I’m finding this edit pass of my book to be extremely hard. When I first started this book I thought I’d be lucky to come up with an acceptable number of words for a novel. Turns out I have the opposite problem. I ended up with 129,000 words, which I cut to 124,000 words but that’s still too long, so in this, I’m hoping my final pass, I want to cut to under 100,000, but I’m not optimistic about achieving that goal. For a while, I think I’m doing a good job, I think I have it mastered. This I should keep, this I should cut, clear as day. But I finished my Part I and only managed to cut about 2100 words, and so far in Part II I’m not doing much better.
One of my main characters, Luke, is actually based on my father. He was a character in real life, with a past he never fully revealed to his family. He was a morally upright Christian man, and there was nothing shady there, just something in his life before he was saved he didn’t feel comfortable telling, something he thought would not be a good influence on his children, something that he gave up once he became a Christian like his dancing, or placing a few bets on the horses. Once he told me that he worked as a Carnival show barker. I ask him what the show was, and he said — You don’t need to know that. So, of course I assumed it was a girlie show. I don’t consider that cringe worthy but that’s the kind of thing he wouldn’t tell.
He had a hard life. His father died when he was a baby and his mother, after being ill for a while, when he was about 15. He quit school in the 6th grade and worked in a lumberyard to earn money to support her. When she died, he felt so lost, alone, and cut adrift with no immediate family that he took to the road, hopping trains, traveling around the country, working odd jobs and never settling. He developed a wanderlust that he later found nearly impossible to tame.
In this fictional scene in 1948 Luke, his wife Grace, and their three children — Carl 10, Darla 6, and Nancy 4 – are in Vega Texas temporarily stranded waiting for their car to be fixed so they can continue their journey from Oklahoma to California. Luke answers a few questions from his family about train hopping.
They are sitting under the shade of a towering cedar elm, facing north toward the two-block long façade of Vega’s small downtown area.
Courthouse Lawn and Old Downtown, Vega Tx
Tumbleweed Excerpt — Train hopping Talk on Courthouse Lawn, Vega Tx.
Grace looks over at Luke and says, “This is a pretty nice little town.”
“Yes, it is. I remember being here in the early thirties.”
“Why?”
“Passing through, looking for work. Hopped off a freight train, the Rock Island Line, when it slowed down to come to a stop.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Grace asks.
“Not much. You have to know how to land, and you wait until the train is only going about five miles an hour. You look for a grassy spot and then jump and roll if you need to.”
“Sounds scary to me.”
“It’s catching the train on the fly that’s scary.”
Carl asks, “How do you do that?”
“Don’t even think about it. It’s too dangerous. I’ve known people that have lost legs or been cut in half catching on the fly. I wouldn’t even think about doing that now.”
Darla scrunches up her face, “Cut in half, ooh. Did it kill them?”
“Of course, it killed them.” Carl says, “What do you think? But, Daddy, how do you do it?”
“Well, you’ve seen those rails on the side of trains at the end of some of the cars, that look like a ladder?”
“Yeah.”
“You run alongside the train after it starts, reach up and grab a rail, usually about the third one up, whichever one is just above your head, and jump, pull yourself up, put your foot on the bottom rail, then climb up on top of the train, or pull yourself up onto an open car. But, if your foot misses the bottom rail, the force of the wind whipping around and under the train can suck you under, and you can be run over by the train wheels.”
“Ooh, that’s awful, but that wouldn’t happen to me. I bet I could do it.”
“No son, don’t you ever even try. Besides, you can’t do that now. The railroads are too strict. The Bulls will shoot you nowadays.”
“Bulls can’t shoot,” Nancy says and laughs.
Luke laughs too. “Railroad Police. That’s what we called them – Bulls.”
They sit in silence for a bit then Grace asks, “Did you find any work around here back then?”
“Yes,” Luke says, “fixing fences at a ranch north of here, but, I tell you, that was a tiresome job, and the barren countryside was tiresome too. There was absolutely nothing but open plains as far as you could see. Just looking at it gave me an empty feeling.”
“Sounds lonely,” Grace says.
“It was. After a while, it just ate at my soul; I got so restless. I got a yearning to leave that I couldn’t get past. One morning I had the wanderlust so bad I hiked back into Vega; caught a train out that same day.
I welcome any and all comments. The only thing I ask is don’t tell me something that equates to “it Sucks” without telling me why and maybe giving me a constructive suggestion about how to cure the suckiness.
Thanks so much,
JoAnn Wilburn
Thank you.