Richards The End of the Line

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 979-8-3509-9508-4
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 328 Seiten

Reihe: The End of the Line

1941. Railroads are no longer being built in the United States. Lines are being abandoned everywhere. But the President of the Soo Line railroad wants his son to learn how to build one from the ground up-so he sends him to the Philippines to build the Manila & Lingayen Railroad. Then the Japanese invade. Will Van Severen and the childhood friend his father sent to look after him, Stuart Hearn, are driven into the Bataan Peninsula, where they are trapped with the rest of the Americans. The Japanese army is closing in. The End of the Line is the story of two childhood friends, both raised on the railroad, both in love with the same woman, facing war and defeat, as well as of the reality of the American railroad in its decline.

Thomas Richards taught literature at Harvard. His other novels are Pretty Peggy-O, Mrs. Sinden, and Zero Tolerance. He has also written a long poem, Antigone at Antietam, and a play, The Grace Abounding.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Richards, Thomas

Leseproben

2

IT WAS LATE IN 1940, nearly the dead of winter. I had a small apartment on a faded city block near Shoreham Yards where I was living while I finished my degree. I’d just graduated from the University of Minnesota in civil engineering, so low in my class my father told me to toss my diploma into one of the snow-covered vacant lots across from the yards. He never went to college and thought my four years were a waste, saying, as he always did, that I never stuck to anything, when what he really meant was that I never stuck to anything he wanted. But he sent me a telegram—from Edina on the southwest side of town to me on the northeast, not more than ten miles away—a telegram with my name on it and no message, just a date and a place.

LAFAYETTE STREET. 29 DECEMBER 1940. THE BOARD ROOM. 5:01 P.

The 01 was railroad time. Train dispatchers never used the even numbers of hours, I never knew why. But it was in the Rule Book, the great Consolidated Code, and my father followed it to the letter.

The day of the meeting, I had coffee in a diner at the Soo building on Lafayette Street. It was getting a little dark outside on a winter’s afternoon and I didn’t mind waiting. There were some other people drinking coffee in booths and they all seemed to be waiting too. My coffee was lightly scalded syrup poured from the bottom of the pot. I looked out the window at the gray street and the brown buildings. Snow was falling onto snow and a wind had kicked up a few swirls of tiny crystals. The air was dry. The wind was shrill with snow. I pulled my coat in close and turned up my collar, feeling the cold leaking in from the window sill. Then I felt a burst of cold air coming from the door, and heard my name being called.

“Will,” the voice said. “Your father said you’d be here.”

I looked up and saw Stuart Hearn. How he knew what my father said was beyond me, but he always seemed to. To my father, Stuart was everything I was not. Captain of the baseball team at Mandan High. Top of his class at the U, taking away all the prizes and getting the best job in town, designing signals for the Soo’s Chicago line. A crack engineer who could calmly and offhandedly run pages of calculations in his head while he was playing poker and drinking everyone under the table, a kind of anointed one who always did manage to have a little too much oil smoothed into his hair. Six three with red hair and restless amber eyes, the pigment only a few shades darker than his hair, he had a way of talking without breathing, as though there was just no time for air. He knew he had the railroad well in his lungs. He came from good Soo stock, way more steeped in it than my family, father a section man, grandfather a surveyor, great-grandfather a tracklayer on a predecessor line, the Minneapolis and St. Croix. His only obstacle on the Soo was me. William Van Severen, Jr.

That day in December Stuart had snow scattered in his hair and a plaid scarf knotted loosely under his collar.

He slid in to the booth across from me, brushing snow from his arms and unbuttoning his jacket. I tried not to look at him. Outside a light ice left a cold film on the asphalt. Steam braided up from the manholes. Snow coated the tops of cars. Slowly, in the dimming light of day, the sky was flattening out with clouds, giving off a low ceramic light, that yellowish gray you see between snowfalls.

“Another cold one,” he said, rubbing his hands together.

