The Railroad Men Who Spoke For Harold

He told them about the winter of ’91, when a coupling failed on a grade outside of Corbett and Harold had climbed down onto the ballast in a blizzard to set a hand brake because the air brakes had iced over, and how he had done it without being asked twice, because that was simply what you did, and how the company gave him a citation for it that he kept in a drawer and never once mentioned to anybody himself.

He told them about the Christmas Harold worked every single holiday shift for six years running so that the younger men on the crew, the ones with small children, could be home with their families, and never once asked anybody to remember that he had done it.

And then he looked over at me.

“And I want to tell you about his wife,” Sibley said, “because I do not believe most of you saw what I saw this last year. I saw a woman drive that man to Omaha and back eleven times through two of the worst winters we’ve had this decade. I saw her give up a job she’d held twenty three years without a second thought, the day the doctor said the word cancer, because she had already decided there wasn’t a single hour of whatever time was left that she was going to spend anywhere but next to him. I sat in that man’s kitchen on Thursday afternoons for eight months and I watched her give him his medicine and change his sheets and laugh at his jokes when he didn’t have the strength left to laugh at his own jokes anymore, and I will tell you something plain, because Harold would want it said plain. That woman stood every shift there was to stand, for twenty six years, and especially the last eight months of them. There is not a man in this hall who worked a harder shift than that.”

Nobody said anything for a long moment. One of the older men, Dale Petty, who had worked the gang crew with Harold back in the seventies, wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand and did not try to hide it, because men who have spent their whole lives around trains and weather and real danger do not generally feel the need to hide much of anything by the time they are seventy.

Sibley was not finished.