Kenny Van Dyke never had any doubt as to what his mission in life was. A large man with thick, unruly gray hair, a fondness for plaid shirts and an eye that had been blinded in a childhood accident, Kenny believed, as his good and devoted friend, Bishop Rory Sandberg, would testify, that he had been called, if not by the Good Lord himself, then by someone else pretty high up to right a historical and geographical wrong that he could not in good conscience leave unchecked to corrupt future generations. The heinous error in question was the claim all too often made that the driving of the Golden Spike that marked the completion of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869 had occurred at the alliteratively-named Promontory Point, Utah, about an hour’s drive northwest of his home.
“Shoot, any danged fool could tell you that isn’t true,” Kenny would solemnly declare to anyone who would listen. “Just look at a map and you’ll see that Promontory Point’s a good thirty-five miles away. It’s the tip of that finger of land that jabs southward into the Great Salt Lake. The place where the railroads actually met was called Promontory Summit because the railroad had to climb over seven hundred feet above the lake to cross the mountains there. Why so many idiots can’t get that straight is beyond me.”
And yet, the “idiots,” as he called them—journalists, textbook authors, even respected historians—kept at it. Many of them had never actually been to Promontory Summit or Promontory Point, but that didn’t keep them from stating as fact something that was not. For Kenny, trying to counter their misinformation was like the little Dutch boy putting his finger in the dike to prevent a flood, but more holes kept opening up and his work never seemed to be done. Even though Kenny was Dutch himself, having been born on a houseboat on the Rhine River in Rotterdam before his family emigrated to Utah after joining the Mormon Church, that analogy failed the aptness test because the story of the little Dutch boy was written by an American who didn’t seem to realize that plugging up a hole with one’s finger could not possibly save a dike that was about to fail. In any case, no matter how many errors Kenny rooted out, no matter how many letters he wrote or phone calls he made trying to correct those errors, there was always another one appearing somewhere else to taunt him.
Kenny often drove out to Promontory Summit, and although he was normally a gregarious and outgoing man, he usually went alone, so no one thought it out of the ordinary when he headed that way one cold, clear Saturday in mid-February in his 1955 GMC pickup. He told his wife, Maxine, he was going rabbit hunting, and he did put his old 20-gauge Winchester pump in the truck along with a box of Remington shells, but the truth, as most people including Bishop Sandberg surmised, was more likely that he simply wanted to get away for a few hours and have some time to himself. It wasn’t often he did anything on a Saturday other than work, which he continued to enjoy even though he was past the normal retirement age. If he got to shoot at a few jack rabbits while he was there, so much the better. Not many people had any interest in the empty, forlorn country around the summit, but Kenny seemed to love it. To him, it was special. He claimed he heard voices out there. He said they spoke Chinese, which made sense because there had been a Chinese labor camp just west of the summit at a place called Dove Creek.
It was somewhere in the broad saddle of the summit, a strong westerly wind buffeting everything in its way and no one around for miles except the ghosts of some of those many tracklayers, that a Box Elder County sheriff’s deputy spotted Kenny’s pickup on a side road a couple hundred yards off the paved highway. Its doors were locked and his beloved 20-gauge pump was lying on the ground fully loaded with the safety on. And there collapsed in a snow patch on the side of the road was Kenny Van Dyke, all 220 pounds of him, cold and stiff and dead.
When Maxine learned that her husband had been found frozen in the high desert on Promontory Summit, she assumed he had died through a simple act of impulsiveness. She didn’t know who she was angrier at, Kenny for straying off the state highway, or herself for letting him go alone. “The damned fool,” she sobbed. “Why in the hell didn’t he use better judgement?” When it was later determined that Kenny had died of a heart attack and not being stuck or exposed to the elements, Maxine was not only consumed with grief, but she felt guilty for all the bad things she had said about Kenny and all the bad words she had used to say them. “Hell” and “damned” were not part of her regular vocabulary, as all who knew her would testify.
