The Railroad Men Who Spoke For Harold
That did not make it right, what he said to me four days later in my kitchen. I want to be clear about that. A man can be grieving and still be wrong, and Kurt was wrong, about the law and about me, and I was not going to let either one go unanswered. I had just decided that the answer was not going to come out of my own mouth, standing alone in a kitchen with a man twice my size and half my patience that week. The answer was going to come from the only people left in this world who actually knew who Harold Buck was, and who knew who I had been to him, because I had spent twenty six years earning that answer and I was not about to let it get written off by a man who had not been in the room for most of it.
The union hall on Saturday had the same smell it always has, coffee and floor wax and the particular must of a building that has hosted every wedding, funeral, and retirement dinner for a hundred miles in every direction since before I was born. Somebody had set up the big percolator urn Harold’s crew always used, the dented silver one that must be sixty years old itself, and somebody else had put together a photo board, snapshots of Harold at nineteen on the gang crew, Harold in his forties running an engine through a snowstorm, Harold and me at our wedding, Harold holding a fish he was prouder of than he had any right to be.
There were eleven of them there, Harold’s old crew, men in their sixties and seventies and one who had to be past eighty, in canvas and denim jackets and the kind of ball caps that have a railroad’s name stitched on the front and have clearly been worn through every season for twenty years. Sibley stood near the coffee urn in his good jacket, the one I knew he only wore to funerals and his granddaughter’s wedding, and when he saw me come in he crossed the room and took both my hands in his, which was more than Sibley Reyes had done in the ten years I had known him, because Sibley was not a man who reached for another person’s hands without a reason.
Kurt came in fifteen minutes late, alone, in the same canvas coat from my kitchen, and he stood near the door like he was not sure he was welcome, which, if I am honest, some part of him probably was not sure of, and some part of him was right to wonder.
I did not call him out. I did not have to.
Sibley tapped a spoon against his coffee cup and the room went quiet the way rooms full of railroad men go quiet, all at once, like a signal had been given down the line.
“I worked forty years next to Harold Buck,” Sibley said. “Longer than some of you have been alive. I want to tell you about the man, because I expect some of you only knew the quiet fella who read the paper at the diner, and that was Harold, but it was not all of Harold.”