Railroad Bums

So, I suppose it’s a ghost story of sorts…She suffered a modest comfort and privilege. One provided her by the solid tenets of hard work and reward, but deep in her spirit she understood, fully, the transactional nature of luck and good fortune and rolling dice. She was widowed young, but it took her many years before she lost her faith, and even more years to lose her grace.

The woman had a son who rejected every gift he was offered, every encouragement, every suggestion. The boy challenged her on every approach. He understood none of her blessing and lived with even less grace.

School teachers called the boy ‘strong-willed’ and ‘stubborn.’ Some churchmen called him bad, evil, one even suggesting he possessed a damaged soul. Attempts to reel the boy in and indoctrinate him into the fold and sooth him with The Word and wash him in the blood led to violent rejection.

A church elder suggested the boy be sent away, as he was a danger to himself and others. After this comment he started a fire at the home of that preacher. While the boy contended it was only a small fire, not intended to, in his words, ‘burn the whole fucking thing down, but just make a point.’ The boy was more than simply stubborn, and he had a sense of humor few understood.

They lived in a town that was once one of the great railroad hubs in the northeast, but as the age of great trains and railmen faded to dark, so did the small town. Often when the boy went missing the woman or the police would go down by the abandoned tracks and round tables to fetch him.

He wasn’t much in the way of years when came an inevitable face off with the school system to see who’d fold first. The school system did. As did the church. Those institutions seemed better off without him, and he enjoyed the disassociated life without the pressure or the daily battles to make him something he would never be.

The boy took to hopping the few freight trains that still passed through the town on their way southbound, always getting caught by the railmen. But rather than attempt to control him or arrest him they let him ride up in the engine among the fascinating levers and copper piping and valves and gauges. They’d drop him a few miles from town, and he’d have to find his way home on foot, but the moments on the train answered a need in him he couldn’t comprehend or explain. Perhaps it was simply that he knew the trains could take him far away from that place he knew but never felt he belonged.

As the complexity of this world engulfs me today, and at times makes me feel I may drown, I feel the older I get the less I understand, there is something in the whistle of a train that calls to me and comforts me. Much of this world feels like something is wrong and a half step out of place.

One night at the rail yard, he met an old man; a self-described stiff, a hobo. His name was Zach. He was fortunate to live in a time when there were still hoboes and rounders and bums. These terms had less a piercing sting than words used today to talk about people we don’t want around us, or people who scare us. The people who confront our comfort in a society that clearly is reeling out of control and has lost all sight of individual freedom.

The boy and the hobo sat for hours by a smokey fire drinking whiskey. The boy sat transfixed as the old bum regaled him with tails of hopping boxcars and traveling across the country and back. He spoke of working some, drinking some, and the honor required to live among thieves. As the long night wore on the boy learned you can be an honest man, or a rich man, but rarely both. The more you claim you need and the more you possess, the harder it was to be true to yourself, to be a man of honor.

The old man painted pictures with his words of hobo jungles and running from sheriffs and constables and a woman he loved once, but he never found the courage to tell her. He lived his life without regret, but few comforts. The boy for the first time in a long time felt himself seen and understood. When he returned home and told them of his friend Zach he was punished and called hopeless.

All these years later he still feels the pull of the train whistle and he often thinks of the old railroad bum, one of the very last of a dying breed, and wishes he’d lived his life in a different and less encumbered way.

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That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.

Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!

Bill

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