Kenny’s funeral was held at the Jensen Brothers Funeral Home on Third South and not at his home church, the Taylor 2nd Ward Mormon chapel on Jefferson, because Marvin Jensen, one of the brothers, was married to Maxine’s sister, Martha, and even in her grief Maxine wanted to throw some extra business his way. He and Martha had sacrificed for years to raise six kids, after all, while she and Kenny had only raised three. The Cadillac Marvin drove around town, she once explained to Kenny, was actually owned by the funeral home. It was meant to show people that Jensen Brothers took things seriously.
“Oh, I know they take things seriously,” Kenny said. “They take money very seriously.”
As the ecclesiastical leader of the 2nd Ward, Bishop Sandberg officiated at the funeral. It was one of the least enjoyable jobs of being bishop, especially when the deceased was a close friend or relative or a child, but it was a job that needed to be done. As a World War II veteran, Bishop Sandberg knew well that death was both capricious and ultimately unavoidable. Lessening his burden was the fact that most funerals in his church were usually short on ritual and long on the life of the deceased, like a religious version of the Ralph Edwards’s TV show “This is Your Life,” as Kenny himself once described them. Long or short or in-between, each life was mourned, each life was honored, each life was celebrated. Friends and family often spoke, and laughter was almost as common as tears, something that always struck Bishop Sandberg as healthy, considering the fallibility of most human beings. If he heard laughter at a funeral, especially the kind that softly percolated up through tears and tightened throats, he believed the healing process had begun, the hope of the resurrection had set in and the eternal human spirit would survive.
Kenny’s daughter Judy, who drove down from Pocatello with her family in their ’55 Chevrolet station wagon, set the tone by describing how “cheap” her father was. “He was always going around the house turning the lights out,” she said. “Poor mom would go down the basement to get something out of the freezer and she wouldn’t be down there more’n a few seconds and—click—it would be completely dark. She had to leave a flashlight down there so she could find her way to the light switch.”
His son Don, who lived nearby and helped his dad run his business, Kenny’s Tires, talked about how his dad would never buy new clothes unless Maxine, who always dressed stylishly for a small- town lady, forced him to. Even then he wouldn’t wear a new suit for another year or two after he bought it. He always said he had to wear out his old one first. By the time he got around to wearing a new suit, it was usually out of style. “But that was my dad,” Don said, “always out of style.”
Even though he carried his own sadness deep inside, Bishop Sandberg chuckled along with everyone else at the recitation of Kenny’s eccentricities. Having known Kenny for many years—Kenny had been his scoutmaster when he was a boy—he understood that some of Kenny’s parsimoniousness came from giving up his dream of attending college to help his family survive by taking any work he could find. But some of it also came from the fact that the tire business, which he had started during the Great Depression on his reputation alone, was a tough business. Had Kenny been a less honest man, he could have made extra money by giving kickbacks to corrupt “adjusters” from the factory back east who would have given him more generous allowances for defective tires customers brought back, but Kenny always refused. He would rather live without light and heat than do something that dishonest. Even after World War II, when Kenny’s fortunes began to improve along with everyone else’s, he continued his frugal ways.
The chief beneficiary of Kenny’s cheapness was Maxine. Every year right after New Year’s, in a move that always caused a few eyebrows to be raised, she took a month-long leave-of-absence from Kenny, the Taylor 2nd Ward Ladies Relief Society and the cold, harsh winters of northern Utah to board the Union Pacific’s City of Los Angeles in Ogden and go down to Long Beach, California. She said her doctor told her the lower elevation and sea air would be good for her heart. She had a sister in Huntington Beach she enjoyed visiting and a cousin out in San Bernardino. But Long Beach was her base. She always tried to rent the same room in the same hotel on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Ocean Boulevard, one that catered to older, longer-term guests like herself, and filled her days watching boisterous sailors on shore leave enjoying themselves at The Pike amusement park or shopping at Buffum’s Department Store a few blocks away. Once a week she traveled to Los Angeles on the region’s remaining interurban rail system where she frequently took tours of Hollywood movie studios and the homes of the stars. Her favorite star’s home, she told Kenny, was Humphrey Bogart’s. “It’s beautiful,” she said, “classy, but not gaudy. I can’t wait for you to see it.” Kenny just looked at Maxine and smiled. Both knew he was not a traveler, and both knew he would rather go fishing any day than go to Hollywood.
