A DEAD MAN'S SHOES
"In the grim dead-end he lies,
With passionless filmy eyes,
English Ned, with a hole in his head,
Staring up at the skies.
"The engine driver swore, as often he swore before:
'I whistled him back from the flamin' track,
And I couldn't do no more!'
"The ganger spoke through the 'phone: 'Platelayer seventy-one
Got killed to-day on the six-foot way
By a goods on the city run.
"'English Ned is his name, no one knows whence he came;
He didn't take mind of the road behind,
And none of us is to blame.'"
--From _Songs of the Dead End_.
The law has it that no man must work as a platelayer on the running
lines until he is over twenty-one years of age. If my readers look up
the books of the ---- Railway Company, they'll find that I started work
in the service of the company at the age of twenty-two. My readers must
not believe this. I was only eighteen years of age when I started work
on the railway, but I told a lie in order to obtain the post.
One day, five weeks following my return from the Argyllshire moors, and
long after all my money had been expended on the fruitless search for
Norah Ryan, I clambered up a railway embankment near Glasgow with the
intention of seeking a job, and found that a man had just been killed
by a ballast engine. He had been cut in two; the fingers of his left
hand severed clean away were lying on the slag. The engine wheels were
dripping with blood. The sight made me sick with a dull heavy nausea,
and numberless little blue and black specks floated before my eyes. An
almost unbearable dryness came into my throat; my legs became heavy and
leaden, and it seemed as if thousands of pins were pricking them. All
the men were terror-stricken, and a look of fear was in every eye. They
did not know whose turn would come next.
A few of them stepped reluctantly forward and carried the thing which
had been a fellow-man a few minutes before and placed it on the green
slope. Others pulled the stray pieces of flesh from amidst the rods,
bars, and wheels of the engine and washed the splotches of blood from
the sleepers and rails. One old fellow lifted the severed fingers from
the slag, counting each one loudly and carefully as if some weighty
decision hung on the correct tally of the dead man's fingers. They were
placed beside the rest of the body, and prompted by a morbid curiosity I
approached it where it lay in all its ghastliness on the green slope
with a dozen men or more circled around it. The face was unrecognisable
as a human face. A thin red sliver of flesh lying on the ground looked
like a tongue. Probably the man's teeth in contracting had cut the
tongue in two. I had looked upon two dead people, Dan and Mary Sorley,
but they might have been asleep, so quiet did they lie in their eternal
repose. This was also death, but death combined with horror. Here and
there scraps of clothing and buttons were scrambled up with the flesh,
but all traces of clothing were almost entirely hidden from sight. The
old man who had gathered up the fingers brought a bag forward and
covered up the dead thing on the slope. The rest of the men drew back,
quietly and soberly, glad that the thing was hidden from their eyes.
"A bad sight for the fellow's wife," said the old man to me. "I've seen
fifteen men die like him, you know."
"How did it happen?" I asked.
"We was liftin' them rails into the ballast train, and every rail is
over half a ton in weight," said the man, who, realising that I was not
a railway man, gave full details. "One of the rails came back. The men
were in too big a hurry, that's what I say, and I've always said it, but
it's not their fault. It's the company as wants men to work as if every
man was a horse, and the men daren't take their time. It's the sack if
they do that. Well, as I was a-sayin', the rail caught on the lip of the
waggon, and came back atop of Mick--Mick Deehan is his name--as the
train began just to move. The rail broke his back, snapped it in two
like a dry stick. We heard the spine crack, and he just gave one squeal
and fell right under the engine. Ugh! it was ill to look at it, and,
mind you, I've seen fifteen deaths like it. Fifteen, just think of
that!"
Then I realised that I had been saved part of the worst terror of the
tragedy. It must have been awful to see a man suddenly transformed into
that which lay under the bag beside me. A vision came to me of the poor
fellow getting suddenly caught in the terrible embrace of the engine,
watching the large wheel slowly revolving downwards towards his face,
while his ears would hear, the last sound ever to be heard by them, the
soft, slippery movement of that monstrous wheel skidding in flesh and
blood. For a moment I was in the dead man's place, I could feel the
flange of the wheel cutting and sliding through me as a plough slides
through the furrow of a field. Again my feelings almost overcame me, my
brain was giddy and my feet seemed insecurely planted on the ground.
By an effort I diverted my thoughts from the tragedy, and my eyes fell
on a spider's web hung between two bare twigs just behind the dead man.
