Most who pass this stretch of highway don’t notice there’s a town here at all. The drivers’ eyes glaze over the flat, yellow land of Central Montana that goes on and on. The only landmark tall enough to see from the road is the abandoned grain elevator. But just as the gray wooden tower comes into view, the AM radio tends to lose its signal. The drivers look down to fiddle with the dial, and there goes the town of Petroleum.
When I was a kid, I could stand on the porch and listen to the grain elevator pounding like a heart. Pop, I had asked my father, do we have the same heart? Because when it beats, and I touched my chest, I feel it right here. He tugged gently on my ponytail. Mary, Mary, Mary, he said. What an interesting little person you are.
Before the summer when misfortune struck, one day was like another. Tractors and sprinklers clattered to life on the nearby ranches early each morning. As soon as the first speckles of sunlight reached our lawn and the empty lot beside it, I’d tramp through the weeds. Toads and jackrabbits seemed to pop out of nowhere if you stomped your foot hard enough.
At five, I was too young for boys, but I’d begun to notice them. They looked entirely different when they were out of school, smiling, squinty eyed, and the color of baked beans, except for the redheads, whose freckles multiplied like magic. These boys were beautiful and scabbed, riding bikes past our house and over the train tracks, letting their pool-wet hair dry in the sun.
In the distance, black splotches of cattle moseyed across pastures, the air sweet with manure. From our porch, I liked to watch tractors divide the land into squares. Week after week, I’d look for changes—the deep brown of turned earth sprouting green, the green rows growing chest-high. If they stayed green, I knew it was timothy hay that would be made into rectangles and thrown from the beds of pickups for cattle to eat. If they changed to gold, it was wheat, which was mowed and threshed, then came to town in trucks brimming with kernels to be weighed and dumped through the grated floor of the grain elevator.
The gray tower stood tall and straight in those years when the train still pulled into Petroleum every weekday afternoon, the final stop on the Milwaukee Road line. Children listened for the blare of the horn, and the rattles and clangs as it came over one last valley to collect our wheat. If I could beg a penny off my father, I’d chase behind the other kids to meet the train.
They weren’t unkind to me, not yet, but I was peculiar to them. Almost all these kids were the sons or daughters of ranchers. Even if one parent was a shopkeeper, schoolteacher, postman, or waitress, the other likely worked on a ranch. No one but my father and me lived in the funeral home.
We crowded near the coins we placed on the tracks, most of us wearing dirty T-shirts, cutoff jeans, and oversized cowboy boots, the uniform of kids who got the bulk of their clothes from the free bin at school.
“Stand back,” the conductor would yell out his window, and I would hold my cheeks to keep them from vibrating. After the train rolled away, we gathered our flattened coins, still warm, while mothers straightened pictures on the walls of their homes. I didn’t have a mother so ours hung crooked.
The train continued on to the gray tower. We were supposed to keep our distance as grain poured from a spout into the hopper car, but I liked to get close enough to hear the rain of kernels and inhale the dust that powdered my arms. By the time I looked away from that fantastic spray of wheat, the other children would be halfway through the field. And I stood apart.
I have always stood apart, off to the side or in the row behind or looking on from my yard as I did that late July afternoon when so much was about to change. I knelt with my trowel beneath the single tree on our property, digging a hole. My collection of Barbies and Matchbox cars shone in the sun. I had enough to share in case anyone wanted to join me.
The dolls were too big for the cars so I had to hold them, face-down, on the roofs as I drove them around the tree roots, toward the deep hole. In my mind, the black Matchbox was a hearse like my father’s, and I could imagine the mournful singing of hymns, the quiet coughs, and the unwrapping of hard candies.
“There, there, rest in peace,” I said. I covered a doll with dirt, placed a rock over the grave, and drove the little cars away.
It would have been a day like any other if not for the sound that turned our heads toward the gray tower. It’s a terrifying thing to hear grown-ups cry out like children. I stood with a tiny car in my hand, and soon a rush of neighbors moved toward the grain elevator. When my father hurried out of our house and told me there had been an accident, I knew something had gone very wrong. It’s almost never good news when people call my father for help.
“Be a good girl, Mary,” he told me. “Stay right here until a sitter comes for you.”
I dug up my muddy-haired doll and started my game again as I watched my father run like he never did before or since.
I was not alone very long before a teenager from the neighborhood came to look after me. She chewed her nails and looked toward the commotion the whole time.
“It’s Eddie,” other teenagers called to her as they sprinted past our house. “It’s Eddie Golden.”
