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Authors: Phillip Depoy

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BOOK: A Minister's Ghost
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And I had agreed with him, smiling, glad to think it was true. I would miss my boyhood chum, no doubt, but the rest of the place sloughed off my spirit without a single thought more than
Thank God I'm getting out.
I leapt onto the train, threw open the window, let the air rush past me as the train picked up speed, headed for Atlanta and my real life, blowing away all the bitter dust from hearth and home. I couldn't think of a strong enough phrase for my sense of freedom. I'd not yet learned to curse.
But I had come back, of course. I stood at the side of the tracks, leaning back against the hood of my truck, still hearing the train that had carried me away roar in my mind.
I gazed at the rhododendrons and compared the path of my life to the railroad tracks. The steel lines bent off suddenly in an unexpected
direction, but they were cast with iron spikes, as unyielding in their direction as the course of the sun and moon, or the planets spinning in space.
You
never
leave home,
I thought.
You just think you do. My house could be in the south of France and I would still live in Blue Mountain.
Home
isn't a place as much as a cellular memory, a collection of experiences that trail out behind you.
Like railroad tracks.
The business at hand was a gloomy, one and the day obliged by shutting up the sky with gray clouds and a light, cold drizzle. I was glad I'd worn the black leather jacket, it shed the rain and stayed warm; regretted the black high-top tennis shoes—liked the look but the feet were already wet.
The town square turned to Renoir for images in that mist: the courthouse became a sheet of brick-red light, the lawn in front a yellowing field of wheat. Thick, black vertical lines played the part of oak trunks, topped with dabs of rust and ocher. The Confederate war memorial statue seemed to wave at me in the shimmering air, and the rest of the shops in the recently revitalized downtown area were obscured by a low patch of fog or poor eyesight.
I should get glasses,
I thought, turning from the square to the more immediate task.
The formerly gravel road, called Bee's Crossing, was slick. It was lined on either side with weeds and dead wildflowers.
I gazed up at the railway warning post. There was no arm to come down to keep a car from crossing the tracks, but the tall post sported two red lights on top of a black bowl the size of half a basketball that would be the warning bell. I wondered how I could find out if it was working besides, obviously, standing there until a train went by.
Nearly leaden with reluctance, I heaved a sigh and pushed myself away from the hood of the truck to wander the scene of the accident. The worst of the wreckage had already been cleared, but the inevitable diamonds of broken window glass glittered in the road and on the tracks. There were a few small pieces of twisted metal and torn rubber, unrecognizable as anything having to do with a car or a
train, but everything else had been impressively scoured. I had no idea what to look for.
I wandered across the tracks, feet more than a little cold.
Bee's Crossing ran straight away from me for two blocks, lined on either side with lots of trees and a few big houses, before dead-ending. One of its cross streets went to the rail station if you turned left, or to the shortcut back to Blue Mountain if you turned right.
The girls were going to take the shortcut,
I thought, but I immediately regretted bringing their image to mind.
I saw them, late coming home from the movies, worried about the parents yelling at them, deciding to go the back way home.
The shortcut was faster than the highway if you didn't mind risking the dirt roads that went up the cemetery side of Blue Mountain. If you had no trouble, you could cut fifteen minutes or more off your travel time, but the roads were treacherous if they'd turned to mud, and you ran the danger of getting stuck and ending up hours late.
The girls had decided to take the chance. If they'd been less concerned with getting home, or earlier out of the movie, they would have gone back on the main road, the way I'd come: past, not across, the tracks.
I made a mental note to check and see what was playing at the Palace, and what time the movie had let out. Pine City had an old movie house, built in the thirties, abandoned in the seventies, restored in the new century and showing old movies.
It was a popular place with tourists because the building's age matched the entertainment offered, and to visitors from the big cities it was an opportunity for time travel: sit in the dark eating a bag of nickel popcorn and watch Jimmy Stewart talk to an invisible rabbit. The place was also a popular dating destination with high school students who had never heard of Jimmy Stewart and felt they were discovering some ancient artifact, a darkened part of the pyramids where no one had ever been before. That sensation was exacerbated by the restoration decor: someone's vision of Solomon's Temple. Clearly a biblical scholar had not been consulted.
The lobby was part Moorish, part Hollywood: tall wooden columns painted gold, frescoes copied from the Sistine Chapel, and wall hangings obviously purchased from the Bela Lugosi estate. Inside the theater, the seats were upholstered with what appeared to be leftover scraps of abandoned “Oriental” rugs. The ceiling had been painted with a “midnight in the desert” theme, stars (twinkling Christmas lights) swirled around a bold full moon (a large auto headlight). In front of the screen, gold curtains closed and opened before every show.
When Lucinda and I had gone to see
Lawrence of Arabia
there, the place was packed. She asked me why I thought so many people had troubled themselves to come to a movie house to see a film they could rent for less at a video store. I told her I thought human beings in the twenty-first century were hungry for communal experiences. She told me she thought coming to the theater was a better date than sitting at home. Most of the audience were couples.
I wondered if Rory and Tess had met anyone at the movies.
I turned around and retraced my steps back across the tracks, paying more attention to anything off to the side of the road. Wet sheets of newspaper, rusted old cans, more broken glass—there was nothing that seemed related to the accident at all.
I decided to wander the tracks. It was clear from the direction of the glass on the street and the other bits of debris that the train had been coming from out of town and going toward the station. It would not have been slowing down much, the old railway station had long since closed. Trains only rattled through town now on their way north with long boxcars and freight piggybacks. The rails were slippery, so I resisted the urge to tightrope-walk the way I always had as a boy.
