Excerpted: I Made a Promise I Could Not Keep

1. Willa and the High School Kids

Teenage boys are in love with death—that’s the going cultural assumption and the image of that cohort, in any case. This passion is a romantic affliction that seems to have defied the different fashions of passing generations. The disease finds its expression by marching off to war, or in whatever current risk-seeking behaviour is on tap. I thought back to those days recently because my middle-aged son and I were driving somewhere and talking about a time when people used to give their cars names. The practice disappeared a long time ago, as far as I know. Can you imagine giving your Tesla (perish the thought) or your Ioniq5 a pet name? In high school, my wreck of a Dodge Coronet was called Angie. Short for Angela. Three-on-the-tree gear-shift, slant six engine. The motor was so efficient and durable that the car-building geniuses in Detroit decided they had better kill it off. Angela, or Angie, because the passengers who rode in her thought that sooner or later she was going to take us straight up to heaven, where we would become angels. Not that it would have been her fault. Some romantic, self-destructive fool would have been at the wheel.

Urged on by something like the same affliction, and around the same time, I climbed up to the top of a signal bridge above the freight yards, a five-minute walk from my parents’ house. In those days, Chicago’s freight yards were the largest in the world, and they moved the poet and historian Carl Sandberg, a cultural hero in my family’s house, to describe Chicago as “Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler” in his poem about the city (yes, those capital letters belong there). Climbing the bridge was a feat of some athleticism. So, then, it could not have been the move of someone wanting to put an end to his life. Or could it have? Risk-taking can be a physical pursuit. A young man would have to pull himself straight up the vertical iron ladder, grimy and rusty and shedding metal filings, to reach the catwalk that held the signal lights from which he could look down.

I now have a suspicion of who and what was behind this act. Willa Cather and her story “Paul’s Case,” which we read in high school English. It did not make “The Seven Most Messed-Up Short Stories We All Had To Read In School” [sic for the capitalization] that I came across while looking for Willa Cather on the net. No surprise which was #1: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” I had a girlfriend in Honours English who read “Paul’s Case” in 1966, her freshman year (can girls be “freshmen?”). I was only in the superior level, so maybe it was assigned to me the following year. Who had the bright idea of asking high-school kids to read a short story about a young man who kills himself? And written by, of all people, a woman who was buried in a grave in New Hampshire that she shared with Edith Lewis, her life partner? There were no trigger warnings, so when I hit the last line, with the conclusion, “then the picture-making mechanism was crushed,” I could not quite understand what was happening. Except I knew it was bad. I was completely unprepared. Good writing should do just that.

The end goes like this, actually:

When the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.

He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs gently relaxed. Then, because the picture-making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.

Yet there I was, up there, on the signal bridge with its red, yellow, and green lights: stop, hesitate, go ahead. I looked down. I cannot say what my intention was. Act out a short story? Imitate a literary model? Conform to a self-destructive romantic scenario? But one thing was clear to me as I looked over the edge of the iron railing. It was a long, long way down. Someone could get hurt falling all that way.

When you read the end of Cather’s story, it seems fairly clear that she disapproved of what Paul, her apparent alter-ego, did, even as she described it so beautifully; hence, the ambiguity. “The folly of his haste.” “The vastness of what he had left undone.” All those places of pure colour that he will never see. I’m on Willa’s side. Obviously—I’m still here.

There were other things about the signal bridge that beckoned me. The attraction of galvanized iron, to begin with, and the appeal of railroads. Start with the iron, its roughness, the history it carried, its primitive nature. Grabbing the first rung of the vertical ladder was a sensual experience. Its power flowed into me. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. As schoolkids, if we came across a length of iron pipe on the street on the way back from class, we would pick it up; it was our treasure, and one of us would volunteer to hide it if he knew a safe place. We kids were like that. We were looking for something solid.

And it wasn’t a dare either. “Bet you can’t climb up to the top, bet you’re too chicken…” There was no classmate egging me on. I was there by myself. Me versus myself.

The appeal of the railroad is more straightforward. It could carry you far away from here, which is where everyone wanted to be. The romance of the hobo sang to us, too. We would sometimes steal into the freight yards—they were private property and watched over by private railroad bulls, Pinkertons—to try and spot the hobos, or at least the remains of their jungles, the word for their encampments. I remember a kid who was a little braver and crazier than the rest of us. He climbed into a slow-moving train (which was called “jumping a freight”) and made himself as comfortable as possible. Then, the next thing you know, the railroad police were calling his parents from California. He was a hero, but his story went no further because he was strictly forbidden from describing his adventures to what would have been a very eager audience.

Years later, inspired by the Britt Hobo Days jamboree that has taken place since 1900 in Britt, Iowa, I set out to write a kids’ book about the yearly national get-together featuring contests (train-imitating on harmonica, best Mulligan stew, etc.), the crowning of the king and queen of hobos, and all sorts of other festivities.

