It didn’t take long to realize again why I hated scoop shovels so much. As Nan said, there really was a mountain of coal to be shoveled from the heap beside the house, through the small window and into the waiting bin in the basement. It was like shunting a million tiny boxcars from a train wreck into a roundhouse. Within a half-an-hour from the time Nan and I got back from school, I thought my back would break or my arms would fall off, whichever came first.
Then I remembered how, a few winters earlier before I got a sled for Christmas, I had used the scoop shovel as a makeshift toboggan. By holding onto the shaft and pointing the handle downhill, I was able to use the shovel as a seat and enjoy a wild ride. It worked best on hard snow.
Using the way the scoop slid like stink on the snow as a reminder, I put the shovel onto the ground and rammed the handle forward into the mound of coal. Chunks of black tumbled down the side of the mound and piled into the shovel’s scoop. It was pretty easy to then slide the load towards the open window at ground level, and forcefully drive the shovelful of coal through. Tilting the handle up slightly and pulling back quickly let the pieces of coal slide into the bin. Another small part of my big job was complete, and it caused a lot less pain in my back and arms.
After that I puffed at a steady pace for a couple of hours. I still had to take breath-breaks often, and Nan brought me glasses of juice every now and then, but mostly I just kept chugging along, like the guy on the train that keeps stoking the engine with coal. An hour before dinner I noticed I had moved about a quarter of the black mountain. I quit for the day and thought I would die when I went to sleep. Already I understood that hitting Myron wasn’t at all worth it. But, helping out Nan and doing something Gramp wouldn’t have to worry about later made me feel good.
I was stiff and sore when Nan pushed me out the door the next morning after the girls left for school. I had hoped she would give me the morning off since I worked so hard the day before. “No rest for the wicked” was her snappy way of squashing that hope.
I was so tired that I didn’t even want to pick up the scoop shovel. It wasn’t just from the work. My head wound caused by the bonking that Myron gave me had woken me up several times during the night when I rolled over on it. It still hurt when I touched it, so it would be a while before I could wear my baseball cap. I worked kind of slowly this time, and by noon I didn’t have a lot to show for my efforts.
I was happy when Nan called me in for lunch. It gave me a chance to beg her again to let me visit Gramp that afternoon. Since I wasn’t allowed to go to school anyway, I figured it would be no big deal to visit him during the day.
Nan disagreed. “Knowing you’ve been kicked out of school will upset him enough, Buddy,” she said. “Seeing you sitting there in his hospital room when the rest of your classmates are in your classroom learning would make him downright angry. He doesn’t need that right now.” Her voice let me know that nothing I could do would change her mind.
I dropped my head down and stared into my tomato soup. The bump on my head started throbbing again, and I could feel my eyes getting wet. I wasn’t angry at Nan, just sad.
Nan put her hand on mine. “I’ll tell you what, if you’re finished getting the coal into the bin by lunch tomorrow, you can visit him in the afternoon. That’s the only deal you’re going to get, so make the best of it.” Nan’s offer was exactly what I needed.
After lunch I went at my task with a vengeance. Things were looking good until I felt myself burning out. I ended the day at a snail’s pace. I had been slowed down by having to go inside and shift the coal away from the window in the basement, where the mound was close to blocking it. Outside there was still a quarter of the pile left. I couldn’t see how I could get the job finished before lunch the next day.
That made me really mad. Not only was I not going to be hunting with Gramp, but it didn’t look like I was going to be visiting him, either. What I had hoped was going to be a special day might turn out to be one of the worst kinds.
It was Riel and Mokey that saved my bacon. The two of them showed up after breakfast early on Saturday morning. I was already moving coal. Although the pile was a lot smaller, it was also a lot farther away from the basement window.
“Are you allowed to play with us today?” asked Mokey.
“What do you mean, ‘play with us’?” interrupted Riel. “We’re not girls in second grade, you knothead.”
“What should I have said?” Mokey asked in a whiny voice. His feelings were obviously hurt.
“I dunno,” said Riel. “How about, ‘Ya feel like goofin’ around?’”
It seemed like I always had to break up their arguments. “Doesn’t matter how you say it, guys. I’ve got to put the rest of this coal down before lunch, or Nan won’t let me see Gramp later.”
“Then we’ll help you,” volunteered Mokey.
Riel was onboard, too. “Ya, you’ve got a couple of extra shovels, don’t you?”
