Montana Railroad Gang

1

MY FATHER was angry. I knew that because he took off his cap, blew at it, and put it back on his head. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man. When he was downright angry he blew at his cap. It was a black cap, with a button on top. Like everybody else in the flat, he wore his cap indoors. Some of the men slept with their caps on.

“There’s no use arguing. Father,” I said. “I’ve signed up with the railroad gang and I am going.”

“And if I should forbid you to go?”

“ You can’t forbid me. This is a free country.”

“It’s a free country! Yes. But that doesn’t mean a son should have no respect for his father and go contrary to his father’s wishes.”

“I am going to Montana.”

“And that is final?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then. I shall go, too.”

“On the line?”

“ Yes.”

“But you think it’s unwise to go on the line.”

“You don’t think so yourself. If it’s good for you, then it should be good for me, too.”

“Your only reason for wanting to go on the line is because I am going.”

“Isn’t that a good reason?”

“But I’m not a child. I can look after myself.

I am eighteen now.”

“ I am not coming to look after you. I am coming because it may be better to work on the line than at the Terminal. If it’s good enough for you, it should be good enough for me too.”

“But I — I don’t want you to come.”

“I don’t want you to go, either. But you’re going. You said this was a free country. If you can do as you please, why can’t I? I am not going with you. I am going with the gang.”

Nothing more was said.

Chris, the straw boss-interpreter, set the fourteenth of March as the day of the gang’s departure for Montana. Chris had arrived in St. Louis from St. Paul around the middle of February. He was sent by the Great Northern Railway to gather a large gang for the Montana Division of that line. With an array of “self-writing” pens and pencils in his vest pockets, and a notebook, he went around signing up people.

Men who worked in factories and foundries, in steel mills, packing houses, and roundhouses, gave up their jobs and signed up with him. It was not entirely the prospect of money that made them do it. Some of them, especially the younger ones, made as much as three and four dollars a day as chippers and coremakers in the steel mills, while the pay on the railroad would be much less. It was more the release, perhaps, from these heavy, sweaty tasks, the getting away from soot and grime and smoke and ashes and grease, that made them sign up for Montana.

With some it was the distant sorcery of the West, the freedom and mobility, the great regions beyond. They had come four thousand miles from the hearthside to where they were, and they would go still another thousand miles or more in their search for America.

Chris made no extravagant promises about wages, living conditions, or special privileges. He said that of all Northwestern railroads the Great Northern was the largest and had the best reputation for “treating good” its employees. He was a goodhearted, well-meaning man, for although he was endangering his own position as straw boss-interpreter he signed up some who could — as the saying goes — buy and sell him when it came to knowledge of the English language, or knowledge of any kind, for that matter. He turned down no one. He did not bat an eyelash when Vasil, who had a reputation as an “agitator” and a “gang-buster,” proffered his five-dollar shipping fee.

As our train glided out of the shed and twisted through the yards, the coal chutes, ashpits, roundhouses revolved into the background. Some of our people who worked in the yards stood on the tracks, in their greasy overalls, their mummers’ faces grinning as they waved to us. Once I had stood there like that, watching the trains and wishing I were on them to be traveling through America. That seemed remote now, like something from a dimly remembered past. Already things that had happened to me in America were forming a past , a history and a background.

The train rumbled over an iron bridge and the noise drowned the chatter of the Balkanians. I kept my face to the window. A sudden deafening roar, galelike, blasted in my ears and my view was blocked by another passenger train going in the opposite direction. The train on which I was went ahead, carrying me forward into a new life.

But I turned my face from the window and there, beside me, was my old life. My father was asleep, the old cap on his head. True, my father was going with me and not I with my father, but the ponderous watch chain at his vest seemed tied to my own neck as much as it was to that old Turkish watch, bulging in his vest pocket, ticking away the old life. And that wasn’t all. I was riding in an American train, going across the heart of America — but as a member of a Balkan community-onwheels, as one of a hundred people who held their nationality in the palms of their hands, like old coins. In the three coaches set aside for the gang, the talk, the music, the memories were Balkan. The Old Country was quarantined here, and I was of it.

