A train whistle screeched as the boxcar began to rattle and quake. Norman shook as he suddenly woke from a restless sleep. He scratched his stubbled chin and reached to check his belongings. Everything was where it was supposed to be – the cap on his head, the three cents in his stained overalls, and a rusty old pocketknife in his hole-ridden boot. The movement of the train was becoming a steady rhythm. Norman looked around the boxcar he sat in and the crates surrounding him. He had checked all of them three hours earlier when he first stowed away. All they held were steel bolts, paint and bricks. But Norman had not eaten in two days, and hadn’t had a cigarette in a week and a half, so he got up and began to search the boxcar again.
“If you’re lookin’ for food, you won’t find none in heye,” said a rasping voice behind him. Norman turned around but saw nothing.
“Over heye,” said a raised hand behind a few boxes in the corner. Norman edged toward the hand, knife ready. As he cleared away the wooden crates, he saw a toothless old vagabond attached to the hand still raised in the air. “I already had a look-see.” The man then lowered his arm slowly, and reached to pull a flask out of his dirty shirt. Suddenly Norman’s interest in this old man sparked.
“Now how’s an old rambler like yourself get hold of what smells like fine whiskey?” Norman asked, eyeing the old man’s liquor.
The vagabond didn’t respond, but instead continued to provoke Norman’s curiosity. He reached into his shirt once more but this time pulled out a small red-and-green box. Norman’s eyes bulged as the man fumbled to pull a cigarette from the box. Lucky Strikes. Instantaneously, Norman sat down beside the traveler. “Need any help with that, old man?”
“Wh– …why, yes … I could use a … a good set o’ hands. Y’see, my hands shake like this ev’re so often. I caint much reason why.” Norman pulled two cigarettes from the package, putting one in the man’s lips and the other in his own. The traveler passed him a book of matches as well as the flask of whiskey. Norman realized as he put the flask to his lips that he had not seen this kind of generosity since before the Depression started.
“So wheye you headin’, son?” asked the vagabond, as Norman took a lengthy drag from his cigarette.
Norman gave the man his flask back and said, “Home.”
There was a short silence until Norman continued, “Little town called Brunswick. Ohio.”
“How long’s it been?”
“Nine– … ten years. Since ’24.” Norman now held the flask again. He took a swig of it and put the cap back on. “I was fourteen when I left.”
“What’s your name, boy?”
“Norman Walker. Yours?”
“Jean Chappelle.”
The two men sat there
with their cigarettes and whiskey until sunset, leaving the New Orleans
swamps towards dryer, barren crop fields.
* * *
Norman awoke with a blinding headache, the sun in his eyes. He lowered the brim of his cap and, as always, checked his belongings. One of his pennies was missing from his pocket. He fumbled along the floorboards of the boxcar, finding only cigarette butts and spilled liquor.
“Old man,” he called.
The old man did not stir. Frustrated, Norman’s head was beginning to feel like a rock, and it was getting heavier by the minute.
“Old man! Jean!”
Still nothing. Norman, knowing he’d get sick if he stood up, crawled beside his companion and touched his hand. It was cold, unmoving. There were no signs of exertion. He had not choked. Jean looked calm, as if he were resting for the first time in ages.
Norman leaned back against a crate without breathing. He squeezed his hat as hard as he could with one hand and covered his face with the other. Jean Chappelle had been the kindest stranger he had ever met, and he had known him for only a few hours. Late into the previous night, Norman and Jean had conversed over whiskey and rum. Norman learned that Jean had been placed into the New Orleans County Orphanage at the age of five. He grew up there until thirteen, when he ran away to live in the streets and docks of his hometown. For two years, he lived off freshly caught fish and food stolen from downtown marketplaces. Eventually Jean’s long night wanderings led him out of the city, and so he traveled, for weeks on end, from New Orleans to St. Louis. He joined the army at eighteen and found himself fighting in the Philippines the next year. Even after he returned home, Jean remained in the army for twenty years.
“I–… I was a sergeant, I think,” Jean had told Norman, and claimed that few Catholics were ever promoted above captain. He was sent to Germany in 1917. A year later, when the Great War had ended, Jean quit his lifelong career in the military, swearing never to kill again. And so, knowing nothing else, he kept moving. For sixteen years, he rode freight trains across the continent, as far north as Vancouver to as far south as Mexico City.
“Being a world trav’ler,” Jean had said the night before his death, “I’ve seen my share o’ suffer’n, and I’ve felt my share o’ pain. And ev’rewhere I go I’ve always known both in one way o’ anothr’e. But one thing I noticed, no matt’re wheye I was, is that people need good comp’ny. They’s so much wrong bein’ done in the world, folks’ll be relieved to find someone just t’ talk to. People don’t hurt s’much when theye talkin’.”
Jean had truly seen the world, had met people from East Asia to Western Europe and all across North America. But Norman was the last person to see him alive. It made him want to say a few words for his remembrance, but Norman could not think of anything, and his head was aching now more than ever. So he sat with the body, squeezing the sweat from his hat.
Finally, Norman decided
to search the vagabond’s pockets. The silver flask had engraved text on it
that read, PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY. He collected the flask
and cigarette pack, as well as the rum bottle in Jean’s pant leg. All were
empty. In his companion’s pockets he also found a single penny. At first he
moved to take that too, but for a moment paused. Whether it was Norman’s
missing penny could not be concluded, and suddenly did not matter, so he
returned it to the old man’s pocket, leaving him one last token from his
travels to bring to his grave. When he arrived in the next town he would
bury Jean Chappelle.
