Beasts

Two wanderers, tossed adrift by the desperation of the Great Depression, encounter something strange and hellish on the benighted plains.

***Content warning: This episode deals with themes of familial abandonment, poverty, and genocide. Discretion advised.***

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Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

History can often be a great teacher – but like many great teachers, she often goes utterly unheeded. Those who grasp greedily for power and wealth seldom learn that both are wild beasts, and that any hold upon them is both tenuous and full of peril. And there are many who are not so privileged, and yet still believe themselves safe from the follies of the rich and the powerful, believe themselves insulated from the consequences of their machinations. Some are even foolish enough to believe that mere virtue is a shield from misfortune – and often those same people are prone to grossly overestimate their own virtue.

But sometimes, near the hour of midnight, under a bright moon, such delusions can be denuded down to their very bones – especially in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Twenty-One: Beasts.

(Sound of a bison grunting and bellowing)

NARRATOR

Papers has almost fallen asleep among the sacks of flour when the young man, who goes only by the moniker Breezy, shakes him awake to tell him the train is coming to a stop. Coming awake all at once, Papers stands and moves toward the door of the boxcar, slides it open just enough to peer out. A light snow peppers the rolling grassy hills and flats, and a bitter wind knifes through his ragged jacket. Papers slams the door shut once more and rubs his hands together.

Won’t be long now, he says. North Platte in a few hours, then on to Denver.

Breezy asks if there might be any work at their next stop. The kernel of fragile hope in the young man’s voice almost breaks Papers’s heart.

No, the older man replies. Not in this part of the country, not for the likes of us.

Vagrants, Breezy spits out the word as if it is laced with venom.

Papers nods, then says that all they’ll find out here is their next ride west. And maybe, if they’re really luck, he adds, a little something to eat.

Yeah? Breezy brightens a little.

Why not? Papers smiles. It is the breadbasket of America, after all. And Christmas is just around the corner too.

(Muted sounds of train on tracks fade in)

NARRATOR

He doesn’t bother to mention that it’ll be bitterly cold, that any food they scavenge will likely be both raw and frozen, and should they be found and tossed off before they reach Denver, it’ll be harder for two hobos to pass unnoticed in these small, distant Western towns where everyone knows everyone. He doesn’t see the need to spoil the young man’s mood any further.

Sometimes, he knows, hope is as essential as food in the belly. He’s seen men who’ve lost all of the former, seen them lie down on the rails and wait for their final train to come and take them to that destination from which there is no return.

The train slowly comes to a complete stop, and the two men wait in the dark for any sign that their boxcar will be inspected, unloaded, or uncoupled from the engine. The waiting is almost unbearable, both men crouched and poised to spring into motion should their ears tell them the worst. When, after about forty minutes, the car slowly begins to move again, both men exhale in relief.

Papers tells the boy to get some sleep, that he’ll take the rest of the night’s vigil. Breezy doesn’t even begin to protest, just lies atop the sacks and falls asleep almost at once. Gently, Papers removes some of many old newspapers that he collects and carries in his worn leather satchel, and which are his namesake, and spreads them over the sleeping lad as a makeshift blanket, before taking his usual post.

As he sits there against the boxcar door, feeling the rails disappearing away behind them, Papers tries not to picture the young man’s handsome, friendly face, tries not to feel that stir of longing which he can tell the other man does not reciprocate. It is this longing as much as the lack of prospects that led Papers to abandon his wife and their four children back in Ohio. And it is this longing, along with that shameful abandonment, that makes a hot black mass of guilt and self-loathing unspool in his guts whenever he thinks of it too long.

So he tries to distract himself by thinking of the childhood stories that are some small part of the manifold reasons he feels drawn westward, the stories of the uncle who had been a soldier and a bison hunter on the Plains. His uncle had told such wild stories, of thundering herds of buffalo so massive that you could fire a line of cannons into them and see no effect at all, of piles of skulls and skins as tall as buildings. And then there were the darker tales, tales of murder and bloodshed, and his uncle had talked so casually of killing the Native people of the Plains that it seemed he thought less of it than of his bison kills.

