Trains

Sitting in the chair, she drew the sweater around her and shivered.  It was late January by the calendar, and as she looked out of the window near her chair, the yard light cast a glow on new fallen snow.  Glancing at the clock she sighed as the time crept by ever so slowly.  It was one of those nights.  She had let the tears spill down and now, she waited for the blessed relief of sleep.  The only sound was the ticking of the clock on the wall, but every once in awhile a gust of wind swept around the corner and whistled as it danced along the old shingle siding. 

Nights like this stretched so intermittably long.  Her thoughts drifted, as they did so often, to what her life was like before, and now.  Now, Papa was gone.  An old man full of years, yes, and those years were spent in her care.  Papa was her responsibility - one that she cherished and took upon herself without hardly a second thought.  She had opportunity to marry any of a number of promising young men when she was in her 20's and 30's and some not so young who sought her out as she grew older.  But, no, that kind of life - the one her sisters and friends found so effortlessly, was not to be her choice.  She knew early on her life was with Papa, and in providing for him - and provide she did.  But now, well, Papa took a final breath, and went home last month, leaving her in an empty house with memories, and pictures, and the cadence of the trains as they rumbled over the tracks and clattered into the night.

She still listened for his footsteps on the floorboards and the creak of his mattress as he turned in bed.  Those sounds  were not to be - but several hundred yards away - the trains came and went, all hours, all through the night.  They ran on a schedule, whistling long and loud as they passed the crossing near her old home. Like beacons in the night - the westbound locomotives headed toward the California coast and the eastbound freighters chugged toward Kansas City and Chicago - each one manned by an engineer, whose job was to blow the whistle as the train went through the crossing. 

40 or 50 trains a day clipping by become an accompaniment to the gardening, the chicken house cleaning, the yard work, or the visiting on the porch. But often, Papa stopped his work to watch the trains roar by, 70, 80, 90 miles an hour as they pulled car after car loaded with wheat, oil, new automobiles, or coal. At night the sweet music of the fast clickity clack along the corridor was a reminder that business and life, proceed as usual through the midnight of sleep.

12:22am.  The discordant wail of a three note blast broke the silence.  He's a little late this evening, she thought.  The notes hung in the air.  The hand on the noisy whistle had rules to follow regarding when to begin to blow, how long to hold it open, and how many times to press the button as the train sped through the north end of the sleeping town.  The engineer peered out the window of the locomotive and spotted a faint yellowish glow coming from the west window of the little brown house.  Someone's up late, he thought. 

She sat in the glow of the lamp, listening to the noise from the wheels and the whistle fade away, oddly comforted, somehow feeling as if an old friend had stopped by to visit and then left in a noisy hurry to get to another destination.  Getting up from her chair, she turned out the lamp and wearily climbed into the wrought iron framed bed.  Pulling the heavy quilt up to her chin, she listened for the trains' songs.  As the melodies echoed through the night, they wrapped her in peace, and she slept, dreaming of a life past.