The Railroad Men Who Spoke For Harold

Sibley Reyes, who ran Harold’s crew for the better part of thirty years and had been retired himself for a decade, came by every Thursday with a pie his wife baked and sat with Harold for an hour talking about nothing, old derailments, a foreman they’d both hated in 1987, a dog Harold had years before I knew him, because Sibley understood something that took me longer to learn, that a dying man does not always want to talk about dying. Sometimes he just wants to laugh about a dog.

Kurt called four times in those eight months. He visited once, in July, for an afternoon, and he sat in the kitchen the whole time on his phone half the visit, and when he left, Harold did not say anything about it, but that night he asked me, out of nowhere, lying in the dark, “Do you think he’ll come when it’s close?”

“I think he’ll come,” I told him, because I did believe it, and I was right. Kurt came for the last three days. He sat by his father’s bed and he held his hand and I do believe some part of him was trying, in those three days, to pay back thirty years in seventy two hours, which is not a thing any person can do, but I give him credit that he tried.

Harold died on a Tuesday morning in October with my hand in one of his and Kurt’s hand in the other, and whatever else I have to say about that family in the days since, I will always be glad of that much, that the boy was there at the end, even if he had not been there for most of everything else.

The funeral was small, the way Harold would have wanted it, at the little Lutheran church on the edge of town where we had been married twenty six years before. Kurt gave a short reading. He looked uncomfortable the whole service, like a man standing somewhere he was not sure he had earned the right to stand, and I remember thinking, watching him, that grief does strange things to people who did not get to finish their business with the person they are grieving, that it comes out sideways sometimes, as anger, because anger is easier to hold than regret.