“You’re a good husband,” Bishop Sandberg often said to Kenny. It was a running joke between the younger and older man.
“Well,” Kenny would reply, “you know the old saying, ‘Happy wife, happy life.’”
Whatever happened in California in the month of January, it always seemed to work. When she returned, sometimes on the City of Los Angeles, sometimes on its sister train, The City of St. Louis, Maxine seemed revitalized, renewed, her heart stronger than ever. She threw herself into family and church activities with abandon. The Lord had blessed her, she said. She couldn’t ask for more.
But Bishop Sandberg knew better. He knew that Kenny and Maxine were still struggling with the loss of their youngest son, Tom, who as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne had participated in Operation Market Garden in Holland and not come back. Maxine had confessed to Bishop Sandberg long before he became bishop, back when she and everyone else referred to him simply as Rory, that her heart hadn’t healed and she wasn’t sure it ever would. That was why as bishop Rory always defended Maxine’s sabbatical trips to Long Beach to the 2nd Ward’s wagging tongues. “She goes down there for her heart,” was all he would say. As far as he was concerned, it was the truth.
It also helped explain why, as bishop, Rory cut Kenny some slack for his habit of sitting at the counter at Dean’s Café in the morning enjoying a cup of coffee, coffee that Maxine wouldn’t let him drink at home because it went against the church’s Word of Wisdom. Unlike so many older men in the ward who had always held tight to the iron rod, Kenny had come to activity in the church the hard way, abandoning a life of drinking and smoking and fighting to get there. By his own admission, Kenny was a mean drunk when he was young, a man who considered the weekend a total waste if he hadn’t gotten into at least one good fight, a man who wore other peoples’ blood on his clothes as a badge of honor. All that ended, however, when he met Maxine, a tall blonde of Danish descent who turned him around 180 degrees—almost. If Kenny hadn’t quite made it all the way yet, Rory believed he should be honored for how far he had come, not condemned for the tiny distance he had yet to go. As far as Rory was concerned, Kenny was a member of the church in good standing. He would put Kenny’s morality, his abundant goodness and generosity up against anyone’s. He always said that Kenny had a big heart, but that expression now seemed inappropriate, since it was the failure of Kenny’s heart that led to his demise.
“You’re a good bishop,” Kenny would say to Rory when the joshing went the other way. Rory’s usual response was, “Well, you get what you pay for,” a joke anyone in the 2nd Ward would appreciate since Rory received nothing for his service. Everything he did had to be done on top of his day job as an accountant and his family duties at home with his wife, Elaine, and their brood of Baby Boomers, some of whom were approaching the dreaded teen-age years. But one starlit night in Wyoming when the two of them were alone for an hour at a Boy Scout camp, Rory caught Kenny by surprise when for the first time he said, “No I’m not,” and he said it quietly and in such a way that Kenny couldn’t help but realize that his friend, the bishop, was serious.
Kenny lowered his head, squinted at Rory over the top of his glasses with his one good eye and asked, “Why the heck not?”
“Because I don’t have the ability to make people feel guilty.”
“Shoot,” Kenny said. “That’s what we have wives for.”
“I’m serious, Kenny. I just can’t do it.”
“What in the world are you talking about?” Kenny asked.
Rory was silent for a moment, lost in thought.
“I was an artillery officer in the war,” he said.
“I know that.”
“We didn’t get the attention some did, but we were good. Even captured German officers I talked to said our artillery was very good. We did a lot of damage.”
