I AM KEST;

If you didn’t like it, why didn’t you quit?

To do what? Wasn’t anything I knew better than farming. I was cursed, that was the problem. Just because I didn’t like it didn’t mean I wasn’t good at it. I could call the weather, for instance. I’d walk outside one spring day and think, now we can plant. Down at the feed store they’d say, George, you’re going to get frozen out. You put in too early and you’re going to lose three quarters of it. But I had a sense. Always got it right, too; even if snow fell, it was a dusting. Farmers around here started planting as soon as they heard I’d bought seed.

That doesn’t sound like a curse to me.

It’s a curse all right, you’re just too young to know about that sort of thing. To be good at something you don’t care about? It isn’t even unusual. Plenty of doctors hate medicine. Most of your businessmen lose their appetite at the sight of receipt. It’s a common thing. Old Bert down to town, he despises that grocery store. Says the routine bores him out of his mind: ordering, stocking, worrying about produce going bad. One day he told me he dreams about tomatoes more than he dreams about his own wife.

Why would you have done if you could have quit?

I’d’ve been a railroad engineer. Best job in the world.

…
The man’s voice took on a wistful note.
If there was ever a moment I was tempted to just walk away from it all it was then. I was fifty years old. I stood there for a while, soaking it all up. Then Lem tells me to sit in the engineer’s seat and lean out the window. You’d have to wear a cap and goggles if we were really running, he says. There’d be a stream of hot cinders going past the window. You know what happens if you’re dumb enough to lean out uncovered, he says. Then he bends down and points to the right side of his face. It’s all pocked with little burn scars, like old craters there in his skin. That’s what, he says. But he was grinning like anything. I almost expected to see cinders stuck in his teeth. And from the look on his face I could see he was one of the lucky ones, one of those people who like doing what they’re good at. That’s rare. When you see that in person, you can’t miss it.

…
Now here’s the thing, the man said, after a long time had passed. When I sat in that seat and learned out the window into the rain and imagined that stream of red-hot cinders going past my face like fireflies, watching a bridge coming up, which was my lifelong dream, do you know what I thought about?

Your farm?

That’s right. There I was, sitting in a stream locomotive, one of the most beautiful engines ever devised. It was magnificent- big and heavy and it made me think of a giant laid over sleeping. Ever since I was a boy I’d thought running a train’d be the most amazing thing ever- especially out in the open countryside, with the throttle screaming wide open, the whole world split by those two rails you’re hurtling down. I could feel it- even in that cold, dead engine- I could feel exactly what that would be like. And when I leaned out into the rain, and the engineer told me about the sparks flying and he showed me his face, all I could think about was all the mud in the pasture, what cranky bitches the cows were going to be in the morning if they didn’t get to pasture. And whether the roof was leaking.