Authors: Denis Johnson
Train Dreams (3 page)
Toward dark, as Grainier lay by the river in a blanket, his eye caught on a quick thing up above, flying along the river. He looked and saw his wife Gladys’s white bonnet sailing past overhead. Just sailing past.
He stayed on for weeks in this camp, waiting, wanting many more such visions as that of the bonnet, and the chocolates—as many as wanted to come to him; and he figured as long as he saw impossible things in this place, and liked them, he might as well be in the habit of talking to himself, too. Many times each day he found himself deflating on a gigantic sigh and saying, “A pretty mean circumstance!” He thought he’d better be up and doing things so as not to sigh quite as much.
Sometimes he thought about Kate, the pretty little tyke, but not frequently. Hers was not such a sad story. She’d hardly been awake, much less alive.
He lived through the summer off dried morel mushrooms and fresh trout cooked up together in butter he bought at the store in Meadow Creek. After a while a dog came along, a little red-haired female. The dog stayed with him, and he stopped talking to himself because he was ashamed to have the animal catch him at it. He bought a canvas tarp and some rope in Meadow Creek, and later he bought a nanny goat and walked her back to his camp, the dog wary and following this newcomer at a distance. He picketed the nanny near his lean-to.
He spent several days along the creek in gorges where the burn wasn’t so bad, collecting willow whips from which he wove a crate about two yards square and half as tall. He and the dog walked to Meadow Creek and he bought four hens, also a rooster to keep them in line, and carted them home in a grain sack and cooped them up in the crate. He let them out for a day or two every now and then, penning them frequently so the hens wouldn’t lay in secret places, not that there were many places in this destruction even to hide an egg.
The little red dog lived on goat’s milk and fish heads and, Grainier supposed, whatever she could catch. She served as decent company when she cared to, but tended to wander for days at a time.
Because the ground was too bare for grazing, he raised his goat on the same laying mash he fed the chickens. This got to be expensive. Following the first frost in September he butchered the goat and jerked most of its meat.
After the second frost of the season, he started strangling and stewing the fowls one by one over the course of a couple of weeks, until he and the dog had eaten them all, the rooster, too. Then he left for Meadow Creek. He had grown no garden and built no structure other than his lean-to.
As he got ready to depart, he discussed the future with his dog. “To keep a dog in town it ain’t my nature,” he told the animal. “But you seem to me elderly, and I don’t think an elderly old dog can make the winter by your lonely up around these hills.” He told her he would pay an extra nickel to bring her aboard the train a dozen miles into Bonners Ferry. But this must not have suited her. On the day he gathered his few things to hike down to the platform at Meadow Creek, the little red dog was nowhere to be found, and he left without her.
The abbreviated job a year earlier at Robinson Gorge had given him money enough to last through the winter in Bonners Ferry, but in order to stretch it Grainier worked for twenty cents an hour for a man named Williams who’d contracted with Great Northern to sell them one thousand cords of firewood for two dollars and seventy-five cents each. The steady daylong exertions kept him and seven other men warm through the days, even as the winter turned into the coldest seen in many years. The Kootenai River froze hard enough that one day they watched, from the lot where wagons brought them logs of birch and larch to be sawn and split, a herd of two hundred cattle being driven across the river on the ice. They moved onto the blank white surface and churned up a snowy fog that first lost them in itself, then took in all the world north of the riverbank, and finally rose high enough to hide the sun and sky.
Late that March Grainier returned to his homesite in the Moyea Valley, this time hauling a wagonload of supplies.
Animals had returned to what was left of the forest. As Grainier drove along in the wagon behind a wide, slow, sand-colored mare, clusters of orange butterflies exploded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees. More bears than people traveled the muddy road, leaving tracks straight up and down the middle of it; later in the summer they would forage in the low patches of huckleberry he already saw coming back on the blackened hillsides.
At his old campsite by the river he raised his canvas lean-to and went about chopping down five dozen burned spruce, none of them bigger around than his own hat size, acting on the generally acknowledged theory that one man working alone could handle a house log about the circumference of his own head. With the rented horse he got the timber decked in his clearing, then had to return the outfit to the stables in Bonners Ferry and hop the train back to Meadow Creek.
It wasn’t until a couple of days later, when he got back to his old home—now his new home—that he noticed what his labors had prevented his seeing: It was full-on spring, sunny and beautiful, and the Moyea Valley showed a lot of green against the dark of the burn. The ground about was healing. Fireweed and jack pine stood up about thigh high. A mustard-tinted fog of pine pollen drifted through the valley when the wind came up. If he didn’t yank this crop of new ones, his clearing would return to forest.
