Louis’s Reviews > Testimony: The United States, 1885-1915: Recitative > Status Update

Arnold heard the blowing of the whistle:
the train was coming.
The only light was that of a small lamp
behind the shutters of the station,
and it gave a best
a weak light on the platform.

The night was dark and cloudy.
In trying to pass from platform to the ground where passengers boarded the train,
he could not see the steps that led from the platform:
slipped
and fell.

There were three on the locomotive:
the flagman, the fireman, and the engineer.
About two hundred yards from the man -
stone-deaf -
the flagman commenced ringing the bell;

within about a hundred yards
the engineer commenced sounding his whistle:
thirty or forty short blows.

The man did not get off the track or look around.

The child was about eight years old.
For some misconduct or other,
his father stripped him naked, threw him on the floor,
and beat him with a piece of rubber pipe,
crying, “Die, God damn you!”
He tried to dash the child against the brick surface of the chimney,
and flung the child again heavily on the floor
and stamped on him.

Jim went to his house
and got a pair of plow lines
and then into the stable
and put one on the jack and led the jack out and tied him to a fence;
and put the noose in the other line around the head of the jack
and began to pull.
The jack began to make a right smart noise.

Its dead body was found next morning,
fifteen or twenty feet from the stable door;
the neck, just back of the head,
badly bruised.