COVID Reflection
The gravel-packed ground was crunchy beneath her boots, still rigid with the late March frost. She was conscious of each footfall as she strode through the side lot, up to the roundhouse. It was eerie how quiet it was. Pausing by the roundhouse door, she turned and looked back at the station. Silent. Its buttery yellow paint, its red window muntins, softly glowing in the young air, hutch-like roof mantling and steep and gray, gray, gray.
The machine shop was silent. That was the weird thing. Even on a weekday, when the trains weren't running, there was always someone in the shop, hammering, or cursing, or grinding an old grab iron loose. Now - nothing.
Not even a wisp of smoke trailed a path from a smoke jack.
She turned back to the roundhouse door - the side door, a small entryway for people. It was wooden, blistered red-pink with old, flaking paint. Her hand paused on the glossy ceramic knob, dark and deep like obsidian.
A sign was hung on the door. "No non-essential workers," it said. Below this sign was another sign with a smiley face. Except you couldn't see the smile - because it was shrouded by a rendering of a blue surgical mask. Heather looked into the blank eyes of the cartoon face. She didn't know what expression its mouth bore behind that mask, but she doubted it was a smile.
She shook her head. Strange. So very strange. And opened the door.
Her fingers flicked the light switches before her foot had even found purchase on the wood floor. The door slammed shut on its rusty hinge. Then she stormed down the narrow aisle, before the lights had woken up. It took a while for them to light. One by one they did, revealing low, smoky forms huddled beneath the pitched roof: mammoth steam locomotives, side by side, each inhabiting a stall of the arcing bow of the roundhouse.
The floor was wooden, and ancient. Giant gouges and pocks ran here and there, evidence of heavy tools dropped over a century of railroading. The skylights in the ceiling cast rays of light that illuminated the gray, dusty air. A century of railroading had gone on in this space - and now it was silent. But that's not what disturbed Heather.
Heather scouted the perimeter for a large metal disk about the diameter of a trash can lid.
"I may have forgotten to lid number ten," Gerald had said over the phone, concern touching his thin voice.
It was alright. Everyone had gone home thinking they'd be back the next day. But then it broke, all over the news. And then the email came saying all railroad operations were temporarily suspended and no one was to show up to work.
Lid in hand, Heather mounted the steps to number ten's running board in five steps. Footboard, pilot, steam chest, smokebox step, running board. One, two, three, four, five. Then she hooked herself onto the handrail and placed the lid on the conical bonnet of number ten's stack with a dull clang.
The smoke jacks above the locomotive stacks had dampers, and caps that could be closed in poor weather. But now that the locomotives would be sitting idle for months it was better to be safe than sorry. Better a capped stack than an accident and a pool of water two months later to rust out the smokebox.
Carefully, she got back down on the running board. She held onto the handrail. It was brass. Polished, but tarnished with oil and smoke spatter. She supposed it would get more tarnished, now. She wiped a smudge futilely. Then held on as she walked the running board to the cab. The door was still open. Squeezing through it and into the cab, she shut the door and latched it closed, then banged her knee and head twice on number ten's backhead piping as she extricated herself from the cab. Deckless engines, she decided, were not for wimps.
She climbed down from the gangway and stalked around the other slumbering locomotives to see if anything else was out of order. Nothing seemed to be. On her way out, she paused and looked at number ten again.
"See you in a couple months," she said.
She hoped it would be only a couple months. She assumed it would be. People would band together and do what was right, right? She couldn't imagine it going any other way. That hope kept her chin held high and though the corners of her eyes were creased in sorrow, and fear, and confusion, she held tight to the notion that she would see number ten under steam and hear its melodious, roaring whistle in the fall. And her friends.
~
Things didn't turn out that way. It took a near two years before things were somewhat back to normal. But eventually, they were. Eventually, people were safe. Eventually, people returned to their routines, and they moved on. Life became almost normal again.
One day five years later, Heather walked on the crunchy gravel of the roundhouse side lot. A mourning dove cooed. The red-winged blackbird couldn't be heard - the traffic on Hillendale Road was too busy. Well, busy as busy got in this rural town.
Steam billowed healthily from the smoke jacks of the roundhouse. Two locomotives were hot - stabled horses to man the day's trains. Shouts came from within. A machine-gun flutter resounded from the machine shop. The Hanna riveting machine, joining parts for a locomotive frame. Tourists skipped across the parking lot to the station to purchase tickets. The sun shone. Voices and laughs swirled around her, a whirlpool of visitors and crew bringing life to the place.
Her hand fell on the doorknob, polished and deep like obsidian.
I'm not the same, she thought.
She remembered the before times. Remembered that they had existed - remembered that they had been. But some part of her was forever caught in the negative space of the between times, so stunned and marred it refused to leave.
She felt that a part of her had been lost, had died in the psychological trauma of the isolation and the uncertainty and the chronicity of the stress, and she wondered frightfully and angrily if she would ever get it back.
Maybe she was still in shock.
Maybe we all are, she thought.
A curt whistle shout came from inside the roundhouse.
She opened the door.
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