It glistened in the sunshine, and a large spider, a little distance out
from the rim, had its gaze fixed on some winged insect which had got
entangled in the meshes of the web. When the old man who had seen
fifteen deaths passed behind the corpse, the spider darted back to the
shelter of the twig, and the winged insect struggled fiercely, trying to
free itself from the meshes of death.
On a near bough a bird was singing, and its song was probably the first
love-song of the spring. In the field on the other side of the line, and
some distance away, a group of children were playing, children
bare-legged, and dressed in garments of many colours. Behind them a row
of lime-washed cottages stood, looking cheerful in the sunshine of the
early spring. Two women stood at one door, gossiping, no doubt. A young
man in passing raised his hat to the women, then stopped and talked with
them for a while. From far down the line, which ran straight for miles,
an extra gang of workers was approaching, their legs moving under their
apparently motionless bodies, and breaking the lines of light which ran
along the polished upper bedes of the rails. The men near me were
talking, but in my ears their voices sounded like the droning of bees
that flit amid the high branches of leafy trees. The coming gang drew
nearer, stepping slowly from sleeper to sleeper, thus saving the soles
of their boots from the contact of the wearing slag. The man in front, a
strong, lusty fellow, was bellowing out in a very unmusical voice an
Irish love song. Suddenly I noticed that all the men near me were gazing
tensely at the approaching squad, the members of which were yet unaware
of the tragedy, for the rake of ballast waggons hid the bloodstained
slag and scene of the accident from their eyes. The singer came round
behind the rear waggon, still bellowing out his song.
"I'll leave me home again and I'll bid good-bye to-morrow,
I'll pass the little graveyard and the tomb anear the wall,
I have lived so long for love that I cannot live for sorrow
By the grave that holds me cooleen in a glen of Donegal."
Every eye was turned on him, but no man spoke. Apparently taking no heed
of the splotches of blood, now darkly red, and almost the colour of the
slag on which they lay, he approached the bag which covered the body.
"What the devil is this?" he cried out, and gave the bag a kick,
throwing it clear of the thing which it covered. The bird on the bough
atop of the slope trilled louder; the song of the man died out, and he
turned to the ganger who stood near him, with a questioning look.
"It's Mick, is it?" he asked, removing his cap.
"It's Micky," said the ganger.
The man by the corpse bent down again and covered it up slowly and
quietly, then he sank down on the green slope and burst into tears.
"Micky and him's brothers, you know," said a man who stood beside me in
a whisper. The tears came into my eyes, much though I tried to restrain
them. The tragedy had now revealed itself in all its horrible intensity,
and I almost wished to run away from the spot.
After a while the breakdown van came along; the corpse was lifted in,
the brother tottered weakly into the carriage attached to the van, and
the engine puffed back to Glasgow. A few men turned the slag in the
sleeper beds and hid the dark red clotted blood for ever. The man had a
wife and several children, and to these the company paid blood money,
and the affair was in a little while forgotten by most men, for it was
no man's business. Does it not give us an easy conscience that this
wrong and that wrong is no business of ours?
When the train rumbled around the first curve on its return journey I
went towards the ganger, for the work obsession still troubled me. Once
out of work I long for a job, once having a job my mind dwells on the
glories of the free-footed road again. But now I had an object in view,
for if I obtained employment on the railway I could stop in Glasgow and
continue my search for Norah Ryan during the spare hours. The ganger
looked at me dubiously, and asked my age.
"Twenty-two years," I answered, for I was well aware that a man is never
taken on as a platelayer until he has attained his majority.
There and then I was taken into the employ of the ---- Railway Company,
as Dermod Flynn, aged twenty-two years. Afterwards the ganger read me
the rules which I had to observe while in the employment of the company.
I did not take very much heed to his droning voice, my mind reverting
continuously to the tragedy which I had just witnessed, and I do not
think that the ganger took very much pleasure in the reading. While we
were going through the rules a stranger scrambled up the railway slope
and came towards us.
"I heard that a man was killed," he said in an eager voice. "Any chance
of gettin' a start in his place?"
"This man's in his shoes," said the ganger, pointing at me.
"Lucky dog!" was all that the man said, as he turned away.
The ganger's name was Roche, "Horse Roche"--for his mates nicknamed him
"Horse" on account of his enormous strength. He could drive a nine-inch
iron spike through a wooden sleeper with one blow of his hammer. No
other man on the railway could do the same thing at that time; but
before I passed my twenty-first birthday I could perform the same feat
quite easily. Roche was a hard swearer, a heavy drinker, and a fearless
fighter. He will not mind my saying these things about him now. He is
dead over four years.