Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #1

Drivin’ that Train


Most of us were alive, but Uncle Frank and Aunt Harriet were boxed up in the baggage car, as ready to get on with decomposition as their pine coffins were. Those of us in the passenger compartment weren’t sad, for we’d been bringing family home for decades; it was what we did. My father, Uncle Frank’s youngest and only surviving brother, said that their great-grandfather had started the tradition when he brought his father home. Since then, aunts and uncles and grandparents and assorted cousins returned to the family cemetery accompanied by as many relatives as could get a few days off from work. We were never told exactly why this had become so important, but it was one of the few family traditions that everyone seemed comfortable with. Nobody extended much effort for holiday gatherings, but when someone died—and in this case two someones—word spread fast.

Uncle Frank and Aunt Harriet had died within a day of each other. They’d both been ill for awhile, Frank’s heart bad for years and Harriet’s lungs more recently so, but they both seemed to have decided that if one couldn’t stay around, the other one shouldn’t. Aunt Harriet must have been at Uncle Frank’s side during his last few hours, but nobody had been by her side. She didn’t even call to tell anyone that Uncle Frank was dead, and we might have gone for days without knowing about either of them if their neighbor who’d mowed their lawn for several years hadn’t checked on them.

Some of us had talked about how things must have happened in the bungalow they’d lived in for half a century, and while we were sad that Harriet died alone, we couldn’t decide on whether she would’ve been sad. My father was 62, Uncle Frank five years older, Aunt Harriet someplace between the two of them.

My father hadn’t said much since we’d left Chicago, just seemed to bide most of his waking hours in the observation car. Going east to west Amtrak always seemed to lose time, even when running across the Great Plains with hardly a hill to climb. My father wondered if this was irony, since time zones were at least partly established to suit the railroad industry. None of us could clearly define irony, though, so we didn’t give it much thought. When the train stopped in Grand Junction, Colorado, we were four hours behind schedule though we never heard why. My father was the only one who stayed on the train while the rest of us hurried into the station to buy some fresh fruit and cold drinks in the small store almost hidden near the bathrooms. Steven, my younger brother, said he thought Dad wasn’t depressed about losing another—his final—sibling as he was at the realization that he was the only one left.

Steven and I, in fact, had long joked about which of us would be the surviving brother. Margie, our older sister, said she gave us odds of 50-50 each. She had also said that the peculiar family tradition was more morbid than not, a drawn-out, perverted version of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Still, Margie was with everyone else buying apples and bananas in the station. When Steven walked off to smoke a cigarette downwind of me, I looked through the windows of the observation car and could see my father looking down at us.