I was kneeling on the ice with the hand auger when Pierre came walking across the lake in his insulated coveralls, a long, careful walk, with his hands in his pockets, as if he were afraid of cracking the surface. Pierre is my foreman, fifty nine, a lean, gray, quiet man from Champlain who has run my track crews for twenty six years. He crouched beside me. “Nolan, I am sorry to bring this to your fishing derby,” he said. “The sheriff just called. They found the Nordco tie inserter on a flatbed at the border crossing. The driver says it belongs to Lavalley Rail.”
Marc Lavalley was ten feet away, in a red hunting cap and a quilted jacket, with a thermos in his hand. He is sixty five, a broad, hearty man with a laugh he uses as a weapon, and he has called me gandy dancer at every derby for twenty years, always loud enough for the other tables. He took one step closer. “What tie inserter?” he said. “Jordan told me you were giving him some old equipment. Said you were retired and had no use.” “I sold Briggs Rail Services in November,” I said. “Twelve million, three hundred thousand dollars. Line 7 went with the sale. The inserter was listed at a hundred forty five thousand. It belongs to the buyer.”
A silence went across the ice like a crack. A man ten yards away dropped his minnow bucket. Michelle, my wife, who had been sitting on an overturned crate with a thermos of cocoa, set it carefully on the ice and rose. She is sixty, a small, brisk woman in a red wool hat, and I have been married to her for thirty seven years. “Marc, I would like you to hear something,” she said, quite pleasantly. “Nolan wanted to see how the family would treat him if they thought he was only a man who drilled holes. I told him it was a cruel experiment. I told him he would be disappointed. And I was right.”
A hand auger lay on the ice at a fishing derby and gave one track contractor the afternoon to bring his nephew back to the work of the rail.
My nephew Jordan was walking across the lake from the parking lot with his hands in the air, as though somebody had already told him to stop. He is thirty, a tall, thin, eager man in a new Lavalley Rail jacket, and he reached us out of breath. “Uncle Nolan, I can explain.” “Please do.” “Line 7 was in the back lot. It was not doing anything. I had a contract for the Adirondack spur, a good one, and I figured if I got it going, I could pay you after.” He looked from face to face. “I thought you would be proud.”
“Proud,” I said. “Jordan, did you know that a tie inserter takes four years to learn to run safely? That the man who taught me died under one in 1988, because a young fellow thought he knew the controls?” His mouth opened. “I am not telling you this to scare you. I am telling you because that machine was on a flatbed at a border crossing with a boy on the seat who had never been trained. Somebody would have been hurt. I am not angry about the money, Jordan. I am angry about the road.”
Marc Lavalley took off his cap. His hair was thin and white under it, and his big red face looked suddenly small. “Nolan,” he said, “I raised the boy to cut corners. I raised him to think it was cleverness.” He turned to his son, and I saw his jaw working. “Jordan, you will do whatever Nolan says. Whatever it is. And you will say thank you at the end of it.” Jordan, who had gone the color of the ice, nodded without a sound.
I told them. The inserter would return to the buyer by the next morning, with Pierre driving the flatbed. Jordan would sign a statement. In exchange, the buyer, a rail contractor out of Albany, had agreed to take him on as a track laborer, on the winter crew, at laborer wages, with a hard hat and a thermos and a foreman who would not spare him. “Pierre will teach you,” I said. “He taught me. Four years on the ground before you touch a machine.” Pierre, beside me, grunted, which is the way he says yes.
“And Marc,” I said, turning, “gandy dancer.” Marc flinched. “Do you know where the name comes from?” He shook his head. “The men who laid the first tracks, a hundred and fifty years ago, with hand tools. They worked in rhythm, to a chant, ten men to a rail, swinging in time, so that it looked like a dance. They built the country. It is the finest word anyone has ever called me.” I let it hang there. “I would just like you to say it as if you knew that.”
Marc worked his mouth. He opened it, closed it, and finally set his thermos on the ice and shook my hand, a long, hard, wordless grip, and held on. Behind him, the derby had gone quiet, a hundred people on the lake, and the only sound was the wind over the ice and the tick of a tip up flag. Then someone shouted, “Flag!” and the whole crowd laughed, grateful, and the afternoon returned to itself. Jordan ran for the hole. A fish was on the line. It was a good one, a northern pike, and he pulled it up himself, shouting.
Jordan worked on the winter crew for two years. He was clumsy, at first, and cold, and one day in January I found him at the edge of the yard with his gloves off, swinging a spike maul at an old tie in a slow, steady rhythm, ten times, twenty, a thin boy in the snow keeping a beat. He did not see me. I did not interrupt. I stood by the fence with my hands in my pockets, listening to him dance, and I thought of a hundred and fifty years of men doing the same on the same cold ground.