A few feet from the crossing, headed toward the abandoned station, a glint of something caught my eye, a reflection. I stepped over the rail and skidded a little on the wet grass. About six feet from the tracks I found two plastic CD cases. One, by someone named Jane-Jane, was empty; the other had a sticker on it that said “from Aunt
Lucinda.” It was the sound track to the movie
O Brother, Where Art Thou?—which
made me smile in spite of the circumstances.
Every once in a while something comes to the mountains that reinvigorates our ancient traditions. In the late sixties and seventies it was the Foxfire project, reintroducing teenagers to their folk heritage. By the turn of the century it was a Hollywood movie reminding America about some of its original music. People all over the world who had never heard of Jeanie Richie or The Skillet Lickers could finally understand, in a context they could accept, the music I considered seminal to our culture: rural, rough roots; simple melodies and age-old stories.
God Bless the Coen Brothers,
I thought, picking up the CD cases,
for making that movie.
A few other bits of trash were around the cases: a crushed lipstick, several Diet Coke cans, a hairbrush. I thought they might have belonged to the girls too.
Just as I was thinking that, the tracks thumped twice, not loudly but hard enough to make me jump. A second later the bell on the warning light by the crossing banged out a message that could have been heard in Vermont: a train was coming. I stepped well back from the tracks, could see the red lights flashing madly.
Then the train blared out its horn and I dropped everything I had just picked up.
The horn shot through the marrow at the center of my bones. I tried to get farther away from the tracks, but the rhododendrons proved a solid wall. I actually began to shiver a little, from the adrenaline or the cold I couldn't tell.
The train called out again, much closer this time, and the bell and lights on the warning pole seemed to intensify. The rails began to shake and the roar of train noise filled the air. I rarely consider praying, but just as the engine shot past, it occurred to me I might take it up. By my estimation it was going seven hundred miles an hour.
Fear might have hyperbolized the estimate a little.
I couldn't move. The rush of wind that the train dragged along
battered me, threw sticks and leaves and bits of trash at me. I folded my arms, lowered my head, and closed my eyes against the onslaught. It was a long train and the assault continued unabated.
After what seemed an hour, the caboose finally shook and rumbled, and noise began to fade; the warning pole fell silent and red lights blinked off.
I couldn't help thinking about an old song called “In the Pines” with its declaration of the longest train in Georgia: “The engine passed at six o'clock and the cab went by at nine.”
I let out a long breath, stooped to pick up the things I'd dropped, and headed back toward my truck.
Well, the warning light works,
I thought to myself, trying hard not to consider what a train like the one I'd just experienced would do to a Volkswagen stopped in its path.
 
A moment later I dumped the CD cases, lipstick, cans, and hairbrush on the passenger seat when I got into my truck. I wasn't sure where to go next, the local junkyard, where I knew Skidmore had had the Volkswagen taken, or the morgue. Neither seemed any good.
Distant thunder encouraged the sky above to darken to charcoal, and the rain picked up a little. Unable to face the morgue, I started the truck and headed through town toward Waldrup's Cash and Tow.
Pine City seemed deserted in the rain, and even the courthouse looked empty. Cars were parked in front of one of the tourist shops, an imitation general store, but the customers were apparently huddled inside, unwilling to face the cold and damp.
Waldrup's was the only towing company in the county and would have made no money at all except for the addition of a thriving junkyard business. It served as a meeting place for teenaged boys with pretensions of automobile prowess. They bought spare parts and swapped fantastic lies about how fast they'd been going when the police caught them.
Once you got any car over about forty on most of our roads, in fact, you'd be off the pavement, onto the shoulder, or flying down a mountain with little hope of stopping until you hit the valley floor.
Anyone who said they'd taken those curves and slopes at more than fifty was lost, himself, to hyperbole.
By the time I got to Waldrup's, the rain had abated, though the sky had grown darker.
The first thing I heard when I opened the door of my truck was a cracking adolescent voice saying, “One hundred and twenty, on two wheels, almost all the way.”
Three skinny boys were standing around a wrecked Mustang, its hood up. I thought one of them might be Nickel Mathews, the cousin of Melissa, Skidmore's deputy/secretary. All three of the boys were staring at the engine the way doctors study a patient on an operating table.
“She's gonna need a valve job,” one boy said quietly, “but I believe she'll make it.”
I walked by them without speaking. The yard occupied three acres, and every inch was covered with something that had once been automotive. The owner, E. P. Waldrup—whose initials did not stand for anything, and whose friends called him Eppie—was asleep in a sagging brown armchair ten feet from the Mustang, next to his “office.” He was decked out in his usual extralarge, grease-stained indigo coveralls. A man of considerable girth, he threatened to break the substantial chair in which he shifted, snoring.
The office was a shack the size of an outhouse that held a desk, a phone, and seven hundred boxes of paperwork that no one in the universe could make sense of except Eppie himself. Beside him, stretched out between the office and a telephone pole, was a heavy metal clothesline wire hung with a bizarre array of metal car parts. That sculptural conglomeration of refuse was the main reason I knew Eppie Waldrup.
Long ago this strange, uneducated man had constructed a rare musical instrument, a sort of junk xylophone. He'd strung up twenty-three various car parts on the metal clothesline just to the side of his one-room-shack office. These car parts hanging in the air were a kind of miracle. If he was in the right mood, and sober enough, he would treat the odd guest to a concert on those scraps of
metal. There being no guest odder than I, Skidmore had persuaded him to perform for me several years previously, and I was enraptured. The sound had unearthly beauty. I had come back to record him twice.
BOOK: A Minister's Ghost
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