Buttons
Admiral Biscuit
The train slowly worked its way up the mountain pass, struggling against the grade and the snow-slicked rails.
Spuds perked his ears as a whistle signal sounded from the front of the train, followed by a reply from behind a few seconds later. They’d picked up a pusher locomotive at the bottom of the pass, to help shove the mixed freight up the hill.
His accommodations were functional, that was the best that could be said for the superannuated passenger car. It was an old design, half given to baggage, and coupled one car back from the locomotive—that first car was a Royal Mail car, complete with a perfunctory RPO aboard, although he guessed that the mail clerk had little to do on the run.
There were plenty of routes that couldn’t justify a dedicated passenger train, and this was one of them. On the other side of the pass was a small railroad village, where he’d make a connection on a proper train back to Manehattan; for now, this was what he could get.
The stove in the car wasn’t up to the task any more, or maybe it was the gusts of wind rattling the windows and finding every crack in the car. Maybe somepony had made a mistake and left the baggage door open.
Spuds pressed his muzzle against the window and didn’t see a trail of baggage. What he saw was ghostly, jagged rocks, pine trees, and swirling snow. Even after Winter Wrap-Up, snow still fell at higher altitudes, and only in settled areas did the weatherponies make any attempt to stop it.
And then only if it threatened to snow on Canterlot. Snow at the peak of the mountain was of no concern.
Another couple whistles from the lead locomotive, a reply, and the hard-working thump of steam slackened off. The motion of the combine coach changed, and just for a moment it felt like he was being pushed before the normal rockiness returned.
A flash of light as the train passed a signal, a hurricane lamp on a pole, then the train bumped across a switch and he started to see signs of civilization.
Out of the corner of his eye, a signboard flashed by too quickly to read. Big Hill Summit, the aptly-named obstacle the railroad couldn’t avoid, not if they wanted to get over the mountains. Surveyors had found no better route.
Underneath his hooves, air hissed, then the brakes started to squeal. Spuds got pushed back in his chair as the rear of the train shoved into the front.
The train continued its slow forward movement until the tender was lined up with the waterspout. Spuds had seen that done enough times he didn’t feel the need to watch.
He’d been alone in the car since the base of the mountain, when the last passenger had gotten off. Would anybody board? He hoped so. Would they be social? That would be ideal.
Off to his right, the nose of the pusher locomotive came into view. He’d interviewed the stationmaster at Big Hill West, who’d told him that he was on the last eastbound train over the pass, and the first one in the morning was westbound, so the helper would run the descent light, ahead of his train.
He’d imagined that that just meant a locomotive, but apparently it also included a caboose, which stopped just abreast of the combine.
There was a standpipe for that track, and the firepony swung it over the hatch on the tender and pulled open the valve. Meanwhile, the back door of the caboose opened and Spuds got a glimpse inside. Right under the cupola, there was an alcove with a desk, and a conductor writing in a logbook of some sort.
The pony on the end platform—a mare, guessing by the silhouette—paused and turned her head, nodded, waved, and then closed the door. She hopped off the steps and looked forwards, towards one or both of the locomotives, before he lost sight of her.
I thought that the train crew lived in their caboose. He’d seen a newer one once, and that had bunks and a bathroom cubicle and a cooking stove. Maybe she just hitched a ride to the summit.
He wasn’t expecting the door to his car to open, but it did, and the same mare stepped inside. She’d closed the door and was several paces into the car before she noticed him.
She hesitated for a moment before deciding to sit next to him. “You don’t mind, do you?”
Spuds shook his head.
“Sometimes it gets lonely, but some ponies want to be lonely, especially out here in the hind end of nowhere.” She stuck out a hoof. “I’m Emerald Green, but you can call me Buttons. Everypony does.”
“Spuds Terkel.”
“You work for the railroad?”
“No, just a paying passenger.” He could have asked if she did, but it was obvious. She had a high-visibility vest with a fat stick of chalk stuck in the pocket, a hard hat, and well-worn hoof boots.
“I wouldn’t pay for this train,” she admitted.
“You’re riding it, too.”
“Touché.” She stuck her tongue out at him. “You’re really clever with words.”
“That’s my job.”
“Really?”
Spuds nodded. “Really.”
“I’m just a fielder,” she admitted. “Mostly. Sometimes I get to do other stuff, and once I get all the way cleared and get my card, I’ll get to be a parlor mare in the crummy on manifest freights.”
“Forgive me if I ask, but what’s a fielder?”
A faint blush crossed her cheek. “Sorry, you wouldn’t know the lingo. I’m a brakemare in the yards right now, and once I get my medical clearance and my union card, I can be a brakemare on freight trains. Uh, and I’ll get to ride in the caboose.”
“So you were just hitching a ride, then? Not part of the normal crew on the pushing engine?”
