The Last Fair Deal Going Down. David Rhodes
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demanding to be set free. He would throw the food back out the chute: “Bastards.” And each week they, one of them, would tell him that he must agree to leave, to go away from their home on the river and their trading post. And each week he would refuse. After awhile he no longer shouted at them and no longer shoved the sack of food back out of the cabin; but still he would not agree. Each week became longer. He spent a winter in the cabin: that must have broken his spirit . . . because of the snow and the quiet. Every rustle of wind would startle him. Perhaps he pleaded with them — promised that he would not try to burn down the trading post again; that is to say he would not drink, which always prompted him to try to burn down the trading post that his brothers had built after his father had died sitting on their new secondhand front porch watching the steamboats. Their mother had refused to come out of the house after that, although Luke always maintained that she was a full-blooded American Indian and up until that time had never slept inside but in a lean-to to the side of the house.
It was then, in the winter, when he met my mother. In that terrible silence he must have heard a crunching sound of frozen leaves and twigs. And somehow with his confused mind that had nothing to think about but itself he was able to know that it was not an ordinary sound . . . and later that it was a walking sound, not of a deer or a bear. From a crack in the east wall where he had dug out the dried mud between two logs, he saw her. Pressing his fear to the bottom of his stomach, he called out to her; and she, though afraid of his voice that the endless months had tortured and hammered into a shape not resembling a communicative form, had come up to the cabin.
Unable to name what he feared he wanted from her, his freedom, he stood whimpering inside the cabin, looking out at the two eyes that were looking in through the crack in the wall stained with the blood from beneath his fingernails. “Give me . . . Give me . . .” He could not say it because by then he had been there too long — so long that he had given up to his own isolation, and even madness.
She, being what she was, could not have let him out even had he asked, because of her fear of his brothers, who had become quite influential during the past several years. She was, however, able to give him the thing he most wanted and every Saturday afternoon shoved him in through the latched feeding chute a bottle of grain alcohol, which he kept hidden under the blankets of his bed and which she picked up every Thursday morning to refill in order that the cabin would not become cluttered with the containers.
The alcohol and, yes, the occasional presence of my mother gave Luke Sledge a stability that enabled him to last another full year, through another winter, before giving in and agreeing to leave. His determination might have been broken before that without her help and so she must have thought to herself many times that she was actually harming him despite her good intentions. She must have thought of this very carefully before reaching a decision — she did! And she continued to make that same kind of decision about him.
Father was let out of the cabin. He took the money, the wagon, the horse, and the dog, drove to the Andover farm, loaded Andrea’s few possessions, set her beside him on the seat, took a ferry across the river, and drove into Iowa.
They went on slowly. The horse was old and Luke stopped along the streams and unharnessed him, letting him wander up and down the creek banks drinking water and chewing on moss and waterweeds. Luke would sit with his back against a wagon wheel while Andrea walked in the water and talked to him about bugs and trees and how her father had laughed so hard when he saw the goose chasing her little brother around the yard, Luke looked at the water; and Bull Frog, the Black and Tan, lay down.
The sun clawed into Father’s milky face. His shoulders turned red and dead skin peeled off in huge patches; the reins wore blisters into his hands that filled with water and burst. In a small town not far from Clinton they bought an ax, a razor, flour, needles, thread, denim, ribbon, beef, and blankets. Father shaved the beard from his face and the sun began to dig into his neck. His muscles ached and they went slowly on, the dust barely rising above the ground under the horse, and Bull Frog running in large circles around them, making a pattern like a writing exercise with two lines drawn through it. At night they slept under the wagon.
“Is it going to rain?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet,” answered Luke, looking out from under the wagon. “I’ll tell you, though, when I do. See, if the wind shifts to the north then it will rain.”
“You’ll tell me then, if it does. Even if I’m asleep. Wake me and tell me if it will rain.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Just because . . . just because I like to know if it’s going to rain. So I can wait for it.”
“Do you want to know how you can tell?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you can see that there must be a lot of clouds over there,” and he pointed, “because you can’t see any stars. You can tell it’s colder too because . . .” But Andrea was asleep. Luke lay still until her body slowed down and her breathing was even. He carefully crawled out from under the covers, circled the wagon several times, located Amos, gave Bull Frog a piece of beef, and returned to under the wagon where he lay listening to Andrea breathing and watching for signs of rain.
They drove on toward Des Moines. Luke Sledge saw a railroad track and he saw a train full of people moving along it. He followed the track and found where it stopped to let people on or off. Andrea and Luke sat on the wagon seat and watched as people came out of the little wooden and brick building called Des Moines Depot carrying leather bags and paper sacks and magazines — the steam wafting up and across the wooden platform, around yapping dogs. Father looked at the engineers as they paraded along beside the trains inspecting the workers unloading the baggage and freight, the signal men and switch operators. Bull Frog lay down in the shade of the horse and went to sleep. Andrea yawned and rested her head against Luke. He watched the people coming off the trains, stretching their legs, surveying the layout of the station against the sky. Mothers careened down the platform pursuing their children gone ecstatic over the motion and noise of the trains. Pigeons clattered up out of their way and settled on the roof. An old man with whiskers and a seaman’s knit hat walked out of the depot with a large push broom and began sweeping the cigar and cigarette butts off onto the crushed rock below. The signal men waved and the switch operators pulled at the long iron levers. A wino, though Father wouldn’t have called him that, walked down the platform and settled onto a bench, where he kept a weary lookout for lucrative situations. The train schedule was nailed onto the outside wall under the overhanging roof; eight trains in and eight trains out every day, three passenger and five freight, two to the north, two to the south, two to the east, and two to the west. Once a week the Rock Island Express came through headed toward Chicago, but it did not stop. Father had seen three trains. The telegraph room was in the back of the station. John Tickie was the operator.
“Mr. Tickie,” Father said, reading the sign on the man’s desk through the wire mesh window.
“Schedule’s posted on the front of the station. Buy your ticket on the train. The 8:27 will be fourteen minutes late this evening,” said Tickie, not bothering to turn around.
“I don’t want a ticket,” said Father. “I’m looking for a job.” Tickie turned around, lifted his spectacles to his forehead and squinted through the wire.
“Work,” Tickie said with no emphasis at all, like someone might say “blanket” or “street clothes.” Father nodded his head slightly, capturing the same enthusiasm.
“Come inside,” offered Tickie, opening the door that also held the wire mesh window. “Care for a cup of coffee?”
“No thanks,” said Father and stared down easily into Tickie’s eyes.
“You want a job on the railroad. What do you know about railroads? You aren’t an engineer, are you; we need one of those. No, you don’t look like an engineer.” He poured himself a cup of coffee from a metal thermos.
“No. I don’t want a job on the railroad. I want a job here. I want to look over this station — watch.”
“Watch. Well,