Beginnings

1962

A throbbing rumble marks the time:
the midnight freight for Winnipeg
and points beyond.
Past swamp and lake and rock it comes
along Sir John A's gift to us: 
seven hundred miles of blueberry scrub
pushed in a line.

There is nothing here; 
one hundred souls, 
twelve cabins and a small prefab,
a log store and abandoned halftrack
long stripped of rubber by little boys.

The horn sounds, and they are here:
four bellowing diesels swaggering arm in arm,
they fill the clearing with a stammering roar
which fades to the rhythmic clatter
of steel boxes behind 
which speak their names:
CN, Soo Line, Great Northern and Santa Fe.

It moves on by, past one-armed Charlie's: 
half a sawyer, contemplating his walls, 
a past when he was whole
and what is left him now: a life 
of cigarettes, canned milk in coffee
and bundled copies of the Star;

And past the school where thirty kids 
sit in six rows for six grades; 
their elders packed off to the Sault to learn 
that they are Indian and unloved;

The place for first friendships
with Earnest and Levius and Luke, 
the boys affecting manhood 
with train-flattened nails as knives,
trading wordless taunts of effeminacy 
by tilted head;

The place where sin first showed itself within,
to one whose push caused a hurting fall
and death revealed itself 
through a missing face each spring;

And beyond that, the lake where fish once thrived
for a short lived industry
that caught and gutted trout and jack
and sent them down the line on ice;
the ice house stands, but the fish are gone
and the jobs with them,
and it's a good mile walk 
to where fish still bite;

On past the store, where flour, traps, guns and knives,
the goods of the world
move over the counter in fall
and skins move back in reciprocal tide
each spring.

The train moves on past all these things,
reminder of a coming leaving;
past one hundred huddled souls 
all folded by the woods' embrace:
from the train a fleeting break
in the flowing spruce,
but to these souls a world;
and to this soul a happy world,
a home to which its heart will hold
through many worlds to come,

One hundred souls: some turn in the night
from the crowing of a far off land
and a click-clack fading down the tracks
away from here.