“The helper? No.” She turned her head out the window as the helper locomotive blew two short whistles and then started moving out. “They’ve been shorthooved in Big Hill West and I picked up some extra shifts. I got to pin on and off to your train and then sit at the brake stand and watch and learn when we pushed your train up the mountain,” she said proudly. “And I’ve already got my nickname, too, everypony uses it, so I bet by next year I’ll be on freight trains. Maybe I’ll be able to work my way up to conductor if I study real hard.” She tugged at her vest, then looked over at him. “You don’t mind, do you?”
Spuds shook his head.
“I’m supposed to wear it all the time when I’m working, but technically I’m not working now. This counts as ‘rest time.’” She made air-quotes with her forehooves.
“Do you need to rest?”
“Nah, I’m off the next couple of days, that’s why I didn’t stay with the helper and sleep in the crummy. They don’t want to give me mountain pay if they don’t have to.” She peeled off her vest, removed her hard hat, and set them on the bench on the other side of the aisle. “I got a room in the bunkhouse in Big Hill East, that’s where I normally work. It’s right close to the station, and the locomotive’s gonna tie up for the night at the roundhouse.”
“I’ve talked to a bunch of Guards, and they’ve all got nicknames, too,” Spuds said. “Seamares, too. Most of them from something they did, one they got from their fellows.”
“Yeah.”
“And, forgive me, but most of the time it was for something dumb that they did.”
“Two shifts in a row, I got every string of cars stopped exactly where they needed to be,” Buttons said. “Nothing past a fouling point, or worse run through a switch so the yard goat had to pin on again, and that was the day I was stuck with a hot-footer in the cab, too, but you think I earned a nickname from that? Oh no. I—do you really want to know?”
“It’s your story,” Spuds said. “You can tell me if you want.”
Buttons nodded. “Well, everypony else already knows, and if you’re on this Tartarus-cursed train, too, that makes you an honorary railroader.” She reached across the aisle, grabbed her hard hat and stuck it on his head. “There.”
“It’s official.” Spuds grinned. “Does the slang just come to you all at once?”
“I wish. First time they told me to get orders from the lightning slinger, I looked up for a pegasus.” She waited before explaining: “That’s the telegraph operator.
“So, I think I should show you first, and then if you still want the story.” Buttons slid off the seat and turned to face her other side to Spuds.
He saw it immediately; it was impossible to miss. A jagged network of raw scars meandering across her flank, bisecting her cutie mark, as permanent as the strap-scars harness ponies often bore but on a massive scale. This was more akin to a war wound.
She must have seen the look on his face, she shied away and turned her rump so it wasn’t as obvious, but now that he’d seen it he couldn’t unsee it.
There was no point in offering encouragement; he wasn't a doctor but he could tell that it was never going to fade to obscurity.
Still, she hadn’t seemed overly fussed about it. “Guards that go on after an injury like that get medals,” he said.
Buttons snickered. “Even if they did something dumb?”
“How dumb?”
“I hadn’t been a cinder cruncher all that long before it happened,” she said. “Not even a year, long enough to learn everything I thought I needed to know.”
“Long enough to get cocky.”
“Yeah.” She sat back in the seat. “And everypony tells you again and again how hard it is to judge how fast cars are moving and what your clearance is and some of the old heads were too cautious to my mind, I should have thought that there was a reason that Stumpy—our yardmaster, he’s missing a hoof—kept yelling at us to be careful and take our time, I thought what does he know, he’s old and can’t get around all that well any more. I shoulda listened to him.
“I was out in the yard and it was faster to jump on cuts of cars as they were moving and set the brakes, rather than ride them like we were supposed to. If you did it by the book, you had to go up to the end of the cut every time, which meant hoofing it across the yard to where the train had stopped. A good hostler’d stop ‘em nearby, but some of the engineers liked making the rookies trot.
“Anyway, I was watching as a string of house cars were rolling down my track, I had my eyes on the last one, I’d already estimated the distance and speed and knew that I could set the binders and get it right where it should be. I didn’t know that they were switching from both ends of the yard, and I never heard the cars coming on the other track.
“I got lucky, I guess. That train was run by an old head we all called Whiskers, and he didn’t like kicking the cars, he wanted to keep them in his control. Their bug slinger was riding on the end car and he yelled and I don’t really remember hearing his warning, but I musta gotten out of the way just enough.
“Next thing I knew, I was flat out on the ground and he was waving his shiner frantically and there was blood everywhere and I couldn’t feel my leg.
“Bunch of ponies scooped me up and Stumpy was shouting that I’d be okay. They carried me back to the knowledge box, and Stumpy gave me a stiff shot of his whiskey to calm my nerves.”
Spuds hated to interrupt, but he needed to properly picture the scene in his mind. “Knowledge box?”
