The Madison Local

One in the morning and the temperature outside must still be in the 80s, he thought.

Matt turned and twisted on the sweat-soaked sheet of his twin bed, which was tucked in the corner of his bedroom of the third-floor walkup he rented off-campus. It was sweltering in the apartment, which had no air conditioning. He remembered that on nights like this, as a boy, he often took an air mattress outside to the porch on the second floor of the duplex his family rented on the South Side of Milwaukee and slept under the stars. There simply was no other way to beat the heat!

Tony, his father, never seemed to mind the heat. Why would he have? The old man was a fireman for the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad—the Milwaukee Road—and he often bragged that the temperatures in the cabs of the engines he rode were at least 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and usually higher, for an entire run. “You folks have no idea what HOT is,” he would bellow when they’d see him at the dinner table on the two or three days every week he was home in the evening.

Matt could still see Tony in this mind’s eye, his face covered in coal dust and soot. The stuff permeated everything—his hair, his clothes, his shoes. His mother, Beth, kept a heavy-duty powdered soap on hand to ensure Tony could wash most of the stuff off himself when he came home from work. She had Fels-Naptha for cleaning his clothes. But that had a distinct, gasoline-like chemical smell that everyone, even Tony, found offensive. Laundry day wasn’t the most pleasant of times in the Kowalski household.

Matt sat up, swung his feet to the ground and went to the bathroom, where he drew a glass of cold water from the faucet. Even that was warm, the ground having been subject to daytime temperatures above 100 degrees for the last week. There was just no escaping the heat.

Off in the distance he heard the mournful sound of a steam train whistle: two long blasts, one short blast, and one long blast. He knew it was the Chicago and North Western Railway’s Madison Local running overnight mail and express shipments from Chicago to Madison. It also was carrying early-morning print editions of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times. Hearing it now, he knew the consist was crossing the last major road before coming into the station on West Washington Avenue, south of the university’s campus.

When he was a kid, his dad had taught him many of the signals engineers used to signal command and safety warnings. He remembered one long and one short blast was a warning to people near the tracks that a train was approaching. He also knew one short blast meant that the train had completely stopped. The things you remember from childhood, he mused. Matt slowly traipsed back to bed and sat. Reaching to his nightstand, he grabbed an open pack of Lucky Strike Reds and his Ronson lighter. Popping a cigarette between his lips, he flipped the lighter’s spark wheel to create a flame, inhaled deeply, and then slowly let the smoke out through pursed lips. He sat there for several minutes, alternating between taking drags on the cigarette and rubbing his chin before ashing the butt in a heavy glass ashtray. The ritual completed, he turned, swung his legs onto the bed, and once again lay atop his sweat-soaked sheet.

Given the short distance between his apartment and the railroad depot, and the stillness of the night, it was difficult to avoid hearing the sound on the engine pulling the Madison Local as it waited in the station for the freight cars to be unloaded. How many times had I heard that chuffing sound of engines like that one? Matt thought to himself. When he was a boy, his mother often took him to the railroad station in Milwaukee to see his father when Tony’s train was scheduled to pass through town. Then, to him, the engines were living creatures—huge, fire-breathing monsters—that belched smoke, and hissed and screamed, even when they weren’t moving. To him, they were alive. And while they were terrifying at first, they also were fascinating. He couldn’t take his eyes nor his mind off them.

He missed those days. Despite his father being gone most of the week, when he was home, the family—Matt, his younger sister, Emily, and his mother and father—enjoyed spending time together. Family dinners, outings at Milwaukee’s Bradford Beach on Lake Michigan, visits to the Wisconsin State Fair, and trips to see the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus when it came to the lake front were highlights.

That life came crashing down at 5:15 a.m. on July 17, 1950, when the engine, tender, and 23 cars of an 89-car Milwaukee Road freight train derailed near New Holstein, Wisconsin. The train was on its way to Green Bay; Tony was the fireman. According to an eyewitness, the engine exploded with such force that it flattened the trees on both sides of the roadbed out to 300 feet. It took more than 24 hours before the resulting fire was extinguished by the responding fire departments, and almost two days before Tony and the engineer’s bodies—or what remained of them—could be recovered.

Even before the flames had been extinguished, a representative from the railroad, accompanied by a priest, came to give Beth the news of her husband’s death. Matt was only 12 at the time but old enough to understand what had happened and the impact it had on his mother. He watched the color drain from her face as she slowly sank into the living room couch. The priest sat beside her, holding her hands and comforting her. He talked about Tony, what a God-fearing man he had been, how he had loved and taken care of his family, and how he would be embraced by his Lord. Beth was in shock. She beckoned Matt and Emily to her, hugging them so tightly they could barely breathe.

That was a helluva kick in the teeth, dad, Matt thought as he got up again, went to the window, and raised the sash as high as it would go. Images of his father’s funeral mass rose into his consciousness. It was held at St. Michael’s Catholic Church some five days after the derailment. Father Sutton officiated. To this day, Matt doesn’t talk about it much. But he has been known to share a few details about it with close friends now and then, especially after two—better, three—beers.

One person he confided in was his childhood friend Darin, also from South Milwaukee, who was attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the same time as Matt. Lying there in the heat of the night, Matt recalled the night they met over drinks some months earlier in the university’s Rathskeller, when Darin asked him about his father’s funeral service. “There’s not much to say,” Matt had replied. “As I recall, it started around 10 in the morning and lasted an hour. What I really remember, though, is my mother . . . she was, like, in total shock.”

Darin was surprised, asking how this could be. After all, almost a week had gone by since she had learned of her husband’s death.

“I don’t know,” Matt remembered saying. “She wasn’t even crying. She just sat in the first pew, rocking back and forth, Beth on her left, me on the right, her arms around both of us. And over and over again she kept saying ‘Oh, God, Oh, God.’ ”

“That must have been very difficult for you,” Darin had said, offering at the time to get each of them another round.

When he returned, Matt recalled telling him: “You know what the worst part was? After the service, people kept coming up to me and saying, ‘You’re the man of the house now, Matt.’ And ‘Your mom’s gonna need you more than ever.’ That’s a lot to lay on a kid of 12, for sure! How the hell am I going to take care of my mom and younger sister?! After the service, the same man who had come to the house with a priest came up to my mom and handed her an envelope. She later told us it contained a check, but the money didn’t last long. So, we had to move down-state to live with her sister’s family a few months later.”

“So that’s the reason you suddenly left school. I never knew what happened to you. One day you’re there, and we’re having a great time together, and then, you just disappeared.”

The rest of their conversation ping-ponged in Matt’s mind as if it had taken place yesterday:

“Yeah, I’m sorry, Darin. What could I have done? I was pulled out of school, and we moved the next day.”

“Jesus, sometimes life sucks!”

“Tell me.”

“So, what happened to your mom and little sister?”

“Emily’s doing fine. She’ll graduate from high school next summer, and I’m going to help her get into college. She wants to go to nursing school.”

“And your mom?”

“Mom didn’t make it. She died three months after dad. The doctor said it was because of a broken heart.”

Off in the distance Matt heard two short blasts from the Madison Local. The engine’s warning bell had also been activated. The train was about to get under way for its return trip to Chicago.

Matt, staring up at the ceiling, shook his head. Mom, dad . . . you didn’t deserve what happened to you. Sometimes life really does suck!