* * *
It was June. If there were not so much dust in the air, the Ohio sun would be beating on Norman’s face as he stood in front of the house he had not seen in ten years. Dry dirt was caked across the porch, and the wood on the walls was eaten away almost to nothing, barely supporting itself. There was no garden in the front yard. He saw no crops or plants for miles. Nothing but dead houses and leaning telephone posts. A month earlier, he had heard, a storm had covered the town in dust, and garbage had rained from the sky. Now Norman saw the town and knew this was true. He had come back to see for himself what had become of it. The Brunswick he once knew was a town built for the railroads. A place that existed only to harbor freight trains. It was no wonder why he and his peers had all eagerly been whisked away by the steel and the coal that looked, to them, like the way to a new life. Only the old or sick remained.
Norman recognized his own footsteps as the only sound in the house. He walked to his mother and father’s room. Empty. No one lived here any more. There was not a single object in that plain wooden house that hadn’t been taken by his family, he figured, or thieves after they had gone. He looked in the empty room he and his older brothers used to share. He had not heard from any of his family since 1924, and had no idea if they were dead or alive, so he decided to look around the town for someone to ask. He went to his neighbors’ front yard and called out for Mr. Avery, who used to own a market stand downtown. This house, too, now seemed empty. Norman realized he might find some people at the town’s church. It was Sunday. When he arrived, a few unfamiliar faces were walking out as Preacher Daniels bade them farewell.
“What’s happened to my town, Preacher?” asked Norman, “and … my family?”
Preacher Daniels squinted at Norman, frowning, and responded, “Who are you, son?”
“I’m Norman Walker. My parents are Frank Walker and Phyllis Walker.”
“Well, son, as far as I can recall, Frank and Phyllis stopped coming to my services about eight years ago. I believe I saw them around town a few times since, but not lately.”
The Preacher did not
know where Norman’s parents were, but was able to tell Norman that the town
had lost most of its population to the freight trains since the Depression,
and the latest dust storms were scaring even more away. Norman had seen this
happening in small industrial towns all across the country. In the Twenties,
he had visited youthful towns. Towns that lacked money but were otherwise
once alive and healthy. He remembered secret parties and dancing on tables
to upbeat songs on the radio. But as time passed, these songs were replaced
with “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime,” as the towns became dryer, poorer, and
emptier. Now his home was among these towns, and Norman had no interest in
staying there another minute. He thanked Preacher Daniels and headed, one
last time, to the Brunswick train station.
* * *
The sun was going down when Norman chose his boxcar – a baked beans carrier, heading west. But before he could crack open a crate, he noticed the two sets of eyes looking towards him from a dark corner. He edged closer to find two children, a young girl shivering in the arms of what looked like her ten-year-old brother.
“Don’t fret, now,” said Norman, “I ain’t gonna hurt you.”
The children did not reply. The girl’s face was still buried in her brother’s arms, but the boy glared at Norman with look that told him he expected nothing good from a stranger. Norman walked over to a crate and pried a board off with the blunt end of his pocketknife. He took out four cans, rolling one to each child and keeping two to himself. The boy snatched up the cans and hungrily gorged on the baked beans inside.
Norman knew what had happened to this brother and sister. He had been finding abandoned youths more and more frequently since the Depression. Unfortunate children whose families could no longer carry them. Children that usually had no idea what had happened to them, or denied it. Some waited in false hope for their families to return, while others went looking for them.
“That’s the difference between a runaway and a stray,” someone had once told Norman, “a runaway knows he’s lost.”
So Norman finished his first can of beans and said to the children, “Listen to me.”
Both were looking at him now, seemingly less afraid.
Norman paused, then continued, looking them in the eyes, “Neither of you will ever see your folks again. You can cross this whole country and not find ‘em. And that’s just how it is.”
The children’s faces showed not fear now but anger and confusion. Still, Norman kept talking, knowing that it was important to tell them this, even if they hated him for it, “I know you don’t like to hear it, but sooner it is you know they’re gone, sooner you forget ‘em.”
But Norman had never truly forgotten his own family. That was what had brought him back to his hometown. There were always nights when he lay alone in a boxcar, thinking of home. He had tried his whole life to escape it, to start his own life far from Brunswick. But until he found the two children, Norman’s new life had not began. Jean Chappelle had once told him that people need good company, but he had never before realized how true this was.
He had always seen a
great disparity in “strays.” But as he sat across from these two, he could
see they were no different from him. They were all ramblers, for whatever
reason. On the trains they were not so much people as they were ghosts,
estranged from the world of the living.
* * *
In a way Norman Walker adopted the two lost children, looking after them until they were grown. They had been abandoned because their parents could not sustain their lives with them, but a rambler has nothing to lose. His whole being was soon centered on the welfare of these siblings. He now had purpose. Now, through their “good company,” he had finally found a life to live.
The children and Norman became a ragtag family of vagabonds. They still rode the rails, but no longer chased the everlasting pull of the journey. They became content, and lived not for something barely out of reach, but to simply exist in each other’s company in peace. And so they rode on, through dust and dirt, leaving the Ohio plains far behind them.