THE EMPORIA SPUR

Junction City, Kansas. 1867. 

It was a cold day, the coldest yet of that winter. 

Victor Otxoa was cutting old, rotten rail ties to feed the hungry stove. He had amassed a sprawling pile when his eldest son came home, breathless, eager to make his report.

The news was dire. On the line to Emporia, at a curve in the track just beyond the Osage reservation border, there were several loose gauge-side spikes dangling from their moorings like rotten teeth. More, the tie plate under several sections of rail was sliding away. The boy insisted he’d have fixed it himself, but he had no tools on him, so thought it better just to hurry home.

It wasn't the kind of job that would keep. Otxoa and his son both knew it. A cattle train was due to roll through that night. Though the engineer was meant to take the miles slow, so as not to spook the steers, Otxoa knew the man for a hothead and a drunk. 

Styres, as he was known, had come up from Arkansas, or so he said, when his family tannery dried up, but it was an open secret that he was a deserter, or worse. Once, deep in his cups, Otxoa watched him fish a battered pocket watch from his pocket, rattle it around. 

Know what this is? he boasted to his companion, dangling the watch in front of the other man's face. Shaking it made an infernal noise, like pebbles in the bottom of a coffee can.  Know what's making that sound? Pulled these off a filthy Irish conscript I sniped outside of camp one night, trying to get the sneak on us. Took each and every one, sold them for a bottle a piece. The boys would weave them into tokens for their girls back home. They put them in rings, in hairpins. It was the fashion.

Otxoa knew he would fly down the track from Emporia at demon speed, blasting the whistle as he went. One loose plate or two wouldn't make much difference to a slow train, but the last thing he needed was a derailment on his stretch of track. So he loaded up the mule with claw bar and spike maul and new plates (should the old ones need replacing) and started out into the cold and the wind.

Twilight descended as he walked, casting a deep gloom over all the winter-wasted prairie. He pulled his coat closer. He wished he had left the mule at home, and let the effort of carrying the heavy tools work up enough of a sweat to warm himself. 

The Emporia spur ran mostly in the shallow creek bottoms that were the primary province of the white men. The tracks flowed through those low, green places, shying away from the desolation of the uplands. But in some stretches, whether due to disputes with landowners or simply an accident of topography, the grade crept up and up out of the bottomlands into the open prairie. There, the grass grew so tall and pressed in so tight to the tracks that tassels of the bluestem stalks brushed up against the carriage windows in a feathery caress. Sparks tossed from the stack sometimes ignited great fires that threw towering walls of smoke across the horizon. And when the wind was right, a rolling wave of flame could scour all the country in sight in an hour or less.  

Otxoa loved these places best, though they were more difficult to work in. They made him feel like a deity, laboring alone in a fresh new world.

As he approached the spot his son had specified, he slipped suddenly on a patch of black ice that ran down the grade and froze in a thatch of thick grass. He righted himself, cursing the way he remembered his father cursing, though he never spoke any other words of Basque. He looked up. 

There was a man standing there in the middle of the track, no more than ten feet from him. He was slim and short, almost a boy. He held his hand in front of his face, as though shielding it from the wind or the slanting winter light.

A few tramps walked these rails, cycling from town to town, never wandering so far they were true strangers in any place they came to. Otxoa knew most of them by now. He frequently made little offerings of bread and beans to the ones who came through hungry, as was his father's practice. But all the derelicts Otxoa knew had a kind of uniform, a necessary set of gear without which any man could not be expected to last long in such a hostile place.

This man had none of those things. He had no pack, not even a threadbare coat. He was dressed for much finer weather than this, in a short jacket and trousers of plain cloth. 

Otxoa called out to him, but the man did not hear him. He seemed lost in every way a man can be lost. Otxoa thought of reaching a hand out to him, maybe tapping him on the shoulder, but something made him decide against it. If the stranger needed help, he could ask for it, and Otxoa would give it. But he didn’t have time to deal with madmen, not when he was quickly running out of daylight and there was still work to be done.

He called out once more, and walked on. Hearing nothing but the wind and the birds, he thought that he must have left the man behind him. He glanced back once, maybe five minutes after spotting him, and saw nothing, so thought nothing more of it. But as he neared the damaged curve in the rail, the one his son had specified, he looked round and saw the lone figure once more.

The man was walking now, though it was difficult to see exactly how he moved. He did not look at Otxoa, but his strange, slow strides carried him toward the railman with unaccountable speed, closing the distance between them. 

