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Show leather bottom of the bag was a steel ring. Father placed the ring over a hook on the upper arm of the crane. When he lifted that steel arm up, a lower arm emerged from the crane to hook onto a ring on the other end of the mail bag. The bag thus swung between the two arms. It looked like a criminal who had been beheaded first, then hanged by his heels until dead. When the local came roaring along the clerk watching from the mail car door raised a steel arm of his own and caught our mail bag around the middle, hauling it into the car. At the same time he kicked off a mail bag for us. The event was over too fast. We caught a glimpse of the mail clerk's face as he stood swinging out his steel arm to embrace our bag around the waist and haul it in. The crane dropped its arms with a clang. Our incoming mail bag skittered a few yards along the track on the gravel. When Frank had trotted us home we impatiently watched Father unlock the bag and dump the letters and small parcels out on the distribution table he'd provided. Then we helped distribute the items in the mail boxes already named for "patrons". Nada Post Office had gone through that first series of processes that sent out the mail and brought in the mail for nearly a quarter of a century. Going the mile to the crane each evening Father or Mother "met" the mail train thus for 23 years of unpaid service. I substituted occasionally when I grew up and came back for a vacation. Sometimes the train was late an hour, two hours, or more. Several times the local was delayed all night because of washouts of track by freshets in the canyons west of Modena. After a year or two the railroad took pity on us and placed an old boxcar without wheels beside Nada signboard. The San Pedro installed a pot-bellied stove in the box car but we had to bring our own wood for icy winter nights. Father wished to see the "cancellation" rise as an index of Nada's growth. He urged us to write friends and relatives in Iowa, Nebraska and California. Thus in a trifling way we subsidized the post office with the outlay for stationery, since we were reimbursed for postage stamps we bought and Father cancelled. |