The Railroad Men Who Spoke For Harold
I want to tell you that I stood there and corrected him right then, calm as still water, and told him the law. I had looked it up myself the week before, sitting up at two in the morning in a house that had gone so quiet I could hear the refrigerator humming three rooms away. I knew already that the Railroad Retirement Board does not pay a survivor annuity to a grown son. It pays the spouse. That is the law, has been the law since before Harold was ever hired on, and no amount of being loud in my kitchen was going to change one word of it.
But I did not say any of that. I want you to understand why, because I have turned it over in my mind more times than I can count since.
If I had stood there and recited the rule to him, he would have heard a woman defending her money. He would not have heard the truth, because grief does not listen to rules, it only listens to people, and Kurt did not know the people who actually knew his father. He knew a man who missed birthdays and worked holidays and sent child support checks through a lawyer for eleven years before Kurt ever called him Dad again on his own. He did not know the man I buried.
So instead I set the dish towel down and I looked at him.
“You come say that to me again,” I said, “in front of the men your father worked the line with for forty years. You come say it to Sibley Reyes and the rest of that crew, Saturday, at the hall. And then if you still feel the same way, we’ll talk about pensions.”
Kurt blinked at me. He had not expected that. He had expected tears, or an argument, or maybe a check written out of fear. He had not expected an invitation.
“Fine,” he said, because men who talk themselves into a thing rarely know how to talk themselves back out of it in front of a woman who has not raised her voice. “Fine, I’ll be there.”
He left without taking his boots off at the door going out either, and I stood in my kitchen a long while after his truck pulled off the gravel, looking at Harold’s crossword, three clues short of finished, and I thought, Harold, I hope I am doing this the way you would have wanted.
Harold Buck hired on with the railroad the summer he turned nineteen, laying track on a gang crew out of Corbett before he ever worked his way up to running an engine, and he spent the next forty one years on that same stretch of line until his knees gave out and the company finally let him retire with a pension and a gold watch that did not keep very good time but that he wound every night anyway out of habit.