Must have been an awful long train ride. Lula to Clarksdale, south to Tutwiler, Glendora to Phillip, Money on to Greenwood. Then swinging due south toward Sidon, Cruger, Tchula, east to Lexington, dead-headin' at Durant. A long ride under the best of circumstances.

The news that Charlie was shot dead must've made the ride fifty times longer, and colder, and quieter and, at the same while closer to God and to Hell.

Momma says most of the family was camped over on the other side of the river, near Helena. Big Dad was an Illinois Central Construction foreman and when he could, took them along with him on the camp cars. When the lines were under construction or repair in 1925, you spent most of your nights somewhere at track's end or wherever it was the labor gang got so tired they couldn't swing a pick, drive a spike or lift a tie. They didn't know what a vacation was, but they gathered around Dad and went with him when he'd let them. They'd settled in for a hot night under the steel black, star-sprinkled sky.

News reached them by telegraph. Charlie had been shot dead right at the front door of The California Café. Seventeen years and some days old, playing football and baseball at the Agricultural High School at Goodman. Settin' out toward home every weekend, eight miles north, to his momma and daddy's back door and the smells of peach cobbler and fried chicken. The first concrete ever laid on highway 51 from Goodman to Durant was not three months old.

Momma says she remembers the ferry ride from the riverbank, east of Helena, over to the Mississippi side, said it seemed like it took hours. The Illinois Central had sent a special train to pick them up somewhere between Clarksdale and Lula and they were on their way, as fast as a belching mass of steel and iron could move them southward.

"They shot my boy dead!" Momma remembers Big Dad hollering as they chugged through Sidon, whistle blowing, coal-box loaded. He knew precisely where his friend's house was, alongside the tracks, and had no doubt he was sitting there to catch the news as it was tearfully slung down from the train, intended just for him. The man waved them by, couldn't find words.

The old train trestle still marks the spot where the Tchula Line crossed 51. They've pulled up the tracks, but not the tears.

Momma was eleven. Her brother was dead at seventeen. Big Dad and Charlie sleep forever, side by side. Big Dad was forty-seven and lived three more. The shooter was forty-seven and didn't. Forty-seven paces separate the two older men's graves.

There's things I won't write while momma's alive.

________________________________

Write to Don Drane at this e-mail address.

Read more of Don’s stories:
Bottle tree: Out of Nowhere
Chief Dempsey’s Cold Plastic Couch
Jim’s Duck
Southern Fried Turkey


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