As a child, he had listened to these stories and thought of his uncle as a hero. Now, they seem to him very different. He has suffered the predations of men who feel superior to him, the railroad police and men rich enough to be insulated from the collapse of the economy, and men almost as desperate as he who will hire him and his like for the mere promise of a meal, and then refuse to pay when they’ve gotten what they wanted from him. 

Feeling sleep coming dangerously close to taking hold of him, he slides the door open just a crack again to let the rush of fresh, cold air invigorate him – but also to look out over these storied, emptied lands. Under the moonlight, they seem to him almost coy, the prairie and the scars of cultivation and settlement upon it teasing some mystery hidden just beneath the surface. And looking out upon that landscape, seeming ethereal under that pallid silver light, he wonders how many bones rest buried in the soil, under the grass and the grain. As they pass a row of distant hills, he almost imagines he can see a ghostly herd of bison running over it, hear the distant echoes of their innumerable titanic hooves.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Sometime later, Breezy awakes. Papers apologizes for opening the door, but Breezy says that’s not what woke him – he simply woke up of his own accord. He muses that he feels like he might have been having a very strange dream, but he can recall only fleeting emotional impressions of it, nothing coherent.

He seems to feel talkative, and Papers is happy to oblige. But when the conversation turns toward the rumor they encountered at the last jungle – or hobo camp – Papers cannot help but feel his mood sour a little.

Whether it is true or not, who can say, but it contained just enough unpleasant detail for Papers to feel uncomfortable with the story of the vagrant who preys upon his own, who gives men second, grinning red mouths in the night and steals what little they have.

True or not, it’s exactly the sort of story that will only ever travel by word of mouth. No newspaper would ever print it – no one cares what happens to penniless strangers in the dark. Most who are not themselves so desperate see men like him and Breezy as nothing more than vermin, better off dead.

Some have taken to calling the man the Grinning Jack – whether that is some reference to the old Jack of London, or something else entirely, Papers neither knows nor cares to know. He does not share Breezy’s dark fascination with the subject, so typical of the young that have not themselves yet experienced the worst horrors the world has to offer.

Gently, he tries to steer the conversation away toward another topic. It takes both time and patience on his part, but eventually he succeeds.

Yet for a long while afterward, resurfaced discomfort bleeds inward from the corners of his mind, reddening his thoughts and making him think of a dark face looming above him, nothing of it showing in the moonlight save the gleam of a too-wide grin.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

They switch trains in North Platte, just as dawn is about to break. The railyard workers – and the pair of police that stroll among them – are vigilant, but not vigilant enough. They manage to slip into another boxcar, this one loaded with bundles of paper.

As they settle in, Breezy makes a joke that Papers must feel right at home. Papers smiles good-naturedly, even though he has heard similar jabs a thousand times before.

Waiting for the engine to pull them out of North Platte and further west, Papers extracts the little bit of flour he pilfered from their last ride, and laments the fact that he can make nothing of it at the moment, having neither viable way to build a cooking fire or any other ingredients. Still in a jocular mood, Breezy tells him to put it away, that there’s more than enough white in the room already.

As their wait stretches into hours, the two men become somewhat nervous, wondering what the delay might be. They had thought the train was finished being shunted, that it looked near departure – any miscalculation on their part could prove disastrous. Being tossed from the train and having to find a harder road west would be the best they could hope for – time in the big house, broken bones and teeth, even an early grave, were just as likely.

Just as their nerves are about to snap, to drive them back out into the open and toward possible discovery, the train begins to roll slowly onward. Relieved, the men slip into an uneasy sleep, Breezy this time taking a seat with his back to the door so that it cannot be opened without them knowing it.

When Papers awakes again, his internal clock tells him that night has fallen again. Ready to take his turn at the watch, he moves toward Breezy, shakes him awake, and tells him to go make himself more comfortable in the warmer interior of the car, among the paper bundles. Nodding sleepily, the boy crawls away from the door and curls up among the cargo, huddling into his worn jacket.

