Reuben and Levi
Six year old Reuben and his eleven year old brother, Levi, are on the run from the boarding school agents. It is their first day of running and they are hiding in a boxcar as it travels through the dark prairie night.
We were lucky to get on the train. I thought for a minute we were going to die. I had seen the older boys do it, running alongside like dogs on a hunt, just real relaxed until they were going the same speed as the train, then grabbing the ladder on the side of the boxcar and swinging themselves up, like getting on a horse. But they were older, and they could lift a saddle above their heads and throw rocks so far you couldn’t see them land. We were just little, Reuben and me, with me only having eleven years and Reuben only having six, and Reuben was different in the head and would never do what anyone said. But we had to go. We had to get away. Momma had said so.
“Just get on the train,” she said. “They’re coming and they’ll take Reuben away, like they did your grandpa. Now run down to the tracks and get on the train. Make Reuben do what you say. Don’t let him run away and don’t let anything happen to him. I’m telling you that. You listen to your mother.”
“I’m listening, Momma, but Reuben doesn’t listen.”
“You make him. You tell him I told you. You tell him Grandpa said so, too.”
The train was really loud. I had to shout to make Reuben hear me.
“Momma told me, Reuben. She said I have to make you listen and do what I say.”
He was all bunched up with his arms around his knees.
“You shouldn’t have pushed me.”
“I had to. The door was really high.”
“Yeah, but it hurt.”
The train was screeching and crashing and shaking all around.
“I almost couldn’t get on. You saw it. I was hanging there, the train going faster. I could have fallen under. My legs would have been cut off. What would you have done then?”
“It hurt when you pushed me. You didn’t have to push me.”
He covered his ears and pulled his jacket over his head.
It was dark in the car. It smelled like old grain, kind of sweet and sickening. The wheels kept making that clacking sound, and there were all the screeches when we went around turns, and we couldn’t see even to the other end of the boxcar.
I put my mouth next to Reuben’s ear.
“Do you think there’s anyone down on the other end?”
“There’s no one there,” Reuben said.
“Are you sure? I thought I heard a sound.”
“There’s no one there. I can tell.”
That made me feel better. Reuben could tell those things. He could go into a room and feel what was in there. He could look at piles of things and tell you how many there were. Sometimes he wouldn’t talk at all, even when people talked to him, then the next day he’d say exactly what someone had said. It was like hearing an echo.
“How’d you remember that?” I’d ask.
“What?”
“What the people were saying last night.”
“I don’t remember anything.”
“But you just said everything they said.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
Sometimes he made me so mad I wanted to hit him. But I never did. I just wanted to.
* * *
I didn’t know where the train was going. I should have been all sad, running away and not knowing where we were going. But I was too scared. And besides, when Reuben was along he took up all the place in your mind just thinking about him and what he was going to do next and keeping him from doing it, or making sure he did something he was supposed to. It was like having a baby, or maybe a mule.
I was getting so mad at him for not sitting down and not caring if I fell under the wheels that I forgot to be scared. That’s why I sometimes liked having him around. There were lots of things to be scared of, and Reuben filled up all the scared places in my mind. Besides, I figured that Creator wouldn’t let someone like him be hurt, so if I stayed close, I was probably all right, too. He was like a good luck thing. But he made me really mad.
We’d been going for lots of hours when the train slowed down. I could see the lights of a town up ahead, like a bunch of fireflies out on the prairie, all gathered together in the dark. It made me feel good but it made me feel sad — there were families there inside those lights, just laughing together and eating supper. It made me think of Momma and Grandpa.
The train whistle blew, big and lonesome. Four times. Woooo. Wooooo. Woo. Wooooooooo. Sometimes the engineer would let that last wooooo go on for a long time, like it was crying out into the night.
I thought of what it must be like to be inside one of those warm houses, hearing that sound, all cozy in a bed. Maybe it made them want to get away, to get on one of those trains and ride away to some place they’d never seen. But maybe it just made them happy to be warm inside their bed. It was a big, lonesome sound. It went way off in the distance.
The train slowed down.
“Come on, Reuben,” I said.
He was all curled up in a ball. “Let’s get off. There’s probably some nice people there. People are nice to kids. Even white people.”
“Leave me alone,” he said. “I’m sleeping.”
“You always say that. I know it’s a lie.”
“No, it isn’t. Not this time. I’m sleeping.”
“How can you be sleeping when the train’s rocking so hard?”
“It reminds me of when Momma rocks me. Leave me alone.”
He pulled his knees up close and pulled his jacket up tighter over his head. I think he was crying.
“Come on,” I said. “We can get some food.”
I was going to try to lift him up and move him, but the train jerked and I fell over. Then it started speeding up. The town just kept going by. I could hear the whistle. Woooooo. Woooooo. Woo. Woooooooooooo. Then it was just a pool of lights disappearing in the distance.
I sat down with my back against the wall. I thought of those houses. I was wishing I was home.
In the 1950s, I grew up three houses from the railroad tracks, in Des Moines, Iowa. When the trains went by the dishes in the kitchen cupboards rattled. Their horns blasted before the crossing, but I don’t recall that we heard every train go by; it became so common. Although in the earlier days The Rock Island Rocket passed by on occasion, most of the trains were Burlington/Northern freighters that were inbound to the Inland flour mill a couple blocks south of us. The boxcars were lined with wire-strap reinforced cardboard to hold their load of wheat inside. Still, despite their efforts, the old boxcar doors leaked wheat from their big sliding doors, creating a miles-long curb of whole grain for rats and other vermin to feast on; where, as a boy of 11 or 12 on Saturday mornings, I hunted rats with my little Fox Terrier, ‘Bridget’, terror in her own right.
I remember the first — and last time, I jumped a freight. I was so hesitant, so afraid, of stumbling under the massively relentless wheels; or slamming my face against the steel ladder on the corner of the boxcar, that jutted out the first two steps. As I ran to grab it on the uneven crushed-stone surface of the railroad bed; I found it impossible to heave myself into an open box car, pitching to and fro, about 48-inches from ground. I was so afraid, that I just held onto the ladder regretting what I had started; hoping it would slow down rather than speed up.
I could vividly see Reuben and Levi in the boxcar, and feel the rocking of the car side-to-side; the noise of the wheels, hear the repetitive click as its steel wheels struck the seam where the rails were joined together. As their train slows for the town, Levi sees a possibility to maybe getting off to find them some food, just as it speeds up again. I had heard the same thing happening to riders, like myself, as they find themselves trapped in or on a boxcar heading out of town bound for where they do not know. Glad it didn’t happen to me.
Looking forward to purchasing Lone Dog Road! See you in Brrrmidji!
Steve Reynolds and I (Catherine Stenzel) are coming to Bemidji this Saturday to see the boy who wrote the book! Steve and I are the two writers from Roseau County/Beltrami Island Forest (NW Minnesota) who write to you every time you post. Save a hug for us at your Bemidji workshop! Soon . . .
By the way, the @ is missing in my email address.
You can tell that I did my share of freight hopping in my youth. I was always terrified that I would fall under the wheels. Only got in the boxcars when the train was stopped. Once hopped a coal car by grabbing the ladder. Climbed up to the open top of the car and slid down into the empty coal compartment and hovered there for several hours, literally almost freezing to death, until the train inexplicably stopped somewhere by the Nemadji River. That brush with a hypothermic death pretty much put an end to my freight hopping. But it lived inside of me sufficiently that I could call upon it when it came time to writer about the journey of Reuben and Levi. As I often say, “Good literature, bad reality.”