Tales From the Front  
                           Hold My Hand as I Leave
                                by Dave Laird
                          Copyright D. Laird, 1994

Old Fred had his hand firmly on the throttles of a three-diesel  train once
more, roaring out of Helena, Montana on a one-way to Spokane. The frequency
with which he could lean his head out the side window of the locomotive,
sniffing the morning air as he passed through the small towns of Western
Montana and Northern Idaho, depended only upon his days off. In the twenty
years Fred spent with the railroad, rising from a conductor to an engineer,
he had hardly ever taken a day of sick leave. He couldn't bear to leave.

That was because there was excitement, even passion, in feeling  the raw,
untethered power in the throttles of the thousand horsepower locomotives as
he roared through the countryside. There was beauty so unspeakable so as to
border on pain, as he watched deer bounding through the trees on a snowy
winter day on the backside of the pass. There was even primal terror, when
some half-crazed yokel tried to beat the train to the railroad crossing
lights, cutting it just a bit too close for comfort. Fred was relieved to
recall that, in his career with the railroad, he'd never killed anyone at a
crossing.

There was all the fire of life itself, painted on the inside  walls for him
inside the giant locomotives. By God, he was an ENGINEER! Knew how to tell
if the track was straight and tight on the ties. Could smell trouble in time
to hit the kill switch, and never lost a train in twenty years. Always knew
how to keep his conductor and fireman, clear at the ass-end of the train,
wide awake with his incessant jokes and hot coffee. He was a company man,
and damned proud of it, from the ground up. He could walk tall, spit
straight and knew how to handle his whiskey. He was a man among men, by god,
and you'd better not forget it, either kind of a man.

Those days when he wasn't pulling loads of rail cars up the grade  that
separates Idaho and Montana were tediously long, impatiently accepted with a
view of the promise that soon he would return to the rails. Perhaps that is
why, in middle age, his marriage, never one of great intimacy, fell apart
entirely. His wife, Abigail, and he quietly unceremoniously dissolved their
marriage that scarcely had lasted as long as his career on the rails, since
they had no children to muddy the legal waters between them.

'To hell with her!', Fred had said on more than one occasion in  the
uncertain period after the divorce was final. 'I don't need a wife! I got a
job to do!'

Five years after their divorce, Fred lost track of Abigail  entirely. The
last that he'd heard, she was working as a hostess in one of the restaurants
in Spokane, but had moved and neglected to leave a forwarding address or
phone number.

Fred retired from the railroad at age fifty, and started  collecting his
pension. After a tenative business venture left him nearly penniless and
deeply in debt to the I.R.S., Fred sold his house on Spokane's east side and
moved into a residential hotel on Spokane's First Avenue.

In those days, living at the Otis Hotel wasn't too bad, all  things
considered. There was the Coach House Restaurant and Lounge right down the
street, which even in its good times was affectionately known as the Roach
Cafe by most residents of the hotel. Most days, he could find someone to
talk to in the lobby, perhaps a fitfully-played game of checkers to pass the
time, and when he wasn't otherwise preoccupied, there were always the rail
yards, bristling with the bustle and roar, sights and smells of the life he
once called his own.

Fred lost track of the number of days he spent, introspectively  walking up
and down the tracks in the rail yard. As the years inexorably passed by, the
number of people he still knew in the rail yards diminished to where it was
a rare occasion when he recognized any of the switchmen, conductors or
engineers that still tended the trains.

Likewise reduced were the number of workmen who knew Old Fred. To  them, the
sight of the old man strolling through the rail yard meant nothing to them.
The only thing which distinguished him from being just another hobo looking
for a fast ride out of town was that he dressed better than any hobo any of
them had ever seen.

Four years ago, Old Fred took a nasty fall, getting off a city  bus, and
broke his hip in three places. Not only did the injury keep him stuck for
several months in the hospital, and then the nursing home, but it severely
curtailed his ability to go for long, memory-laden walks in the rail yards.

The only places that Fred could walk after his recovery without  the
ever-present danger of a fall was on flat city sidewalks, and even then he
had to use a cane.

Even with limited mobility, Fred grew increasingly despondent.  Most of his
old friends in the Otis Hotel had either died, moved into nursing homes or
simply faded away, like the faded, once-gay pastel orchids on the wallpaper
in his room. There was a new generation of hotel residents, some of whom
were violent, angry, malevolent toward anyone and everything in their path.
There were drugs being sold in the lobby during the evening, and one
evening, a man was killed outside the lobby for his Social Security check.
It was getting so back, Old Fred wouldn't even stir out of his room after
dinner.