“The yard office. Basically just a shack with a desk for the yardmaster and a lightning—a telegraph operator. And a first-aid kit.” She flicked her ears. “I guess our sparks burned up the wires, I was kind of out of it, what with the whiskey and blood loss. They couldn’t get me on a train to a proper hospital, and they thought it’d take too long by wagon, so they hauled me off to Patches. He’s the company doctor and seamster in Big Hill West.
“Couldn’t have asked for a better doctor,” she said. “Gave me some morphine before he started to work, promised me it would be okay, kept talking to me as he stitched me up, and said I’d gotten more buttons than anypony else he’d fixed.”
“Buttons.”
“Yeah, it didn’t make sense to me at first,” she admitted. “I was kinda delirious and the morphine, he put on some Mercurochrome after he finished to help with the bacteria and that hurt a lot even with the morphine and I was tired and just wanted to go to sleep, and he had a guest room but I was big-headed and wanted to go back to my own bunk.
“And the next morning, of course my flank hurt and I lifted the covers ‘cause I couldn’t remember why and I looked like some kind of demented plushie with a dual row of buttons all around my wound.” She gestured back at her flank. “’Cause thread’s thin, like a cheese slicer, it’d just pull through when I moved around.
“Didn’t get the nickname right away,” she continued. “Not until I went for beans, Patches told the railroad I was off-duty until the buttons came out, and I got some ribbing from that but it was all light-hearted. I was kind of thinking like it was a normal day, and I showed my pie-card at the counter and sat down at my usual table, and Tonk—she’s our car knocker—said she coulda fixed me better and there were enough red buttons on my flank that even the worse stargazer would know to stop.
“Couple days later, while I was still off-duty, they had a silly ceremony where they awarded me with the hotbox lid that got me. They’d cleaned it off, and took it to be lettered up. That was when my nickname really stuck, it was on that journal box lid, and from then on everypony has called me Buttons.”
“Does that ever bother you?”
Buttons shrugged. “They say that the rules of the road are written in blood, and now I know why. I got lucky, really. There was—” Her eyes got a distant look, and Spuds was smart enough not to press her.
“Anyway, that’s why I decided that maybe I should try to get a safer job than being on the drill crew. After I’d rested for a week, I got limited clearance from Patches and learned how to run the airbrakes from the coffeepot clown, and sometimes it’s fun in the cab but it’s too hot and crowded even if you’ve got a good view. Especially with four in there, and the coal heaver shouting at us all the time to get out of his way. Better to ride in the crummy, there’s more room and I can sneak into the runner’s bunk when we’re sided out.”
Spuds blinked; about half the slang had gone over his head but he never liked interrupting a pony in the middle of a good story.
Buttons yawned and covered her mouth with a belated hoof. “Sorry, work’s catching up to me, I guess. Or else all the heat from the stove here. Our skipper likes to keep the crummy windows open when we’re pushing so he can hear the signals better. Doesn’t bother me, I’m used to being outside on my hooves, if I had my own room at the bunkhouse I might keep the window open.” She sighed. “Be nice if they roomed everypony who worked in the strawberry patch together, but they base it on seniority and pay bracket, so I gotta share with a coal-heaver who doesn’t like the cold.” She yawned again and Spuds pulled down the window, letting in a blast of cool air and a gust of snow.
“We can switch seats, if you want.”
“You don’t have to,” Buttons said, and motioned to the nearly-empty coach. “I can move to a different seat, I’m probably bothering you.”
“Not at all.” Spuds stood up and moved to the aisle, and after a moment, she nodded her head and took his seat.
He tried not to stare at her flank as she slid into position, but the scar was hard to ignore, it naturally drew the eye.
•••
She told him other stories as they descended the mountain pass, not all of them hers. Legends of the railroad, some of them almost mythical in the telling, like when a brakemare and conductor had run a caboose down this very pass to catch a wayward boxcar with a lantern and presumably a crewpony trapped aboard. Of pulling a special duty shift helping clean up after a train derailed ‘into the ditch’ picking up splintered boards and crates and barrels of cargo which could be salvaged. She pointed out the window as they passed by the accident site, although there was little that could be seen at night.
The story that stayed in his mind, even after they’d parted ways, she to the rooming house and he to his hotel, was how she’d earned her nickname.
Was it a story worth telling?
When ponies pictured trains, it was always as they went along the rails, steaming towards their destination. A few were interested in the locomotives, all shouldered up at the roundhouse or waiting their turn for a fresh load of water or coal.
Even he had to admit that he never thought about classification yards, or the ponies that worked on the ground there, and he might not ever have if it weren’t for a chance meeting on a train.
Spuds looked over at the bed, and then he turned the wick on the lamp up, dipped his pen into the inkwell, and started to write.
Ponies who work the rails have their own language, not unlike sailors. And while we may often think of the engineer with her head out the window as she races her locomotive along its route, many other ponies work lesser-seen jobs. . . .
Author's Note
Thanks to Chicago Ted for pre-reading!
Click HERE for story notes
