Before the Whistle—The Yard Comes Alive 🔍

The six o'clock whistle cuts through the yard, and the day shifts into gear. I move along my section with the other men—we don't talk much, just nod and position ourselves at our stations. The locomotive I saw earlier is being readied for a run; I can hear the fireman shouting something to the engineer, their voices thin against the hiss of the steam valves. The steel under my hands is already warm. I've been doing this work for three years now, since I turned eighteen, and I know every bolt and coupling on this line like I know the crack in my ceiling back home. Today feels like every other Friday in the summer—the same rhythm, the same weight, the same distant sense of time passing while the world spins somewhere else.

Midday Rest—Letters and the News 🔍

By noon, we break for thirty minutes in the shade of the storage shed. I sit on an upturned crate with my lunch pail, the same hard bread and cheese as always, and I watch the other fellas. Tom's reading a three-day-old newspaper, muttering about the fighting in France—the Allies are pushing forward, the papers say, though it all feels very far from here. One of the new boys asks me if I ever think about enlisting, and I shrug. The railroad needs men too, and I'm keeping production moving, which matters. My mother wrote last week asking if I'd heard from my brother; I haven't, and neither has she. I finish my bread and check the time on the water-stained clock above the shed door. We've got four more hours before the evening shift takes over, and the August sun is at its worst.