Occasionally my father would wake and lean over to the window. For a minute or two his sleepy eyes would gaze listlessly at white farmhouses, cathedrallike red barns with cupolas on their roofs, and circular towers, like campaniles, attached to them. He would shake his bewildered head and close his eyes again. I knew he was unhappy, and it hurt me.

Yet I had only to look out I he window at the fields and farmhouses and the clumps of trees rotating backward to regain my sense of separation and forward motion. Broad, flat earth rolled away with American prodigality. And my being yearned to be one with it. Small towns whirred past. A little depol with the name of the town beneath the gable would revolve away, to be succeeded by a factory chimney spinning after it, then a white church spire, a red-brick schoolhouse with a facade of rectangular windows. And then again rolling, spreading earth, boundless, unhedged.

2

THE hundred men, strung upon the line, appeared like a tribe of pigmies lost in a glacial region and trying to bore their way out of it into a habitable world. With puny bodies, cumbrous in heavy wraps, and with steel implements, we defied the skincracking cold which gripped the plain. There was nothing tame or gentle about this Montana country. It was one vast desolation. The snow was not deep, for blades of last year’s grass stuck above it. But the cold was all-pervading.

The track ahead was but a thin stripe upon the earth’s white expanse. And upon this band of steel the hundred men, like animated tumbleweeds, bent and twisted, bored and scratched. Upon the white bosom of American earth we engraved a necklace of steel — s*et in tie plates, clasped with bolts and angle bars, brocaded with spikes. And there it lay secured to the earth, immovable.

I had always thought that, the building of a railway was a complicated business, as mysterious as the building of a steamboat or a locomotive. And I had believed that we would be carrying the steel while others — Americans — would be doing the skillful work. Now a hundred erstwhile plowmen and shepherds tore off the old track and built it anew as fast as they tore it up, and the whole thing st ruck me as too simple to be true. There was the feeling in me that the hundred men, adults though they were, were just children pretending to be building a railway, over which maybe a toy train could pass, but no real one.

There was not an engineer in sight , nor an American, to tend credence to this thing, to impute reality to what was being done. The boss was an Irishman with the fantastic name of Pat — just Pat. Could a man named Pat build a railway? Besides, Pat did nothing anyway. Wrapped in a bearskin cloak which reached to his galoshes, and with a beehive fur hat. upon his head, he walked up and down the track, from the claw bars to the spike malls, doing nothing, saying nothing.

Around eleven o’clock, when some sixty or seventy new rails had been strung upon the line, Pat called a stop. The men lay huddled like a flock of sheep while Pat and Chris took over the business of the temporary closing of the track, which, like the whole process of laying steel, turned out to be a simple matter. The connection was accomplished with a switch point, the truncated end of which was joined to the nearest new rail and the bladelike point spliced against the old outcurving rail ahead.

Since the track had been opened in the morning this was the first chance I had to see Vasil, who was on a spiking team in the rear. The sight of him now lent some credence to the reality of the railway we were building.

“Is this all there is to building a railway, Vasil?”

“It’s simple enough here in a straight line but gets plenty complicated on curves, bridges, and switches.”

“Why did we close up?”

“ I think for the Fast Mail. That’s the train which carries the U.S. mail from St. Paul to Seattle. It’s the fastest train on the line. If Pat stopped it forone minute we’d have a new boss tomorrow morning. Freight trains you can hold.”

“So a train will pass over this track we just built?”

“And how.” ,

“Why is it forbidden to hold the Fast Mail?”

“Because it costs the Great Northern one thousand dollars for every minute the Fast Mail is late getting into Seattle. It’s in the contract. It comes cheaper to the company for us to wait a whole day than for the Fast Mail to be one minute behind schedule. Nobody can hold the Fast Mail.”

