or from Nemadji Elementary, they rode close to each other, the proximity occurring more often when he had time between trains—for the tracks at M.P. 15.9 are only a few steps farther from the house than from the highway. To Joe Rubin what did it matter that sometimes there was a woman driving parallel to him at the same speed he was going? Since the old neighborhood of Jews on Connors’ Point had vanished, he thought there was no one worth noticing. His people had intermarried or moved away—everyone but the track inspector, who’d put off marriage to care for his parents. When his father died, the synagogue closed; the remaining old people went to Adas Israel in Duluth. Right before his mother died, the boarded-up Hebrew Brotherhood Synagogue in Superior (where his parents once had to reserve seats during High Holidays because of the large turnout of people) was set on fire. Over and over in the last weeks of her life, his mother said to Joe, “This isn’t how it should end.” As if to support her claim, her burial left the Hebrew Cemetery filled to capacity.
Busy as he was, Joe Rubin didn’t often go to visit his parents’ graves, and there was nothing left to see of the synagogue.
He concerned himself with a different kind of particulars now. He’d become a detective of sorts. At work he carried with him a small book. In some dreary northern place, when he got out of the truck to stretch, he compared pictures of animal tracks in the book to tracks he saw in ditches and fields, or sometimes running along or between the railroad tracks. Sometimes these mammal tracks made exquisite designs. Magnified, the smallest of them—shrew tracks—looked like hands with long, crooked fingers growing sharp and thin at the end. He learned that “long-tailed shrews frequently leave a tail mark on their trail, which is barely over one-inch wide.” During the course of his investigation, he read in Mammals of the Superior National Forest that “red fox prints appear as a line of prints as if the animal were walking along a string. A fox track is roughly circular and 1.5–2 inches in diameter. In soft snow where detail cannot be seen, their tracks appear as a line of round depressions.”
Sometimes he confused mammal tracks with the tracks made by birds’ claws. The way they went out over the fields, on out into the distance, all these (if you pretended) could be the tracks of people like the wandering inspector. The variety of mice living in the area presented problems in track identification, too. Above the snow and tunneling beneath it, they left an artistic network Joe Rubin got on his knees to observe. What was so unusual about his kneeling in snow? Joe wondered. Old-time railroad workers broke out a pint of brandy or a couple of miniatures of whiskey or vodka to keep them company. At least what Joe Rubin did endangered no one. Kneeling in his brown jacket and insulated pants, he looked as if he were praying as he searched for the animal tracks, which, to him, seemed to represent the Diaspora of the Jews.
As he was doing this searching that resembled praying one afternoon when the schools celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and when he himself waited for a taconite train to pass, a voice startled him. The trackbed, the tracks, the gray signal masts looked especially forlorn. All morning a biting wind ducked low over the fields. Now this voice—“You grow to be like the company you keep.”
Turning, he saw a woman in the middle of Number 2 track.
She said it again in what he thought must be Polish, “You become like the company you keep . . . Z kim przestajesz takim się stajesz.”
She walked down the slight pitch in the road, crossed the highway, and went into her house, wondering, the teacher, why she hadn’t walked toward the river on her day off. She sat a half-hour in her coat and gloves pondering it.
Now that he had seen her, she wouldn’t catch him so deep in thought again.
When he heard her call to the rural mail carrier one afternoon, “Yes, it’s a nice day,” several months had passed. He’d traveled hundreds of miles round-trip from Superior to Chub Lake. He’d seen the spring sun erase mouse and hare tracks in the snow. He’d even noticed willows along the route turning yellow. Their leaves would appear in a month.
Two nights in February, on the other hand, she’d stayed at school for open house. One night in March, she had drunk too much Irish coffee, finding herself staring at the M.P. 15.9 sign. Another night that month, she had reread all her husband’s letters, whispering “Jerzy” in Polish.
In April, when the wind is sharp (wind that sounds like her husband’s name), then in the shelter of ditches bloom delicate cowslips, which her husband had called marsh marigolds. He’d ask in letters from Buffalo, New York, or Lorain, Ohio, “Are the marsh marigolds blooming, Sofia?”
“The cowslips, don’t you mean?” she’d answer, jokingly.
He never bothered to correct her. A wheelsman on the ore boat William F. Sutter, he drowned in a Lake Michigan storm when the marsh marigolds were blooming back home. As a widow she learned that the chaliced, yellow flowers with heart-shaped leaves really are called marsh marigolds as often as cowslips. Each year for the ten years since her husband’s death, they bloomed. Each April she was sad.
She didn’t know the track inspector’s name, but on her way to school, she was aware of his truck on the tracks paralleling the highway. She knew from a lifetime of learning important and unimportant facts that James J. Hill, the Empire Builder, had brought the railroad through here in the late 1800s, that her dear mother came from a part of Poland now called Silesia, that Douglas County has high unemployment, that a bulbul is a Persian bird, that the moisture content of hay in silos has to be checked to be sure that the hay doesn’t combust, that cowslips are marsh marigolds, and that during the Middle Ages, Poland was a haven for Jews. She knew this last like she knew what a trapezoid is—or a parallelogram (her husband had accumulated compasses, rulers, protractors). What she knew about Catholic Poland and the Jews, that miscellaneous fact, would matter to Joe Rubin and the teacher. Now in a gusty April, however, she sat in the place where roads cross, the lonely four corners where, with nothing stopping it, the wind sweeps along without regard for anything.
When she was thinking of the track inspector—which she did at odd moments, happy to know that if he was at M.P. 15.9 then her house would be safe from intruders—the wanderer was thinking of her.When he had time, he’d surprise her, stand at the crossroads, wave to her. What did she mean saying he would become like the company he kept when he had no company? He imagined he saw those who really mattered, the people of the Diaspora, in the winter prints and tracks, in the forest shadows when the snow left, in the brown grass of fields, in the pictures on his walls. He could trace them back to Noah. His ancestors had remained four hundred and thirty years in Egypt. Such was the company Joe Rubin kept! If he hadn’t found a home and still wandered the earth, enduring hardship and insult, such was his lot, he told himself as he radioed the dispatcher for a track warrant.
The one thing Sofia Stepan did with delight was to grow a garden out of sight of the railroad tracks and the county trunk highway. Except for this garden, she in no other way indulged herself. Though the garden stood in sunlight all afternoon on the south side of the house, by six o’clock—no matter the warmth of the day—it was cool and quiet. There she grew aster, yarrow, phlox, black-eyed Susan, hollyhock, butterfly bush. Coreopsis and lantana were not unknown to her. From flower to flower fluttered cabbage butterflies, mourning cloaks, monarchs, swallowtails. One afternoon she counted sixty-five butterflies. Sofia thought the butterflies could impart something of their beautiful delicacy to you in proportion to how much peace and strength you needed after a decade of disappointments.
Though Joe Rubin hadn’t seen her garden, he thought of the woman at the crossroads often. In May, convinced that the language she spoke was Polish and that she appeared to like seeing him at the
