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By Root 348 0

by Hazel Felleman, is a 670-page brick. Ms. Felleman, a longtime editor of the Queries and Answers page of the New York Times Book Review, is hailed in the introduction by Edward Frank Allen as “the liaison officer who has coordinated the poetry preferences of the nation.” Our copy resided on a shelf beside the Monarch woodstove. Best Loved is arranged in twelve sections. I spent the majority of my time in section VIII, “Humor and Whimsey.” “The Animal Fair” and “How Paddy Stole the Rope” were favorites. But one night I stopped off in section III, “Poems That Tell a Story.” And, I came to a poem titled “The Hell-Bound Train.” It scared the bejesus out of me.

It has been twenty years since I read “The Hell-Bound Train,” and over deer hunting season this year, when I was in my parents’ house, I had another look at it. I couldn’t remember much about the poem, just the idea of a locomotive steaming for hell. I recalled an image of the devil stoking the steam furnace.

Turns out the poem’s main character is a cowboy. I had forgotten that:

A Texas cowboy lay down on a barroom floor

Having drunk so much he could drink no more;

So he fell asleep with a troubled brain

To dream that he rode on a hell-bound train.

I remembered none of this. But there, in the second stanza, was the image that had scared me silly:

The engine with murderous blood was damp

And was brilliantly lit with a brimstone lamp;

An imp, for fuel, was shoveling bones,

While the furnace rang with a thousand groans.

The lines hit my third-grade gut like an electric acid ball. Reading the next ten stanzas was like walking through a house of horror—the lost souls “all chained together,” the air becoming “hotter and hotter” until “the clothes were burned from each quivering frame.” There was shrieking and begging, there was the devil, capering and dancing for glee. “You have…mocked at God in your hell-born pride…so I’ll land you safe in the lake of fire…where your flesh will waste in the flames that roar.”

In the last two stanzas, the cowboy startles and wakens with an anguished cry. In great desperation, he prays for salvation.

And his prayers and his vows were not in vain

For he never rode the hell-bound train.

I ran to the bathroom.

I stood between the toilet and the sink, teary with fear, praying that I might escape the hell-bound train. I stood there a long time. When I had finally composed myself, I cut quickly through the light of the dining room, up the stairs, and straight to bed. Dad was at the kitchen table, but I didn’t want to talk. Beneath my quilt and with quaking heart, I promised God I would do better. At some point in the supplication, I slept.

When I checked out a copy of The Writer’s Market from the L. E. Phillips Memorial Library sometime in the late 1980s, I was gainfully employed as a registered nurse and had not the slightest conception that I might one day actually pay the rent by writing. I’ve been surviving at it in one form or another ever since, and so far so good, but as a freelance operator you never get clear of the sense that the current gig might be your last, and this is what drives me to hunt down magazine assignments and pitch the next book and hit the road for days on end with boxes of books in the trunk and my well-worn anecdotes at hand. We’re in good shape right now (it helps when I get my annual Social Security statement and see all those four-figure years in the not-so-distant past). Still, as I once heard someone put it, the secret to successful self-employment is to wake up scared every morning, and I usually do.

In public, I am prone to saying freelance writing is a slightly less reliable way of making a living than farming. But when I think of all the hungry mouths circling the dinner table, and Dad out there in the barn trying to make a living with the milk of eighteen cows, I scale down the drama. Dad supplemented the milk check with some on-call work for a factory in Bloomer over the years, and Mom earned money from the county for providing foster care, but even with that in