Mama was a dainty eater. She always thought a lot white eating, and soufflé brought out her best ideas, Papa always said… in self-defense, I suspect.
Mama said, “A girl like Fran… she has everything. Two years' high school, a half interest in my Papa's oil well.”
“Honey, there is no oil in Vermont.”
“You mean they haven't found it yet.”
“No, they haven't, have they?”
“No,” said Mama, with that cold-in-the-head voice. “Stevie, take your elbows off the table.”
Papa said, “I admit Fran has a lot for a small town.”
“Too much for Jed Billpen,” said Mama, closing the conversation for the evening…
Well, the next day I went down to the depot where Jed Billpen was a freight clerk. He made out bills of lading and h'isted freight on a handcart, and was very handsome and had huge muscles and could roll cigarettes one-handed, and, of course, he was going to play second base with the Yankees some day. In those days, being all that was better than being president of a bank. All great men started almost like that.
Jed saw me as I stood on the depot brick steps waiting for the A.M. Express to roll flat some pennies I had placed on the rails…
“Stevie,” said Jed. “You're a real man now. Let me feel your arm.”
I let him.
“Stevie… that's hard as iron. You'll be in there pitching a hard game of ball soon.”
“Oh, I want to be manager and pass the hat.”
“You do take after your family,” he said, and then he slipped me a note smelling of eating tobacco. “Now you give this to your Aunt Fran at supper, and you'll be free to come in and watch me load steers any time you want.”
“Ought I?”
“You're a man now,” said Jed.
“Well…”
“You've got to figure these things out for yourself.”
“Aunt Fran expecting it?”
“That's a sport,” said Jed, and went off to help a crate of turkeys towards a roasting oven 400 miles away.
Of course I gave Fran the note, and she went out after supper to run down to the drug store “to see about a new rat for her hair.” I offered her the six I had in a cage in the barn, but she said no, thank you.
The next day I went out past the factories to the Billpen place to see the new straw roof Mr. Billpen had put on their house.
It looked very fine… and people passing on the Big Express must have looked down on it and wondered how it came there… and then they forgot it and waited for the great city to come panting and leaping into view twenty-five miles away.
But we kids… I used to go to visit the Billpens and play Indians and Tiger Hunting in the river meadows with them. We used to sit by the rail lines and watch the fast trains pass, and very beautiful people would sit at crisp white tables and be served rare foods in silver trays by giant black men. The trains never stopped, but passed in a grind and rush, and the dust would fall back slowly and nothing much would happen on the rail lines again until another train was due…
Mr. Billpen used to shake his head and say he couldn't believe it… “People eating soup on a train going sixty miles an hour… how do they keep it out of their laps?” It was too much for him, and he would go up to the stove works and help load stoves into freight cars. Mr. Billpen did any kind of work… there were a lot of little Billpens to feed.
The stove works were about a mile above the rail line, connected by a single track spur, and the stoves would be loaded into three or four cars, and when they were loaded, they waited up there until a willing freight train passed. Then a small, puffing engine would push them down the easy grade to the main lines, and the freight train would break open and the stove cars would hook up, and the train would come together and the whole long worm of weathered freight cars would chug chug off to market…
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