybe sock. But they generally had so little on the punch I didn’t sock back. After a while I passed what seemed to be the last of them, and then the rain began coming down to mean it, and I jammed the papers under my jeans, so if I needed them again they wouldn’t be so wet. Then I heard two guys talking, off to one side: “Come on, fellow! You can’t lay there like that! You got to get up and—”
“God damn it, I said let me alone!”
“But that’s no way to talk.”
“Then beat it.”
“If your foot hurts, then—”
“It’s shot. And I’m shot, and—”
“But there on the ground, on a night like this, you’ll die! You don’t know how cold it’s going to be! You—”
I made myself not hear it and went on. Off to the right there was rising ground, and I veered toward it to get out of the water in the path. I ran wham into something that sent me sprawling to the ground. I sobbed at how my toe shot fire up my leg, and jumped up and kicked at the thing. Then I went on. Then I almost ran into another one. Then it soaked into my head what I had run into. It was a couple of tool chests, six or eight feet long, with slanting lids on them. I thought of the guy back there, and how if he could get into one of these things he’d at least be out of the wet. I began telling myself to get on, or I’d be shot too. But before I got to the path again my foot hit something and I almost died at the pain in my toe that time. But my ear kept giving it to me, the clank I had heard, and then I went back. I felt around and found it was an open box of spikes. I kept mumbling to hell with the guy, to get on before I died too, but I took a spike and felt my way back to the first box and slipped it in under the hasp of the lid and pried. The staple flew out and off on the ground. I lifted the lid and felt around in the chest. It was empty.
“All right, grab his feet, get between them, and hold them so he can’t kick. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“I got ’em, big boy. Say when.”
“What are you getting ready to do to me?”
“Up with him!”
“Let’s go!”
I lifted him under the arms from behind, the other guy by locking fingers under his knees, and we swung him along, me shambling backward. When we got to the chest we set him down and I opened the lid again and spread out my pape
rs, that I had dropped inside, so he could keep warm. Then I climbed in, reached over, got my grip under his arms again, and lifted. At last, then, we eased him down on something dry. So he’d be out of the wet I climbed out and we dropped the lid on him. He screamed and yelled like some kind of he-devil inside a bass drum, and called us every name there was. At last we tumbled to it that he thought we were going off and leave him there to die. I said: “Well, what do we do now?”
“Search me. I run into him this afternoon in the jungle there by the water tank and he was pretty far gone then, what with that raw place he had on his foot, but I talked to him and finally got it through his head that no real hobo would let a thing like that get him down, and at last I pumped enough guts in him to get him aboard the train. Then on the coal gond he got off a lot of wild talk about how his folks have a store in Sandusky and he graduated from high school and run a power shovel on a road job in Denver and then got laid off last winter and never was tooken on again, until I got sick of it. I said: ‘Well, for the love of Pete, you and who else? You think you got it all to yourself? You think so, eh?’”
But when I heard some bumping in there, and then the lid was shoved up and he stuck his head out, I was a little on his side, because if there was one thing I wouldn’t accept it was the idea of being a professional hobo. So I thought a minute, and then I said: “I got an idea.”
“Yeah? What is it?”
“Feel the end of this box.”
“O.K., I got it.”
“The way I figure it, the lid and front and back and bottom of this thing are nailed to the ends, not the ends to them. That means, if we got inside there, and braced ourselves against the back, with our feet against the front—”
“Right!”
So that’s how we did it, this guy that had helped me at one end, me at the other. We kicked with our heels hard against the boards in front, and in between we shoved. Pretty soon they began to give, slammed down in the mud, so at last, even with one guy lying against the back, there’d still be room for the other two to sit facing each other at each end, out of the wet, but at the same time with fresh air, so it wouldn’t be like any coffin, which I suppose it was, more or less, if you were shoved in there all alone. I sung out to watch the nails that were sticking up, and then I raised up beside Mr. Grievous, where he was still standing in the middle. “Now, my young friend, I’ve had about all out of you I’m going to take. There’s some kind of a bed for you here, and if you keep still and do what you’re told you can keep warm and even get yourself a little sleep. After that, when we get some light on the subject, we’ll see what can be done about your foot, and maybe get you to Dalton. Until then, if you don’t want a bunch of fives in the kisser suppose you lie down and shut up and give other people some peace. And while you’re making up your mind—”
I let him have it, not hard but hard enough, high on the chest. He went down and started crying. “Stop that.”
We eased down the lid, the other guy and I, put our backs to the ends, and sat there. It was a God-awful place to spend the night, but at least we could stretch our legs and pull papers over them, and we were out of the wet. “What’s your name, fellow?”
“Hosey.”
It’s only now, writing it, that I’ve tumbled his name was really Hosea. At the time, it seemed like Hosey, so I’ll let it stand. “Mine’s Jack. What’s his?”
“He said call him Buck.”
“Pleasant dreams, guys.”
“Same, Jack.”
“Go to hell, you bastards!”
But the cold was knifing in and my back ached, and I thought if I couldn’t stretch out I’d crack up too and maybe not last. “You asleep, Hosey?”
“What do you think?”
“There’s another tool chest up there.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
We went out, shivering where the rain beat down on us, and I took my spike, and we pried the staple out of the other box pretty quick. But when we lifted the lid it was all full of shovels. “Shall we throw them out, Jack?”