Otxoa paused, considering. He would see to his work, then give this man the help that he needed. But even when he turned away and tried to walk on, he felt the presence of the man like a beam of hot sunlight against his back. 

The mule was starting to fret, tugging at the lead in his hand, nicking its head one way, then the other. The wind picked up, and in the dim light of the gathering dark, Otxoa thought he could see the beginnings of a small, swift storm coming down with the North wind. 

Otxoa picked up his pace. He spoke soothing words to the mule, wishing he had Basque ones to use, feeling somehow that those might have worked their magic more effectively than his rough English could do. He did not want to turn around. 

The storm pressed in, faster than should have been possible. Sleet pelted the side of his face. He was almost running now to keep up with his poor mule. He did not dare to turn around, though guilt gnawed at him. The young man would need help, would some place to rest and dry off when the storm had passed…

Around him, the wind began to roar. The gusts and bellows became a constant, piercing shriek. Still, even in the darkness, and the chaos of hail and driving rain, Otxoa knew the tracks well enough to tell that he had reached his destination. He could see the loose spikes his son had spotted, the torqued rail plates. They could not wait to be repaired. He yearned to take cover, but there was nowhere to go. All around him was nothing but the undulating grass, whipping back and forth like a teamster’s switch. Straining hard, he held back the mule long enough to take hold of his tools, but the moment he let go the animal pelted away into the grass, screaming. 

He remembered a story told by an old Osage he knew well, about the first locomotive he’d ever seen cross the prairie. He heard the sound of the engine first, before he saw it, and was sure a twister had come down out of the cold blue sky, like they sometimes did in stories. Eager to investigate, he had sat horseback on a high hill, watching the great puffing beast belt out sparks and clouds of steam. But then the engineer pulled the whistle, cracking the blue sky in two and at the piercing agony of that sound his horse had fled, fear-mad. 

The story was not half so comical now as it was to him then. An unmistakable, thrumming sound pressed against his ears. There was electricity in the air. He couldn’t see far enough into the iron-grey twilight to detect it, but he felt it. Like a living thing, a monster woven of wind and dust, he felt the twister coming for him. 

He dropped his tools. His hands were too numb with fear and icy rain. The warm, soft animal within him knew only the need to find shelter. But he remembered the young man on the tracks, knew he could not simply leave him there, so with one last wrenching pang of effort, he turned. 

The man was there – not up on the grade, but right there. Six scant inches separated their faces. Otxoa cried out, but the sound was whisked away at once by the rushing wind, the driving rain. He wheeled backward, arms careening, fell hard onto his outstretched hand. The sound of the twister was close now, chugging madly, steadily. He could see it, parting the air. 

The stranger did not move. He did not seem to feel the stinging sleet in his face. The wind did not ruffle his strange, plain uniform. His hair lay still under his flat cap. 

Otxoa began to pray, to plead with the thing. But he could only pray in English. And he didn’t know what good that could possibly do. 

The man opened his mouth. His mouth, Otxoa now saw, was not a mouth at all but a ragged red wound. Empty gums flapped in the wind. Otxoa could hear them, wet reverberations of flesh against flesh, set against the counterpoint of his coarse breathing. The lips formed words, but no sound came forth, or it was swallowed up by the rising shriek of the building wind. It was close, the whistle of the gale through the grass heralded the twister’s advent. If the stranger did not get down, it would sweep him away. Otxoa looked up, and saw the thing standing above him, looking down from between the rails. 

The ground beneath Otxoa’s back began to shake. He shut his eyes, wondering how it would feel to be lifted in the air by the twister, to be flung out into space, wondered if it would feel like taking flight — when the din of the storm was pierced by the alien cry of a steam whistle, the shriek of sudden brakes, the menacing whine of torqued steel. The stranger turned, his face illuminated for one brilliant moment by the light of the oncoming engine’s blazing lamps. Otxoa curled in on himself, pressed his face to the earth, did not open his eyes. All was blackness. 

**

He went back, afterward. He could not have lived with himself, otherwise. But it took days.  

By then, the remains of the wreck were well picked over. Spars of wood long as a man was tall littered the ground. Some had found their home in the ground, buried a foot deep in the earth, like lightning bolts. Others had come to rest in the bodies of the unfortunate herd, most of which still lay where the derailing had left them, slumped on their sides in an attitude of resigned repose. 

The engineer, the firebox-boy, the two relief men were all duly found and identified amidst the wreckage. But of the unfortunate young man in his meager clothes, Otxoa never found any trace or heard any word, and he told no one what he had seen.