Somehow the handle on the square-ended shovel had been broken, so we actually only had one long-handled spade and a hoe. But, even with just these few weapons, we were able to attack the remaining pile as if we were digging for diamonds. I used the spade while Riel manned the scoop shovel, proving again that he was stronger than me. Mokey’s job was to tug and push coal from the back of the pile with the hoe, moving it closer to Riel and me. We got into kind of a rhythm, like a well-oiled team, and within an hour the ground where the hump of coal had been was as smooth as a baby’s bum.
Exactly on schedule, Nan showed up with juice for three. I guessed she had been keeping an eye on us from the wash pantry window.
“Wow, very impressive, boys,” she said, looking at the ground where the pile used to be. “I’d say you’ve earned the rest of the morning off. Why don’t you go play together for a couple of hours? Be back by lunchtime, though. I’ll have some sandwiches ready for you. Then you and I will head up to the hospital, Buddy.”
“That’d be great, Mrs. Richards,” said Mokey. He thought any plan that had food in it was great.
“Thanks, Nan,” said Riel. He always called my grandmother that name, too.
I echoed Riel.
“So where are we going to play together,” sang Mokey, after Nan had gone back inside with our empty juice glasses.
We argued for a few minutes about what to do, and then settled on hiking the tracks. We hadn’t done it since the last spring and figured it was time again before the snow started to fall. Hallowe’en was only a week away, and the white stuff could start floating down any day.
To us, hiking the tracks just meant walking the rails the way a trapeze artist would walk a tightrope. We headed to the west end of the rail yards, where all the tracks came together into just one pair that carried on to the rest of the world. The rules of the game, if it could be called a game, were simple. We just had to walk a rail, balancing in our best style. If someone stepped off, that was a point against him. The person with the fewest points against from where we started until we got to the trestle, about a half-mile down the track, was the winner.
Mokey had never won. Half the time he never even joined in. Riel and I were both much better at it than him, and about equal to each other. I guessed we were probably tied overall after hiking the tracks dozens of times over a few years. We never really kept score from one time to the next.
The rails and the rail yards were places to have fun or places to be feared. Ever since we were little and would put pennies on the tracks, we had considered the rail yards as one of our playgrounds. We never put nickels or dimes, and certainly never quarters, on the tracks. They were too valuable. But, lots of pennies were sacrificed to see how flat they could get after being run over by a freight train, or maybe two or three freight trains.
Our parents were the ones who made the rail yards seem scary, when they gave us lectures about the dangers of playing there. They always included gory stories about people who had been dragged for miles or were split in two while trying to crawl under a train to get to the other side of it. A person could easily be killed when a big train started rolling on its way without warning. None of us were ever, ever to crawl under a train. Nor could we climb over the couplers, which were those massive iron locks that joined railcars like hands locked together. No one knew when the brakeman might order cars to be shunted from one track to another.
To get around a train we were expected to walk down to one end of the train or the other. Even doing that was only allowed because the underpass that let us get across the rail yards was almost a mile out of the way.
Like every kid in town, we did what the adults expected when it came to crossing the rails, except maybe too often we did cross through the trains on the tracks. More than once, I had climbed up the steps on one side of a passenger car and down its steps on the other side, especially in the cold of winter, when walking around a train seemed to take way too long.
Of course, there were also those few times when we used to play Cops-and-Robbers or Hide-n’-Seek inside the passenger cars. That game was best played at night in the glow of the lights from downtown. We played there because we had heard how older kids before us used the passenger cars for their own games. Or they would go there to sneak a smoke, or to “make out,” as they called it. Maybe we wanted to be a bit like them.
The most scared I had ever been of the rail yards was the time Aunt Bud had her accident the last winter. It was around midnight on a really cold night in early February. Because of her weak left arm and her limp, left over from her bout with polio at my age, she wasn’t terribly strong, and her balance was always a problem. It didn’t help that she was working the late shift at the mental hospital, and that the bus dropped her off on the other side of the tracks. Walking home through the underpass was out. It was way too cold and the walk was too far. And taking a cab every night was just too expensive.
On that night, I was woken up from my sleep on the couch in the living room by thumping and scratching at the front door. Usually, nothing could wake me once I had conked out, but for some reason, I heard the sounds and woke up.
The kitchen light was always left on for Aunt Bud when she worked night shift, because she was the last one to get home. The light helped me get to the door quickly, just as I also heard the heavy thumps of Gramp’s footsteps coming down the stairs.
I opened the door to find my aunt, the sweetest lady with the voice of a songbird, lying on the landing under the cover of the porch, crumpled like a broken doll. Her nurse’s cap was still on her head, but the buttons of her winter coat had been pulled off, showing that the bottom part of her blue uniform was torn and soiled. The palms of her gloves and the white nylons on her legs were ripped to shreds. The one nurse’s shoe she wore, which she always kept sparkling white, was scuffed brown and grey. Her other one was missing. I could see blood leaking from the palms of her hands through the holes ripped in her gloves. Blood was also dribbling down her knees and shins.