“I would certainly hope so.”
“But it’s one thing to think about in the abstract. It’s another to see it in real life. We shelled some German cities for days. There wasn’t much left when we were through with them. And all I could think about then, and all I’ve thought about since, is how many people we might have killed, how many might have been women or children, how many might have been babies. We didn’t know if they’d gone to shelters or were hiding under their beds. We just kept shelling and shelling. I’ve got enough guilt inside me to last for eternity.”
“But we were at war,” Kenny said. “You can’t beat yourself up for that. You had to do that!”
“I know,” Rory said. “They were the enemy. I understand that. But I still have nightmares. I still see dead people. I don’t feel absolved of anything.”
“What the heck does that have to do with being bishop?”
“Maybe,” Rory said slowly, “it’s a question of magnitude. People come in and confess things to me all the time—they did this or they did that—but most of what they tell me seems so…inconsequential. All I want to do is lean over and say, ‘Let me tell you what I did.’”
Kenny looked up at the stars for a moment.
“Rory,” he said. “Do you think Tom—if he’d survived—would have nightmares too?”
“Yes, I think he probably would.”
“I guess that’s one good thing about leaving this life. You don’t have nightmares anymore.”
“No,” Rory said, “I don’t imagine you do.”
###
Kenny was buried in the Taylor Municipal Cemetery under a gun-metal gray sky. An icy wind swept across its gentle hills and around its leafless trees and snow was in the offing. So, when friends and family retired afterward to the 2nd Ward Cultural Hall where tables had been set up and a late lunch served by the Relief Society, they did so quickly and with more gratitude than usual. His official duties over, Rory withdrew to allow Maxine to be comforted by her family and many friends. She’s in good hands, he thought to himself, seeing her slender, slightly stooped frame surrounded by so many. So, it came as a surprise when Maxine asked to speak with him privately in his office before most people had even begun to leave.
“Bishop,” she said when Rory shut the door, “I’m worried about Kenny.” Her eyes, which had been dry since leaving the graveside, were tearing up again.
Rory took Maxine’s hand and said, “Now, I know what you’re going to say, Maxine. You’re worried about that coffee, so let me tell you that there are worse things a person could do: lying, stealing, cheating on their taxes. Drinking coffee is such a little thing, you shouldn’t worry about it.”
“I know it’s a little thing, bishop, but I was always taught that we should keep all the commandments, big or small.”
“We should, you’re right,” Rory said. “But Kenny was making progress. He was down to half a cup.”
“He was down to half a cup for years,” she said. “You should’ve been tougher on him.”
“Maybe you’re right, but look at it this way. If you violate the Word of Wisdom, whether it’s drinking coffee or alcohol or smoking cigarettes, you’re mostly hurting yourself. But there are some sins—let’s take gossip, for example—where you’re often hurting others. And you don’t even know how many people you might be hurting when you gossip.”
He let go of her hand and began pacing.
“In Matthew, the Lord tells us it isn’t what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, it’s what comes out of it. And it’s so true! I tell you, Maxine, my job would be a whole lot easier if I could just get rid of gossip. Why, if I had to choose between someone who drank coffee and a gossip, I’d choose the coffee-drinker every time. It wouldn’t even be close.”
Maxine stared at him. “I’m not sure I get your point, bishop.”
“Sometimes,” Rory said, as he sat down, “we lose sight of the big picture. What’s really important. What’s really sacred.” He picked up a pencil and held it between his hands, the eraser in one hand, the lead point in the other. “As you know, I’m an accountant. I spend my days balancing books, pluses over here, minuses over there. I’m simplifying, of course, but you know what it’s like—you did Kenny’s books for years. Anyway, you can tell a lot about someone by looking at their books—especially at tax time.” He smiled and put the pencil away.