And without a word, she grabbed my hand and we ran together, my shoulder and elbow and wrist feeling as if they might separate. My feet tripped over each other but I had to keep up. We ran until we were standing in a crowd of somber neighbors. The great building itself was quiet, but the crowd hummed with worries and pleas. Many wore their work uniforms—waitresses in aprons, K–12 teachers in dress shoes, ranchers in dirty boots and gloves.
I wriggled my sweaty fingers free of the sitter’s and pushed toward the front, where a half circle of girls sobbed quietly and said the name Eddie again and again. I tried to place where I’d heard his name before. Another girl came running as she pulled a crimson jersey over her tank top. Her friends touched the name golden on the back of it and cried louder.
“Oh, him,” I said to the girls as I moved closer, because of course I knew who Eddie Golden was now that I saw the basketball jersey. He’d taken the Petroleum Oilers to the county championship the year before, when he was a senior. He was the only one I ever saw on the court with a beard.
The girls closed their circle and called toward the gray tower, “We love you, Eddie!”
When I wormed my way around them, I came to the side of the train, where it would normally stop to catch the wheat. I squeezed between freight cars, followed the piercing buzz of chain saws and men shouting with strained and testy voices.
“Give me a shovel or a bucket, goddamnit!”
“You see I’m busy cutting? We need to made this hole bigger.”
No one seemed to be working together. Some focused on breaking open the wall, but couldn’t agree how or where to cut through it, while others tried to manage the grain that exploded out of the hole.
“Saw’s overheated. Fuck this.”
The man looked around like someone might lend a hand, but everyone stayed quiet.
“Mary, where’d you go?” The sitter grabbed my wrist hard. “I’ve been . . .”
She stopped to look where I had been looking, where all of us had been looking, and her grip went soft. There, in the jagged square they’d cut in the side of the building hung Eddie’s yellow work boots. If you could shut out all the hurrying and shouting, if you could shut out the endless wailing high up in the tower, you’d hear the grain dropping all around Eddie.
I felt a tug on the back of my T-shirt, up by the neck.
“This is not what I’m paying you for,” my father said to the sitter. “Take her home.”
All that walk back, I listened to the drone of voices and the awful crying that wouldn’t stop. And if I closed my eyes, there were Eddie’s yellow boots.
We stood at the edge of my lawn, watching others as they flowed to and from the gray tower. I kept one foot on the grass, the other in the road.
“What happened?” the sitter asked whenever another teen passed our house.
A boy stopped to answer her.
“Eddie Golden fell in the grain,” he said, distracted, looking toward the ever-growing crowd.
“I heard he went under,” said a second boy, and he shook the other’s hand. “Hey, man.”
“Hey. I’m just heading up. My dad’s already there with his chain saw.”
“What’s he cutting?”
“They’re trying to break through the wall of that storage bin.”
“What happened?” the sitter asked again.
Like most boys in town, they knew plenty about the work that went on at the elevator, how the grain was pouring into the hopper, as usual, and then it just stopped.
“The wheat gums together,” said the first. “When the weather’s been wet. It happens all the time.”
The second boy looked at the sitter and explained, “That’s when you have to send someone up to the storage bin.”
“They sent Eddie and his younger brother.”
“The younger brother, too?” he said. “What’s he, twelve?”
“Nah. Fourteen. Just skinny.”
“They went up to do what?” the sitter asked.
“Just walk out onto the grain,” said the first boy. “Break up the clumps. It’s easy work.”
“How do you know so much?” she asked.
“I had that job a couple summers ago,” he said. “The pay is shit. If it’s your first job, they don’t pay the full wage.”
I imagined the scene that day and for years after: the two standing at the top of the hot and dusty grain bin. Eddie tall and capable with his dark, thick beard and athletic build; the younger brother slight, his hands still baby soft, complaining of the heat.
“You guys talking about the accident?” asked a third boy. “I was up there a while. I just came back for my camera.”
He aimed it at the sitter and clicked.
“Don’t,” she said, covering her face.
There had never been so many kids standing on our lawn at once when there was not a funeral service inside. The first two ignored the new boy, describing how the younger brother harnessed up and climbed through the hatchway.
“And then he just stood on top of the wheat, kicking at one clump of grain.”
“Like this,” said the boy with the camera, and he kicked his foot in slow motion, like he was the laziest guy in the world. “Eddie’s yelling at him to put some muscle into it.”
“How do you know?” the sitter asked.
“I told you. I was up there,” he said.
He aimed his camera at her again.
“I said, don’t.”
I’d been standing with one foot in the road but moved back onto my lawn.
“So, before anyone interrupts again . . .” the first boy said.
“Who’s interrupting? I can’t tell the story too?”
“No one asked you to tell it.”
