The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [163]
Slowed by the curve and the upgrade, it was a long freight consisting almost entirely of empty gravel hoppers open to the sky. The first dozen hoppers went by before he decided that no open boxcars were coming. In a burst of energy he ran alongside the train, trying to match its speed, then grabbed on to a hopper’s ladder and climbed up. The empty gravel hopper had high metal sides and a bottom that sloped toward the center, where Nail saw a chute for unloading the gravel and a metal beam broad enough to sit on. He hopped down and gripped the beam tight with both hands, as if he were riding a bucking horse; his knuckles stayed white and his hands grew tired.
The rough ride lasted less than a hour before the train stopped. Nail stood up on the beam and could just see over the side. A water tank loomed ahead down the tracks, but the train had not stopped for water. A sign beside the tracks read simply houston, and Nail remembered that the famous man had been an Arkansawyer before he went to Texas. Three men were walking down the track from one direction, and the brakeman was coming to meet them.
Nail ducked back down and heard a conversation:
“Seen any riders?”
“Aint looked for none.”
“What’s in these cars?”
“They’re empty. Caint you tell?”
“Wouldn’t be somebody ridin one of those empties?”
“Take a look if you want. You huntin hoboes?”
“Fuck hoboes. We’re huntin for a man escaped the pen last night.”
“Any reward on him?”
“A hunderd dollars.”
“Jesus! I’ll help you look myself, but there’s sixty-three empties on this train. Take you all day to climb up and look into each one of ’em.”
“Tell you what. See that water tower up yonder? We’ll just climb up on that, and y’all drive under real slow, and we’ll look into each of the cars that way, and if we see anybody, we’ll wave you down.”
The voices stopped. Nail cautiously raised his eyes above the side of the car. The brakeman was heading for the caboose, and the three men were going the other way, toward the water tank. Soon the engine puffed steam and the train lurched and began to move. Nail climbed over the opposite side of the car, hung from the ladder for a moment, watching the tracks in both directions, then jumped down to the roadbed and tumbled into a ditch. He clambered into a stand of weeds and crawled low a good distance from the tracks before he stood up and got as far away from them as he could.
But he continued in the direction of the tracks, because it was a generally northwestward course and that was his inclination. He hiked up through Copperas Gap, keeping the tracks in view, but when he reached the point where they veered sharply westward, he began to think that he ought to abandon his plan to take the train part of the way home. And his sense of direction, which kept wanting to turn north toward home, disliked the train’s westerly course. He wanted to get across the Arkansas River and up into the Ozarks. Once in the Ozarks, even the foothills, he would feel as if he were back in his own country, and that would give him strength to walk another week, if need be, to reach Stay More.
Just to the north of Copperas Gap is a place where the Arkansas River, plunging southward and running into a mountain, narrows dramatically and bends eastward. It is one of the river’s narrowest passages in Arkansas, and it was there, probably, that Nail decided to cross.
In trying to find that spot on my map, I was astonished to discover something very strange: that the hamlet, or settlement, or maybe just a riverbank landing, on the north shore of the Arkansas River, where the current would take him or his body after his