“The point is,” he continued, “that Kenny was a good man. He really was. We all joke about how cheap he was, but when it came to helping others, he was the most generous person I’ve ever known. He would literally give you the shirt off his back if you needed it. Why, the list of people Kenny helped in one way or another is as long as my arm. And I’m on that list, as you know. I guess what I’m saying is that when you stack up all Kenny’s assets, I don’t think the Lord is going to care all that much whether he had that one little liability on the other side of the ledger.”
He paused.
“Besides,” he said, “that morning half-cup of coffee kept Kenny from getting migraines.”
“What migraines?” Maxine asked, wrinkling up her brow. “Kenny didn’t have migraines.”
“Shhh,” Rory said, putting his finger to his lips.
Maxine stared at Rory for a moment almost without blinking as what he said sank in. Then she dabbed her eyes, stood up and gave Rory a hug. “Bishop,” she said. “I’ve always been fond of you. You remind me of Tom.”
###
In the days immediately following Kenny’s funeral, several people came up to Rory and said, not in an unkind way, they didn’t think Maxine would last long now that Kenny was gone. The two of them had been that close. To be honest, Rory wondered himself how Maxine would deal with widowhood, but he usually deflected such concerns by saying, “Oh, I think Maxine’s stronger than people think she is. She might fool us all.” Still, over the next several weeks he watched for any sign that Maxine might be faltering. What he discovered, as Kenny might have said, “surprised the heck out of him.” Maxine had signed up to go to Weber College in the fall.
“You never cease to amaze me, Maxine,” he said. “What brought this on?”
“I never had the chance to go to college when I was young,” she said. “I didn’t have the money. Neither did Kenny. We both talked about going, but between making a living and raising kids and taking care of each other, we just didn’t get around to it. Besides, I’ve got a bet with my granddaughter, Margo, that I can graduate before she does.”
“That’s wonderful,” Rory said. And then, almost without thinking, he added, “Are you planning on majoring in anything in particular?”
“Literature,” she said. “I’ve always been interested in Western women writers like Willa Cather and Juanita Brooks.” She touched Rory on the arm and added with a twinkle in her eye, “But I’m going to minor in history. How could I not, considering that crazy man I lived with all those years?”
Rory found that he missed “that crazy man” more than he expected. Kenny was one of the few men he had ever really been close to, one of the few he’d ever felt comfortable talking to. Even though Kenny was older by a generation, Rory thought of him more as a peer, a contemporary. Whatever age gap existed between them was meaningless.
“Is it true,” Kenny once asked him, “that you got a Bronze Star?”
“Where’d you hear that?” Rory asked.
“I think one of your kids might’ve spilled the beans. Is it true?”
Rory hesitated. Finally, he said, “Yes.”
“The way I heard it, you didn’t tell anyone about it. Elaine was cleaning out a closet and discovered it by accident when it fell on the floor. And when you came home that night and she asked you about it, all you said was, ‘It’s nothing.’ Is that what happened?”
“Yes, but what’s your point? They handed those things out like K Rations. I didn’t do anything special. I just did my job”
“That’s a common mistake of the younger generation,” Kenny said.
“What is?”
“Thinking that doing your job is nothing special. Sometimes doing your job is very special, especially if you do it well. You know,” he said, as he punched Rory on the shoulder, “your modesty is one of your nicer qualities, but even modesty can be overdone.”
“Thanks,” Rory said, feigning injury. “I’ll keep that in mind the next time I decide to get cocky.”
“What about your dad?” Kenny asked. “Surely you told him about that medal.”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t tell anyone.”
“That’s too bad. Dads like to know about those things.”