All I could say was, “Aunt Bud!”
“Help me up, Buddy,” she said, wincing. “Help me up, so I can get inside. I’m so cold.”
Before I could even reach down to get hold of her, Gramp pushed me out of the way and bent down and scooped her up. He had his housecoat overtop of his flannel pyjamas and wore slippers on his feet.
“I’m sorry, Dad. The tracks were slippery and I fell. There was no one around, and I couldn’t get up. I had to crawl home.”
“Aw, Bud. It’s okay, sweetheart. You’re okay. You’re home now. Let’s get you warmed up.”
The rest happened pretty quickly. Nan, also in her housecoat and slippers with her nightie underneath, soon came down and took over. She got Aunt Bud cleaned up. Gramp made her some tea, and then shortly after, he carried her upstairs and put her to bed.
Aunt Bud never cried at all. I knew that I would have. I couldn’t help crying a little bit for her when I went back to bed. I hated to imagine the thoughts that must have gone through her mind while she was out there in the dark and the cold—the numbing, freezing cold. Maybe she thought she would be run over by a train as she crawled over each slippery, frozen rail. Maybe she thought she would die from the cold before she could make it home. I shuddered at the thought of how much hurt she could have felt as she dragged herself over cinders and ice and railroad ties, which could splinter and leave jagged, oil-soaked, wooden knives under her skin.
Gramp found her shoe the next day.
Our hike along the tracks was a lazy, easy way to spend a late Saturday morning. It was exactly what I needed after my tough work shoveling coal. The sun was full, but didn’t have much heat in it. There was no wind. It seemed that Indian summer had come and gone, and that winter snows would soon come calling. At least there were still deep blue skies and golden, dried out weeds and grasses along the train tracks with stubble off in the fields. The view over the ravine and down into the river valley was as beautiful as ever.
We had flushed a couple of prairie chicken and a covey of partridge near the tracks early on, and it made me angry to think I could have been taking aim at others like them with Gramp if he wasn’t so sick. The birds were attracted to the rail line where they could peck at gravel and maybe find some grain that had spilled out of rail cars hauling wheat from the elevators.
We kidded one another as each of us did our balancing act on the rails. By the time we had reached the trestle, Riel had only slipped off his track three times. I had stepped down a disappointing six times. Mokey quit counting after ten, and had even quit rail walking altogether. None of us had ever made it the whole way to the trestle without slipping. My record of two slips from the start of the half-mile to its finish was the closest any of us had come.
The trestle, a wooden bridge just wide enough to take the set of tracks and its ties, was a couple of hundred feet above the top end of the ravine, and stretched for almost a quarter of a mile across it. It was usually our turning back point. Mokey had kind of decided that on the first time he came with Riel and me. But, this time Riel had other ideas.
“Waddya’ say, Buddy? Are you game to walk the trestle? We’ll double the points for a step-down.”
“You’re on,” I said, accepting his challenge.
“Aw, no. Jeez, guys. Let’s turn back,” whined Mokey.
“You don’t have to hike the tracks, Mokey. You can keep walking the ties,” I said.
That didn’t help Mokey feel better. “You know I can’t stand heights. Why do the two of you always have to make things so tough?”
We didn’t answer him.
The rails and the ties and all of the huge beams and posts that made up the trestle were open to the sky and the wind. There were no handrails on either side, and the ends of the ties were less than a dozen feet from the outside of the rails. Beyond those there was nothing but air. If you looked down at your feet, you couldn’t help but gulp just a bit at how far it was to the ravine bottom below. Mokey had a habit of watching his feet while he walked the ties, which was what caused him so much fear.
“Let’s do it,” I said to Riel, and started off.
Almost exactly halfway across, Riel and I were even with each other on our separate rails. Surprisingly, neither of us had stepped down. Mokey straggled a few yards behind, smack-dab in the middle of the tracks, taking one careful step after another. He was absolutely not going to try to walk the rails. With each wobbly foot he put ahead of the other, he would look down through the ties to the ground far below. Even though Riel and I were still cool from the autumn air, Mokey’s nerves were causing sweat to trickle from beneath his wheat-coloured hair and drip off his forehead.
Riel always tried to get the best of me when we went against each other in a game. Most of the time he would try to distract me or taunt me in hopes of getting an advantage. I knew this challenge wasn’t going to be any different.
