The railway and Marfa are forever intertwined. By Sterry Butcher
I
t began this summer, when we slept with our windows open. The first time it happened, I awoke in the middle of the night not knowing what I’d heard. It sounded like loony laughter from a dozen different souls, some of them clapping weird noisemakers, before their demented hilarity abruptly ceased. Moonlight streamed into the room. The Catahoula at the foot of the bed listened too, eyes shining and ears pricked. The train’s horn blew from the tracks a mile away, a winsome four-blast call: “I’m here; I’m here; here, I’m here.” Immediately the party erupted again, but now, with my wits about me, I recognized the troublemakers. Coyotes. Coyotes howling and yipping in answer to the train. Why these coyotes accompany the train’s wail, I do not know, but they’ve continued in the months since, always in the gloaming or cloaked by night, sometimes quite close to the house, which sets the Catahoula to lift a lip and rumble meaningfully. A strange, long string of interspecies communication has thus evolved: the train warning people of its approach, the coyotes calling to the train, the dog cautioning the coyotes that home, this place, is off limits, while I lay a comforting hand on the dog’s paw in the dark. Our place is at the edge of Marfa, where the highland plain rolls out beyond our kitchen door, but for many years we lived in the center of town. The railroad tracks bisect Marfa, and no one who lives here is far from them. The old house was one hundred yards from the tracks, and, as people do, we grew so used to the train and its horn that we didn’t always consciously hear it and certainly didn’t wake to it. “What the hell,” a wild-eyed first-time houseguest
Spring 2022
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