“Forget it,” my children’s book publisher told me in no uncertain terms. “We don’t romanticize homelessness here.”

The publisher clearly did not see the poetry and the tradition in what I was proposing. I was disappointed, but not altogether surprised. After the coronation in Britt, there was a chance to meet hobo authors and listen to them read from their works, mostly poetry. A shame I never got to write that scene.

For years, I have marvelled at the Lyons Township Board of Education in Chicago for adding the Willa Cather story to its curriculum. Imagine that happening now—impossible. The board would be accused of incitement to suicide. The trigger warnings would rain down, obliterating the story completely.

Willa Cather was a woman who often dressed as a man and never made a pretence of heterosexuality, the way some homosexuals used to, and probably still do, male and female alike. But the issue goes much further than that. It is one of literary reception, and how people read, if they agree to sign the contract that binds reader and writer.

Had we high-school kids been told ahead of time that Willa went for women, we would have rejected the story before we even read it. That meant she was queer—yes, the word was used back then—and we didn’t want to be queer, we wanted to be normal, even if some of us were  not. All of that biographical information would have rendered the story unreadable to us. Just the way that, if we had received trigger warnings about the suicide at the end, we would have pushed the story aside, because who wants to be caught killing themselves?

The up-front classifications, the trigger warnings—they’re destroying reading, especially for young people. Over the phone, I recently talked to that Honours English girlfriend. “I knew there was something up with Willa Cather, something special,” she remembered, “I just didn’t know what it was.” That something is the beginning of curiosity, and questioning, and finding out, and deciding for yourself without any authority making up your mind for you and telling you when to quiver in fear.

Back in high school, nobody wanted to get caught red-handed jumping off a bridge, though I do have friends who have made the leap. I will speak of them in the present tense, since they are still with me, crowding around my worktable, pushing and shoving and trying to make their case and, who knows, taking the inverse tack and regretting it the way Paul did, almost immediately, and too late.

There is my German friend whom I think of frequently, because I pass his spot nearly every day. He would sit at the bus stop on Park Avenue in Montreal, waiting for the 80 South to come along, at the corner of Saint Viateur, right in front of the YMCA, from which I would emerge several times a week with a triumphant and healthy glow, intent on living forever. I would catch him sitting shame-facedly on the bench, because when the bus pulled away, headed for its next stop on Fairmount, he was still sitting there. “You didn’t take it?” I asked him in the face of the evidence. He nodded sadly. “No. It wasn’t the right one.”

Later, I remembered that exchange, which seemed humorous at the time, but was not. In the end, there was no right bus to take. He had left his home country, I suspected, because he wanted to drink himself into oblivion without family members clucking their tongues. In the end, his designs were more drastic, more sudden. A close friend of his pleaded with him at length to accept her help. He could even come and live with her. He brushed her off repeatedly. But on the note that he left, which the police discovered, he gave her name and number as the person to contact in case of the obvious misfortune he had left. She was furious, and rightly so. “He refused everything I offered,” she said, “and then I’m supposed to step in and clean up the mess, now that he’s gone and killed himself?”

Most times, suicide is a performance. It is cruel theatre, like many other forms of mental illness. I realize that might be an unpopular stance. We’re supposed to display understanding and largesse of spirit, and realize that self-harm can be a call for help, a desperate last attempt to attract attention to a person’s difficulty in remaining in the world. And I do agree with Albert Camus that there is only one serious philosophical question, “and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living.” Yes, of course, from the point of view of philosophy. But it has occurred to me, based on what I have seen, that manipulation and exhibition are a part of the disorders that drive people to make that sad decision.

A gentleman I know, whose daughter was nine months pregnant, invited her to visit him at his house in the country. When she arrived, she found him in his car in the garage, the engine still running, the doors sealed, the sedatives on the passenger seat next to him. A woman I know mostly by reputation called her boyfriend at the bar he worked at, and asked him to hurry back from his job, she was missing him, and when he did her bidding because she was a needy person and he wanted to be there for her, he discovered her hanging from the rafters on the back porch. In self-murder, she has become something of a martyr, but to what cause, I do not know. The idea is to do maximum harm to the people who least deserve it. Is that the intent?

At the memorial service that followed some time later for the gentleman in his car, the suicide note was displayed, enlarged, on an easel. I had never seen such a prop at a commemoration of someone who has passed on. I wondered: was this some sort of rite from a religion I was ignorant of? “Being of sound mind,” the note began. The rest of it went on to absolve the dead man’s immediate family of any wrongdoing or responsibility or neglect. Since they were the ones staging the service, they wanted to have the last word. They had blown up and displayed the note for all to see. QED. But no one will ever know the unknowable truth.

Excerpted from I Made a Promise I Could Not Keep by David Homel © 2026.  Used with permission of Linda Leith Publishing.

* * *

Order a copy of I Made a Promise I Could Not Keep here on All Lit Up, or via your local bookseller.

For more Excerpted, click here.