Hacktown, U.S.A., was a terrible place to live. It did not have just one area you could call the slums and one area you could not. The whole town was the slums. The only people who lived there were working class and below. They were mostly laborers who could not afford to live anywhere else. Carpenters, mechanics, railway workers, the men who worked on the assembly lines in Ariville, these were the upstanding members of Hacktown’s community. My father was one of these and so was I.
My father was a great man in Hacktown. He was a handful of only a few men who were masters in more than one thing. He was a carpenter and a mechanic and a magician in both. There was nothing he could not build. There was no motor he could not fix. Because of this, he worked in the rail yard where the Hacktown trolley was laid to rest every night. My mother had died so long ago I could not remember what she looked like, so Pop and I lived alone in one of the tenements not very far from the rail yard because he was the man who worked on the trolley.
The Hacktown trolley was famous. It was how the assembly line workers got to work every day. In 1840, Hacktown had started using the trolley and became one of the foremost technological towns in the United States. The trolley had never been vandalized, never stopped working and was always on time. People in Hacktown were proud of their trolley. Men who worked on it, like my father, were respected because of their association with it. The trolley ran to the Ariville station about three miles away. Ariville was where the rich people lived and no one from Hacktown went there unless they worked there. Neither I nor my father had ever been there.
I grew up in the tenements. I can not say it was the best place to live. Before I was twelve, my best friend had already been killed in a knife fight. I had been in two myself- won one, lost the other. Some days it was a miracle I survived. After twelve, I began working with my father all the time. He had taught me how to work before, but now my training began in earnest. I became his apprentice. It only took a few years before I was his journeyman. The work was in my blood. I thought that eventually, I would take my father’s place or start out on my own somewhere else. I was young. I wanted to see the world and there had never been a place where a man with two skilled hands could not work. The Great Depression came in 1929 when I was fifteen. It killed many people’s dreams.
Later that year, the Hacktown trolley ceased to run. The people who owned came and carted it away. They carted it away using Clydesdale horses from some farm. The trolley had always run on its motor. It had never been so broke that horses were needed. Now, with its motor still in good order, it was taken away by a pair of nags who would be turned into glue in less than two years. Every man who worked in the rail yard, every man’s wife, every man’s child stood staring as the trolley, the backbone of Hacktown’s life, was taken away. Most people lost hope then.
It took less than a year for most of the people we had known for years to pack up and leave. The ones who were left only drifted away like dead leaves. More people came in from other parts of the country, but they never stayed long. Hacktown was as dead for them as it was for the people who had left. The population varied with the day, always hovering on a number less than half of what it had been. Food was scarce and expensive. Anything you could not produce yourself could not be bought either. My father and I lived a very lean lifestyle. I was younger and felt better most of the time, but Pop was getting old. I worried about him. I did not have long to worry.
One day, the wife of the owner of the assembly lines in Ariville came riding through Haktown. It was a foolish thing to do. Her name was Elizabeth Richardson. There she sat on her thoroughbred horse, with her fashionable clothes and the blood in her round cheeks. People stared. To them, she was a picture of wealth and privilege and a full belly. As she rode through the streets, crowds gathered around her. The people were angry. To their minds, all their hardship was her fault. Her husband had shut down the assembly line robbing them of their jobs, their wages and everything they needed. Here and there an angry shout came from the crowd from some unidentifiable mouth. She was scared.
Pop and I watched from the midst of the crowd. We had not had work in awhile, so we had started to wander around town offering encouragement to our friends. It was different for us. Pop and I were both men without families, so we could afford to have a more optimistic view of all the trouble. Most of our friends were not so lucky. A few of the husbands had disappeared, leaving wives and children behind. We would help them as best we could. Those husbands who stayed were depressed and angry. They were the ones who started the trouble.
Mrs. Richardson could feel the crowd’s animosity. Her horse was spooked as well, so with only the thought of going home in her mind, she turned around to leave. The crowd closed in, getting angrier by the minute. People were shouting. She kept spinning around, keeping them all at bay, but they would have her. They needed something to hate, something to blame for their misfortune, and she had become that for them.
Pop and I muscled our way to the front of the crowd, very close to her. We both tried to talk sense to our friends, to hold them back. They kept crowding in on us and we were weak from lack of nourishment. They beat us back, right into the side of her horse. I looked up at her as the crowd grew louder and more violent, starting to pick up stones from the ground. She looked straight into my eyes, her eyes wide with fear. “Help me!” she said desperately. Pop heard it, too. He used the last of his strength to hoist me onto the back of the horse and slapped it hard in the rump, making it rear up angrily. We shot away.
I had never been on the back of a horse before. It was very high up and felt very powerful between my knees. Luckily, Mrs. Richardson was an accomplished rider and she was able to bring the horse to a stop after we were out of reach of the crowd.
“Are you alright?” she asked. She asked me if I was alright.
“Fine,” I said, breathing heavily. I dropped off the back of the horse eagerly. “Sorry about that.”