He built his cabin about eighteen by eighteen, laying out lines, making a foundation of stones in a ditch knee-deep to get down below the frost line, scribing and hewing the logs to keep each one flush against the next, hacking notches, getting his back under the higher ones to lift them into place. In a month he’d raised four walls nearly eight feet in height. The windows and roof he left for later, when he could get some milled lumber. He tossed his canvas over the east end to keep the rain out. No peeling had been required, because the fire had managed that for him. He’d heard that fire-killed trees lasted best, but the cabin stank. He burned heaps of jack pine needles in the middle of the dirt floor, trying to change the odor’s character, and he felt after a while that he’d succeeded.
In early June the red dog appeared, took up residence in a corner, and whelped a brood of four pups that appeared quite wolfish.
Down at the Meadow Creek store he spoke about this development with a Kootenai Indian named Bob. Kootenai Bob was a steady man who had always refused liquor and worked frequently at jobs in town, just as Grainier did, and they’d known each other for many years. Kootenai Bob said that if the dog’s pups had come out wolfish, that would be quite strange. The Kootenais had it that only one pair in a wolf den ever made pups—that you couldn’t get any of the he-wolves to mate except one, the chief of the wolf tribe. And the she-wolf he chose to bear his litters was the only bitch in the pack who ever came in heat. “And so I tell you,” Bob said, “that therefore your wandering dog wouldn’t drop a litter of wolves.” But what if she’d encountered the wolf pack at just the moment she was coming into heat, Grainier wanted to know—might the king wolf have mounted her then, just for the newness of the experience? “Then perhaps, perhaps,” Bob said. “Might be. Might be you’ve got yourself some dog-of-wolf. Might be you’ve started your own pack, Robert.”
Three of the pups wandered off immediately as the little dog weaned them, but one, a dis-coordinated male, stayed around and was tolerated by its mother. Grainier felt sure this dog was got of a wolf, but it never even whimpered in reply when the packs in the distance, some as far away as the Selkirks on the British Columbia side, sang at dusk. The creature needed to be taught its nature, Grainier felt. One evening he got down beside it and howled. The little pup only sat on its rump with an inch of pink tongue jutting stupidly from its closed mouth. “You’re not growing in the direction of your own nature, which is to howl when the others do,” he told the mongrel. He stood up straight himself and howled long and sorrowfully over the gorge, and over the low quiet river he could hardly see across this close to nightfall … Nothing from the pup. But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart, and after an evening’s program with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant.
He tried telling Kootenai Bob of this development. “Howling, are you?” the Indian said. “There it is for you, then. That’s what happens, that’s what they say: There’s not a wolf alive that can’t tame a man.”
The pup disappeared before autumn, and Grainier hoped he’d made it across the line to his brothers in Canada, but he had to assume the worst: food for a hawk, or for the coyotes.
Many years later—in 1930—Grainier saw Kootenai Bob on the very day the Indian died. That day Kootenai Bob was drunk for the first time in his life. Some ranch hands visiting from across the line in British Columbia had managed to get him to take a drink by fixing up a jug of shandy, a mixture of lemonade and beer. They’d told him he could drink this with impunity, as the action of the lemon juice would nullify any effect of the beer, and Kootenai Bob had believed them, because the United States was by now more than a decade into Prohibition, and the folks from Canada, where liquor was still allowed, were considered experts when it came to alcohol. Grainier found old Bob sitting on a bench out front of the hotel in Meadow Creek toward evening with his legs wrapped around an eight-quart canning pan full of beer—no sign of lemonade by now—lapping at it like a thirsty mutt. The Indian had been guzzling all afternoon, and he’d pissed himself repeatedly and no longer had the power of speech. Sometime after dark he wandered off and managed to get himself a mile up the tracks, where he lay down unconscious across the ties and was run over by a succession of trains. Four or five came over him, until late next afternoon the gathering multitude of crows prompted someone to investigate. By then Kootenai Bob was strewn for a quarter mile along the right-of-way. Over the next few days his people were seen plying along the blank patch of earth beside the rails, locating whatever little tokens of flesh and bone and cloth the crows had missed and collecting them in brightly, beautifully painted leather pouches, which they must have taken off somewhere and buried with a fitting ceremony.
