The Push
I walked the Airport road, three miles at least, passing hillsides and rambling meadows, scents of honeysuckle and clematis filled the air, and I was as far away from an airport as you could be. It’s a good road to walk, without a light or a stop sign, and if you’re on horseback, you can come up on a racing horse very fast, and then suddenly, you would stop to meet a main road. But by the time you reached it, you would have already had your thrill. The main road is not that big or busy, it’s just another way to get into town. But back roads going north to south are different, they’re less busy, and with the day’s casting overhead and a misty morning, it was a good time to walk on.
I came upon a railroad crossing and looked down the rails. Grey gravel, tightly bound and unmoving, flanked the rails. Stepping into the gravel, I tried my footing. I could walk on it and follow the length of the rail. Walking on the gravel for a time would be good, I thought. I could easily turn back and would not get lost, as I often do. I tried walking on the gravel. Because I was not in shoes, but only sneakers, I walked slowly. It was a bad idea. I could not walk for long and turned back to reach the road.
Standing in the middle of the crossing with my dog beside me, I looked to her, and she was looking down the rails, too. Sitting between two large cornfields facing east to west, until the rails touched the horizon, and the gravel looked flat, and I could no longer see where it ended, where both rail and gravel looked as one, it was there, at that vast expanse of rail, silver and straight, and the gray muted gravel, stark and supporting, that I thought of Paul.
Paul walked the gravel every day, checking railroad cars. “Paul, just how long is a railroad car?” I asked him one day. When he told me the cars he inspected were over a mile long and that he walked the parked cars, each one of them, every night in the Albany freight yard, and that was his job; he was a railroad car checker, an inspector, I was surprised. He always blamed the railroad and that darn gravel for pushing him into an early retirement.
I thought of Paul as I walked up the last hill and down the next. I called for my dog to hurry; the rain had picked up. I wore a white cotton shirt and I knew it would not hold up for long. I reached the car; my dog was wet as she jumped into the hatch. I toweled her off. I got into the driver’s seat, adjusted the mirror, and opened the window to get some air into the car. I wiped the rain from my face and the fog from my glasses. I had come clean and nothing else on my mind.
©Terry Rachel, 2014
A Hardscrabble Daughter 
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