Visitors packed the platform as I walked toward the station, and the new stationmaster had the bell up on a little draped pedestal by the doors with a card in front of it.
The card said HISTORIC BELL, CIRCA 1920. That is what you write when you have not asked anybody.
He had a schedule to keep and a crowd to move and at ten o’clock he rang it, and he rang it wrong. Four fast strikes and a flourish, like a man calling children to supper.
You could feel the platform change. Two hundred tourists noticed nothing. About forty locals went quiet, and Ada Sifuentes, who is ninety-one and comes to the festival in a wheelchair, put her hand on her son’s arm.
Because that bell has a pattern. Two, then one, then two. It is not decoration and it is not mine and it never was. It is in the book.
The depot keeps an operating rulebook. Not a museum thing, a working one, revised in 1998 when the excursion line came back, and every man who has stood on that platform in a uniform has signed the front of it. Rule 14 is one paragraph long.
Two strikes, pause, one strike, pause, two strikes: departure of a train carrying the remains or the family of a railroad man. All hands on the platform will stop work and stand still until the train is out of sight. This signal is not to be used for any other purpose and is not to be rung by a person who does not know what it means.
Ada buried her husband Ramon in 1994. He worked the Silverton line thirty-one years and went out of Durango on the ten o’clock in a baggage car with his family in the coach behind him, and my predecessor rang two-one-two, and every man on that platform stopped and stood.
I have rung it that way nine times in twenty-nine years. Two were for men I ate lunch with.
I did not make a scene. I waited until the crowd moved off toward the roundhouse, asked the new man for ten minutes, got the rulebook out of the drawer under the counter, which he had never opened, and let him read Rule 14 himself.
He is thirty-three, he came from a hotel group in Denver, and nobody told him a thing. That is not entirely his fault, and I said so.
He rewrote the card that afternoon. It says what the bell is, what two-one-two means, and that visitors may ring the standard departure signal and only that.
In November he asked me to teach him the pattern properly, out on the platform, nobody around. Took him forty minutes to get the pauses right. He was careful about it, which is all I ever wanted from anybody.
Then in February he called me at home at six in the morning to tell me Vernon Pike had died, and to ask if I would come down and ring it, because he did not feel he had earned it yet.
I rang it. Ada came. The platform stood still.
Anybody can pick a thing up and call it a prop. Whether it is a prop depends entirely on whether somebody still knows what it is for.