He had nothing, ate little and had lost the memory, somehow, of  the feeling
of his hands upon the throttle. The sound of the locomotives coming through
downtown no longer bothered him, and he slept fitfully in a dreamless,
vacant haze.

On a hot summer afternoon, as Spokane went screaming into the  peak of the
rush hour, Old Fred saw Abigail, for the first time in nearly two decades.
Fred recognized her immediately despite her hair being nearly white, the
furrows of age carving up her once-delicate face and the cast-off clothing
she wore.

She had been hit over the head by one of the street punks that  waited for
old women along the mean streets. She lay, dazed and bleeding in the gutter,
her shaky hands grasping what was left of her pocketbook, crying into the
sooty heat beating back at her from the sidewalk where she lay.

"Abigail, what the hell happened to you?" Fred asked in a  solicitous voice.

A city cop with a desultory, slack look on his face, moved  crabwise between
Fred and Abigail, his night stick held at port arms, and in a gruff voice
muttered, "Move on bud. The show's over."

"She's my former wife. I have every right to talk with her."

"I don't care if she's the Dairy Queen princess of 1923, unless  she wants
to talk with you, you'd best move your ass on up the street or else I'll run
you in."

Somehow, Abigail managed by gesturing to the cop to convince him  to leave
Fred alone. The cop sighed, as if a great imposition had been placed firmly
on his shoulders, but finally moved a few yards away, giving she and Fred a
semblance of privacy in which to talk.

Fred could see the years had not been nearly so kind to Abigail  as to
himself. Her clothes were standard Salvation Army issue for old women
looking for a bargain, her hands were covered with age spots and her hands,
which he held firmly in his were distorted and swollen with arthritis. He
held on for dear life, through the tears, and then, later, through the
ambulance ride to the hospital where a faceless surgeon put a few stitches
in her head.

They spent the next week of their lives in a somewhat disjointed  manner.
First, Fred moved her into a room down the hall from his at the hotel,
making certain to explain to anyone who would listen to his rambling tale,
who she was. He took a little money out of his savings and bought her some
reasonably clean clothes, and helped her move all her worldly possessions
from the real flea-bag she had been living in over to her room down the hall
which wasn't nearly so filthy or dangerous.

The last time I saw Old Fred and Abigail together, it was in the  lobby of
the old hotel, at their marriage where I was the youngest man in the room.
One of the pastors from a street ministry performed the ceremony, while a
retired vaudeville musician played several melancholy songs on the upright
piano sitting in the corner of the lobby. Nearly all the residents of the
hotel were in attendance. Some of them were strangely dressed in clothing
styles not seen since the thirties and forties, but no one seemed to notice,
or if they did notice, they were too polite nor to mention it.

Black Anna, a black bag lady with a reputation of being one tough  old gal
of extraordinary girth and strength, stood crying into a hanky throughout
the entire ceremony. Tony Martin, the manager of the hotel had even sprung
for the cost of a wedding cake and flowers adorned the smoke-colored lobby
for the first time in many, many years.

It was, sadly enough, the last time that I would see Old Fred or  Abigail
alive.

I heard on the grapevine that serves the West First Street area  that Old
Fred and Abigail, for lack of something better to do, started performing
volunteer work together at a place that works with troubled teen-aged kids.
A whole new generation developed a candid love for this old couple who,
despite their infirmities, bitter memories and fears of street kids gone
tough-sour, reached out to the next generation who came through the doors in
an unending swarm each day.

Fred and Abigail were never very far from one another in their  last days
together. Nor were they very far from the kids who truly needed their love
and understanding.

After their ninth-inning reunion, it was only somehow fitting and  proper
that it was there, with Abigail at his side, that Old Fred drew his last
breath. It was said by some who had grown attached to both of them, that
Fred's old heart simply could not handle the stress, after all those years
of solitude, of sharing his life with someone.

Unlike the ferocity with which he had welcomed life, Fred tiptoed  out the
doorway of life into the next world with scarcely a whisper.

His heart attack was quick and merciful, but while he lay,  cradled in
Abigails lap, waiting for the ambulance that would be too late, he had time
to ask, "Although I never once gave you the time of day when we were first
married, when we were first married, would you please hold my hand as I
leave?"

Sixteen days after Old Fred was quietly laid to rest in the VFW  Cemetary,
Abigail passed away quietly in her sleep in the old hotel room, in the
self-same squeaky old bed she and Fred had shared for the last years of
their lives.

There is a place, somewhere, where children and their parents are
reconciled forever. There is a place where tears of joy and compassion flow
like water, down endless meadows of tranquility and serenity. And, for a
short time, Fred and Abigail were there, on West First Avenue, together.

The avenue breathes...