Last Train to Copperfield

On the morning The Waiting Room opens, Addie Fennimore hangs her grandfather's brass lamp over the door of the ticket-museum cafe she has built out of a dead depot in Copperfield, Montana. By noon a company man named Nathaniel Cross steps off a test train with Document No. 7 in his folio: the Absaroka & Western has filed to abandon the Copperfield Branch, sixty-two miles of steel between Marlowe Junction and the end of the line. Unless the Interstate Commerce Commission says otherwise, the last scheduled train runs Sunday, December 14, at 8:40 p.m.

Addie knows railroads from the inside. She held a dispatcher's desk at Marlowe for six years, until the night of January 21, 1957, when a dark signal at Bitterreek put two trains on the same mile of main line and the company wrote the failure into her file instead of its own. Now she runs coffee and pie in the depot her grandfather kept, a building that smells of coal smoke, kerosene, and half a century of varnished fir, and the timetable she carries in her head is the one part of her the railroad never managed to void.

The town has eighty days and one weapon her grandfather left behind: paper. A petition that opens with 212 names. A locked drawer that opens with a key hidden in the lamp's base, and inside it the string charts of the Blizzard of 1949, when four stranded mainline trains came up the branch and Copperfield fed 280 passengers for four days. A hand-lettered supper ticket, pinned to a wall of four thousand tickets, signed by a girl who still owes the town a hot supper, paid in full, sort of. And a waybill box that says the branch carried 688 carloads in 1957, against the 342 in the company's own file.

Cross came to measure the line for the grave. He stays for coffee, then for checkers, then for something neither of them names, a company man who has signed two branch closures and is deciding whether Copperfield becomes the third. But up in Marlowe, Vice President Curtis Mabry is closing the branch for its rail, promised to the Harlow Loop in the spring, and the order-wire reel that could prove what happened on the night of January 21 has been voided, re-issued, and shelved where nobody was supposed to read it.

Then Teapot Pass closes early, a nine-year-old needs a surgeon ninety-one miles away, and the embargoed branch moves once more at 11:05 p.m. without anybody's permission. What a railroad is worth has never once appeared in a timetable. It shows up on snowed-in platforms, in ledgers of babies born behind a ticket window, in a supper ticket a town never tore up, and in the hands of people who keep carbons of everything.

The hearing is coming to Copperfield. The last train is coming to Copperfield. Paper remembers what companies forget, and December 14 arrives at 8:40 p.m., with a whole town planning to be on the platform when it does.