The Winter Marshal

The Fenwick branch left the Union Pacific main line at Sherrod and ran north for forty miles across country that looked, from the window of the one passenger car, as if nobody had ever meant anyone to live in it. Sagebrush and snow, snow and sagebrush, and low brown hills with the wind combing the grass flat on their tops. Now and then a line of cottonwoods marked a creek. Once, far off, a band of antelope ran alongside the train for a mile, white rumps flashing, and then turned all together like a flock of birds and were gone.

Elias sat by the stove at the end of the car with a carpetbag at his feet and a letter in his coat pocket, and read the letter again, though by now it could have been recited.

The Board of County Commissioners of Carbon County, meeting at Rawlins, this 28th day of October 1879, being informed of the resignation of the town marshal at Fenwick Junction, and it being necessary that the peace be kept there through the closing of the branch, hereby appoints the bearer acting marshal of the said town at a salary of sixty dollars the month, until the first train of spring, when the appointment may be confirmed or ended as the Board sees fit.

Somebody at Rawlins had underlined until the first train of spring twice in pencil. Elias had looked at the pencil marks for a long time on the platform at Sherrod, waiting for the branch train, and then folded the letter again along its creases, carefully, the way you fold something you mean to keep. Elias had asked the clerk why. The clerk had looked out of the window at the sky and said that the last marshal had not liked the idea of five months, and that the one before him had not liked it either, and that there was a reason the salary was sixty dollars and not forty.

There were eleven other passengers in the car. A drummer in a checked suit with a sample case of patent medicines, who had tried twice to sell Elias a liver tonic and then gone to sleep. Two young men in new boots going up to work for a rancher. A woman with a baby, going to join her husband, who kept asking the conductor how much farther. A thin man in spectacles with a cough, reading a newspaper from Philadelphia three weeks old. And at the far end, by the door, a man in a buffalo-hide coat and a wide black hat with an eagle feather in the band, sitting very straight, with a watch chain across his waistcoat, who had looked at Elias once when Elias got on at Sherrod and then gone back to watching the country go by as if he were reading it.

The conductor came through at three with the lamp and a bucket of coal. He was a heavy, gray, cheerful man named Mulcahy who had worked the branch for six winters.

"You'll be the new marshal," he said, feeding the stove. "Heard at Sherrod. Well. There's worse places than Fenwick in the winter." He considered. "Not many. But some." He shut the stove door. "We run one more train after this one. Saturday. After that it's snow in the cuts from Mile 20 to Mile 30, and nothing moves on this branch till April, and nobody comes, and nobody goes. You understand that? Nobody. If you forget your toothbrush, you'll wait till spring for another."

"I understand."

"They all say that." He looked at Elias with some kindness. "Town's all right. Three hundred souls, give or take. Railroad agent, name of Bliss, frets. Telegraph office, Mrs. Lowe, knows everything. Rancher, name of Strand, owns the creek and knows it. Mrs. Aldine owns most of the rest and is a lady about it." He picked up his bucket. "You'll get on. Or you won't. Either way you'll be there."

At a quarter to four the train came over a low rise and there it was.

Elias stood up and went to the window, and the man with the cough folded his newspaper and came to stand beside him, as if he had been waiting for a reason.

Fenwick Junction lay in a shallow bowl of land at the foot of the mountains, where the branch simply stopped. A turntable, a water tank on legs, an engine shed, a long gray freight warehouse with the company's name painted on it. A depot with a telegraph wire running into it from a line of poles that followed the track back the way they had come. Beyond the depot, a single wide street of false-fronted buildings, a few in brick, most in weathered pine, with a church standing half built at the end of it, all rafters. Behind the street, scattered up the slope, houses and cabins and corrals and woodpiles, and smoke going straight up from every chimney into a sky the color of pewter. And behind all of that, filling half the sky, the mountains, white from the shoulders up, with a single notch in them where the pass went through.

"You see the notch," said the man with the cough. He had a soft Philadelphia voice. "Sayer's Crossing is thirty miles beyond it, they say, though there is nothing there yet but surveyors' stakes and a printed map. The railroad means to build over that pass next summer. Or not." He coughed into a handkerchief. "It depends, I'm told, on whether Fenwick is still here in April. Kettering. I keep the books at the Brass Rail. You will find me useful, marshal, or at least accurate."

"Is there a chance it won't be here?"

Kettering looked at the mountains for a while.

"There is always a chance," he said, "in a place like this."

The train came into Fenwick Junction in a long sigh of steam and stopped at the end of the line, where there was nothing beyond the buffer but a bank of old snow and the mountains.

Half the town seemed to be on the platform. Men in sheepskin coats and women in shawls, children, dogs, a boy selling newspapers that were a week old. They had come for the mail and the freight and the news, and to look at the new marshal, and they looked. Elias felt it the way you feel weather, stepping down onto the boards with the carpetbag: three hundred people deciding, in a moment, what sort of winter they were going to have.

A woman in a dark wool dress and a gray shawl came out of the telegraph office at the end of the depot with a sheaf of yellow message forms in her hand and a pencil behind her ear. She was perhaps forty, with a straight back and a tired, humorous face, and ink on two fingers of her right hand.

"You'll be Elias," she said. "Rawlins wired. I'm Hattie Lowe. I keep the key." She held out the ink-stained hand, and Elias shook it. "The commissioners said to give you these." She handed over a ring of iron keys, heavy and cold. "Marshal's office on Front Street. The stove draws if you kick it. The cell lock sticks. The last man left a bottle in the desk drawer, which I'd pour out if I were you, and a list of everybody in town who owes a fine, which I'd burn." She looked at Elias for a moment, frankly, the way the whole platform was looking, but with something in it that the platform did not have. "Welcome to Fenwick Junction. I hope you like each other's company, all of you. You're going to have a great deal of it."

Behind them the engine let off steam, and the mail sacks came down from the car, and somewhere up the street a church bell that had no church yet around it began to ring for evening, hung from a frame of timbers under the unfinished roof.

Elias stood on the platform with the keys in his right hand and looked up at the notch in the mountains, where the light was going, and thought about Mulcahy's word. Nobody. Nobody comes, and nobody goes.

Two days until the last train. Then five months.