Chris and Pat walked up and down the track. The ground wind, which had winnowed the snow, had died down, and the plain, as if in hushed expectation of the Fast Mail, lay in frozen quietude. Only the telephone wires moaned continuously.

“We’re getting paid for doing nothing,”I remarked.

“It’s the only rest we get,”replied Vasil. “ Except when we come to switches and the Irishman will he scratching his head to figure out the position of the frog and the head block. But switches here are far apart. In summertime there’ll be more trains slock trains, fruit trains, specials. Stock trains you don’t hold either. They’re as important as the fastest passenger trains. The animals lose weight in travel and the faster you get them to the Chicago stockyards the more money they bring.”

The things this Vasil knew!

Pat’s thin voice announced the approach of the train. “Here she comes. Everybody up now.”

The men stirred, picking up their tools as they stood up. I looked up ahead to the east. And there, where the track vanished, a bundle of black smoke was visible. That and nothing else. But that was the Fast Mail. That patch of black smoke on the steelgray horizon began to rouse the plain. We could delect a faint sound emitted by the rails.

By and by the bundle of smoke assumed the shape of an inverted cone, with its apex spinning on the edge of the plain. And soon I saw the engine, a black point upon the rim of the horizon. There was now a distinct vibration upon the rails, with the emission of an occasional sound as when you pick at an overstretched wire.

The men, holding claw bars, line bars, line wrenches, spike malls, adzes, tongs, and standing upon the embankment, looked like an armed savage tribe watching a vessel steam up to the shore of their island. The approaching train seemed the only living thing upon this broad expanse of lifelessness. I watched the locomotive grow bigger and bigger as it left more and more of the plain behind it. With reduced speed, the locomotive rolled on, the head of it rearing higher and higher.

Pat stood in the middle of the track signaling to the engineer to continue on with caution. Two short blows of the whistle acknowledged Pat’s signal and he stepped out onto the embankment.

The engine appeared immense. Its cowcatcher was sculptured in ice, but its stack belched smoke, for there was a fire in the heart of the engine which no cold could stifle. And as long as the wheels stayed on the rails, the engine was a mighty power, It moved on, its wheels rolling with earth-shaking ponderosity. The pistons shuttled like gigantic arms bending at the elbow to propel the wheels.

The locomotive was still over old track, and the wheels turned slowly, cautiously, feeling their way, as if suspicious of the new track ahead, laid by us. The engine itself sniffed, scented, its many valves spurting out jets of vapor.

The men withdrew farther down toward the ditch, and I too stepped back with them, but mv eyes were on the front wheel, watching it come closer and closer to the point of connection. High up in the cab the engineer had slid open a section of the glass that enclosed him, and his goggled eyes held the rail below like a pair of binoculars.

My heart thumped in my breast as the front wheel turned onto the switchpoint. The next instant it was on the new rail, and then upon the joint which I had made secure with the bolts and the fishplates, and on it rolled, over the new track.

I gave out an involuntary cry and brandished my line wrench like a mace. And then a chorus of a hundred voices waked the plain from its frozen lethargy. There was warmth and cheer in every voice, as if the locomotive were a rescue party from a peopled world come to us forsaken upon the nakedness of a cold and desolate America. The engineer gave out a prolonged, heartening whistle, and the train gathered speed upon the new and firmer track.

I watched the Fast Mail disappear into the unknown West, and I felt less alone now, less cold.

“All right, men, rip her up now,” Pat yelled in his high-pitched voice.

A new energy seized the workers. The claw bars clamped the spikes with the iron fangs of the bars and jerked them out like frozen worms. The tongmen slung in the new thirty-three-foot rails with the lightness of sticks. I unclasped the metal hooks of my sheepskin-lined coat so as to breathe more freely, and I took off my mittens that I might touch the steel with my bare hands. And then I felt as if a candle were suddenly lit inside me, glowing within me and warming my body. In crowded St. Louis I had never felt so close to America as I did now in this pathless plain. I knew that as I touched the steel, linking one rail o another, I was linking myself to the new country and building my own solid road to a new life.

