The Flicker of Old Dreams Read online

  Dedication

  Dedicated to Esther J. Scherlie Adams of Winnett, Montana

  Epigraph

  The world is growing less familiar, less yours, day by day.

  —Anand Giridharadas

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Up from the Blue

  Also by Susan Henderson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Most who pass this stretch of highway don’t notice there’s a town here at all. The drivers’ eyes glaze over the flat, yellow land of Central Montana that goes on and on. The only landmark tall enough to see from the road is the abandoned grain elevator. But just as the gray wooden tower comes into view, the AM radio tends to lose its signal. The drivers look down to fiddle with the dial, and there goes the town of Petroleum.

  When I was a kid, I could stand on the porch and listen to the grain elevator pounding like a heart. Pop, I had asked my father, do we have the same heart? Because when it beats, and I touched my chest, I feel it right here. He tugged gently on my ponytail. Mary, Mary, Mary, he said. What an interesting little person you are.

  Before the summer when misfortune struck, one day was like another. Tractors and sprinklers clattered to life on the nearby ranches early each morning. As soon as the first speckles of sunlight reached our lawn and the empty lot beside it, I’d tramp through the weeds. Toads and jackrabbits seemed to pop out of nowhere if you stomped your foot hard enough.

  At five, I was too young for boys, but I’d begun to notice them. They looked entirely different when they were out of school, smiling, squinty eyed, and the color of baked beans, except for the redheads, whose freckles multiplied like magic. These boys were beautiful and scabbed, riding bikes past our house and over the train tracks, letting their pool-wet hair dry in the sun.

  In the distance, black splotches of cattle moseyed across pastures, the air sweet with manure. From our porch, I liked to watch tractors divide the land into squares. Week after week, I’d look for changes—the deep brown of turned earth sprouting green, the green rows growing chest-high. If they stayed green, I knew it was timothy hay that would be made into rectangles and thrown from the beds of pickups for cattle to eat. If they changed to gold, it was wheat, which was mowed and threshed, then came to town in trucks brimming with kernels to be weighed and dumped through the grated floor of the grain elevator.

  The gray tower stood tall and straight in those years when the train still pulled into Petroleum every weekday afternoon, the final stop on the Milwaukee Road line. Children listened for the blare of the horn, and the rattles and clangs as it came over one last valley to collect our wheat. If I could beg a penny off my father, I’d chase behind the other kids to meet the train.

  They weren’t unkind to me, not yet, but I was peculiar to them. Almost all these kids were the sons or daughters of ranchers. Even if one parent was a shopkeeper, schoolteacher, postman, or waitress, the other likely worked on a ranch. No one but my father and me lived in the funeral home.

  We crowded near the coins we placed on the tracks, most of us wearing dirty T-shirts, cutoff jeans, and oversized cowboy boots, the uniform of kids who got the bulk of their clothes from the free bin at school.

  “Stand back,” the conductor would yell out his window, and I would hold my cheeks to keep them from vibrating. After the train rolled away, we gathered our flattened coins, still warm, while mothers straightened pictures on the walls of their homes. I didn’t have a mother so ours hung crooked.

  The train continued on to the gray tower. We were supposed to keep our distance as grain poured from a spout into the hopper car, but I liked to get close enough to hear the rain of kernels and inhale the dust that powdered my arms. By the time I looked away from that fantastic spray of wheat, the other children would be halfway through the field. And I stood apart.

  I have always stood apart, off to the side or in the row behind or looking on from my yard as I did that late July afternoon when so much was about to change. I knelt with my trowel beneath the single tree on our property, digging a hole. My collection of Barbies and Matchbox cars shone in the sun. I had enough to share in case anyone wanted to join me.

  The dolls were too big for the cars so I had to hold them, face-down, on the roofs as I drove them around the tree roots, toward the deep hole. In my mind, the black Matchbox was a hearse like my father’s, and I could imagine the mournful singing of hymns, the quiet coughs, and the unwrapping of hard candies.

  “There, there, rest in peace,” I said. I covered a doll with dirt, placed a rock over the grave, and drove the little cars away.

  It would have been a day like any other if not for the sound that turned our heads toward the gray tower. It’s a terrifying thing to hear grown-ups cry out like children. I stood with a tiny car in my hand, and soon a rush of neighbors moved toward the grain elevator. When my father hurried out of our house and told me there had been an accident, I knew something had gone very wrong. It’s almost never good news when people call my father for help.

  “Be a good girl, Mary,” he told me. “Stay right here until a sitter comes for you.”

  I dug up my muddy-haired doll and started my game again as I watched my father run like he never did before or since.

  I was not alone very long before a teenager from the neighborhood came to look after me. She chewed her nails and looked toward the commotion the whole time.

  “It’s Eddie,” other teenagers called to her as they sprinted past our house. “It’s Eddie Golden.”