“Suppose,” I said, still avoiding his eyes.

“You don’t want to talk to me?”

“That’s not it.”

Stuart tilted his head and squirmed in his seat.

Out the window, the street was lined on both sides with lighted shops open late after Christmas. A thin Santa rang his bell by the curb.

A hard light filled Stuart’s eyes. I could almost hear him thinking, here we go again—

“You’re not going to say no to him this time, are you?” he asked at last.

I cleared my throat. “No.”

“Good,” he said. “You won’t because you can’t. Just like I can’t.”

“I know that, Stuart.”

“I know you know it. I’m counting on it.” He paused. “Counting on you.”

“My father—”

“Screw your father. He has nothing to do with it. I talk to him not because he wants to talk to me but because I want to talk to him. He knows what I need to know. What you need to know, too. To run this railroad.”

“I don’t want to—”

“Don’t even say it,” he said, speaking over me. “Don’t even think it. There is no end of the line for you, Will, and there isn’t for me either. Those tracks just spiral away into infinity.”

I shook my head.

“I don’t know exactly why he wants to see you this afternoon, but I have a pretty good idea.”

“He wants me to be you,” I said shortly.

“No no, that’s not it at all. He wants you to become the thing that it was in him to become, that he never became—”

“That’s ridiculous, Stuart. He’s the president of the line.”

“Your father doesn’t want to be president of anything. He hates titles, you know that. Even owning it is secondary for him. He just wants to save it.”

“From what?”

“I don’t know. From itself. From being the thing that it is. From being—stuck—unchanging.”

“He told me the line was solvent.”

“For the time being,” he said. “But he’s looking ahead. That’s where you come in. You don’t like it. You think he doesn’t know that? If you take over this railroad someday you’ll act coldly, clearly, rationally. You’ll close the stations that need to be closed because you never cared about them in the first place. He has a passion for the railroad, and he can’t stop himself from trying to save every bit of it he can, and neither can anyone else—including me.”

“So you’re telling me—”

“He wants you because you don’t want it. He needs that. The whole thing is just too damn ingrown.”

Sitting there, my hands pulled into my sleeves, I found myself listening for random noises, a clock ticking, the grinding of a bus turning a corner down a side street, the humming of a refrigerator, the clatter of dishes back in the kitchen—anything but what Stuart was saying.

“You’re not even paying attention, are you?”

He was right. I was scraping the linoleum with the edge of my fingernail.

“But what if I don’t want to rebuild it? What if I want to just let the whole thing go?”

“It won’t matter. You’ll have done what you needed to do.”

I paused. “Why are you telling me all this?”

A draft came in from the door and I pulled my heavy coat a little closer around me.

“I know your father,” he said slowly. “He can be brutal.”

“Not toward the railroad,” I said.

“That’s right. Not toward that, in the least.”

Stuart left me with that bit of understatement, giving me that look he always gave me, that said, Will you gotta start learning to live the life you have.

Watching him leave the diner, I wanted to kick myself. I should have been more careful. I was actually a little afraid of Stuart and often found myself telling him things I didn’t mean to. I tried not to look at him too much or sit too close to him, but he somehow always sought me out, pulling his chair up next to mine in some diner and drilling me with his self-confident stare. Our meetings were always brief and with a purpose. He knew my father really liked him. He certainly had high expectations for him. I think, too, both of us sensed it was my father’s intention to bring us together eventually in some large and ambitious scheme.

The Soo building on Lafayette closed at five o’clock. I got there a little early and went straight up to the fifth floor. The elevator passed each floor, clicking as it went. The fifth click was engineering. Fluorescent lights buzzed in a high corridor. Some green cables dangled from the ceiling, probably from the telephones that were going in to replace the telegraph. The Soo was slow about such things. Out on the Grain Line, there were only three wires going out of each station, one for incoming and one for outgoing and one for God knows what, all telegraph...