A
t just about the time Grainier discovered a rhythm to his seasons—summers in Washington, spring and fall at his cabin, winters boarding in Bonners Ferry—he began to see he couldn’t make it last. This was some four years into his residence in the second cabin.
t just about the time Grainier discovered a rhythm to his seasons—summers in Washington, spring and fall at his cabin, winters boarding in Bonners Ferry—he began to see he couldn’t make it last. This was some four years into his residence in the second cabin.
His summer wages gave him enough to live on all year, but he wasn’t built for logging. First he became aware how much he needed the winter to rest and mend; then he suspected the winter wasn’t long enough to mend him. Both his knees ached. His elbows cracked loudly when he straightened his arms, and something hitched and snapped in his right shoulder when he moved it the wrong way; a general stiffness of his frame worked itself out by halves through most mornings, and he labored like an engine through the afternoons, but he was well past thirty-five years, closer now to forty, and he really wasn’t much good in the woods anymore.
When the month of April arrived in 1925, he didn’t leave for Washington. These days there was plenty of work in town for anybody willing to get around after it. He felt like staying closer to home, and he’d come into possession of a pair of horses and a wagon—by a sad circumstance, however. The wagon had been owned by Mr. and Mrs. Pinkham, who ran a machine shop on Highway 2. He’d agreed to help their grandson Henry, known as Hank, an enormous youth in his late teens, certainly no older than his early twenties, to load sacks of cornmeal aboard the Pinkhams’ wagon; this favor a result of Grainier’s having stopped in briefly to get some screws for a saw handle. They’d only loaded the first two sacks when Hank sloughed the third one from his shoulder onto the dirt floor of the barn and said, “I am as dizzy as anything today,” sat on the pile of sacks, removed his hat, flopped over sideways, and died.
His grandfather hastened from the house when Grainier called him and went to the boy right away, saying, “Oh. Oh. Oh.” He was open-mouthed with uncomprehension. “He’s not gone, is he?”
“I don’t know, sir. I just couldn’t say. He sat down and fell over. I don’t even think he said anything to complain,” Grainier told him.
“We’ve got to send you for help,” Mr. Pinkham said.
“Where should I go?”
“I’ve got to get Mother,” Pinkham said, looking at Grainier with terror on his face. “She’s inside the house.”
Grainier remained with the dead boy but didn’t look at him while they were alone.
Old Mrs. Pinkham came into the barn flapping her hands and said, “Hank? Hank?” and bent close, taking her grandson’s face in her hands. “Are you gone?”
“He’s gone, isn’t he?” her husband said.
“He’s gone! He’s gone!”
“He’s gone, Pearl.”
“God has him now,” Mrs. Pinkham said.
“Dear Lord, take this boy to your bosom …”
“You could seen this coming ever since!” the old woman cried.
“His heart wasn’t strong,” Mr. Pinkham explained. “You could see that about him. We always knew that much.”
“His heart was his fate,” Mrs. Pinkham said. “You could looked right at him anytime you wanted and seen this.”
“Yes,” Mr. Pinkham agreed.
“He was that sweet and good,” Mrs. Pinkham said. “Still in his youth. Still in his youth!” She stood up angrily and marched from the barn and over to the edge of the roadway—U.S. Highway 2—and stopped.
Grainier had seen people dead, but he’d never seen anybody die. He didn’t know what to say or do. He felt he should leave, and he felt he shouldn’t leave.
Mr. Pinkham asked Grainier a favor, standing in the shadow of the house while his wife waited in the yard under a wild mixture of clouds and sunshine, looking amazed and, from this distance, as young as a child, and also very beautiful, it seemed to Grainier. “Would you take him down to Helmer’s?” Helmer was in charge of the cemetery and, with Smithson the barber’s help, often prepared corpses for the ground. “We’ll get poor young Hank in the wagon. We’ll get him in the wagon, and you’ll go ahead and take him for me, won’t you? So I can tend to his grandmother. She’s gone out of her mind.”
Together they wrestled the heavy dead boy aboard the wagon, resorting after much struggle to the use of two long boards. They inclined them against the wagon’s bed and flopped the corpse up and over, up and over, until it rested in the conveyance. “Oh—oh—oh—oh—” exclaimed the grandfather with each and every nudge. As for Grainier, he hadn’t touched another person in several years, and even apart from the strangeness of this situation, the experience was something to remark on and remember. He giddyapped Pinkham’s pair of old mares, and they pulled young dead Hank Pinkham to Helmer’s cemetery.
