| OCR Text |
Show could be asked to report to work within twenty-four hours and then remained awake for days at a time. He rode a particularly dangerous section of rail, one running from Kearney to Burwell. While most routes in the country run east-west, the Kearney- Burwell route runs north-south. This meant the train constantly passed through intersections where crossing arms had not been installed and people weren't expecting a train. The engineer he road with most often, Whistling Willie, had killed some twenty-nine people on this route alone. Whistling Willie rode from Kearney to Burwell constantly blowing the whistle in hopes of avoiding the thirtieth. Many times my father would find himself in a small town in Nebraska for a few hours, waiting for the return route. On these evenings, the engineer often persuaded him to down half pints of Canadian Club in one swallow along with the other men in the crew. A month earlier he had been in a classroom arguing an esoteric point of jurisprudence, now he was trying to hold his own with men who had seen automobiles fly to pieces on impact. Of the stories my father tells about his work on the railroad, the one I remember most clearly is the story of an accident. A train that had derailed in the middle of nowhere, my father a member of the clean up crew. It is dark in my mind, twisted metal and train cars folded like accordion pleats. A wheat field at the end of August, waiting to burn. My father spends the entire night working by headlamp, the beam catching glimpses of train detritus-handles, panels, the lunchbox carried by one of the railwaymen. Every now and then he hears a coyote call across the plains and waits for his mate to answer. When she does, he thinks of my mother, home in bed asleep, untouched by wreckage and death. This is exactly what she fears when she drives him to 29 |
