The Winter Family (13 page)

A train began to move in Rome, Georgia. Thick black plumes pumped out of the smokestack and the whistle trilled. The wheels accelerated infinitesimally but inevitably, and soon the train was out of the station, heading west toward Alabama.

The train came upon the barricade ten miles out of town. At first, to the engineer, it looked as if a group of men were trying to move something across the tracks. It was broad daylight, and a robbery was the furthest thing from his mind. He pulled on the whistle, and the piercing shriek of it rang out through the trees, over the hills, and across the narrow river. The men by the tracks did not move. As the train drew closer the engineer saw the white sheets draped over the men’s heads, the rifles they were holding, and the heavy trees and boulders blocking the track.

“God damn it,” the engineer swore.

The fireman looked up from his dime novel.

The engineer considered attempting to barrel through the barricade. But the thought prompted a horrible vision of the train derailing and the passengers being hurled against the ceiling or through the windows, glass breaking, screaming. So he cursed again and yanked on the brakes, hard, so the fireman was thrown forward off his chair.

“What’s happening?” the fireman cried.

Shouts came from the passenger car behind the locomotive.

The engineer lifted a shotgun from the rack above the window.

“Robbers?” the fireman said. “How many of them?”

“Looks like they’re from the Klan,” the engineer said. He was a little man, missing his left leg below the knee, neat in his dress, with a bushy mustache. “I’ll be goddamned if I let them get into the express car.”

“You really want to die for the Brink’s Company?” the fireman asked, but he lifted his shovel, ready to use it as a weapon.

The train had stopped and the Klansmen were running at them. The engineer leaned out of the window to take a shot, but someone jumped up from the ground and grabbed the barrel of the shotgun with one hand and the collar of his jacket with the other. The man braced his legs against the steel side of the train and hauled the engineer through the window.

“Jesus!” the fireman cried.

He dropped his shovel and held his hands in the air.

“Open the door!” someone barked.

Down on the ground, the acrobatic Klansman was kneeling on the engineer’s back and jamming a pistol against his head. The other Klansmen, dressed in everyday clothes except for the white hoods, clambered up the ladder into the locomotive and pushed into the passenger cars.

“Hands up!” they barked. “Get them up where we can see them!”

Gunshots barked in quick succession. Screams from the passengers.

“That’ll be the conductor,” the Klansman said as he bound the engineer’s wrists behind his back with wire. “You’re a salty bunch, ain’t you?”

“What’s your accent?” the engineer said. “You ain’t from around here.”

The Klansman jerked the engineer to his feet.

“Are you boys even in the Klan?” the engineer demanded.

The Klansman let out a low chuckle and said, “As far as you’re concerned, I’m the grand wizard.”

The engineer clenched his teeth and allowed the Klansman to propel him up the ladder into the train.

Inside the Klansmen were moving through the first passenger car, pointing their weapons at the passengers, collecting wallets, watches, and jewelry. A smear of blood was on the rear wall. Underneath it the conductor sat in a crumpled heap, not moving.

“You goddamn murderers,” the engineer said.

“You all want to act like heroes,” the grand wizard said. “Well, in my experience, this is what heroes get.”

“We can’t get into the express car,” a Klansman said to the grand wizard.

“Yes we can,” the grand wizard replied.

“The door’s made of iron,” the Klansman said, “and they bolted it from the other side.”

“Well then,” the grand wizard said. “We’re gonna have to get them to open it.”

The engineer let out a short laugh.

“Think that’s funny, do you?” the grand wizard asked.

“I think you’re all a joke,” the engineer said as he limped through the passenger car. “I think you’re all a disgrace to southern manhood. I think you’re a disgrace to the Confederate States of America, which I gave my leg fighting for. The Klan’s supposed to fight for white rights. Here you are robbing honest southern folk trying to make an honest living.”

“You’re full of opinions,” the grand wizard said, leading the engineer through another car filled with passengers, all of their hands in the air, no one moving. At the end of the car was the promised steel door, locked shut. As they approached it, the grand wizard ducked behind the engineer to avoid being shot through the eye slot.

“Don’t listen to anything they say!” the engineer shouted.

“Who’d they shoot?” an expressman called through the door.

“They got Bedford,” the engineer said. “They snuck up on me and Ronnie. Don’t worry about us none, we deserve whatever we get.”

The grand wizard struck the engineer in the back of the head, hard but not too hard, just to shut him up.

“I’ll make this short,” the grand wizard said. “This is a robbery. You open that door, you open the safe, and we will be on our way. If you don’t do what I say, so help me God, I will personally kill every man, woman, and child on this train. I’ll save you for last, and what I do to you won’t take long, but I’ll fit a goddamn eternity into it.”

“You’re bluffing,” an expressman said.

“No,” the grand wizard said. “I ain’t. And I’ll prove it to you.”

“You can’t prove something like that.”

“Sure I can. This little old engineer has got plenty of salt and pepper, don’t he?”

“If you lay one hand on him …”

The grand wizard grabbed the engineer’s shoulder and spun him around. The engineer braced for a blow, or a shot, but nothing came. He noticed that the other Klansmen had fallen quiet. They were looking at their shoes. They seemed almost abashed.

“Look into my eyes,” the grand wizard said.

The engineer did, and what he saw took his breath away. He opened his mouth but no words came out.

“Donald?” the expressman said through the door. His voice was unsure. “Donald, what’s he doing to you?”

“My god,” the engineer said.

His bladder released. The sound of urine hitting the floor was unmistakable.

“Donald?” the expressman said. “Donald?”

“Open the door,” the engineer said. “Open the door.”

And the magic word was being whispered back and forth, moving through the passenger cars like waves chopping across the surface of an unruly sea: Winter, Winter, Winter.