“I’m the only one who was even there,” he said. He looked at the girl. “The boss, he goes running up to the tower, asking what’s taking so long. So Eddie gets out there on the wheat. And he’s stomping hard, breaking up the clumps.”
“He should have worn a harness.”
“Yeah. No shit.”
“These pockets in the wheat, you don’t see ’em. They can just collapse under you.”
“You can be gone in seconds. Sucked under fifty tons of grain, man.”
“I heard him bawling,” said the sitter.
“No. That was the younger brother. The kid in the harness.”
“The lazy one I told you about. The one who kicked like this,” and he gently kicked the sitter’s foot.
“I heard him too,” I said. “Just crying and crying.”
“He was dangling at the top of that storage bin.”
“He’s still there. You hear ’im?”
We all looked nervously toward the grain elevator.
“Did they save Eddie?” the sitter asked.
The boy with the camera bent over, laughing. “Save him?”
“They’re trying to dig him out,” said the first. “That’s what my dad’s been doing up there.”
“Imagine it, man, all that grain going up your nose.”
“You can hold your breath.”
“I don’t think so, man.”
“We should get up there.”
As the two walked toward the tower, I thought of how Eddie’s feet hung through that square they’d cut out of the wall.
“Wait up,” said the boy with the camera, hustling. “My dad has a shift tomorrow morning. I wonder if they’ll give him the day off?”
Late that night, my father and the men who’d stayed until the end came back to our house, so sweaty the room steamed. There were five of them, covered in dust from the wheat: Pop, the doctor, the sheriff, the manager of the grain elevator, and the father who’d hurried up there with his chain saw. I made a joke about the stink in the room but no one laughed. They just sat around our kitchen table, hands trembling, pouring drinks. The babysitter, anxious to go home, shooed me toward my room, but I only went as far as the stairs.
“What killed me was all those girls telling us, ‘Hurry, hurry.’”
“And that goddamned whimpering.”
I tiptoed closer.
My father’s face looked deflated, as if air had been let out of it until only the creases and folds remained. What these men understood the moment they reached the scene was that there was never the chance of a rescue. They knew, as they started up their chain saws, that Eddie had already suffocated. It had taken three hours to recover his body, three hours of cutting through the wall and shoveling away grain. Once the star of his high school basketball team, the guy cracking jokes during breaks at work, here was the version of Eddie Golden they’d always remember, his nose and mouth plugged with wheat.
“Have anything stronger, Allen?” the manager asked my father.
Sweat dripped down the backs of my knees. Sometimes the room was silent, the house hot with breath, and only the sound of glasses clunking against the wooden table. Other times the men talked over each other, telling their stories until all the parts fit together.
After Eddie’s death, his mother asked to have a photo taken with both her boys. She’d failed to take pictures of them as young men—life had simply become one of rushing to finish chores, rushing down the highway to do errands, rushing home to make dinner—and she needed to remember Eddie as he looked that morning. His dark eyebrows, the full beard that couldn’t hide his near-constant grin, the strong body like his father’s. She needed to remember them all together, even if that image was hardly true.
The three wore their most formal clothing and posed as if Eddie, eyes closed and slumped between them, were still alive. This is what I would think of all that night and for many nights after with an awful, secret thrill. Mrs. Golden and her younger son argued about whether or not to smile. The look on their faces—though it’s only a story now; no one I know has ever laid eyes on the photo—is said to be the glassy-eyed look of shock. And no one would mistake the younger boy’s tight lips or the mother’s exposed teeth as smiles.
The day after the accident, the men who worked at the grain elevator stayed busy at the site. The grain had to be thrown out because it had been sitting in there with Dead Eddie and all the sawdust from cutting a hole wide enough to retrieve his body. Spoiled grain piled near the opening where they’d pulled him out, and flies buzzed around it and laid their eggs.
I wandered close to the gray tower, an ice cream cone dripping to my elbow, and watched the grown men argue. Some calculated the losses from that day—wheat they’d grown and cut and would have shipped to the flour mills and breweries. Those numbers showed in their jaws, clenched and twitching. When the train pulled in at its usual time, these men spoke for a long while at the engineer’s cab with hands in their pockets.
I thought I was the only kid too curious to stay away, but noticed a number of us standing behind trucks or along the tracks.
“She’ll know something,” a boy said, tipping his chin toward me.
He called me over to a cluster of older kids, probably nine- or ten-year-olds, sitting together on the rail. They didn’t stop their talking as they made a space for me beside the only other girl, and I sat politely, with hands clasped.
“We saw the younger brother walking home afterward. His face was covered in snot.”
