Chapter 5: The Yard

Jonas's POV

The cold at the east yard comes up through your boots at three in the morning, and you stop noticing it around the fourth hour.

I walk the trains with a lantern and a hammer.

I tap each wheel, and listen for the one that rings wrong, and write the number on a clipboard if it does.

It's not hard work, but it's honest, and a bad wheel doesn't care whose son you are.

On Sunday night I was thirty cars deep on track nine when I realized I had walked the last ten without hearing a single one.

I was thinking about my wife's hands.

"Rowe," the foreman called from the shanty door. "You went by a hot box."

"It's not hot."

"You didn't check."

"It's not hot," I said, and went back and checked, and it wasn't.

He grinned at me and went inside to his coffee.

I stood there with my lantern and thought about Friday afternoon.

She had come into the bedroom in the middle of the day and taken the sheet off me.

She told me to keep my hands on the pillow.

Five years married, and Marty had never ordered me to do anything.

I had lain there with my wrists up by my head and she had said Good.

Just that, in a low voice, and she meant it.

I'd felt it in the back of my knees.

Nobody has said it to me since I was about nine years old.

I should have been the happiest man in Ohio.

Instead I had lain next to her afterward, with her back turned, and listened to her breathe. She wasn't asleep.

Something was wrong, and she wasn't going to tell me what.

I know my wife.

When she has a problem she makes a list and does it, and she doesn't say a word until it's done.

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