A few days later, another train rocked from side to side, sending up showers of sparks from the tracks, as it made its cacophonous way through the southern slums of Chicago. Men and women caked in filth and wrapped in rags leapt out of its way as it crashed through one ground level intersection after another, never slowing.

The terrain was perfectly flat, marked only by an endless stretch of dirty, flimsy two-story wood cottages that had been hastily thrown up after the Great Fire.

When the train left the congestion, the smoke, and the squalor of the city and emerged into a darker and muddier place, it was invaded by a smell like the den of an ancient and insane animal: rich, full, expansive. It seemed to have a texture; it was almost generous. And it only grew stronger as the train picked up speed.

The whistle shrieked and the brakes howled as the train came
to an unsteady halt. The doors opened and the few men aboard stepped down into the yards. The last one to disembark was the only man not holding a handkerchief to his face. His hair was combed and he was wearing an expensive suit, but there was nevertheless something careless about his appearance. As if he knew how he ought to dress but was only willing to go through the motions. A little stubble was on his cheeks and his cuffs were wrinkled and the bottoms of his trousers were muddy. Only his spectacles were perfectly clean.

He made his way over the crisscrossing railroad tracks until he came to the gates of the Union Stock Yards. A crowd of men were gathered there, waiting to be called for work. They sat on the ground or crouched on their heels, blowing on their hands and pulling their collars up against the cold.

“Hello, Mister Ross,” one of the guards said.

Two of the other guards began to push open the gates. While he was waiting, Noah Ross spared a glance to the slum crouched between the walls of the stockyards and its dump. The vile, stained houses were built next to gutters filled with blood so thoroughly congealed that cats could scamper across them. Children ran and laughed in the gloam of the smoke and the rising sun.

When the gates opened the smell redoubled and Noah’s ears were assaulted by the screaming of the pigs. Thousands of them were crammed in square pens divided by wooden walkways, packed so tight they stood in shit up to their knees and could scarcely turn around. All of them raised as much din as they could, as if they were sending an appeal up to heaven.

Buyers and sellers paced the walkways and leaned over the railings to inspect the animals. More than one buyer raised his hat to Noah, who passed them all with a curt nod, on his way toward the huge, windowless pork plant.

The plant manager, a man named Dennis Addy, was waiting outside the front door, dressed in a long faded coat that was stained with shit and blood. As they shook hands, Addy gestured to a group of workers in one of the pigpens. Whips cracked and the workers shouted, driving the pigs up the “Bridge of Sighs,” a chute that ran up the wall of the plant.

“Come on in, Mister Ross,” Addy said. “I trust you’ll find everything to your specifications.”

Inside the stench was so overpowering it was like having a foul rag pushed in your mouth. They had entered an enormous room where the floor was tacky with blood. Dirty men with heavy knives and cleavers waited at various tables. Addy ushered Noah to a staircase in the far corner that led up several flights to an observation deck.

Noah Ross took out a small, leather-bound notebook from his pocket and handed it to Dennis along with a pen.

“I’d be very obliged if you’d take some notes, Addy,” Noah said.

“Certainly, sir,” he replied.

Across from the observation deck was the catching pen where the Bridge of Sighs ended. As Noah watched it rapidly filled with pigs driven up from the yards. Five men waited next to a solid metal wheel with chains attached to its edge. The wheel was turning slowly.

Noah removed a heavy silver watch from his pocket. At the click of a button it sprang open.

Behind him, Addy raised his hand, and the five men in the catching pen leapt to work. Three of them drove the pigs toward the wheel by striking them with wooden sticks while two took turns grabbing the pigs and using the chains to attach them to the wheel.

The pigs tried to scamper free and shook their legs to get loose but the wheel kept turning inexorably and they were lifted, one after another, squealing and kicking, into the air.

Noah looked at his watch.

“Ten seconds,” he said. “Seven seconds. Eight. Eight. Seven. Ten. Eight.”

Addy wrote the numbers in the book.

When the pigs reached the top of the wheel they were transferred to a metal rail that slid them down toward a tall, burly man bearing an enormous knife. He caught the first pig, and while it was still struggling and shrieking, jabbed his knife into its throat and then did his best to dodge the massive stream of blood that exploded from the wound.

“Eleven seconds,” Noah said. “Thirteen seconds. Fourteen seconds. Thirteen. Twelve. Sixteen. Hmm. See how the blood is pooling in the gutters?”

“Yes, Mister Ross.”

“Make a note of that,” Noah said. “Does it often do so?”

“Oh, yes sir.”

“Make a note to hire someone to sweep those gutters,” Noah said. “A child perhaps. We could have a boy or girl for fifteen cents a day. There’s fifteen cents of blood hardening right there. I can see it.”

Once the pigs had been mostly drained of blood, they slid farther down the rail and were dropped, in some cases still wriggling and bleating, into a huge vat of boiling water. A steam-driven rake dragged through the water and tumbled the pigs, pink and clean and scalded, onto another table where a group of workers attached a chain through each pig’s nose so it could be dragged through another machine.

“Ten seconds. Ten seconds. Ten seconds. Good. The machine is very reliable.”

When the pig emerged it had been shaved nearly bald. Two workers quickly removed any remaining hairs. Powerful butchers stepped forward and chopped at the pigs’ necks, almost severing their heads. Then they lifted the carcass back up and hitched it to the overhead rail, sending it to another butcher to be disemboweled and split in two, then whisked into the cold room for storage.

After a few more observations, Dennis and Noah made their way through the chilling room. Big blocks of ice rested in front of fans, and the dripping hog carcasses dangled in row after row like stalactites in a cavern far below the earth.