3

ON a warm sunny June day which had brought, the gophers from their holes, the roadmaster dropped a message from the rear platform of the Skidoo, and before Pat had had a chance to read it the men began to shout, “We’re moving.”

“All right, men,” Pat announced, “we are moving. We close up right away.”

It was to be the longest move yet, more than a hundred miles, to the West. Moving was always exciting. It meant an interruption in the monotony of work; it meant riding across new country, to a new camp site, perhaps near a town where there might be a store, or close to the Missouri, in whose muddy waters one could take a bath on Sunday. We moved in the daytime, and as a rule by freight trains, occasionally by a work train. That meant slow going. The men liked it, even if it wasn’t comfortable riding, because we got paid the same as if we had been at work on the track.

By four o’clock in the afternoon tools, handcars, pushcar, switchpoint, and other equipment were loaded on the flatcar and the camp was ready to be picked up at a moment s notice. With still two full hours before dinner, the men took advantage of the interval to indulge in hobbies and devote time to their personal appearance at the company s expense. Some took out their musical instruments, some organized card games on the grass flat before the cars, others set down backgammon boards and reclined on the ground. There were two professional barbers and they both set up shop in the open, trimming hair at twenty cents a throw to earn a few extra dollars. The cook was heard to argue with those who had lined up before the kitchen door with basins for hot water for shaving.

“ We need the hot water for the dishes,” the cook complained. But he kept filling the basins which were held out to him. “ Why do you have to shave? Where do you think you’re going, to Great Falls?”

I took soap and towel to the tank to save lugging water in pails to the wash stand in the bunk car. I was drying my face when I heard the ring of the gong, an old fishplate hanging at the door of the kitchen. “Is it for dinner?” I asked a man standing in a doorway.

“It’s for a meeting, for not to move at night.”

All through camp the men were stirring. A score or so were already gathered before one of the dining cars, clustering about Vasil. I climbed into our bunk car, hung the towel on its nail above my bunk, put on a clean shirt, and was ready t o go. Then I turned to my father, who was lying down.

“You coming to the meeting, Father?”

“No, I’ll just rest. Let them thrash it out.”

“Don’t you feel good?”

“ I don’t feel bad.” His voice sounded feeble. He had the easiest job in the gang, carrying shims in a two-pound lard pail and holding one at the end of a rail as the next one was set in place by the tongmen. A child could do what he was doing — st ill, he was perpetually tired.

When I got to the meeting nearly everybody was there. The discussion was underway and I heard a young man say, “Work animals get better treatment.”

“ Work animals have better sense than some of us.” This was said by a dusky fellow with straight, coal-black hair, who was a spiker.

“I never heard of any place where they paid you while you slept,”declared an elderly man, who as an adzman did work that was play compared to spiking.

“That’s just the point,” said Vasil. “You won’t sleep. These freight trains average about fifteen miles an hour and that means you’ll be banged and bumped all night long. And you should be paid for it.”

“That’s too bad. Are we made of glass? It’s unreasonable to demand pay for lying in your bunk. Whether you sleep or not.”

“Here comes Chris,” someone said. The straw boss-interpreter was seen coming out of Pats car.

“Are they going to move us at night?” asked Vasil of Chris.

“We’ll be picked up around ten tonight.” Chris’s straw-colored hair, freshly combed, was wet and stiff. He fingered the gold heads of several pens and pencils in his vest pockets. On hot days he would remove his jacket, but never his vest, which he would wear unbuttoned.

“What about time?” demanded Vasil.

“Pat’s got no authority to give time for night moving.”

“Has he asked for authority?”

“There’s no use telephoning. The answer will be no. It’s the rule.”

“The answer may be yes if Pat says the gang’ll strike.”

“Who elected you spokesman for the gang?” Chris jerked out one of the fountain pens from his pocket and waved it at Vasil.

