Part 2
Ida set the red board first.
She went out into the storm with a lantern and hauled on the cold lever until the signal arm dropped to stop, red lamp lit, and she tied a red flag to the switch stand for good measure. Number 3 would not pass Carlyle tonight. Sixty people would sleep in their coaches on the siding and complain about it in the morning.
That was the easy part.
Then she put on Walt's old buffalo coat over her own, and took his canvas bag down off the nail, and went across the yard to the section house and pounded on the door.
The section foreman, Mr. Haugen, had a bad back and a worse temper. His boy, Pete, was fifteen.
"Mrs. Rusk," said Haugen, in his nightshirt. "It is midnight. In a blizzard."
"I need the handcar," said Ida. "And Pete. And I need them now."
The handcar was a flat little platform on four iron wheels, with a seesaw pump handle in the middle. Two people stood facing each other and pumped it up and down, and the car went.
Ida pumped one side. Pete pumped the other. They had a lantern lashed to the front and a shovel on the deck, and the snow came at them out of the dark so thick that Ida could see the rails for maybe twenty feet.
They made eight miles an hour on the open stretches. In the cuts, where the snow had drifted across the track, they made nothing at all. They got off and shoveled. They pushed the car through by hand, and got back on, and pumped again.
Ida's arms burned. Then they stopped burning and went numb. She was fifty-six years old. She thought about that once, and then she did not think about it again.
At three in the morning, sixteen miles out, Pete shouted and pointed.
Ahead in the snow, there was a light. A lantern, swinging slowly back and forth across the track. The old railroad signal: stop.
They braked the handcar in a drift twenty yards short.
Beyond the lantern, Ida could see the wreck. Freight cars, black shapes in the white, tumbled down the bank by the culvert and across both tracks. One telegraph pole snapped off at the bottom and lying in the snow, the wire coiled across the ground like a dropped fishing line.
The man with the lantern came stumbling toward them through the drifts.
He was tall and stooped and bundled to the eyes, with snow caked white on his shoulders. His cap had blown off, and his head was bare and bald as an egg, shining wet in the lantern light.
He held the lantern up and looked at her.
"Who in heaven's name," he said, "would come out here tonight on a handcar?"
Ida pulled the scarf down off her mouth.
"Carlyle Siding," she said. "Ink froze in the bottle."
The lantern shook in his hand.
There was no time for anything else.
The freight crew was in the caboose, the only car still on the rails. The brakeman had a broken arm. The fireman was cut about the head. Thomas Avery had walked two miles from Elm Spring in the storm when his wire went dead, to find them and flag the line. He had been out in it for five hours.
"The dispatcher needs the report," Ida said. "Which tracks. How many cars. Who's hurt. He won't send the wrecker blind."
"The wire's down," said Thomas. "Both ways. There's no way to..."
Ida opened Walt's canvas bag.
She took out the little brass pocket set, no bigger than a cigar box, and knelt in the snow beside the fallen pole. She found the wire where it lay coiled across the ground, east of the break. She scraped the ice and rust off the bare iron wire with Walt's knife, the way she had watched him do a hundred times, and clipped the pocket set onto it, and grounded the other lead to the iron rail.
Then she put her frozen fingers on the key.
Thomas Avery knelt beside her in the snow and held the lantern.
"Ellis," she sent. "Ellis. This is Carlyle, from the Sand Creek wreck."
For a long moment, nothing. The wind screamed across the plain.
Then the little sounder clicked, faint and quick. "Go ahead, Carlyle."
She sent it all. Eleven cars off. Both tracks blocked. Brakeman, broken arm. Fireman, cut. Crew in the caboose. Need wrecker and doctor. Number 3 held at Carlyle on the red board. Thomas told her the car numbers and she sent those too, one by one, with her fingers so cold she could barely feel the key.
When she finished, Ellis came back at once. "Wrecker leaves at four. Doctor aboard. Good work, Mrs. Rusk." And then, after a little pause: "I said you were paid to sit. I take it back."
The wrecker came at seven, with the gray dawn behind it.
By then the storm had blown itself out, and the sky was clear and pale and enormous over the white plains. The freight crew had gone back in the caboose of the wrecker train to Ellis, and the doctor with them. Pete Haugen was asleep sitting up on the handcar, with his cap over his face.
Ida Rusk and Thomas Avery sat together on the bottom step of the caboose, in the sun, drinking coffee the wrecker crew had given them out of tin cups.
She looked at him in the daylight. A long, stooped man with a bald head and a gray mustache, and deep lines around his eyes, and a nose that had been broken once, a long time ago. Not handsome. Not anything like the man she had made up for herself in two winters of clicks in the dark.
Better.
"You're grayer than a badger," Thomas said.
"I told you I was."
"You did." He looked down into his coffee. "I'm sorry I'm two weeks early for Sunday."
Ida laughed. It surprised her. It had been a long time.
They sat in the sun a while longer. Then Thomas stood up, stiffly, and held out his hand to help her up, and she took it.
"GN, Ida," he said. Out loud, for the first time. And there it was, the little hitch, before the last letter, like a man stopping on a doorstep.
She did not let go of his hand.