“I wanted to spit on him. All that whining. Jesus.”
“I hear Eddie looked pretty bad. He got real hot in there.”
“Tell us what you know,” the girl said to me.
They had not heard the details of the family photo. They had not heard of Mr. Golden’s outburst at our house, when he told my father that his younger son could not attend the service. His wife, either, if she complained. We feasted on this story as it passed from child to child, each adding grisly details overheard or simply imagined as we lay in bed, too jittery to sleep.
We sat with our legs touching, the rail heating up with the sun. I’d never felt such a sense of belonging.
Over the days that followed, as the gray tower stayed silent, men still drove their trucks to work in the morning and parked. In a little while, they drove away again. The spilled grain began to sprout, and the funeral attended by all those sobbing teenage girls came and went. But nothing returned to normal.
I was only vaguely aware of the strangers who’d come to our town with their clean shirts and clipboards (the county inspector, contractors, people from the railroad and insurance companies), all collecting information, and with each visit, stealing a little more hope that work would resume. The men who grew wheat on the ranches seemed to understand right away, as they did not meet the eyes of the men they knew so well at the grain elevator. Because they would still grow wheat. They would just drive it farther to other towns and other men.
The beating heart of Petroleum had stopped. And as word spread that it would not be revived, that the elevator would be closed from that day forward, its workers stripped out levers and dials. They cut out the little buckets that used to carry the kernels, scoop by scoop, to the top of the tower and tip them into the storage bins.
Mr. Purvis, the plant manager, was the last to give up on the place, dressing each day for work (jeans and a button-up) and carrying his black lunch bucket. He’d just sit there in his office as we peeked through the window. The day he finally cleared out, lugging one large box of papers to his truck, a desk fan jammed under his arm, he wouldn’t let anyone help.
It wasn’t long before the kids took over the grain elevator. We found Mr. Purvis’s office, the walls fireproofed with tin, and the only thing pinned there was a no smoking sign and a calendar with a different naked lady for every month. We explored the maze of wooden rooms and shafts, the place full of floor sweepings and rats, echoing as we climbed the rusted ladders. There in the dark, we played a game called Eddie.
We stood in a circle and held hands—girls I hoped would one day play dolls with me, boys with calloused fingers whose touch felt electric. I thrived on the sound of our breath together, amplified inside those walls, the dusty air drying the backs of our mouths.
We played with the savagery of children who’d learned not to burden adults with our fears. We shouted at one another at the volume many of us knew in our homes.
“Do your job, you weakling!” the one playing Eddie might shout as he stomped into the center of the circle, where the younger brother kicked his feet at the clumps of grain like he didn’t care a thing about this kind of work.
Everyone understood Eddie’s rage, how laziness in a town like this had consequences. We felt it then, the town spiraling around us, though we knew nothing about insurance hikes or the shiny metal elevators of bigger towns. Whether the accident was directly to blame or only seemed so, it marked the year the grain elevator shut down, the year the train no longer stopped in Petroleum.
We played the game for hours each day. When the one playing Eddie jabbed his stick at the ground, the children all screamed and fell on him. This was the part of the game when injuries happened, boys and girls crushing each other, pushing sod into noses and mouths. The youngest, not yet invited to play, cheered from the sidelines, full throated.
Whoever played the younger brother cried like a baby while the rest pointed fingers and chanted, “Sissy, sissy, look what you’ve done.”
I loved all this touching, though many complained my hands were clammy. I even loved the pushing and tackling, the scrapes and bruises it left. I believed this was friendship. I believed it would last.
From this frenzied scrum, we eventually emerged with hoarse voices and sweaty hair to reenact our favorite scene. The game always ended with a family photo. Everyone wanted to be Dead Eddie, slumped with his head at a tilt.
For the men who had carried proud titles like manager, elevator operator, grain merchandiser, and industrial mechanic, the days no longer had structure. You’d see them in the diner or leaning against the outside of a building, not sure how to spend their time. Something hard had grown into their faces, and you could follow it down their tight jaws to the raised cords on their necks, and you just knew the tension kept going. They’d become rigid, like that tightness would never get itself unclenched.
They often stood clustered in town, demanding the dignity of work. You’d overhear their grumbling. They needed to do something with their hands. They needed something to fill the hours, something to talk about when they went home at the end of the day. Many developed strange ticks—rubbing their hands together and forgetting to stop, looking hard off to nowhere and not hearing if someone spoke to them. Whenever I saw these men in town, I’d walk way around them as I would a hot stove. By summer’s end, many had taken jobs as handymen, bartenders, short-order cooks, janitors, whatever was available—changes they probably thought were temporary.