“Nobody did,” a thin voice chirped. “He rings the gong on his own. Now he says we’ll strike. We’ve got something to say about that.”

“When a worker’s not paid for his time, his time’s his own,” argued Vasil. “And nobody has the right to budge him from his home.”

“Don’t forget there’s wheels and rails under your home,”Chris answered. “ Your home belongs to the company and the company can move its own property as it pleases.”

“That’s right,” several voices echoed Chris. “That’s right.”

“That’s not right,” said Vasil calmly. “ We’re in the cars, see. And that makes a lot of difference. We’re not property, we’re human beings; not freight either. Look here, men, for myself I don’t care. A dollar one way or another don’t make much difference to me.”

“It don’t to us either.”

“All right then, it’s not the dollar. It’s whether it’s right or wrong for workers to be pushed around without compensation. The company owns the cars and the tracks, it’s true, but the company don’t own us, and shouldn’t move us on our own time unless we are willing

“We’re willing,” screeched a short, stumpy man with a solid, cube-shaped body.

“We’ll find out who’s willing and who’s not. We’ll take a vote.”

“ It will do no good,” counseled Chris. “ We’re all for pay. Nobody is against pay. But we can’t get it. There’s no authority. St. Paul says no pay for night moving.”

“We’ll not vote for pay,” declared Vasil. His words evoked some laughter. And his own face twisted into an ironic smirk.

“What’ll we vote for cucumbers?”

“We’ll vote on whether to strike.”

“What’ll we strike for?”

“For straight time, or time-and-a-half, for night, moving.”

Many voices spoke up at once: “He’s crazy,”

“He’s a gang-buster,” “He don’t give a damn if we all get fired.”

Then a single voice was speaking. “ We came here to work, not to right wrongs. There’s work elsewhere. Whoever don’t want to be moved at night he knows what to do.”

Then Vasil made a fresh start . “ Look here, men. I know we came here to work. I’m not against working. I am a worker. I’m speaking to you as a worker. I’m not urging you to stop work. I am only trying to tell you that when we are not, at work our time is our own and we shouldn’t let ourselves be pushed around.”

There was earnestness in Vasil’s voice. If there was anger in him he did not let it go into his voice or into his words: he let it escape through his hands, which worked continually, clenching and unclenching.

I felt Vasil’s strong belief in what he was saying. His words, while not tense or loud, rang with convict ion. They were like the strokes of his spike mall, precise, compact, well aimed. I saw the hostility in some of the faces, and the cold, steely eyes turned on him. And I could think of nothing to say which would‘carry any more weight than what Vasil was saying, yet I had a strong urge to add my own voice to his, and once or twice I did open my mouth to say something, but said nothing.

“Who are we, a bunch of Balkanians, to be telling the Chewtobaccos what’s right and what ‘s wrong?” someone said. “They really ought to charge us fare for carrying us to this new place of work. Still, if they were to do that, I’d say, yes, let’s protest. But. to ride on a train, just to ride on a train, and demand pay for riding on a train, I never heard of such a thing.”

After much argument someone had sense enough to suggest, “ It don’t cost nothing to vote, so let’s do it and stop this wrangling.”

“Wait a minute. Why should a whole gang yield to Vasil?” This was said by the Avocat, a law student who had joined the gang wholly for reasons of health.

“You’re not yielding to me. We’re to ballot and I’ll abide by the majority opinion same as anybody else. We’re simple people and we wish to settle this matter by the simple method of voting.”

“Then were giving in to you,” insisted the Avocat.

For perhaps a whole minute Vasil stood silent. Then he said, “Well, what, do you propose?”

“ I propose we first take a vote on whether to vole for a strike.”

Many people scratched their heads, unable to grasp the fine point.

“I never thought of it in that light,” said Vasil.

“Let’s do it that way before somebody asks for a vote on the vote whether to vote for a strike. Now understand, men, we’re not voting on the question of a strike, but on whether we should vote for a strike. Those in favor of taking a vole for a strike raise your right hand.”

