BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER SIXTEEN

1908

REILH BROTHERS

"If preacher-man is right, we should be coming up on where the new branch is supposed to take off from." Charles Reilh exhaled smoke from his just-lit cigarette, then blew another breath of fog to measure just how cold it was. In the moonlight, glancing off the snowdrifts on a clear January night, the two clouds hung still-ly, unbullied by wind but, even in their wispiness, weighted by gravity. "Twenty below, I'd say."

John held to his silence, his teeth getting ready to start chattering. It's only a three or four hour ride, his brother had said when they left the Arco bar. But their horses took off when they stopped to relieve themselves, each thinking the other was holding the reins. That meant at least two hours, maybe three more, and his feet were already numb, his fingers, even gloved and buried in his pockets, likely approaching frostbite status. And they had drank the last of the quart bought at the tavern some time ago, the jar discarded along the railroad tracks. The bad part of drinking was setting in, the wall it provided against weather disappearing.

"A shyster among shysters, that Mr. Wickham. Did you see how his silver tongue darted in and out like a frog's? The Wamsleys and that old fella were indeed eating it up, though. No wonder he's got himself a Carey project. Fits right in, just like ole Moroni Skeen. Remember Moroni?"

John stumbled on a tie, fell to an awkward crouch and grabbed a rail, saving himself from a full roll down the supporting bank.

"Careful there," Charles said, reaching to lift his brother. "Nothing worse than a man can't hold his drink. Shouldn't have had that last one."

"Or the one before," John mumbled, upright.

"Just a little ways further."

John grunted.

Leaning back with arms widespread, Charles exclaimed, "Ain't it somethin'! Moon. The Buttes. They'd scare a stranger, I'm sure, imposing as they are. Lucky we didn't come to this country at night. In the winter, no less." He cackled. "We'd have turned tail and run."

To their right, the Big Southern Butte, to their left, the Twins, East and West, cast a distance neither of the men might define, their outlines clear and distinct. The Big Southern towered twenty-five hundred feet above the flat, the East butte a thousand feet shorter and the middle just a couple hundred lower yet. Close and far at the same time, the shadows of their various folds gave them an eerie character.

"Skeen. Wickham. Peas in a pod. If you went down the Land Board's list, you'd find the rest of them, all the same. That fella with the water-bouncer, I met him once. Down below Twin Falls. He was the champion. But Skeen, you could believe Skeen even when you doubted him, particularly if Lyman was nearby, he was a little more solid. You do remember the Skeens, don't you?"

"I remember." John was counting the ties. He'd worked the rails, helped build this stretch of track, somewhere in his mind he knew how many rails made a mile. It'd come to him.

"Always touting the miraculous, old Moroni. 'Lo and behold!' A little late on pay, though, if I remember." He waited for his brother to catch up. "Not as late as their competitors', though. At least it was real pay, not scrip."

He went on when John didn't reply. "Wickham's no Mormon, but he's a preacher nonetheless. He was in on a scheme over in western Idaho, got sued for fraud. Run out of—Kansas, was it?—for diddling a sweet young parishioner. Diddling us, now. How's he going to get water through the Sinks—Jesus walked on water, nothing in the Bible says he can keep it from draining through the cracks in the ground. What gets me is, why does old Wickham think they call that river Lost? He going to find it?"

John rubbed his hands together, put them on his ears and immediately pulled them away when they hurt what they touched. "People believe what they want to believe," he said.

"Wickham, he's a brimstoner, you can tell. Moroni Skeen, no preacher maybe, no more than all the Mormons, not sure he was even still a Mormon, to tell you the truth, but don't they all believe everyone has a direct line to the upstairs man? Don't that make them all preachers? Rev-e-lations! Glory be! A lot more work got done when he was away than when he was around. His brother, now, old Lyman, he kept a little more quiet. He at least finished her up. Mama and Papa, though, couldn't have been pleased with that little war their boys waged with the United. 'Course, they was dead."

Forty-one. Forty-two. "McCandless was a Mormon, too," John managed in reply. "He straightened things out."

"McCandless, I admit, was an honest one. I think. Lyman, maybe. Though those Skeens were always close to a lot of gunshots, you have to admit. Not just the three bullets Moroni took, but those Aiken murders in the fifties, and their friend getting killed for adultery in the seventies. Wouldn't surprise me if they weren't in Brigham's gang of thugs. Anyway, it took Bothwell and McConaughy to finish what was started—"

"And the government," John said. His teeth were starting to bounce against each other. He shook his head, hoping to jar whatever mechanism had gone awry.

