This essay is a creative story on Sarty's life twenty years after his father's death from his attempt at burning De Spain's barn. It recounts how he felt after his father's death and his current job as a train conductor kicking vagrants like his dad out of the trains. He sits down on his bed and remembers what his pa did the first day he came to the plantation and even the time he defended his pa in court.
¶ … surplus appropriated in toto by the landlord class from the sharecropping peasant, via both rental share and 'dues', was such as to drive the peasant family to the barest minimum consistent with its reproduction as a cultivating unit." (Byres 28)
The roads of Maine cover the once grand forests as a young man makes his way home. His whistle jutting out of his right coat pocket and his conductor's hat placed over his neatly combed hair, he walks quickly to a house nearby. In his left coat pocket is his round watch he picked up at a lcoal flea market and on his pants is the pin left by his wife at 5am. Sarty, now thirty, enters his home from a long day of work.
"Honey, can you imagine a man, round pap's age, was trying to get on the rail carts?" said Sarty to his wife Martha.
"You mean them ol' vagrants who keep hoppin on for a free ride?" asked Martha.
"Yeah, this is the seventh time this week I dun caught them and they just keep coming back for more. I feel sorry for'em but the manager'll fire me if I don't kick'em out."
"Do what you have to for this family. Blood's thicker than water and you gotta watch out for me and the girls. They need you to put food on the table."
"It burns me up inside that people keep doin stuff that's bad for'em even if they know they'll get in trouble." Sarty said as he hung up his jacket on the coat rack.
"I've been doin this for near ten years and not once did I ever get a break from it. I guess I musta kicked off the train near one thousand bums and vagrants. It makes me so mad I tell you what."
"Oh but honey, don't you want to relax and sip some tea. I got it boling. Let me pour some for you."
Martha went to the kitchen to fetch the tea when Sarty decided to go upstairs to his bedroom to look at the frame sitting on the fireplace. It held inside a tattered piece of clothig wth blackened blood and gun shot residue.
"Why'd you have to go and do that pap? Blood s'posed to be thicker than anything, but you're head was thicker than that de Spain and fellow and look at what you've become now, a distant memory. I told you to let go of those barns. Why'd you have to go and make me choose..."
Martha entered the bedroom and handed Sarty the tea.
"Are you thinkin bout your dad?" asked Martha
"Yeah, those stupid bums I caught today told me they were share croppers and lost all their money. They said some nigger took their jobs and they needed to go else where that's why they decided to hop on in the train."
"What does that have to do with your daddy?"
"Heh, one of them even had cow dung on his left shoe. Did you know my dad enterted one of them great plantations and rubbed dung all over one of their rugs?"
"No Sarty, you ain't tell me anything like that."
"That's cause the day he died I never looked back. I decided that my momma, my aunt, my brothers, my dad, they were all part of the past and I was headed towards the future."
"Weren't you scared of being on your own? You were only ten."
"Well, the owner of the plantation, De Spain, felt bad for killin my dad for startin the fire, and decided to pay for me to go stay at one of his servant's quarters. It was there I spent the next couple years learnin to read and write and became obsessed wth trains."
"Ha, I remember. The first time I met you, you was playing with a minitature toy train in school."
"Yeah, we were 13 ronud that time and I though you were the prettiest girl in town. Funny how we got married at 16. You sure were svelte back then."
"I'm svelte now Sarty, lean like a grasshopper."
"More like a pig..."
"What did you say Sarty De Spain?"
"Nothin. Anyway, I saw my mom the other day."
"How is she farin?"
"She's alright. De Spain gave her a job cleaning the house with that black butler. My aunt worked in the house too and my brother got up to no good stealing from local stores."
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