“Buddy, hold on,” he said. “Do you feel that vibration in your feet from the rail? I think there’s a train comin’!”
I wasn’t falling for it. “Not a chance. You’re not gonna’ get my goat and make me slip this time.”
He tried again. “I swear. I think there’s a train comin’. We’d better hustle back before it catches us out here in the middle.”
Mokey chimed in. “Cut it out, Riel. You’re not being funny.” There was real anger mixed in with his fear. “I’m having a tough enough time as it is.”
Then, as if God was secretly punishing him, Riel slipped off the rail and stepped down between the two steel tracks. As he did, his leg slid right between two of the oil-soaked beams. The rest of his body ended up stretched across the ties.
“You okay, Riel?” I asked, somehow managing to keep my balance on the rail.
Mokey couldn’t say anything. He just stood in the middle of a tie with his hands up near his shoulders. His face had gone even whiter.
“I’m fine,” laughed Riel. “That was close.”
He recovered quickly, and brought himself up to his knees. As he put his hand on the track to push himself up, his smile disappeared. He put his ear to the steel rail.
“Jeez, I’m not kiddin’, guys. There really is a train comin’. Listen,” he ordered.
“I can’t move! My feet are frozen. Oh, God, I’m gonna’ die…” Mokey was having another one of his fits.
“C’mon, Riel, you know how he gets,” I said. “You just want to win the game, and you’re not playing fair.”
“No, I’m tellin’ you, there’s a train coming. We gotta get outa’ here.”
Mokey was close to a total breakdown. “What am I gonna’ do? Help me, guys. I swear I can’t move.”
I gave in and stepped down off the rail to put my ear to the track. I didn’t hear anything. There was no vibration at all in the strip of steel. “There’s no train coming,” I said.
I looked up to Riel who had an evil grin as wide as the ravine glued to his face.
“Gotcha’!” he shouted, looking from me to Mokey.
“You can be so mean sometimes,” howled Mokey. His legs found strength enough to turn and shuffle in the opposite direction. “I’m going home.”
Riel and I followed. I felt a little sorry for Mokey, but when Riel looked at me and winked, I couldn’t help but shake my head and smile back.
Gramp looked the worst I had ever seen him. The yellow colour of his skin seemed to be made more sickly because of the greyness overtop of it. Dark, half-circles under his eyes made the yellow in the whites of them even scarier.
Between the look of him, the hanging bag with the tube that led to the needle in his arm, and the silly blue gown he wore that was half-hidden under the sheets, I was starting to feel queasy like I had before. Added to the way the whole hospital looked and the weird smell that wouldn’t let me get a proper breath, I worried that I was going to faint—again. I really wished that Nan had come with me, but she had decided to come up that evening instead. At least it wasn’t a problem for me to sneak up to his room on my own.
“Are you going to be all right, Buddy?” Gramp whispered. His voice didn’t seem strong enough to do anything more than that. “You’re getting a little green-in-the-gills, and you’ve got that funny look to you again. Don’t go fainting on us anymore. I don’t think the floor could take your head banging on it.” He tried to chuckle at his joke, but ended up coughing until it seemed to hurt him.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Sorry for what, Son?”
“For making you go hunting. Nan said getting cold while we were hunting put you back in here.”
“Nonsense,” he said quickly. “I could have gotten chilled just as easy working in the garden, which is where I would likely have been if we hadn’t gone hunting. Don’t you dare think for a minute that it’s your fault I’m in here.”
I wasn’t totally convinced.
Gramp cleared his throat. “I’m here because I probably ate the wrong pickled egg at the beer parlour. That’s what Dr. Rhomberg said was how I could have picked up the bug. He also mentioned that my catching it was less likely than winning the Irish Sweepstakes. Great luck, eh?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Look, I’m going to be stuck in here a while. That leaves you the only man in the house. So I need you to step up and take some added responsibility.” He had shifted to a more serious tone.
I felt like I was supposed to nod, so I did.
“Your grandmother told me you’re already getting all the coal stored in the basement. Good for you. That’s a great start.”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling a flush of pride squirt through me.
“But, how you got around to taking on that job leaves a whole bunch to be desired. What’s this about you becoming a thug? I always thought of my grandson becoming a lover, not a fighter. Why did you hit that poor kid?”
The flush of pride became a sunburn of shame.
“I don’t know why I did it, Gramp. I was just so mad, probably at her more than Myron. But I couldn’t hit her. She’s a woman, and, well, she’s my teacher.”
