mean about the nightmares, everybody has those–I mean about wakin’ up and thinkin’
there might be somethin’ under the bed. I’m too fuckin’ old for the boogeyman.’
We all said we wouldn’t tell, and a glum silence fell over us again. It was only
quarter to three, but it felt much later. It was too hot and too much had happened. We weren’t even over into Harlow yet. We were going to have to pick them up and lay
them down if we were going to make some real miles before dark.
We passed the railroad junction and a signal on a tall, rusty pole and all of us
paused to chuck cinders at the steel flag on top, but nobody hit it. And around three-
thirty we came to the Castle River and the GS&WM trestle which crossed it.
14
The river was better than a hundred yards across at that point in 1960; I’ve been back to look at it since then, and found it had narrowed up quite a bit during the years
between. They’re always fooling with the river, trying to make it work better for the
mills, and they’ve put in so many dams that it’s pretty well tamed. But in those days
there were only three dams on the whole length of the river as it ran across all of New Hampshire and half of Maine. The Castle was still pretty free back then, and every
third spring it would overflow its banks and cover Route 136 in either Harlow or
Danvers Junction or both.
Now, at the end of the driest summer western Maine had seen since the
depression, it was still broad. From where we stood on the Castle Rock side, the
bulking forest on the Harlow side looked like a different country altogether. The pines and spruces over there were bluish in the heat-haze of the afternoon. The rails went
across the water fifty feet up, supported by an underpinning of tarred wooden support
posts and crisscrossing beams.
The water was so shallow you could look down and see the tops of the cement
plugs which had been planted ten feet deep in the riverbed to hold up the trestle.
The trestle itself was pretty chintzy–the rails ran over a long, narrow wooden
platform of six-by-fours. There was a four-inch gap between each pair of these beams
where you could look all the way down into the water. On the sides, there was no
more than eighteen inches between the rail and the edge of the trestle. If a train came it was maybe enough room to avoid getting plastered… but the wind generated by a
highballing freight would surely sweep you off to fall to a certain death against the
rocks just below the surface of the shallow running water.
Looking at the trestle, we all felt fear start to crawl around in our bellies… and
mixing uneasily with the fear was the excitement of a boss dare, a really big one,
something you could brag on for weeks after you got home… if you got home. That
queer light was creeping back into Teddy’s eyes and I thought he wasn’t seeing the
GS&WM train trestle at all but a long sandy beach, a thousand LSTs aground in the
foaming waves, ten thousand GIs charging up the sand, combat boots digging. They
were leaping rolls of barbed wire! Tossing grenades at pillboxes! Overrunning
machine-gun nests!
We were standing beside the tracks where the cinders sloped away towards the
river’s cut–the place where the embankment stopped and the trestle began. Looking
down, I could see where the slope started to get steep. The cinders gave way to
straggly, tough-looking bushes and slabs of grey rock. Further down there were a few
stunted firs with exposed roots writhing their way out of fissures in the plates of rock; they seemed to be looking down at their own miserable reflections in the running
water.
At this point, the Castle River actually looked fairly clean; at Castle Rock it
was just entering Maine’s textile-mill belt. But there were no fish jumping out there, although the river was clear enough to see the bottom–you had to go another ten