Once more, Papers rolls the door open a mere crack, peering out into the darkness. The landscape has changed, growing even flatter now, miles of grassland swaying and rippling with the frigid November night wind.

Papers begins to think of his uncle once more, of his tales. Sometimes he’s wondered how much of those stories was exaggeration, and how much was simply relation of a world that no longer exist – a world that men like his uncle destroyed beyond all recall.

The train passes a herd of lowing cattle, and for the briefest of instants, Papers thinks it might be some remnant of the old roaming buffalo before he understands what he is looking at. The moon has passed briefly behind a cloud, plunging the world into a momentarily deeper darkness.

When it reemerges, the cattle are gone, and there is nothing but sprawling grassland once more, not even the tiny twinkling lights of a distant town.

But then, Papers thinks, he does see something.

At first, he thinks it’s only another train, rolling along on a distant, parallel track. But there’s something about it that seems utterly unfamiliar, and sets him ill at ease. His own train begins to curve slightly south, bringing it closer to the parallel track. And then he begins to see what has unsettled him – the train is too pale beneath the moon, gleaming almost white, as does the track beneath it. And as they draw ever nearer, he begins to see the details of its construction.

The other train is not composed of metal and wood, but from innumerable bones: skulls and femurs, ribcages and spines. Some are bison, but others are clearly human. A few are antelope, or wolf, or coyote, cougar – even bird bones, passenger pigeons, hawks and eagles and owls. But by far, bison and human are the best represented.

Behind him, Breezy awakes once more, again seeming to feel garrulous, and he begins to speak, unconscious of the vision before his companion, about his own grandfather who helped to build the very railroads they ride upon. He speaks with such pride of the man, that Papers hesitates to even mention what he’s seeing, and a part of him even fears that if he does mention it, the younger man won’t see it – that it’s only a phantasm of his own mind. Being a penniless vagrant is bad enough; being a penniless vagrant with an unhealthy mind would be far too much for him to bear.

So he absent-mindedly listens to the young man while he looks out at the approaching monstrosity. The engine, or head, or whatever it might be on such an otherworldly construction, belches forth smoke and fire – but it neither looks nor smells like the usual smoke of an engine. It smells like singed hair and burning flesh, or ruin and death and terror; it smells like the end of the world, Papers thinks. And now he sees that a horrible light has begun to glow from the eyes sockets of the many, many skulls, like a ruddy fire has kindled within the empty crania.

(Muted sounds of train on tracks fade out)

NARRATOR

Breezy, seeming to notice his distraction, stops speaking of his grandfather, and asks him what’s wrong.

Nothing, Papers says, but Breezy seems to hear the lie, stands and approaches to peer out over Papers’s shoulder. From the sharp intake of breath by his ear, Papers knows that Breezy can see it too.

What is it? he asks, voice fragile as a rotten fingerbone.

I don’t know, the older man replies.

But some part of him believes that might be a lie. Perhaps no great crime occurs without birthing something new. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction – he’s heard that somewhere. And perhaps great death and misery and destruction, pure malice, can birth something unprecedented, something every bit as monstrous as its progenitor.

Now it is close enough for them to see that a few of the skeletons are reassembling. Two full and intact human skeletons rise atop the others, and raise their hands, waving at the hobos, beckoning for the living men to join them only the train.

Slowly, purposefully, Papers slides the door closed.

What should we do? Breezy asks.

Papers takes a long moment before responding that they should simply continue west as quickly as they can.

But he wonders if that train will disappear when they’ve left the Plains behind them, or if indeed they will ever leave the Plains. He wonders if they have somehow stumbled into hell, and are doomed to ride strange railways forever.

Outside, the great strange train beside their own offer up a thunderous voice, like the roar of every thing that ever had a throat and died full of anguish and purest rage.

The moon shines down like a too-wide grin in a shadow-shrouded face. 

(Soft, sinister music)

(Sound of a monstrous train bellowing)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]