Rory wasn’t sure what his father knew or wanted to know about him. His father was a banker, a man comfortable behind desks and in board rooms. Except for the fishing and hunting trips he’d taken Rory on when he was young, he was somewhat distant, showing little interest in what Rory was up to. He always seemed preoccupied. He was watering his lawn the day Rory first saw him after coming home from the war. It was a Saturday afternoon and his father, a distinguished-looking man of medium height with wire-rim glasses, was wearing his usual gray, work-around-the-house pants and shirt he bought from Penney’s. He looked older, of course, but not by much. When he saw Rory, his face lit up. He put the hose down and walked quickly toward his son with his hand outstretched. But Rory didn’t want a handshake at that moment. He wanted a hug. He wanted a hug from his father more than he’d ever wanted a hug from anyone in his life, so he ignored his father’s outstretched hand and threw his arms around him. He could feel his father tense up, feel his awkwardness. His father was a good man, but he wasn’t a hugger. He was descended from impassive farmers and merchants from the Scania region of Sweden and hugging, at least according to his mother, just wasn’t in his genetic makeup. And because of that, Rory knew that for as long as his father would live, there would always be some small, immeasurable distance between them.
###
One year almost to the day after Kenny’s death, Rory was released as bishop and Maxine’s nephew Quinn Jensen was given the job. Rory was now just plain Rory, although to many he would always be referred to as “Bishop” out of respect for the job he once had. And now that he was no longer bishop, now that he no longer had to devote most of his non-working hours to church affairs, he had a little more time to himself, time to spend with his family, time to devote to his work, even time to spend a few hours by himself, doing things that only had value to him.
So it was that he took a break from work and family one sunny winter Saturday and drove out to Promontory Summit in his old 1953 Studebaker pickup, which he, in his careful way, always kept in top condition. It hadn’t snowed in a week and he didn’t expect the roads to be a problem, but out of habit he threw a tow rope and chains in the back just in case.
He’d been to Promontory numerous times in his pre-war rabbit-and-pheasant-hunting days, but he hadn’t paid a visit since coming back from Europe. He didn’t hunt anymore and had never gotten caught up in the romance of the railroad the way Kenny had.
“What is it with you and the railroad, Kenny?” he’d once asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Why is it so important to you that the place where we say the Golden Spike was driven is the right place? It seems like a small thing to get worked up about.”
“Shoot,” Kenny said. “If we can’t get something right that’s that simple to understand, that easy to verify, what else can’t we get right? It’s not a matter of opinion. It’s not a matter of what you feel in your gut, or even what your politics are. It’s a matter of fact, historical and geographical fact! And the fact is it was done at Promontory Summit, up there on that high ground, and nowhere else. Think about it, Rory,” he said. “In that one brief moment, our world became smaller, our country became more united, things were never the same again. We owe it to ourselves and to future generations to know exactly where it happened. To say it happened somewhere other than the exact spot where it did happen is an insult to everyone who worked so hard to build it—especially those who died to build it.”
“So why do so many get it wrong?”
“As best I can figure it, it’s because General Dodge originally thought he could build the Union Pacific across the lake to Promontory Point and then run it up the west side of the peninsula, but when he sounded the lake in 1868 as the railroads were approaching Utah, he discovered it was 14 feet deeper than when the lake was first sounded back in 1849. That changed everything. They had to build around the lake instead of across it. See, what nobody knew then was that the lake rises and falls cyclically over time. Maybe if they’d consulted the Indians, they would’ve known that, but nobody asked the Indians what they thought. That’s probably how Promontory Point got confused with Promontory Summit and why so many people got it wrong and still get it wrong today. Promontory Point sounds good, I’ll give you that, but just because something sounds good doesn’t mean it’s right.”
As his old Studebaker climbed toward the summit up the lonely, twisting highway, Rory suddenly noticed the double cuts running up and down the mountainside. He’d forgotten about them. The railroad had abandoned the Promontory route in 1904 when it built a trestle across the Great Salt Lake, shortening the route by 43 miles. The rails on the old route had been removed for use as scrap iron during World War II. Decades of wind and water erosion had taken their toll, and unless you were paying attention, it was entirely possible not to notice the cuts and the two track beds at all. He pulled over at a turnout and got out of his truck.
