the Jewels of Nebraska, Episode 2: Thimbles and Long Johns

To start this series from the beginning.

Kohn Bördson should have been in an asylum, and he might have been if there was anyone crazy enough to put and keep him there. I'd heard of him when I was alive. Shoot, everyone in Western Nebraska had. He was a big tall Swede with graying red hair and eyes so piercing light blue that he seemed to create a shadow behind anything he stared at. No one I had talked who had cast that shadow seemed very happy about it.

Kohn had lived with a tribe of Lakota Sioux for some years as a youngun. He could track anything that drew breath, so said, and above all, he had a strange preoccupation with thimbles; wore silver thimbles on his fingers at all times. Some people thought he had lost the tips of his fingers in an Indian rite or some accident, but this was not true. He wore them because hated the feel of touching anything. He had also grown partial to the sound they made tapping on a table or scraping along the grand stair railing of a fine hotel.

“Kids?” he said pulling on his mustache, “waste my time.”

“You are in my debt Mr. Bördson.” Bodene said. He tried altering his posture in the chair to see the man's face beneath the brim of his hat.

“I pay you another time. No kids.”

“Did someone get you to church?”

“No, kids too easy. It's insult.”

“Your past debt, plus five thousand.”

Kohn drank his whiskey in one gulp and turned the glass over looking at his thimbles through its semi-clean surface.
"Booze illegal to everyone but you? Its broad daylight for Pete's sake."

“Each,” said Kohn.
"Pardon?"
"Five thousand," he put his glass down, "each."

Before he could complain, Kohn raised his head and his black Stetson making the full gaze of his expression visible to Bodene. His thimbled fingers made a galloping motion, threatening to strike the barroom table, only coming close.

“Okay, okay, five thousand each,” Bodene relented.

Kohn's unchanged face told him that the deal, and the conversation, were done.

“I'm hungry.” Billy said.

Ruby woke up to her little brothers voice. She was cold, like it was fall. She couldn't make out much through the open box car door. She pulled her mama's shawl tight around her shoulders and went to the door. When she looked up she could see stars but right in front of her it was as black and nothin'. The line between the two was a jagged line of rock that wavered up and down with the motion of the train. They were next to some sort of rock face only a few feet from the tracks. The rock face fell away and she could see further. Ruby took a breath. The air was perfumed with pine and the sweetness of a blossom she did not know. For the first time in her life, the horizon did not make a straight line. Its silhouette climbed and fell in peaks and valleys.

They were in the mountains.

She thought of a dancer she had seen on a trip to Omaha. Ruby had seen pictures of mountains in a National Geographic at Doc Fox's house, and now she was there. She wished for daylight.

“I'm hungry Ruby,” he repeated.

She reached into her bag and broke off a hard piece of biscuit. Billy held it close to his face in the dark, made a face and threw it out of the open box car.

“What are you doin'! That's our food you little...”

“I want eggs!”

She wanted to hit him. Then she saw the faint glisten of a tear on his cheek. She drew him to her.

“I know, so do I.”

Kohn stood on the tracks. He looked East, then West. He bent down and held a handful of gravel in his hand. He got up and strolled to the station. His thimbles drummed on the ticket window until a frail old man emerged.

“Yes?”

“Grand Junction,” Kohn said, "one way."

The train started to slow in lurches and screeches.

“C'mon,” said Ruby.

“We're getting' off?” said Billy.

“There ain't no food here. Sit on the edge.”

“But we're still moving.”

“We don't it's not just going to speed up again. Hold my hand.”

My kids waited for what looked like a soft patch of land and jumped. No patch of land is soft at fifteen miles an hour though and Ruby felt a sharp pain as she hit.

As their Papa, you'd think I'd be worried and fixin' on how I could help 'em, make 'em safe. I can only observe, there's nothing I can do to help my children anymore. I'm not sure how to put it in words for ya, but there is no fear for me anymore and with it went away anything that could vex me. Might have made me crazy when I was walking the earth mortal like, but in the split second before I died, all I could think was that I'd never see my children again, that I broken my promise to Lottie. Yet there they were; my precious children along side the tracks near Eldorado Springs Colorado. Being with them, however it that be, was a blessing I'll never be able to find the right praise for.

 When Ruby jammed her shoulder jumpin' from that train. I didn't feel the angst of a father like I would have. I saw that she did it protecting her little brother.

Billy remembered breaking his shoulder falling from the hay loft when he was a spot younger. Doc Fox put his arm in a bed sheet so it hung from his neck. He fashioned one for his sister out of his long johns.

“I ain't wearing that thing.”

“Ruby, you got to, you can't barely move it.”

“I can't go 'round in your underwear.”

“It's the only thing long enough to tie around your neck, less'n you wanna tear up one of your dresses.”

He had her there. “But what if someone sees.?”

Billy looked around at the wilderness and back at his sister. She humph'd started walking down the tracks.

“Why you going that way?” he said, running to catch up. “That's the way we came?”

“There was a town, some houses. Maybe we can find a garden before someone wakes up. Food or not, I'm just hopin' for a bed sheet on a clothesline so I can get your smelly skivvies off me.”

Continued in episode 3