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Show -119 a slowly passing boxcar. I was twelve years old, which would have made Jacob nineteen; he ran alongside, swinging his arms, stumbling on the cinders, red-faced and furious. I climbed up the iron ladder and leaped down into a bed of fragrant cedar shavings. If Jacob had been calmer I might have jumped right off the train again, but I took a perverse pleasure in his panic at the same time that I was sorry to see it. I was frightened but my fear soon passed. Flat on my back I stared up into a flawless sky; the smell of cedar came up around me and I floated softly above the clacking rails while Jacob's shouts and warnings fell away behind me, getting fainter as my train picked up speed. For the first few miles the tracks followed the highway; later they left it to strike deep into virgin woods. From where I lay I looked far up into the tops of enormous trees; when I sat up I saw that we were rolling beside hidden streams, past dark mysterious pools, through clearings spotted with wild iris and adder's tongue, under the reach of solemn branches furred with blue and gray lichens. I hitched home from Newport in a cold drizzly rain; a three-quarters drunk lumberman dropped me off at the door at two in the morning. I tip-toed inside, hoping Adam was in bed, but he met me in the hall. My father had just stepped out of the workshop; he held a wooden mallet in his |