He tried to imagine the scene as it would have been in 1869. Because the government had not designated an official meeting place until settling on Promontory Summit, the railroads continued working past each other after they met, each anxious to claim as much ground as possible. It wasn’t a war exactly, although rival track workers were known to lob sticks of dynamite at each other in moments of madness. The Union Pacific, with its largely Irish crews, kept digging and filling and laying track in a westerly direction beyond the summit while the men of the Central Pacific, the largest portion of them Chinese, dug and hammered and sweated to the east. There were no machines. It was all done by backbreaking human labor. Anyone who was sick or injured and couldn’t work didn’t get paid, and anyone who died was quickly buried and forgotten as the railroads moved feverishly on. Death comes to us all, and that’s a fact. A great thing was accomplished here, but how many men, so far from home, so very far from home, died in the process, their lives uncelebrated, their deaths unmourned, forgotten to all but God?
Rory shivered in the cold wind that was biting at his back. It reminded him of Belgium in 1944, the coldest winter of his life. His old army jacket that he was wearing was lined inside, but it gave him precious little protection and he wished he’d kept his woolen Army overcoat to use on outings such as this. The roads he’d traveled over there were different from the highway he was on today. They were snowy, wound through forests, fields and small towns and were hideously littered with the detritus of war. By comparison, the highway to Promontory Summit seemed almost pristine, as if most evidence of human presence had been blown away to some distant location. For a moment, he thought he heard voices coming down through the sagebrush, a strange babble of sounds carried by the wind. He looked around, but saw nothing. He shivered again.
He got back into the warmth of his truck and continued on toward the summit. When he arrived, he took in the scene around him while taking sips of hot chocolate from his Thermos. An old train station had stood nearby for years until vandals burned it down. Only part of the blackened facade was left standing and he could see that it had been shot at multiple times with rifles and shotguns by hunters or kids who had no sense of decency and who treated guns as toys. The town that had once existed here with its restaurant, general store, locomotive roundhouse, and homes was now just wind-blown sagebrush.
He thought it a shame that so little remained at the summit to commemorate what historians called the “single most important day in the history of the west,” only a simple cement monument off to the side of the highway where the railroads met. Maybe someday, he thought, we’ll get around to properly honoring this place.
As he finished his hot chocolate and felt its warmth spread throughout his body, Rory began to think it fitting that Kenny had died at Promontory Summit. Kenny loved the place. It seemed to give him peace. Rory wished he knew why, and why Kenny came out so often. All he really knew is that the death of his longtime friend meant the whole area was imbued with a sacredness that most people would never think to find in such an unexpected place.
It was true that Kenny was not a traveler, not since he came to Utah as a boy. He always said he couldn’t afford it or that he’d rather go fishing. He’d never been more than a few hundred miles from his home town. But Rory wondered if he and Maxine would benefit from a trip to the American military cemetery in Holland where his son might be buried. Rory thought such a trip such a trip back to the land of Kenny’s birthplace might be good for both of them, that a visit to the cemetery might allow them to come to terms with the death of their son, but Kenny always said no.
“Why not?” Rory once asked, as gently as he could.
“Because,” Kenny said, his head bowed, “no one knows where Tom’s buried. His remains have never been identified.”
As he turned around to head home, Rory thought he now understood why Kenny came to Promontory Summit, why he came so often, why he loved it so much. Men died to build the railroad and it was not known what happened to many of them along all those hundreds of miles of track. According to Kenny, some were buried where they died, some in nearby towns with cemeteries. Many of the Chinese workers who died were shipped home, as stipulated in their contract, but not all. Thus, for Kenny, this spot where the railroad was finally completed, was as good a place as any to honor the dead who helped build it. Maybe this empty, windswept mountain crossing became a stand-in for that other place, the one he could not bring himself to go to. All Rory knew is that if it gave Kenny comfort to come here, who could blame him?
Dennis Read is a former employee of FEMA. Irreantum nominated his story “Unclean Money” for the Best Spiritual Literature and Pushcart prizes.
