Raising Steel

RAISING STEEL / Eric Trethewey Imagination, some say, as if it were a blossom that opens on no green plant, no particular soil. But here, this landscape crosshatched with conveyance, it's from dirt the roadbeds have risen into legend, taking on contours, leaving borrow pits the earth allows, taking and leaving ache by ache before the mind could ever shape an image of its doings and keep them whole beneath the passing weight of things. Across the continent, once, you'd see spare rails stacked in big-town switching yards, or scattered out along those streaks of rust that tied together places people lived. Too heavy to steal, they'd sit untended, workways on their rests, thirty-odd-foot lengths of ball, web, and flange-replacements for what was always wearing out. They wore men out. Ball'er, the canary would sing to the section crew, and they'd roll the ball toward their bodies, ready to lay the rail just so across the sleepers and spike it home. Locals, they were, like us. But older. Mornings, we'd see them cranking out on the day's run. They knew what to look for: sun kinks and ravelled track, or crossties turning to kindling under the trains. Sometimes they'd wave. And sometimes, in springtime, say, their faces wouldn't see us, their bodies wilted on the trolley in a tangle of scythes and spike mauls, heading home. We'd be lakeside, on the embankment, or below a trestle, lines in the water, rods like easy magic in our hands. 26 · The Missouri Review It was just a game for us. Tramping home, bored with too much fishing, too few fish, we'd lay aside our gear in cinders, weeds, and try to budge those rails from their rests. Easy to forget, how much it takes to raise one. Hunkered down in the heat, muscles quivering, we must have known it was a way of proving something, how steel, even rolled into slender wands weighs more than you'd imagine, eyeing it from a distance, weeds and woods in bloom, on a clear day, a warm afternoon, in spring. Eric Trethewey The Missouri Review · 27 ...