I went deeper and deeper into the woods and sometime at the height of the afternoon wandered into a stand of ancient pine with a porous forest floor of brown pine needles that was so soft you couldn’t hear your own footsteps. It was dark in here, there was an umber twilight in lieu of the day, and there seemed to be no usual busy life at all, no birds, no insects, just this dark place of unnatural quiet. Looking up, I could hardly find anything green. Yet it was not threatening, the solitude was so complete, the stillness so perfect that I felt as if I had come into some vast, hushed cathedral of peace. Not even a Father. I stopped walking and stood very still and listened for I don’t know what. And then, right in my tracks I sat down and for a while was as still as everything else.
I thought of Fanny the Fat Lady’s warm hand on the small of my back.
By early afternoon I was traveling again on roads, only jumping off to the side when I heard a car coming, or taking to the woods in order to skirt a town. I went along that day with no destination in mind, no plan of action except to follow the rise, and go for the altitude. I had no food left and did not feel I needed any. I came out to a broad plateau and looking out ahead of me realized I had gone past the region of towns and now, for my arrogance, had no hope of supper unless I found a farmhouse somewhere.
The open ground was uncultivated, mile after mile. I was on a crumbling two-lane road with grass growing in the cracks and this suggested to me the unlikelihood of a ride coming along. Still I kept going.
And then with the sun turning red as it dropped toward the evening, I saw to my left, perhaps fifty yards into an open space of tall weed and tangled brush, a single-track railroad embankment. Behind the embankment was a curved outcropping of shiny flaked rock. I got up on the embankment for a professional survey: I had happened upon a one-track spur line of some sort. I figured that as it curved in an arc around the rock hill, there was a fair chance it would be going slowly enough to hop. Coming down from the roadbed, I found a bare patch of ground spotted with oil. And beside the charred remains of a fire I saw a flask of clear glass and a lady’s shoe with the heel torn off. So others had stopped here in their great study of the outdoors — it was a station of sorts.
I gathered a great bundle of kindling, but I was too tired to build a fire. I lay on my back with my hands behind my head and I watched the sky. The sun had gone down but the sky was still blue, a very pale blue, with a few high clouds still golden with sunlight. Soon I was lying in the dusk and feeling the chill of the evening but the sky was sunlit and blue and so far away in its warmth that I felt I was looking at it from a grave.
—
I fell asleep that way and sometime during the night was aroused by a train whistle. I lay there listening for it again in case I had only been dreaming. Again I heard it, this time somewhat closer. I stood up and tried to pound some circulation into my stiff hulk. The train was coming without question now. I had no idea what time it was, the sky was black, starless. I thought I could hear the locomotive. I moved toward the embankment and waited. I could hear the engine clearly now and knew it was moving at a slow speed. The first I saw of it was a diffuse paling of the darkness along the curve of the embankment. Suddenly I was blinded by a powerful light, as if I had looked into the sun. I dropped to my knees. The beam swung away from me in a transverse arc and a long conical ray of light illuminated the entire rock outcropping, every silvery vein of schist glittering as bright as a mirror, every fern and evergreen flaring for a moment as if torched. I rubbed my eyes and looked for the train behind the glare. It was passing from my left to my right. The locomotive and tender were blacker than the night, a massive movement forward of shadow, but there was a passenger car behind them and it was all lit up inside. I saw a porter in a white jacket serving drinks to three men sitting at a table. I saw dark wood paneling, a lamp with a fringed shade, and shelves of books in leather bindings. Then two women sitting talking at a group of wing chairs that looked textured, as if needle-pointed. Then a bright bedroom with frosted-glass wall lamps and a canopied bed and standing naked in front of a mirror was a blond girl and she was holding up for her examination a white dress on a hanger.
Oh my lords and ladies and then the train had passed through the clearing and I was watching the red light disappear around the bend. I hadn’t moved from the moment the light had dazzled my eyes. I’d heard of private railroad cars but was not prepared. I was under the impression I would see it again if I waited. I waited. I heard it going down the track and listened until I couldn’t hear it anymore. Into my vacated mind flowed all the English I never knew I’d learned at Paterson Latin High School. Grammar slammed into my brain. In an instant this vision of incandescent splendor had left me more alone and terrified than I knew it was possible to be.
I got a fire going and made it as large as I could, I threw everything I could find into it, it was a damn bonfire and I crouched beside it trying to get warm I made an involuntary sound in my throat for my dereliction, my loneliness, the callow hopes of my life. Who did I think I was? Where did I think I was going? What made me think it was worth anything to stay alive?
The fire blazed up. I wanted to get in it.
At the first light of the morning I climbed the embankment and set out down the tracks in the direction the train had gone.
7
Compare the private railroad car sitting on the Santa Fe siding one night in 1910 in front of the mine near Ludlow Colorado whose collapsed entry was being dug away by rescue crews. Late at night by the glow of torches they began to bring out the dead hunky miners, some so impregnated by coal dust they looked like ancient archaeological finds of considerable significance. Some had been blown to pieces and were assembled on the cold ground by thoughtful colleagues who matched the torn halves of pants legs or recognized what head went with what trunk. The boy followed these deliberations and remarked on the sepulchral interest of assembling pieces of bodies matching and discarding, trying this arm here that foot there on the dark ground, the chill of the October night on the slag hills, the black mineral mountains looming darker than the night sky, the boy noticing the darkening stains around the bodies as blood blacker than coalwater. Some miners were brought out intact, uninjured and looking only slightly stunned to have breathed all the available air until there was no more. Some faces had the look of irritability that comes when something small has gone wrong. Others had eyes rolled into their heads in exasperation others had sorrowed into death and by some curious self-embalmment of the skin left the tracks of their tears like shining falling stars through their grizzled faces. The rescue work was commanded from the private railroad car, a property like the mine and like the miners of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and in the car a self-sufficient unit with bedrooms kitchen small library and a row of partners’ desks were three or four officers of the firm some in gartered shirt sleeves efficiently dealing with the wives making settlements pushing waivers across their desks proffering pens matching the tally sheets to the employment records and in general dealing so efficiently with the disaster that the mine would be back in action within the week. The only thing that threatened this work performance was the occasional embittered woman who would come in screaming and tearing her hair and cursing them in her own language. They would nod to one of the private peace officers and the troublesome woman would be removed. Gradually in his inspection of the disaster the boy found his way into the car and in the moment before he was ejected he observed one of the company officers, a stolid man impassively wiping the spittle from his cheek. The brass plate at his desk informed the boy of F. W. Bennett Vice President for Engineering. Warren felt the rough hand of the armed guard on his neck and then the coolness of the night air as he flew from the top of the rail-car step to the graveled ground. His knee was embedded with bits of stone as the miners had been peppered with coal fragments, so he understood that feeling. To understand what it meant to be buried alive in a mountain he sat later with his eyes closed in the night and his hands over his ears and he held his breath as long as he could.