“Going to work on the railroad.” He kept gazing mildly and curiously at me. “Shovel out those
tracks. That work they talked about in chapel this morning. You remember.”
“Have a nice day at it, anyway,” he said.
“I will. You too.”
“I will if I find what I’m looking for—a beaver dam. It used to be up the Devon a ways, in a little
stream that flows into the Devon. It’s interesting to see the way beavers adapt to the winter. Have
you ever seen it?”
“No, I never have seen that.”
“Well, you might want to come sometime, if I find the place.”
“Tell me if you find it.”
With Leper it was always a fight, a hard fight to win when you were seventeen years old and
lived in a keyed-up, competing school, to avoiding making fun of him. But as I had gotten to
know him better this fight had been easier to win.
Shoving in his long bamboo poles he pushed deliberately forward and slid slowly away from me
down the gradual slope, standing very upright, his skis far apart to guard against any threat to his
balance, his poles sticking out on either side of him, as though to ward off any interference.
I turned and trudged off to help shovel out New England for the war.
We spent an odd day, toiling in that railroad yard. By the time we arrived there the snow had
become drab and sooted, wet and heavy. We were divided into gangs, each under an old railroad
man. Brinker, Chet and I managed to be in the same group, but the playful atmosphere of the
apple orchard was gone. Of the town we could only see some dull red brick mills and
warehouses surrounding the yards, and we labored away among what the old man directing us
called “rolling stock”—grim freight cars from many parts of the country immobilized in the
snow. Brinker asked him if it shouldn’t be called “unrolling stock” now, and the old man looked
back at him with bleary dislike and didn’t reply. Nothing was very funny that day, the work
became hard and unvarying; I began to sweat under my layers of clothes. By the middle of the
afternoon we had lost our fresh volunteer look, the grime of the railroad and the exhaustion of
manual laborers were on us all; we seemed of a piece with the railroad yards and the mills and
warehouses. The old man resented us, or we made him nervous, or maybe he was as sick as he
looked. For whatever reason he grumbled and spat and alternated between growling orders and
rubbing his big, unhealthy belly.
Around 4:30 there was a moment of cheer. The main line had been cleared and the first train
rattled slowly through. We watched it advance toward us, the engine throwing up balls of steam
to add to the heavy overcast.