That mirror, that’s one I hate to let go, he said. That was my daughter’s the whole time she was growing up. It probably seen her more than me-everything from a baby up to twenty years old. Sometimes I wonder if all that might still be inside it. Got to make an impression on a thing, reflecting the same person every day.

Edgar swiped a rag along the glass and peered in. The mirror’s surface was dusty and the silver had been eaten away in islands of black. He waited for ghostly afterimages to form: a baby in its mother’s arms, a girl brushing her hair, a young woman twirling blithely in a prom dress. But all he saw was his own reflection leaning up toward him.

There’s no one there, he replied.

Oh, said the man. Well, I thought maybe.

The best way to keep the man talking, Edgar had learned, was to stay quiet and wait. He leaned the mirror back against the wagon and began collecting the broken china that lay around it and dropping the pieces into a chipped ceramic pan.

Whole years went by I wasn’t so happy here, the old man said. Most of the late 1950s in particular. The Eisenhower years. Bad times.

You were a farmer?

Yup.

Didn’t you like farming?

Oh, gosh, I guess I hated it sometimes. Do you know how early you have to get up to milk cows? You get to ’em late, they try to step on your feet. They see you with the stool and the bucket at ten in the morning and you better be walking directly down the center of the aisle, because sure enough a ten-pound hoof is gonna come striking out. They’ll kick you squarely in the nuts if they think they got a shot at it. I know one fella it happened to. He quit farming and moved to Chicago soon as he could walk again.

Edgar thought about this.

Was his name Schultz, by any chance?

Naw, one of the Krauss boys, the old man said. Anyway, just out of fear, if nothing else, you get up when it’s pitch dark and they’re still a little sleepy. You milk until your hands ache. Then you shovel out the stalls, which is no great treat. I was always amazed at just how much poop come out of a cow. Little hay goes in, huge cowpies come out. How does that happen?

I don’t know much about cows, Edgar signed, after a long pause.

And that’s just the work before breakfast, the man continued. Then there’s planting and harvesting. Things breaking down. Calves birthed in big blue placentas with veins thick as your finger. Mastitis. Worms. You ever seen a cow magnet? Unbelievable. Looks like a giant metal bullet. You shove it right down the cow’s throat and a year or two later it comes out the other end covered with nails, bolts, hunks of wire. I know a man found his watch that way. We cut silage right up to the time snow flew, wondering if we were going to kill everything by putting it up wet. Fences broken, cows wandering in the woods. Some nights I’d come to the house so tired I didn’t know if I could lift a fork to my mouth.

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 a 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.

What would you have done if you could have quit?

I’d’ve been a railroad engineer. Best job in the world. You turn a crank and ten thousand tons of freight starts to move. You ever been inside a locomotive?

No.

I was up in Duluth once and I went to the rail yards just to look at locomotives and I got to talking with a fellow and he knew one of the engineers walking by. He says, Hey Lem, come on over here. And this fellow-he’s dressed in overalls and a conductor’s cap just like you might see on television-he walks over. This man says, here’s a gentleman never seen the inside of a locomotive. Is that right, Lem says, and he walks to a telephone and makes a call to someone. Maybe the trainmaster, I don’t know. Then he hangs up. Well, come on, he says. We start walking down the platform, past all the hopper cars and tankers and cabooses and he says over his shoulder, whatcha wanna see? Steamer or diesel? Steamer, I says. And he leads me to engine number six-six-one-five-the number was painted in big letters on the side. It was one of them big ones, cowcatcher like a bushy mustache, covered with bolts the size of your head, drive rods thick as your leg. Black, like it was carved out of a solid block of ore. He just points and names things. Air reservoir. Cylinder. Sandbox. Steam dome. Injectors. Drive wheel. Then he scrambles up a ladder and motions me up, and we stand inside the cab. He keeps naming things off. Firehole. Reverser. Regulator. Throttle. That engine was cold and dead while we was standing in it-Lem said it was in for repairs-but even like that, a person could feel the power in it.

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. Nineteen fifty-five. 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 a person, you can’t miss it.

Edgar cautiously let his eyes drift over until the old farmer registered in his peripheral vision. He was standing with his chin dropped to his chest, lost in thought.

Now here’s the thing, the man said, after a long time had passed. When I sat in that seat and leaned 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 steam 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 mow roof was leaking.