American Masculine Read Online Free PDF Page A

smells the earth, he sleeps on dirt. North still but jobless, he waits overnight in a line of one hundred men. The head man sees his size. He gets on as a workman with the railroad. He’ll earn some money, buy himself some land. Perhaps buy back the land they lost. Plant a hedge of wild rose, he thinks, for his mother. He is six feet nine inches tall and weighs over three hundred pounds. He works the Empire Builder, the interstate rail from east to west. He works with muscle and grit. He shovels coal. He keeps his own peace.
    Alone in the late push across the borderlands they ride the Hi-Line of Montana and he stops for a moment and rests his hands on the heel of the shovel, rests his chin on his hands. He feels the locomotive spending its light toward the oncoming darkness, toward the tiny crossings with unknown names, the towns of eight or ten people. He feels the wide wind, sees the stars in their opaque immensity. He hears the long-nosed scream of the train, bent in the night, and he pauses and considers how fully the night falls, how easily the light gives way, then he returns to his work.
    Late he lies himself down in his sleeping berth. He stinks of smoke and oil, the sweating film of his body envelops him and he falls toward sleep as one who has come from the earth, who has molded it with his hands, who has returned again. In his place in the dark, always he hears his mother. Mind your schooling, she says. It is after dinner. She lays him down. He is a child sleeping, and in the silence between night and dawn, waking him she speaks her elegant words, presses her cheek to his small cheek, whispers, Awake, awake, O Zion, clothe yourself in strength. Put on your garments of splendor. She smooths his eyebrows with a forefinger. You can get up now, she says. She touches his face with her hand.
    It is not yet dawn. He lies on his side, sees on the hard shelf before his eyes the ivory hair comb bright as bone. He takes the comb in the curve of his hand. He lies still. He puts the comb to his lips in the transparent light. He breathes his deep and holy breath. He remembers the clean smell of her hair. Along the spine of the comb he moves his index finger, then he eyes his finger for a moment, coal and dirt deep set in the whorls. He draws his hand to his mouth and licks the tip of his finger. The sun has broken the far line of the world. His tongue tastes of light.
    He works the train and travels to places he has not yet known, where day is buoyant and darkness gone, and when death comes seeking like the hand of an enemy he gives himself over, for it is death he desires, and death he welcomes, and the spirit of his good body is a vessel borne to the eternal.
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    HE IS BORN INTO THIS WORLD, he is named. He is made of dirt and fighting and the grace of his mother’s words. He is one. He is caught in the mass of many. The earth bends beneath him and he listens to the whistle of the train, the notes like a voice of reason in the early dark that wakens him and returns him, takes him weary back to the loaded pull of the cars, the sound of the push and the steel of the tracks.
    He rises. He begins again.
    The older men on the line call him Middie because they’ve heard talk of him breaking the back of a bull that wouldn’t carry his weight. It was at a rodeo he entered when he was nineteen, up in Glendive. The bull was old and skinny, put in by a local farmer as a joke. The bull didn’t show enough verve, so the boy bucked the animal himself.
    Bent its middle like a bow, the vet said. Sprung its spine.
    The bull had to be put down. The boy had both hated and delighted in this, delighted in undoing the farmer’s intention, hated that the animal was hard done by. The railroaders laugh their heads off and Middie has to listen to them nearly every stop. They sit behind their counters at each station chewing the fat with Prifflach the conductor as they tell and retell what they’ve heard. Middie doesn’t like them. When they speak