The Railroad Men Who Spoke For Harold

I met him at the Wheatland Diner on Route 2, where I had waited tables since I was twenty three, through one bad marriage of my own and a boy I raised mostly alone until he grew up and moved to Colorado to work the oil fields. Harold used to come in after the night switch, order the same plate of eggs and hash every single time, and sit at the counter reading the paper without talking to anybody, because that was Harold, a man who said ten words where another man would say a hundred, and meant every one of them.

It took him the better part of a year to ask me to a dance at the grange hall. It took him another year after that to tell me about Faye, his first wife, and about Kurt, the son he had with her, and about the divorce that had gone so bad that by the time Kurt was twelve, Faye had moved three states away and taken the boy with her, and Harold had let her, because the railroad worked him sixty hours some weeks and he did not think he could fight a custody battle and hold a job that put food on anybody’s table at the same time.

“I made the wrong call,” he told me once, years into our own marriage, sitting on the porch with a glass of iced tea sweating in his hand. “I thought I was being practical. I thought there’d be time later to make it right with him. There wasn’t as much time as I figured.”

He sent money every month until Kurt turned eighteen, more than the court ever ordered him to, and he wrote the boy letters that mostly came back unanswered, and twice a year, Christmas and the boy’s birthday, he called the number Faye gave him, and more often than not Kurt would not come to the phone. By the time Kurt was a grown man with a wife and two children of his own, he and his father spoke maybe four times a year, short calls, polite as strangers, and Harold kept a photograph of a boy he barely knew anymore on top of his dresser and dusted it himself because he did not trust anyone else to be careful with it.

I remember the night Harold finally told me all of it, out on that porch, how his voice had gone rough in a way I had never heard from him before or since. He was not a man who cried easily, or who talked about his own failures out loud to another living soul, but that night he did both, and I sat there and let him, because sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a proud man is simply not interrupt him while he is finally being honest.