Helmer, too, had a favor to ask of Grainier, once he’d taken the body off his hands. “If you’ll deliver a coffin over to the jail in Troy and pick up a load of lumber for me at the yard on Main, then take the lumber to Leona for me, I’ll pay you rates for both jobs separate. Two for the price of one. Or come to think of it,” he said, “one job for the price of two, that’s what it would be, ain’t it, sir?”
“I don’t mind,” Grainier told him.
“I’ll give you a nickel for every mile of it.”
“I’d have to stop at Pinkham’s and bargain a rate from them. I’d need twenty cents a mile before I saw a profit.”
“All right then. Ten cents and it’s done.”
“I’d need a bit more.”
“Six dollars entire.”
“I’ll need a pencil and a paper. I don’t know my numbers without a pencil and a paper.”
The little undertaker brought him what he needed, and together they decided that six and a half dollars was fair.
For the rest of the fall and even a ways into winter, Grainier leased the pair and wagon from the Pinkhams, boarding the mares with their owners, and kept himself busy as a freighter of sorts. Most of his jobs took him east and west along Highway 2, among the small communities there that had no close access to the railways.
Some of these errands took him down along the Kootenai River, and traveling beside it always brought into his mind the image of William Coswell Haley, the dying boomer. Rather than wearing away, Grainier’s regret at not having helped the man had grown much keener as the years had passed. Sometimes he thought also of the Chinese railroad hand he’d almost helped to kill. The thought paralyzed his heart. He was certain the man had taken his revenge by calling down a curse that had incinerated Kate and Gladys. He believed the punishment was too great.
But the hauling itself was better work than any he’d undertaken, a ticket to a kind of show, to an entertainment composed of the follies and endeavors of his neighbors. Grainier was having the time of his life. He contracted with the Pinkhams to buy the horses and wagon in installments for three hundred dollars.
By the time he’d made this decision, the region had seen more than a foot of snow, but he continued a couple more weeks in the freight business. It didn’t seem a particularly bad winter down below, but the higher country had frozen through, and one of Grainier’s last jobs was to get up the Yaak River Road to the saloon at the logging village of Sylvanite, in the hills above which a lone prospector had blown himself up in his shack while trying to thaw out frozen dynamite on his stove. The man lay out on the bartop, alive and talking, sipping free whiskey and praising his dog. His dog’s going for help had saved him. For half a day the animal had made such a nuisance of himself around the saloon that one of the patrons had finally noosed him and dragged him home and found his master extensively lacerated and raving from exposure in what remained of his shack.
Much that was astonishing was told of the dogs in the Panhandle and along the Kootenai River, tales of rescues, tricks, feats of supercanine intelligence and humanlike understanding. As his last job for that year, Grainier agreed to transport a man from Meadow Creek to Bonners who’d actually been shot by his own dog.
The dog-shot man was a bare acquaintance of Grainier’s, a surveyor for Spokane International who came and went in the area, name of Peterson, originally from Virginia. Peterson’s boss and comrades might have put him on the train into town the next morning if they’d waited, but they thought he might perish before then, so Grainier hauled him down the Moyea River Road wrapped in a blanket and half sitting up on a load of half a dozen sacks of wood chips bagged up just to make him comfortable.
“Are you feeling like you need anything?” Grainier said at the start.
Grainier thought Peterson had gone to sleep. Or worse. But in a minute the victim answered: “Nope. I’m perfect.”
A long thaw had come earlier in the month. The snow was melted out of the ruts. Bare earth showed off in the woods. But now, again, the weather was freezing, and Grainier hoped he wouldn’t end up bringing in a corpse dead of the cold.
For the first few miles he didn’t talk much to his passenger, because Peterson had a dented head and crazy eye, the result of some mishap in his youth, and he was hard to look at.
Grainier steeled himself to glance once in a while in the man’s direction, just to be sure he was alive. As the sun left the valley, Peterson’s crazy eye and then his entire face became invisible. If he died now, Grainier probably wouldn’t know it until they came into the light of the gas lamps either side of the doctor’s house. After they’d moved along for nearly an hour without conversation, listening only to the creaking of the wagon and the sound of the nearby river and the clop of the mares, it grew dark.
Grainier disliked the shadows, the spindly silhouettes of birch trees, and the clouds strung around the yellow half-moon. It all seemed designed to frighten the child in him. “Sir, are you dead?” he asked Peterson.
