Normally, safety was paramount, but tonight, speed was of the essence.

Word had come via telegraph that people in the small town of Cloquet were dying in the storm, freezing to death in makeshift shelters that served as the town. A great fire had sped up the state to engulf most of the towns north of Branch during the summer. It had been a wall of flames that sent plumes of smoke miles into the summer air, a wall of death that had killed many of the farmers who settled the area. Yet many survived, taking comfort from the living and burying the dead.

People had seen enough tragedy during the last year, too much to accept the fate of the victims in Cloquet. They hurriedly gathered supplies from the towns to the south of the burn scarred land. Loaded on this train, the tracks cleared, and Karl given the burden of delivering the rescue. It was both an honor and a curse. He could not afford to make a mistake or people would die.

A black man made the weight of this burden worse; it was abhorrent for Karl to place trust in a creature that had until recently been a slave. Silas was incapable of the thought and dexterity needed for this night’s work. Despite this handicap, Karl resolved to push his train to the limit. Challenging the bitter cold of artic air settled over the land and made metal brittle and trees explode.

Silas moved to the other side of the cramped cab and cleared his own windows. His actions were deliberate and hard, as if he was practicing a method to kill Karl. The engineer watched his fire-man with suspicion. After a few minutes of clearing ice, Silas silently handed a clean rag to Karl, then ducked under the tarp once again to check the coal.

The icy wind seemed to suck the air from Silas’s lungs. He deliberately drew air in thru his nose and pulled the kerchief tied around his neck up and over his nose. Breathing this cold air too quickly could freeze a man’s lungs and Silas was not about to give Karl that kind of satisfaction; telling a story for the rest of his life of how the dumb black man killed himself on a winter night by breathing.

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The Civil War and freeing of the slaves had not done a damn thing to change the life of blacks. They still carried the load and performed the tasks no one else wanted to do, or no white man wanted to lower himself to do.

His father was the son of a slave, the son of a man who had died trying to escape north during the war. The Moore’s had worked harder than their neighbors to gain the dream white people accepted so casually, freedom to exist without an overseer. Stupid comments came from ignorant people, angry people who saw the Moore’s as a threat; that the color of Sila’s skin might taint the community, or he might not be capable of existing with intelligent whites. What if he was a criminal risk, a deviant or a molester?

These thoughts flowed through Silas’s mind as he bent to the task at hand and checked each of the tarp tie downs with a firm tug. It was quick work, but Silas found he was unwilling to reenter the locomotive cab immediately. Instead, he climbed to the open flat of the coal car and stood upon the top of the water tank in the full wind of the train’s passage. Turning to face the wind, Silas raised his arms and leaned into the gale.

People like Karl Tiegue never changed; they remained opposed to humanity in all its glory and suspicious of any change to the world; it was enough to make a man scream. It was enough to make Silas want to kill men like Karl, and it was a burden to know there were always more idiots to suffer.

Their creativity only matched the hateful nature of the whites dedicated to fashioning fresh forms of outrage. Their capacity for racism had no end.

The cold seeped into Silas, but he stood firm against the wind, opening his eyes and searching the night for an answer. Smoke from the locomotives stack flowed past to his right, forced aside by the crosswind. How could he deal with a man like Karl?

Silas knew he was smarter than that piece of shit in the engineer’s seat, but there was nothing he could do about it. If there had not been the lives for more than one hundred people at stake, he would have fought the…what? Silas shook his head and smiled to himself as he bent down and climbed out of the full force of the wind. It was nineteen oh four, but it might as well be eighteen sixty-five. Nothing had changed and tonight was not a night for risks.