At sixteen, Eli Lacroix sleeps in the freight
shed behind the Grand Trunk depot in
SainteAnnedeBellevue, where the rails still glow
warm at dawn from yesterday’s steam. The 1912
expansion cut through the old beaver meadows,
but no one else notices how the iron sings back—
low, looping lullabies in Anishinaabemowin,
humming through the sleepless nights. The tracks
don’t just carry trains; they carry the memory
of the land before the surveyors came, and Eli
hears it clear as breath.
His mother died when the trestle collapsed near
Lac des DeuxMontagnes, and the company buried
her name under a steel plate. No monument. No
ceremony. Just silence. Eli carries her beaded
moccasin in his coat pocket—its pattern matching
the rhythm of the rails. He doesn’t speak of it.
Not since the boys at the hockey rink called him
“ghostboy” for talking to the wind. He’s the
outcast who fixes steam valves with his fingers,
who knows which ties creak when the moon is full,
and who never joins the Sunday picnics where the
FrenchCanadian families toast to the Dominion.
Then he meets Clara Moreau. She’s the daughter
of the stationmaster, whose father built the
line’s most notorious deviation—digging through
sacred stone circles near Lac Simon, silencing
the drumming earth with dynamite. Clara laughs
at Eli’s quietness. She brings him apple butter
in jars stamped with the Canadian Pacific logo,
and he learns to whistle back the railsong in
harmony. They sit on the embankment after curfew,
watching the stars blink over the sleeping
engines. He doesn’t say he hears the land weep.
She doesn’t ask why his fingers tremble when the
whistle blows.
But when the stationmaster finds Eli’s mother’s
moccasin tucked beneath the switch lever—where
the song is loudest—he doesn’t yell. He doesn’t
threaten. He simply takes Eli to the old quarry
where the stone circles once stood. “You think
this land remembers you?” he says, voice like
gravel under boots. “It remembers the ones who
broke it.” Then he hands Eli a chisel and a
steel bar. “Clean it. Every trace. Or I’ll have
you shipped to the northern camps. No one misses
orphans who sing to ghosts.”
The rule bites here: any Indigenous artefact
found on Crown land after ’09 is seized as
“unregistered salvage.” Eli’s mother’s moccasin
is now evidence. He can’t keep it. He can’t
speak of it. But the rails won’t let him forget.
On the night of the first snowfall, Eli doesn’t
chisel. He takes the moccasin to the deepest
curve of track, where the song becomes a chorus.
He lays it down. He sings back—not in words, but
in the old rhythm, the one his mother taught him
through humming while mending nets. The rails
answer. Not with sound. With light. A pulse of
auroragreen, rising from the ties, curling into
the shape of a crane, then a canoe, then a
woman’s face—his mother’s, smiling, not weeping.
Clara finds him there. She doesn’t speak. She
kneels. Places her hand over his. The light
doesn’t vanish. It wraps around them both.
The next morning, the moccasin is gone. The
tracks are silent. No one mentions the green
glow. But Clara’s father resigns that week. He
leaves a note in the station’s ledger: “Some
things shouldn’t be buried. I was wrong.”
Eli doesn’t go to the camps. He doesn’t leave
town. He starts teaching the Métis kids at the
mission how to listen—not to the trains, but to
what’s underneath them.
And every winter, when the frost cracks the
earth just right, the rails still hum.
And someone always stops to hear.