“Who? Me? Nope. Alive,” said Peterson.
“Well, I was wondering—do you feel as if you might go on?”
“You mean as if I might die?”
“Yessir,” Grainier said.
“Nope. Ain’t going to die tonight.”
“That’s good.”
“Even better for
me
, I’d say.”
me
, I’d say.”
Grainier now felt they’d chatted sufficiently that he might raise a matter of some curiosity to him. “Mrs. Stout, your boss’s wife, there. She said your dog shot you.”
“Well, she’s a very upright lady—to my way of knowing, anyways.”
“Yes, I have the same impression of her right around,” Grainier said, “and she said your dog shot you.”
Peterson was silent a minute. In a bit, he coughed and said, “Do you feel a little warm patch in the air? As if maybe last week’s warm weather turned around and might be coming back on us?”
“Not as such to me,” Grainier said. “Just holding the warm of the day the way it does before you get around this ridge.”
They continued along under the rising moon.
“Anyway,” Grainier said.
Peterson didn’t respond. Might not have heard.
“Did your dog really shoot you?”
“Yes, he did. My own dog shot me with my own gun. Ouch!” Peterson said, shifting himself gently. “Can you take your team a little more gradual over these ruts, mister?”
“I don’t mind,” Grainier said. “But you’ve got to get your medical attention, or anything could happen to you.”
“All right. Go at it like the Pony Express, then, if you want.”
“I don’t see how a dog shoots a gun.”
“Well, he did.”
“Did he use a rifle?”
“It weren’t a cannon. It weren’t a pistol. It were a rifle.”
“Well, that’s pretty mysterious, Mr. Peterson. How did that happen?”
“It was self-defense.”
Grainier waited. A full minute passed, but Peterson stayed silent.
“That just tears it then,” Grainier said, quite agitated. “I’m pulling this team up, and you can walk from here, if you want to beat around and around the bush. I’m taking you to town with a hole in you, and I ask a simple question about how your dog shot you, and you have to play like a bunkhouse lout who don’t know the answer.”
“All right!” Peterson laughed, then groaned with the pain it caused him. “My dog shot me in self-defense. I went to shoot
him
, at first, because of what Kootenai Bob the Indian said about him, and he slipped the rope. I had him tied for the business we were about to do.” Peterson coughed and went quiet a few seconds. “I ain’t stalling you now! I just got to get over the hurt a little bit.”
him
, at first, because of what Kootenai Bob the Indian said about him, and he slipped the rope. I had him tied for the business we were about to do.” Peterson coughed and went quiet a few seconds. “I ain’t stalling you now! I just got to get over the hurt a little bit.”
“All right. But why did you have Kootenai Bob tied up, and what has Kootenai Bob got to do with this, anyways?”
“Not Kootenai Bob! I had the
dog
tied up. Kootenai Bob weren’t nowhere near this scene I’m relating. He was before.”
dog
tied up. Kootenai Bob weren’t nowhere near this scene I’m relating. He was before.”
“But the
dog
, I say.”
dog
, I say.”
“And say I also, the
dog
.
He’s
the one I ties.
He’s
the one slips the rope, and I couldn’t get near him—he’d just back off a step for every step I took in his direction. He knew I had his end in mind, which I decided to do on account of what Kootenai Bob said about him. That dog
knew
things—because of what happened to him, which is what Kootenai Bob the Indian told me about him—that animal all of a sudden
knew
things. So I swung the rifle by the barrel and butt-ended that old pup to stop his sass, and wham! I’m sitting on my very own butt end pretty quick. Then I’m laying back, and the sky is traveling away from me in the wrong direction. Mr. Grainier, I’d been shot! Right here!” Peterson pointed to the bandages around his left shoulder and chest. “By my own dog!”
dog
.
He’s
the one I ties.
He’s
the one slips the rope, and I couldn’t get near him—he’d just back off a step for every step I took in his direction. He knew I had his end in mind, which I decided to do on account of what Kootenai Bob said about him. That dog
knew
things—because of what happened to him, which is what Kootenai Bob the Indian told me about him—that animal all of a sudden
knew
things. So I swung the rifle by the barrel and butt-ended that old pup to stop his sass, and wham! I’m sitting on my very own butt end pretty quick. Then I’m laying back, and the sky is traveling away from me in the wrong direction. Mr. Grainier, I’d been shot! Right here!” Peterson pointed to the bandages around his left shoulder and chest. “By my own dog!”
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