Train Dreams

Forty-one days later, Grainier watches as a train crosses the Eleven-Mile Cutoff Bridge over the Moyea River. It is a feat of engineering, yet “Grainier felt sad” (11). However, he seeks out similar work, and in 1920, he goes to Washington state to repair the Robinson Gorge Bridge. When that is complete, he joins the Simpson Company to remove timber from the forests. Sawyers cut down the trees, limbers clean off the branches, buckers cut the trees into logs, and chokers fasten cables to haul the logs out. 

Grainier is a choker, and he relishes the hard work, for he enjoys being among the colossal trees. An older worker, Arn Peeples, warns him that a tree is a person’s friend until that person tries to cut it down. The men toil from sunrise until dinner. Exhausted, they sleep in tents that Peeples claims are from the Civil War era.

Peeples tells stories of when he was a sawyer, calling everyone else “Minnesota fellers,” no matter where they come from. He recalls his days working in Arizona. Claiming to have been to Tombstone and met the Earp brothers, he worked in mines and logged. The oldest among their crew, he now works as the powder monkey—the person who excavates tunnels with dynamite. 

This dangerous job sometimes results in a dud charge, a blast that fails to ignite. This requires Peeples to enter the tunnels and inspect the charge, which could detonate. However, Peeples dies not in an explosion but several days after getting hit in the head by a “widowmaker,” a dead branch that fell from a tree. He recovers from the blow but experiences dizziness and forgetfulness; then he contracts a fever and does not wake one morning. The crew honors him with a makeshift gravesite, and his friend Billy says a few words.

After Peeples’s death, the workers wonder if it was a brain injury or an illness that claimed his life, for he was delirious at the end. Billy works as a grease monkey with the captain’s son, a 12-year-old named Harold. Two days after Peeples’s death, Harold collapses in dizziness. When he falls, he nearly gets trampled by horses, but Grainier saves him. That same night, Billy comes down with a fever and raves in his sleep. Harold recovers, but Billy does not. By the week’s end, the job is done, but six more men get sick. The captain disbands them for fear of another influenza epidemic.

Years later, in the 1960s, Grainier remembers these days when he watches ironworkers on a bridge across the Moyea River. When the workers finish, they jump into a net, and Grainier marvels at how he used to swing from the girders. Now, he is old and struggles to stand from a stool. It occurs to him how long he has lived and how much he has seen. He remembers how, in 1950, he saw the World’s Fattest Man, who had to be removed from his trailer by a crane. Grainier confuses the order of events in his life, for he believes that he saw the World’s Fattest Man on the same day that Elvis Presley rolled through town. He also remembers seeing a wolf-boy and flying in a biplane. Ultimately, his story began on a train.

Grainier remembers riding a train alone to Idaho when he was little, to live with his aunt’s family. He cannot recall where he came from or his parents, and no one ever shares this information with him. He believes that he was born in 1886 in either Canada or Utah. On the train for several days, Grainier had his destination—Fry, Idaho—pinned to his chest. One of his cousins says he spoke only French on his arrival, while her brothers insist he was a Mormon. By the time Grainier considers consulting his aunt and uncle, who he considered his parents, they were already dead.

His earliest memory in Idaho is when he and his uncle watched as hundreds of Chinese families were forced to leave town on flatcars. Grainier remembers their voices sounding like birds and how children were pushed to the inside of the flatcar while men sat along the edges. Grainier did not wonder where they were deported to until the day he helped almost kill the Chinese laborer. He learns that they were deported to Montana into an area known as China Basin. 

He also remembers when the Kootenai River flooded and carried whole buildings away. Near where his family lived, an older gentleman repaired boots. Inside his shop, he kept beeswax that he used to wax thread. Grainier and his cousins would steal hunks of it, for it tasted like candy. One day, the man called them into the shop as he spit tobacco into the jar of beeswax. Then, he offered them a taste and laughed hysterically.

In 1899, Fry merged with another town to become Bonner’s Ferry. Grainier attended school there until his early teens. After his aunt and uncle passed away, he lived with his eldest cousin. During this time, he spent his days fishing on the Kootenai River. One day, “he came on an itinerant bum, a ‘boomer’” (30), sitting against a tree nursing an injured leg. Dirty and dusty, the man, William Coswell Haley, had been cut on the back of his knees and wanted to share a few things before he died. Grainier could only look on, mouth agape.

Haley told his story. The backs of his knees were cut by a man called Big-Ear Al, who also stole $14. Because he could not walk, he would sit there until he rotted and died. About four years prior, he had a good job and lived with his brother’s family. However, he raped his niece Susan each night. He claimed that she never woke up. One day, he arrived home from work to find his sister-in-law weeping. Her husband had beaten Susan to death because she was pregnant. Hearing this, William walked to the railroad, hopped on a flatcar and lived on the go ever since. After telling his story, he requested that Grainier bring him a drink of water.