Hobo Signs

Ellie weren’t the only girl riding the rails in the 1930s – I’d say one in ten of the young people we met was a girl, though grown women were rare.

To these grown women fell the duty of holding things together back home like a ruff-stitched patch while their husbands and brothers and uncles took to the road, looking for any kind of work to be found.

Not just grown men, as I say, from our home town there were seven of us, Ellie being the only girl. We rainged from fourteen to eighteen, and stuck together thick and thin.

You’d get that, clumps of youngsters from the same town, and you came to know them by the names of those towns, for personal names were two hard and two many to keep track of. Plus we all were changing from year to year, by this I mean height and looks and for the boys general hairiness. As a for instance, we were the Bentons, from our small farming community in Kansas.

We called it the road, I am back to this business of hitting the road, but in truth it was the tracks, the train tracks, the UP and the many short lines that connected and criss-crossed in those days, for this was the favored way of travel if you were poor, desparate, or adventurous.

You did your best to stay shy of the yard bosses and their hired hands and when the train shrugged and heaved forward from a dead stop but before it picked up two much speed you ran alongside, grabbed holt of a handle on one of the boxcars, and swung yourself up into what you hoped was an empty space… and not a nest of robbers, or lumber stacked so thick to the edge that you bounced right back out onto the tracks.

Going on the road meant one less mouth to feed back on the farm, and if you weren’t cheated out of your pay or had it stolen in the hobo camps you might even bring some money home to help see the family through the winter.

I suppose the common course of events was to gather a few warm clothes, a frying pan, a pot, some knives and forks, and some bedding, that being as much as you would be able to carry anyway, and steal away from home at dawn, leaving a note behind.

We mostly followed the harvest, traveling clear across the wide country so as to start in the produce fields in California, proceeding to the hay harvest in the Rockies, then the corn and wheat fields of the Midwest as we got closer back to home.

It was a strange life, some bursts of pure beauty on starlit nights as you lay back on the boxcar roof and looking up, those though you might call fewish and far bewteenish, and I notice that people hang onto these poetic images so as to plane down the splintered edges of their memories which are otherwise hard and unyeelding.

I ended up in the lumber business.

There was much that was boring and outright dangerous about this way of travel. We all knew men who had been pulled under the cars and met a gruesome death when their grip slid from the boxcar handle.

The only thing that made it a reasonable thing to do were the desparation of the times.

It struck me then that I wanted to take Ellie away from this when we was grownup enough, which in the 1930s came a little earlier than it does now.

Bewitched, stricken, charmed, I learned all those words later, and no sooner learned them than I applyed them after the fact to what I felt for that girl. Deep red hair, a wiry form equal to any athletic dare any boy threw at her, a sceptical nature and a good heart, that was my Ellie.

Nothing was ever said out loud, but whenever Ellie needed water fetched or someone to keep her company in the camps, it was me she would turn to.

We had knowed each other in town at a distance, but here on the road we found our common ground, and it was like listening to a radio station that only we two knew the signal of.

There was a fair amount of decisions to make on the rails – when to leave town, which direction to go – and we were the ones making them, needing only a word or two, and a look, between us. What common sense and general purpose the little group had we were the keepers of it, the two of us.

The others knew nothing of this but we did, which only made the knowledge stronger and more secret. And more downright thrilling, it would come to me now and again, a word, thrilling, that most people would not think to associate with me either in my outwards or inwards self. Or selfs if that is the correct term.

By the others I mean my cousins Jeremy and Clem, the two Dawson boys, the half-brothers …..well, never mind all of them, the only name you need to keep in mind is Chance McGee, as slippery a boy as ever I had known till then.

Just as we were the Bentons, so did Chance travel with the Clearwaters, their home town back in Illinois. A smooth talker, full of poetry, and did he ever lose a chance when Ellie was around to frame himself in the open door of the boxcar like he was on stage?

No, he did not.

Over a certain length of time I came to not think too highly of Illinois or its people, though I am told there is good farmland there, and they at least get enough rain, which you couldn’t always say about Kansas.

Now as far as I knew they, this Chance and my Ellie, had only had the kind of brief conversation you’d get on the road, but now and again when I seen them together, I had the uncomforting thought that there were radios and there were radios, and you never could tell which exact one someone was tuned to.

We would come upon the Clearwaters seldom at first…and then not seldom enough, until we seemed to be coming upon them all the time.

All the time.

Now you may know that hobos have a secret set of signs they use to leave signals with, a top hat might mean that here lived a gentleman, a picnic bench meant food for work, and three balls in a row meant watch out or you’d end up on the chain gang.

We had most of these down – oh, there must have been forty – when of a sudden there showed up a new sign sketched with charcoal on a fence post, or on a tree on the edge of one of the train camps, shaped like a ruff compass this sign was, with a star placed different places at different times. 

I could make not hide nor hair of it, nor could the others, so I put it to one side in my mind, but do you know who took a peculiar interest in that sign? Ellie did.

By now it seemed we could hardly turn around without finding the Clearwaters, and especially him, this Chance that I speak of, underfoot. 

Ellie and I kept up our decision-making, though we come to split duties after a while, with me deciding when to leave town and her deciding which direction to leave in. She just thought it would be better that way.

Town after town I saw her staring at that same sign, and just about the time it accurred to me that it was a compass telling us – telling Ellie! for that was what was going on! – which direction the Clearwaters were about to travel so the two of them might see one another again, then that was the same time that Ellie left for good, leaving me a note that said simply and kindly that she and Chance McGee had decided that they were star-crossed lovers, he told her so all the time and was poetry itself in the telling, and they were aiming to set out on life’s adventure together, and would I please tell her Aunt Helen when I got back to Benson. 

I’ve read that letter many a time these twenty years, the creases where it was folded barely hold now.

I don’t know why I do, read the letter I mean, seeing as how I tell myself I want to forget her and the contents of the note and never think of them again in my life. I have set about this business of forgetting with vigor, you may trust me, but don’t seem to be making much progress on it. You’d think twenty years practice would have gotten me further than it has.

One thing I can’t forget, at the bottom of the page is the sign, the compass, the one I couldn’t figure out for so long, but this time without a star, as though they were leaving the whole question open, and not letting anyone – perhaps even themselves – know which direction they was heading.

I suppose it makes me wonder if some things ought to have been said out loud after all.

And I still can’t get a natural good feeling about people from Illinois, my guard is up on this matter you might say, though I’m sure there are some good souls that hail from there, and I seed the fact that they do have more dependable rainfall there than do us or we if that is the better word. I’m not sure any of the good ones are from Clearwater though.