“We and who else?”
“One hell of a job.”
“Let’s go back.”
We dropped the lid again but something fell over inside with a clatter. “Raise her up again, Hosey. We better have a look.” What it was, was a couple of buckets that had been used for cement, and then stacked one inside of each other. We went back to the other box and sat some more, but then something in my head began talking to me about those buckets. So I got busy. I went out, stumbled along, and pretty soon came to my box of spikes. I grabbed three or four in each hand and came back. Then, keeping out of the wet as well as I could, I felt for the end of the nearest board we had kicked off the front, held a spike there. I beat on it to drive it in. I drove more thumb than spike, and my hand was all cut and bruised next day from the mislicks, but I got it in an inch or two, until with my finger tips I could feel a crack. I left that first spike sticking up, took another spike and drove it in the same way, along the fine of the crack. I used spikes like a rail-splitter uses wedges, and when I started in with the third spike the board cracked like a shot two or three times. Then I jumped out there in the rain, grabbed the two-inch strip that was splitting away, and pulled. It came clear. I started in on the next two-inch strip. “What you doing, Jack?”
“Breaking wood for a fire.”
“In this rain?”
“In those buckets it’ll burn.”
“That’s right. By punching holes in them—”
“We got a brazier.”
He helped, then, splitting up one board while I worked on another, until we had six or eight two-inch strips drying under the lid. We took them over to the track. Then one at a time we put them under the rail, heaved up till they broke, then did it over again, until we had three or four armfuls of wood in pieces maybe a foot long. Then we punched holes in the buckets the same way we had split the boards, using one spike for a punch and the other for a hammer. Then we stuffed one with paper and wood, put the other one on top, and lit it. Then we had the one pretty thing we had seen that night: orange light through the holes. Then there was the sound of wood steaming, then a loud crack, then another and another. Hosey looked at me, then took off some kind of a thing that was supposed to be a hat. He was a tall, thin guy, maybe thirty, maybe forty, maybe fifty, with those queer, bright eyes old hobos have, that at first look friendly, till you see it’s the friendliness of a scavenger dog. But I took off my hat too and we warmed our hands.
“... There’s a snake under this goddam box! It’s crawling through that knothole!”
“Buck! After all Jack’s done for you I’d—”
“Hosey, he’s right. There is a snake down there, and the main purpose of the fire, of course, is to tempt and entice and decoy the snake, so he’ll raise up through the knothole, and then Buck can bite off his head, accomplishing the double objective of getting something to eat and obtaining snake oil to put on his foot and—”
I was making it up as I went along, but Hosey kind of grinned, and I might have run on quite a while, I don’t know. But just to give it some routine, I put my finger down the knothole. And when something touched it that was cold and soft and wet, I yelled. “Well, ain’t you the funny son of a bitch. Get yourself a kazoo, why don’t you, and play tunes at it, and then when he sticks his head up you bite his head off and squeeze his ribs for oil—come on, Jack, why don’t you laugh?”
“Starting up again, are you?”
“Oh, I ain’t dead yet.”
With him jawing at me and Hosey looking first at me and then at the hole, I had to do something. I picked up a spike and went around behind. Of course, pitch dark as it was and wet as it was what you could see was nothing at all. But I lit a match, and it spluttered out but the flash was enough to give me the lay of the land. The chest had been set on top of a little rise, but behind it the ground fell away into bushes and grass, and it was a little gully, just a crease in the dirt, maybe a foot wi
de and six or eight inches deep. It looked like something must have crawled in there to get out of the rain, but what to do about it I didn’t quite know, and fact of the matter, if it hadn’t been for the razz I’d just taken, I probably wouldn’t have done anything. But I kneeled down and lit another match. Then the ground gave way, and before I could get up I felt it coming toward me, whatever it was. I heard a squeal, grabbed, stood up with him, and then went running around with him to the fire. Sure enough, he was just what my ears had told me he’d be: a little piney woods rooter, as they call the wild pigs in the South, maybe three or four weeks old, kicking and squealing and biting. “Hosey!”
“Yes, Jack.”
“Reach in my right-hand pants pocket, get the shiv in there, take it out, and open it.”
“O.K.”
“Hand it to me.”
“Here it is.”
“Stand clear. I’m going to stick him.”
I’d never stuck a pig in my life, but there’s plenty of things you can do if you get hungry enough. I jabbed the knife into his throat, then held him by one hind foot and went over to the track with him, so we wouldn’t have the blood so near. I had no more feeling about it then than if I was emptying a bottle. When he seemed to be bled I went over to the other shed, where there was a stream of water running off the lid, and washed him. I took the cup off my canteen and set it there to fill. Then I went back to the fire. I’d never cleaned a pig either but I figured it would work like a fish. I spread out a newspaper, split him down the belly, took out the gut, wrapped it up, all except the liver, and threw it on the other side of the track. Then I washed him some more. Then I took the knife and cut the skin, bristles and all, off the four legs. I went over to the other box, felt around, and found a fork, one they use to fork ballast with. I laid it over the fire, so the tines made a grill. I laid the meat on it. Brother, was it a smell, when that shoat began to broil! “Jack.”