Harriman

The houses came in on flatcars.

Rafael Morales had been told this would happen and had not believed it until the first string rolled past the Reno yard on the morning of the Fourth, eastbound, slow, a locomotive and eleven flatcars and on every flatcar a house. Whole houses. Frame houses with their windows still in and their stovepipes still up and their curtains, some of them, still hanging, chained down to the deck at the sills, and on the porch of the third one a woman in an apron sitting in a kitchen chair with a baby on her lap as if she had been asked to keep an eye on the place while it moved.

He stood with his shovel and watched it go by. So did everyone in the yard. Nobody said anything until the last car had cleared the switch, and then the foreman took his hat off and put it back on and said that was Wadsworth, that was, and went back to work.

It was Wadsworth. The Southern Pacific had decided, a year and more back, that the division point thirty miles east on the river was in the wrong place, out on the desert where the water was bad and the town had never taken, and that the shops and the roundhouse and the yards and the hundreds of men who worked them should be somewhere else. Somewhere else was a stretch of ranch meadow three miles east of Reno, flat, wet in spring, with the river on one side and the Truckee Meadows running out to the hills on the other, where the company had bought up the land and laid out streets and sunk a well and put up the walls of a roundhouse with stalls for forty-one engines. It had a name. The company had named it Harriman, after its own president, and painted that on the depot, and everyone said the name the way you say a name you have not decided about yet.

Rafael was twenty-two and had been in the Reno yard four years, since his father’s legs had gone. His father had worked this yard when there was nothing east of it but sage and had told him, in the way old men tell you things they want you to remember and are not sure you will, that a railroad town was not a place, it was a decision, and that the railroad could unmake the decision any morning it liked. Rafael had thought the old man meant Reno. He understood now that he had meant Wadsworth. Wadsworth had been a town for thirty-five years. It had a school and a church and a graveyard, and this morning it was going past on flatcars with its curtains up, and by tonight it would be a place where the train did not stop.

At noon the foreman sent six of them east on a work train to help unload.

Rafael had not been to the new town. He had seen it from the main line, the way you see a thing you have no reason to look at, a scatter of raw lumber and a water tank and the long curve of the roundhouse wall going up. Up close it was worse and better. Worse because it was mud: the meadow had not dried yet, and the streets the company had graded were cut to ruts, and the men from Wadsworth who had ridden in ahead of their houses were standing around in it with their hands in their pockets looking at survey stakes. Better because it was enormous. The roundhouse was the biggest thing he had ever seen a man build. It stood open to the sky with its stalls like the teeth of a gear, and inside it there were already engines, sitting on the pits, being worked on, as if the building had been finished around them.

The houses were coming off with jacks and rollers and a great deal of shouting. A house would be raised off its flatcar on screw jacks by a crew of twenty, and timbers slid under it, and then the whole thing walked off the car and down a ramp of greased planks onto the ground with men on ropes on both sides keeping it from going anywhere it wanted, and then dragged by mule team along a graded street to a lot with four stakes in it and set down. He watched the third house, the one with the woman on the porch, come down the ramp with the woman still on the porch. Nobody had asked her to get off. When it was on the ground and the mules were unhooked she stood up with the baby and went inside and after a moment a curtain moved.

He worked until the light went. Rope, mostly. By the end he could not close his hands. There was a band somewhere, because it was the Fourth, and firecrackers, and a man going through the mud with a bucket of beer, and a speech being made off the back of a wagon by somebody from the company that nobody could hear over the switch engines. Rafael did not try to hear it. He sat on a stack of ties at the edge of the yard with two men from Wadsworth who had worked the roundhouse there and would work it here and were, he gathered, not sure how they felt about that, and one of them pointed with his chin at the depot and the name painted on it and said that it would not last.

“The name?”

“Harriman does not want it. That is what they say. Does not want a town in the desert named after him.”

“What will they call it?”

The man shrugged. “Something. It does not matter what they call it. The roundhouse is what it is. You can call the roundhouse Harriman or you can call it Jones. Forty-one engines is forty-one engines.”

Rafael looked at the roundhouse in the last light, the great curved wall of it, the stalls, the smoke from the engines already inside. West of it the sun was going down behind Reno, three miles off, where his father was sitting on the step of the house near the river with his bad legs stretched out, waiting to hear what the new place was like. He would not know what to tell him. That it was mud. That it was the biggest thing he had ever seen. That a town had gone past on flatcars with a woman on the porch and had been set down in a meadow by suppertime and had a curtain in its window by dark.

He decided he would tell him about the woman. The old man would understand that better than the roundhouse. A railroad could move a town. It had not thought to ask her to get off the porch.

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