  And without a word, she grabbed my hand and we ran together, my shoulder and elbow and wrist feeling as if they might separate. My feet tripped over each other but I had to keep up. We ran until we were standing in a crowd of somber neighbors. The great building itself was quiet, but the crowd hummed with worries and pleas. Many wore their work uniforms—waitresses in aprons, K–12 teachers in dress shoes, ranchers in dirty boots and gloves.

  I wriggled my sweaty fingers free of the sitter’s and pushed toward the front, where a half circle of girls sobbed quietly and said the name Eddie again and again. I tried to place where I’d heard his name before. Another girl came running as she pulled a crimson jersey over her tank top. Her friends touched the name golden on the back of it and cried louder.

  “Oh, him,” I said to the girls as I moved closer, because of course I knew who Eddie Golden was now that I saw the basketball jersey. He’d taken the Petroleum Oilers to the county championship the year before, when he was a senior. He was the only one I ever saw on the court with a beard.

  The girls closed their circle and called toward the gray tower, “We love you, Eddie!”

  When I worm
ed my way around them, I came to the side of the train, where it would normally stop to catch the wheat. I squeezed between freight cars, followed the piercing buzz of chain saws and men shouting with strained and testy voices.

  “Give me a shovel or a bucket, goddamnit!”

  “You see I’m busy cutting? We need to made this hole bigger.”

  No one seemed to be working together. Some focused on breaking open the wall, but couldn’t agree how or where to cut through it, while others tried to manage the grain that exploded out of the hole.

  “Saw’s overheated. Fuck this.”

  The man looked around like someone might lend a hand, but everyone stayed quiet.

  “Mary, where’d you go?” The sitter grabbed my wrist hard. “I’ve been . . .”

  She stopped to look where I had been looking, where all of us had been looking, and her grip went soft. There, in the jagged square they’d cut in the side of the building hung Eddie’s yellow work boots. If you could shut out all the hurrying and shouting, if you could shut out the endless wailing high up in the tower, you’d hear the grain dropping all around Eddie.

  I felt a tug on the back of my T-shirt, up by the neck.

  “This is not what I’m paying you for,” my father said to the sitter. “Take her home.”

  All that walk back, I listened to the drone of voices and the awful crying that wouldn’t stop. And if I closed my eyes, there were Eddie’s yellow boots.

  We stood at the edge of my lawn, watching others as they flowed to and from the gray tower. I kept one foot on the grass, the other in the road.

  “What happened?” the sitter asked whenever another teen passed our house.

  A boy stopped to answer her.

  “Eddie Golden fell in the grain,” he said, distracted, looking toward the ever-growing crowd.

  “I heard he went under,” said a second boy, and he shook the other’s hand. “Hey, man.”

  “Hey. I’m just heading up. My dad’s already there with his chain saw.”

  “What’s he cutting?”

  “They’re trying to break through the wall of that storage bin.”

  “What happened?” the sitter asked again.

  Like most boys in town, they knew plenty about the work that went on at the elevator, how the grain was pouring into the hopper, as usual, and then it just stopped.

  “The wheat gums together,” said the first. “When the weather’s been wet. It happens all the time.”

  The second boy looked at the sitter and explained, “That’s when you have to send someone up to the storage bin.”

  “They sent Eddie and his younger brother.”

  “The younger brother, too?” he said. “What’s he, twelve?”

  “Nah. Fourteen. Just skinny.”

  “They went up to do what?” the sitter asked.

  “Just walk out onto the grain,” said the first boy. “Break up the clumps. It’s easy work.”

  “How do you know so much?” she asked.

  “I had that job a couple summers ago,” he said. “The pay is shit. If it’s your first job, they don’t pay the full wage.”

  I imagined the scene that day and for years after: the two standing at the top of the hot and dusty grain bin. Eddie tall and capable with his dark, thick beard and athletic build; the younger brother slight, his hands still baby soft, complaining of the heat.

  “You guys talking about the accident?” asked a third boy. “I was up there a while. I just came back for my camera.”

  He aimed it at the sitter and clicked.

  “Don’t,” she said, covering her face.

  There had never been so many kids standing on our lawn at once when there was not a funeral service inside. The first two ignored the new boy, describing how the younger brother harnessed up and climbed through the hatchway.

  “And then he just stood on top of the wheat, kicking at one clump of grain.”

  “Like this,” said the boy with the camera, and he kicked his foot in slow motion, like he was the laziest guy in the world. “Eddie’s yelling at him to put some muscle into it.”

  “How do you know?” the sitter asked.

  “I told you. I was up there,” he said.

  He aimed his camera at her again.

  “I said, don’t.”

  I’d been standing with one foot in the road but moved back onto my lawn.

  “So, before anyone interrupts again . . .” the first boy said.