All right hands went up, including the Avocat’s.

“That settles that . Now we shall vote again, but this time it’s whether to strike or not to strike. This will decide it.”

“Just a minute,” a voice spoke up. It’s not against the law to strike, is it?”

“We have a legal right to strike,” assured the Avocal.

“ I just wanted to be sure we’re not breaking any laws.”

“All in favor of striking so as to get time for moving at night raise your right hand,” said Vasil.

At least a score of men were counting hanjls, some inaudible, some loudly. Thirty-one hands were counted.

“Those against striking raise your right hand. ‘

Fifty-three hands went up.

“Okay, fellows. We move on our own time, without pay.”

4

YOU’LL soon get well, Father. You need rest and some good food. I’ll go ask the cook if he’s got something special.”

On a nail above the bunk in which the sick man lay hung his old Turkish watch, with the winding key on the heavy silver chain. The watch looked out of place here in the boxcar but no more so than its owner, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling, his lips dry and cracked.

“I’ll soon have no need of food, said my father weakly. “As for rest, that’s for God to give.”

“You’ll get well. And as soon as you’re strong enough to travel well go back to St. Louis. You shouldn’t have come here in the first place. You’ve got to eat something to give you strength. Now don’t worry. I’ll be right back.

“I can’t eat, my son.” The voice was like the voice of a cracked bell.

“Then maybe we should send for a doctor. Pat said he’ll send the section foreman with the motorcar to fetch a doctor. There’s one in Glasgow. It’s only twenty miles.”

“To send for a doctor that distance! He’ll charge a whole month’s wages.”

The next day Pat sent the section foreman for the doctor. It was August and a hot sun was beating down upon the roofs of the bunks, overheating the

interiors. Still the sick man fell chilled to the bone. I put his coat over the blankets, and watched his dry forehead for sweat. There was no sweat.

“ Pull the covers from my chest, my son.”

“Is it loo hot for you, Father?”

“Will you please pull the covers down?” He had to stop between words for breath. It was labor for him to speak.

I uncovered his chest.

“ Inside the vest, on the lining,” he whispered.

On the left side of the vest against the lining there was a patch pocket with a Hap over it secured by a small safety pin. I unfastened the pin and took out a wallet, shaped like1 an ordinary envelope. “ Is this what you want?”

“ Yes.”

“You want me to keep this for you?”

“ Listen, my son. Will you send one hundred dollars to my sister Kyra. And say to her that I did not forget her.”

“Of course I will.”

“That’s good, that’s good.” He rested a moment. And then again in a faint voice, “ Will you forgive me my son if I’ve been angry with you — and said things — in my anger — you are a fine soil will you —” The whispering faded.

When the Turkish watch on the wall pointed to half past two I heard the cough of the section foreman’s motorcar and went to the door. I climbed down the ladder and started up the bank to meet the doctor, who turned out to be surprisingly young, for a doctor. He could hardly have been thirty, had no beard, no mustaches, and wore a loose-fitting gray suit. The only thing to inspire confidence in him was the little bag he carried, a little black leather bag with a shiny metal clasp.

“ I am Doctor Wainer,” he said. “ Is it your fat her who’s sick?”

“Yes. He’s very sick.”

The examination was very brief. I stood by quietly, watching the doctor hold my father’s wrist a while, take his temperature, and listen to his breathing through a contrivance.

He put the listening contrivance back in his bag and clicked the bag shut. He then carefully pulled up the blankets to cover the sick man’s chest and motioned to me to follow him.

Out on the grass he turned and spoke to me. It was as if some mechanism spoke and not a human voice. “You know what pneumonia is?”

I thought a moment. Then my mind supplied the unpronounced letter “p,” and I nodded affirmatively.

“How long has he been ill?”

“ Four days.”

“Why didn’t you send for a doctor the first day?”

I made no reply. There was nothing I could say.