She looked back the way we had come. “I didn’t believe the stories. I wanted to make sure for myself.” She turned a gentle eye on me. “Thank you for helping me.”
“I would have done it for anyone,” I said with a nod of the head. I was not expressly sure that I would have done it for anyone, but it seemed like a good thing to say. I was very young then.
“Please, let me repay you in some small way.” She held a silver dollar out to me, the only money that was really worth anything those days. “It doesn’t compare to what I owe you, but its all I have at the moment.” I hesitated. “Please take it.”
I took it. “You had better go,” I said. “Its not safe here.”
“Thank you.” She rode off with a friendly wave.
I went back home, sure that I would find Pop there. He was not. I went looking for him, thinking only that he had stopped to help someone else. As I walked down the stairs to the ground floor, the women in the doorways cast strange looks after me. I was friendly as I always was, but they closed their doors against me. It was no better out in the street. Growing less and less sure about where my father was, I went back to the street where the mob had been. He was lying in the road. I went to him, thinking maybe he had just fainted, but he was not breathing. The mob had killed my father.
As I sat there crying over him, a gang of four boys my age came over to me to rough me up. They said I was a traitor, that Pop had deserved to die. They hit me and kicked me, till I was only a ball on the ground. It was a pair of women who saved me. They came forward with their brooms to bat the boys away. The beating stopped and that was all I needed to get on my feet and run away.
I ran toward the deserted rail yard, to my father’s workshop. I could hear the boys running behind me, shouting profanities and directions to each other. I knew the rail yard well, but they were faster than I was. They cornered me in one of the workshops. We fought. Grief and anger had taken me over and I fought with no thought to my own safety. I punched one in the nose, causing him to fall to the ground howling in pain. Two of them tried to grab me so the third could have an easy shot, but I kicked one in the balls, sending him down to the ground. The other two jumped me together, pushing me down against a workbench. I grabbed a wrench and swung. I hit something hard and felt one body slide down me to the ground. The last one ran away.
I watched him go, hefting the wrench menacingly. Two of them got up and ran after him, but the third just lay there. The blood was pooling around his head. I bent over him,, shaking him. He was dead. The blood was on the wrench, too. I dropped it as if it had been on fire.
They would be after me. The boys would go to the police and they would come after me. They would put in me in jail. They would hang me. Afraid now, I went to my father’s workshop and grabbed his tools. They were all I could think of that would be useful. I could not go home, so I tried to find a place where I could stay. Then it occurred to me that I would never be safe in Hacktown again. I decided to go the train depot and hop on a boxcar. I would leave this place forever.
It was twilight when I got there. There was only one train to choose from, so I walked along it, trying to find an open car. Unluckily, the conductor and the engineer saw me and chased me off. They were hot on me when I ducked into a cubby-hole below a squeeze chute for loading cattle. Much to my surprise, I sat down on a girl. Her cry of amazement nearly got us both caught, but I quickly covered her mouth with my hand. The conductor and the engineer passed us by. I let go of the girl’s mouth when I felt tears touch my hand. I told her it would be alright and popped my head out to look. There was no one in sight.
I stepped out all the way and dragged her out with me. We could not stay there. I took her hand and went back into the abandoned workshops of the rail yard. There was one that had not been in use since before the Depression and I chose that one. It had an upper story where lumber had once been stored. We climbed up there and sat on a cluster of two-by-fours in the dark. The girl sat next to me.
She was not much younger than I was and very thin. I had never seen her before, so she could not have been one of the kids from the tenements. I knew every one of them. Her hair was dirty, but it looked blonde. Her face was streaked by tears. All in all she was a pitiful sight.
“What is your name?” I asked.
“LeeAnn,” she sniffed. “You have blood on your shirt.
I looked down. I did indeed have blood on me. It had to have been from my father. I remembered I had held him in my arms. I also had blood on my hands, but that was not his. That was from the boy. I started taking off my shirt, wiping my hands on it. “Are you alright?” I asked
“I didn’t want them to find me.”
“Who?”
“The engineer. I fell asleep on a boxcar and I woke up here. If they find you, they beat you. I’ve been told that. I didn’t want to be beaten.” She was starting to cry again.
I tried to calm her. I handed her my handkerchief. “You safe now. I won’t let them get you.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re in Hacktown. This is the rail yard. You’ll be fine here.”
“What is your name?”
“I’m William.” I was always called Will. I can not figure out even now why I told her my full name. “I’ll take care of you.”
“Really?” she asked, wiping her face with her sleeve.
I nodded earnestly. “We’re both alone. All we have is each other.”
She moved over next to me. I put my arms around her. That was how it would have to be from then on. Pop was dead. I was hunted by the police. I was alone in the world. So was she. We needed each other. We would be there for each other.
Occasionally, ladies and gentlemen, I dream some great dreams and those dreams find there way onto the paper. This is one of those times. Last night, I dreamed this dream and, because I feel guilty that my last post was late, I decided to put it up for you. Enjoy!