  “Who’s interrupting? I can’t tell the story too?”

  “No one asked you to tell it.”

  “I’m the only one who was even there,” he said. He looked at the girl. “The boss, he goes running up to the tower, asking what’s taking so long. So Eddie gets out there on the wheat. And he’s stomping hard, breaking up the clumps.”

  “He should have worn a harness.”

  “Yeah. No shit.”

  “These pockets in the wheat, you don’t see ’em. They can just collapse under you.”

  “You can be gone in seconds. Sucked under fifty tons of grain, man.”

  “I heard him bawling,” said the sitter.

  “No. That was the younger brother. The kid in the harness.”

  “The lazy one I told you about. The one who kicked like this,” and he gently kicked the sitter’s foot.

  “I heard him too,” I said. “Just crying and crying.”

  “He was dangling at the top of that storage bin.”

  “He’s still there. You hear ’im?”

  We all looked nervously toward the grain elevator.

  “Did they save Eddie?” the sitter asked.

  The boy with the camera bent over, laughing. “Save him?”

  “They’re trying to dig him out,” said the first. “That’s what my dad’s been doing up there.”

  “Imagine it, man, all that grain going up your nose.”

  “You can hold your breath.”

  “I don’t think so, man.”

  “We should get up there.”

  As the two walked toward the tower, I thought of how Eddie’s feet hung through that square they’d cut out of the wall.

  “Wait up,” said the boy with the camera, hustling. “My dad has a shift tomorrow morning. I wonder if they’ll give him the day off?”

  Late that night, my father and the men who’d stayed until the end came back to our house, so sweaty the room steamed. There were five of them, covered in dust from the wheat: Pop, the doctor, the sheriff, the manager of the grain elevator, and the father who’d hurried up there with his chain saw. I made a joke about the stink in the room but no one laughed. They just sat around our kitchen table, hands trembling, pouring drinks. The babysitter, anxious to go home, shooed me toward my room, but I only went as far as the stairs.

  “What killed me was all those girls telling us, ‘Hurry, hurry.’”

  “And that goddamned whimpering.”

  I tiptoed closer.

  My father’s face looked deflated, as if air had been let out of it until only the creases and folds remained. What these men understood the moment they reached the scene was that there was never the chance of a rescue. They knew, as they started up their chain saws, that Eddie had already suffocated. It had taken three hours to recover his body, three hours of cutting through the wall and shoveling away grain. Once the star of his high school basketball team, the guy cracking jokes during breaks at work, here was the version of Eddie Golden they’d always remember, his nose and mouth plugged with wheat.

  “Have anything stronger, Allen?” the manager asked my father.

  Sweat dripped down the backs of my knees. Sometimes the room was silent, the house hot with breath, and only the sound of glasses clunking against the wooden table. Other times the men talked over each other, telling their stories until all the parts fit together.

  After Eddie’s death, his mother asked to have a photo taken with both her boys. She’d failed to take pictures of them as young men—life had simply become one of rushing t
o finish chores, rushing down the highway to do errands, rushing home to make dinner—and she needed to remember Eddie as he looked that morning. His dark eyebrows, the full beard that couldn’t hide his near-constant grin, the strong body like his father’s. She needed to remember them all together, even if that image was hardly true.

  The three wore their most formal clothing and posed as if Eddie, eyes closed and slumped between them, were still alive. This is what I would think of all that night and for many nights after with an awful, secret thrill. Mrs. Golden and her younger son argued about whether or not to smile. The look on their faces—though it’s only a story now; no one I know has ever laid eyes on the photo—is said to be the glassy-eyed look of shock. And no one would mistake the younger boy’s tight lips or the mother’s exposed teeth as smiles.

  The day after the accident, the men who worked at the grain elevator stayed busy at the site. The grain had to be thrown out because it had been sitting in there with Dead Eddie and all the sawdust from cutting a hole wide enough to retrieve his body. Spoiled grain piled near the opening where they’d pulled him out, and flies buzzed around it and laid their eggs.

  I wandered close to the gray tower, an ice cream cone dripping to my elbow, and watched the grown men argue. Some calculated the losses from that day—wheat they’d grown and cut and would have shipped to the flour mills and breweries. Those numbers showed in their jaws, clenched and twitching. When the train pulled in at its usual time, these men spoke for a long while at the engineer’s cab with hands in their pockets.

  I thought I was the only kid too curious to stay away, but noticed a number of us standing behind trucks or along the tracks.

  “She’ll know something,” a boy said, tipping his chin toward me.

  He called me over to a cluster of older kids, probably nine- or ten-year-olds, sitting together on the rail. They didn’t stop their talking as they made a space for me beside the only other girl, and I sat politely, with hands clasped.

  “We saw the younger brother walking home afterward. His face was covered in snot.”

  “I wanted to spit on him. All that whining. Jesus.”