William Cherry’s suicide on the railroad tracks

William Cherry’s suicide on the railroad tracks becomes a stark interruption in the landscape of Railton and in William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s efforts to make sense of what he sees around him. Cherry was a lifelong Conrail employee who lay down on the track in the middle of the night and was decapitated. The reported fact that he had just retired with a pension and full benefits unsettles the usual explanation that despair followed a sudden economic loss. His death remains unexplained, and that uncertainty is precisely what gives it force in Devereaux’s account.

Circumstances and Discovery

The death first enters the narrative during a drive along Church Street, beside the broadest part of Railton’s railyard. The yard stretches across roughly twenty sets of tracks, many occupied by rusty boxcars. Devereaux sets this space against the town’s former prosperity: a century earlier, the yard would have been full and Railton’s citizens could look toward a secure future. The streets now contain empty, littered parcels, while Church Street itself has lost its churches. The last, a condemned red-brick building, was razed after children broke in and fell through its floor. Cherry’s death is reported within this landscape of vacancies, but the narrative does not claim that the town’s decline caused it.

At first, people speculated that Cherry was among the men laid off the previous week. That explanation would have made his suicide legible as a consequence of immediate financial injury. It proved to be the opposite: Cherry had recently retired, with his pension and full benefits. The reversal does not disclose a motive. Instead, it strips away the convenient certainty of the layoff story and leaves the neighbors, and Devereaux, confronting a death that cannot be accounted for by the most obvious economic narrative.

Public Reaction and the Failed Explanation

On television, Cherry’s less fortunate neighbors say that he had it made and cannot understand why he died. Their response makes security itself seem like an insufficient answer. The pension and benefits establish what Cherry had obtained materially; they do not reveal how he experienced that prospect, what he feared, or what led him to the track. The contrast between his apparent good fortune and his act therefore remains unresolved rather than turning into a moral lesson about gratitude or a diagnosis of his state of mind.

The reaction also belongs to a Railton accustomed to measuring prospects through layoffs, pensions, and the town’s lost prosperity. The mistaken first assumption about Cherry fits that public vocabulary: people reach for the familiar explanation of job loss. When the facts overturn it, they are left with bewilderment. The narrative preserves that bewilderment rather than supplying an authoritative account of Cherry’s private reasons.

Devereaux’s Reflection

As Devereaux and Teddy Barnes wait to turn from Church Street, the immediate setting narrows from the vast, underused railyard to Teddy’s struggling Civic climbing Pleasant Street. The car manages the steep hill, and Devereaux is discouraged by the very fact that it will make it. He wonders whether Cherry, too, feared that things would work out if he did not do something drastic to prevent them. This is Devereaux’s speculation, not an established explanation of Cherry’s decision. Its importance lies in the question it opens: apparent survival, or the prospect of eventual security, cannot be assumed to feel like hope to the person living through it.

The juxtaposition is deliberately uneasy. The car’s laborious ascent ends in success, while Cherry’s death is recalled as an irreversible act; the small triumph of getting up the hill does not settle the larger question of why a person might reject a future others regard as fortunate. Devereaux’s thought links the scene’s ordinary movement to the suicide without claiming that the two are equivalent. The passing image of the car making it is enough to unsettle his confidence that making it is necessarily a comfort.

Newspaper Accounts and the Limits of Narrative

Later, Devereaux searches the student newspaper for a follow-up to the report that Cherry lay on the tracks earlier that month and was decapitated. The original story had suggested there was more to the circumstances than met the eye, and he hopes for some further account. None is provided in the material he reads. He is left considering that despair may be the simplest of tales, though the word simplest does not make Cherry’s death comprehensible; it marks the danger of mistaking a neat account for knowledge.

The newspaper search is followed by his reading of a column by his mother about a boy in Bellemonde who, after leaving the institution responsible for his care, climbed onto the roof of a residential tower and jumped. The boy’s death is a separate event, not an explanation of Cherry’s. Its placement nevertheless sharpens the passage’s attention to how tragedy is reported, witnessed, and made into an argument. Devereaux questions whether his own attention to small, imagined details is a writer’s habit or evidence of a warped sensibility. In Cherry’s case, the facts remain spare: a railroad track, the middle of the night, a recent retirement, and neighbors unable to reconcile the death with the life they thought he had. The account’s refusal to fill those gaps keeps Cherry’s suicide from becoming a tidy symbol of either economic decline or personal failure.