“I can’t take the responsibility of moving him to a hospital now. It’s too late.” The doctor spoke without emotion. He was not angry.

For a moment, or two both the doctor and I remained silent. And then it was he again who spoke, but still without feeling, without sympathy, without even a tone of impatience in his voice.

“It may not have helped anyway,” he said. “There’s no resistance.”

“ llesistanoe?”

“Yes. Strength. The body has no strength to fight the sickness. Hard work. Bad food.”

The doctor’s phlegmatism extended even to the matter of his fee. Failing to think of the word fee, and aware of my inability to phrase my question more delicately, I asked, “How much you charge, Doctor?”

“It doesn’t much matter. Ten dollars will do.”

He took the ten-dollar bill and without bothering to look at it stuck it in a pocket.

“Keep him wrapped up and give him plenty of water. All he can drink.” Then he walked up to the waiting motorcar, and the section foreman drove him off.

That night I stayed up till midnight but there was nothing much I could do. My father would not even take a sip of water. His breathing, the only sign that he was alive, was so labored that every time, he breathed out 1 feared he would have no strength to take in sufficient breath to keep him alive.

After the others had gone to bed around ten o’clock, I kept the kerosene lamp on the floor and turned low so that the glare from it might not interfere with their sleep. I myself lay in my bunk, but awake, my whole being tuned to my father’s breathing, picking it out from the breathings of the others.

A little after midnight I fell asleep. When I waked, the first thing 1 listened for was my father’s breathing. I tried to separate it from the other respirations as I had done before I had fallen asleep. But I couldn’t. I lay there quietly and listened intently, so intently that after perhaps a minute my car picked up the clean, metallic lick of the old Turkish watch hanging on tHo wall above ray father’s bunk. That gave me a momentary reassurance. I could not conceive of that old watch ticking without my father’s breathing.

I rose and picked up the lamp from the floor and turned up the wick. I put the lamp up on the narrow folding table between my father’s bunk and my own. The flame cast a weak yellow light upon

his face, which looked as if he bad fallen into a degp, dreamless sleep. My father was not breathing.

I went over and touched Vasil, who lay asleep in thp bunk next to mine. “Vasil,” I whispered. “Vasil.”

Vasil sat up and stared in the semi-darkness.

“I think my father is dead, Vasil.”

“He died?”

“He’s not breathing.”

“God’s been kind Ho him. Guess we should wake the others.”

“Yes.”

Slowly and silently the band of men moved across the open plain behind the coffin of rough pine boards borne by a farmer’s cart. The farmer on the driver’s seal, with his team of horses, alone seemed of this place.

I paced directly behind the cart, Vasil at ray side. I was dressed in my brown suit and wore my felt hat and I did not weep. In all the sadness that hovered about me there was deep inside me an unsuspected sense of relief.

I was thinking how different ray mother’s funeral had been, which I remembered vaguely. The procession here through the treeless plain was unreal and unbelievable. There was something incomplete, unfinal, about my father’s death, and about his burial. This was no way to return a man to his eternal resting place. No bell tolled; no priests in vestments swung fuming censers or intoned funeral chants. And there was no avenue lined with tall poplars and cypresses leading to a chapel shaded by ancient oaks and walnut trees.

My mind wandered to the Old Country, to St. Louis, and then would project into the future and would return to the plain, to the coffin, How my father would grieve if he knew that he had become the cause of every mail in the gang losing a day’s wages in order to bury him.

We carried him to a small burial ground fenced off by barbed wire to keep the cattle from tramping on the few graves. It was a lonely and remote spot, but a more fitting burial place could hardly be found, for scarcely fifty feet away was one of those mesas that rise sheer from the plains, like temples, to heights of two and three hundred feet. No one could be in the shadow of this majestic tableland without being aware of something mysterious and supernatural dwelling within its terraced sides. The group gathered about the coffin, now set on the ground, was not impervious to the mystical spell which emanated from this natural monument. That in itself seemed to make up, in some measure, for the lack of religious rites.