Charles nodded. "And some Eastern money. A lot of it." He stopped. "We need a fire. We have matches. We have sagebrush. Let's start ourselves a fire. Get warm before we go on. You get some brush on that side, I'll get some here on this other."

Charles stepped down the bank, broke sage and gathered it until he could hold no more, scrambled back up. John was sitting against a rail. "Shouldn't have let go the horses," he muttered.

"Gone now," Charles said. "Wasn't like them to do that, they picked a bad time to change their behavior. You sit. That's fine. I'll get one more armful, then I'll start up a fire."

It didn't take long, given the amount of brush out by the tracks, to gather enough to burn. Charles had a fire going in but a few minutes, then went for more tinder. "Enough to hold us for just a few minutes, then we'll be on our way."

John was still counting, his head lolling. The cold felt like a companion, too close, he tried to shake it off.

Charles dropped another load nearby, not too close to the crackling fire, set his feet where they could warm.

"I think Moroni and that other Mormon on the United were in cahoots. How else would you explain both ditches side by side? At least for the first couple years." He paused, looked at his brother. "Don't put your hands so close. Warm them slow or you'll make it worse."

John, slumped forward, grunted.

"And what do you think of the Great Northern Railroad. 'Five million dollars in stock,' says Mr. Wickham. From Cerro Grande to McCollum—there ain't even a McCollum yet and he's selling lots!—and onward. To Salmon! To Lewiston! To the coast! Does he think we're fools?" He pulled back his feet from the fire, held his hands forward. "Come to think of it, given the crowd Wickham was pulling, fools are indeed what we are."

His brother was snoring. Charles stood up, went to the other side of the fire to lay him down so he didn't roll into the fire. He threw a few more branches and felt sleep coming on him, as well. "Wake me up if the train comes and I don't hear it," he said, then laughed, knowing his brother didn't hear him.

When the train came at dusk, they had already froze. John had used the rail as a pillow, with the expected result. Charles arm, sprawled across the other rail, ended up similarly.

***

"Let the Italians pick them up." William Chubbuck, the engineer, had stopped the train, though not soon enough. He'd surveyed the pieces of the two men, frozen solid. "They don't have to get the small bits."

"Locatelli!" Oscar Hoagland, the assistant, shouted out. "Fernando! Di Renzo! Favro! The rest of you Eye-Ties, too, you know what to do. Put them in the empty boxcar at the end."

The workers saw the carnage and recoiled. Pieces of flesh stood out red against the surrounding snowdrifts. A head, rolled on its cheek, lay in the right of way. On the other side, a sleeve with a bloody end, a boot with a bone protruding. Nearby, numerous pieces lay scattered close by, less as the distance increased.

"Make quick!" Hoagland's voice rang out. "We have a schedule to keep."

In five minutes the bodies rode in the last empty boxcar. Hoagland made the Italians ride alongside the remains. They made a silent pact, each with himself, to find new work. They'd made a similar pact in the mines when they moved to railroad work.

They knew work, they'd helped built this branch, had seen the land, great swaths of unfarmed soil in between the rocky sections. It needed water, is all, though some said it could be dry farmed. There was a canal planned through the rocks north and west of Moreland. Locatelli had a piece in mind. South of the rocks, where that same canal would come through, Fernando and Favro had already spoke to each other about acreages. The three of them would only be about three miles apart, and Locatelli had plans for starting a pasta company in Pocatello. They'd grow the wheat, a sort proper for making macaroni and spaghetti, Americans didn't understand that bread wheat was different.

Di Renzo had filed on a piece marked out south of Taber, he already walked four miles from it every morning and night, going to work at the Taber siding where the maintenance car was kept and then back. They knew the Rossis, both Frank and Charlie, hoped for an acreage southeast of DiRenzo. Martin Rossi, a shirttail relation, was figuring out how to file on another piece not far from them.

The Italians' body heat, minimal as it was, was enough to start thawing the retrieved remains. Small amounts of blood collected. At the Arco stop, Locatelli got off—he'd had enough. When the others realized he was quitting, they too jumped off. Hoagland and Chubbuck saw them walking away too late. "Goddammit!" Chubbuck yelled. "You goddamn worthless foreigners!"

©2025 Ralph Thurston