The
Murderous Steam Shovel
By ALLISON V. HARDING
You know those stories—you've read them—where people set things down for the record in notebooks. I don't do that. This story is in my mind. I go over it detail by detail and I can remember the whole business. And the remembering assures me that I am not crazy, that all this did happen. People who have seen things and had things happen that other folks don't experience are called crazy. It's the easiest way—and the most reassuring!
So I go over and over the story in my mind, and I say, Vilma—that's my name—here's just what has happened to you from the beginning, and because it's all so clear and distinct—you're not crazy! It all started with that construction job just above the Northville Valley country, or maybe it all started when I married Ed Meglund.
Ed had always been in construction. He had the build for it, big hands, big frame, two hundred pounds of muscle and sinew on it, not so much between the ears. But you know the song, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"! Even I, Vilma, and his wife, wouldn't exactly have ever called Ed good. The outfit he'd worked for was Greene Construction and as Ed had never had much education, they gave him the jobs you could tell he could do just by looking at him, driving a ballast truck or digging or shoveling or using his strength and weight somehow.
He made a fair salary and we lived in Northville pretty comfortably. But I remember the night he came home and said they had a shovel on the job now, a big new tractor steam shovel, he told me. Ed's hard blue eyes lit up and I could tell the way a wife can without any speaking that what Ed Meglund wanted to do more than anything in the world was to run that shovel. That's a better job, of course, with more money and getting looked up to.
I never asked very many questions of Ed because he doesn't answer unless it pleases him, but I could tell from his face at home nights that he wasn't getting any closer to that old steam shovel. One Sunday when we were driving around up in the Northville Valley country, he toured me past the construction site and pointed.
"There he is, Vilma."
Well, one steam shovel looks about the same to me as another with those caterpillar feet and the operator's house and then the scoop that comes out so, you know. A woman never sees the same in them as a man does. Ed was just bubbling over.
"Isn't he a beaut!"
I read the letters that ran across the coping near the roof. Greene Construction Company, I made out.
"We call him Big Mike."
"That's a name for a derrick," I sniffed. "Howdya get that?"
"Oh, I dunno," replied Ed. "But isn't that a beaut!" he sighed.
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