“I don’t have to guess you mean Miss Ruby,” he said. “You really need to understand, though, that you have to let her be responsible for herself, while you need to be responsible for yourself. Be bigger about things than she is. Always step back when you get angry and take a deep breath. You might see that most of what you’re angry about is not really important. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you honestly get it?”
“I got it.”
“Good.”
There was nothing funny about our little back-and-forth agreement this time.
Gramp took a deep breath, and then let his head fall back on the pillow. He had talked a lot and his voice was getting weaker. He already looked even more tired than when I had first come in a few minutes earlier. On the walk over I thought I’d bring up the ending of the World Series, hoping it might take his mind off being sick. But it didn’t seem at all important or even worth mentioning anymore.
“You’re looking pretty tired, Gramp. Maybe I should go and let you get some rest.”
“Not yet, Buddy. There are some things I need to say to you.”
“What things?” I asked, struggling to remember if I had done anything else I could get in trouble for.
“Some things that are very important to me. Things we’ve never talked about before. Things I thought I wouldn’t have to say to you until you were a lot older.”
I was relieved for a second, but then my mind raced. “They can wait, can’t they?”
“Probably. I would hope so. But let me say them now—just in case.”
“What do you mean, ‘just in case’?” I didn’t like those words.
He didn’t answer my question, but kept going on to what I guessed he had planned.
“Well, Buddy, when it comes right down to it, life is pretty much about challenges and choices. Each and every day we’re faced with those, some big and some small.”
He seemed to have gained strength from somewhere. I could feel all of mine draining from me.
“I believe the measure of who we are, or will become, is determined more or less by how we deal with our challenges, and the choices we make when we’re faced with them.”
I was trying my best to get what he meant, but he was saying some pretty difficult stuff. I imagined I got the drift, but I couldn’t say that I got exactly what he meant by each word. He kept going.
“If we face each challenge with a purpose and a pure heart, and vow to do good things, chances are life will work out for us.”
“But what if things don’t work out?” I asked. “What if you do your best and your best just isn’t good enough?”
He looked me right square in the eyes. “Then you try your best to be strong. You try to learn from each mistake you make. And, ultimately, you pick yourself up and soldier on.”
He was stronger now than he had been during my whole visit. I didn’t want to make him weak again by talking more, but I had to be sure I understood what he wanted so badly to say to me.
“I thought you always taught me that there is no trying. I though you said that to try meant you had an easy out if you failed. That you either did or didn’t. That trying was really setting up a person to fail.”
He seemed pleased I had been listening closely enough to remember word for word what he had told me a while back. A smile came to his face.
“You’re right,” he said. “I forgot.” Then the smile slipped away. “Better put, if you do, you win,” he went on. “If you don’t, you lose. The aim is to always win more challenges than you lose. Make the best choices you can to win more often.” He paused and looked as deeply into me as I ever remembered him doing.
“Get it, Buddy?”
“Got it.”
“Good.”
I believed I really did get it.
Maybe that was what then caused him to laugh a little, because he believed I really got it, too. Or, maybe he laughed because he liked the little Get it? Got it. Good! game we seemed to play a lot.
“I think you’d better scoot now, Son. I feel the need for a nap comin’ on.”
“Can I come and see you again tomorrow?” I asked.
“The doctor says the more I rest, the quicker I’ll get better. He also says that visitors tend to wear a patient out. So, I think we’d best hold off on your coming by till next Saturday. Okay?”
I found it hard to hold back my disappointment, but I nodded my head so my voice wouldn’t betray me. I wanted to say that it wasn’t fair he would have to stay in this place, with its weird smells and scary hospital tools hanging around. Secretly, of course, I would have loved to hear him say that we’d be going hunting again the next weekend.
But then I remembered, “Actually, next Saturday is Hallowe’en, and Mom, Nan and Aunt Bud want me to take the girls trick-or-treating before it gets dark. I have to help get them ready, too. I don’t know if I’ll have time to come and see you, what with getting costumes on them and everything.”
“That’s not a problem, Buddy. Good for you for helping out. We’ll make it Sunday, then.” He nodded, and smiled from the corner of his mouth.
“Come and give me a hug now,” he commanded. I pretty much fell into his arms, sprawling across his bed.
As he squeezed me hard, he said, “I love you, Buddy. I hope you know that.”
“I do, and I love you, too, Gramp,” I said back. I was afraid I was going to start crying. I didn’t want to.
I wanted to show Gramp that I could be a man, and I didn’t think a man should cry. So, I was surprised when he gently pushed me up, with his hands locked onto my upper arms, to find that there were tears in his eyes.
He patted me on my chest and then my cheek. “Do good things, Son. Do good things…”
Then he waved me away.