. . . the subject of trains

Trains drove their sound into my subconscious at sixteen. After spending all of my life in the suburbs of Atlanta, my family found itself in a ranch style home that rested on a concrete slab like all the other homes in the small neighbor that was once, apparently by the number of fruit trees, a grove. It was an odd spot for a neighborhood in that it was really only one road circling a flat piece of ground between one of Orlando’s many lakes and Hwy 17/92 - a main thoroughfare, leading north out of Orlando deeper into the sprawl.

In the morning darkness, I would drag myself from bed, prepare and walk out of the grove of homes and go and wait on the side of the highway for the bus to take me to Winter Park High School. That’s when I remember really hearing that train, in those early hours, as I slumbered my way down the empty neighborhood road, feeling the bath of warm air of middle Florida and noticing a seeming gloom hovering in the trees, moss, around the streetlights. I would hear that train. Even came to expect it in the morning. Then I would hear it again at night, lying on my back in bed.

It’s hard to say how often I heard the pulling train cars because after awhile, I think I actually stopped noticing. My mind began to register it as insignificant. Until sometime in the late night or early morning hours of February, when my father pulled himself from my parent’s bed, quietly removed the small shotgun and shells from underneath the bed (the same gun and shells I had seen under the bed when snooping for no real reason). He walked out to a small fenced area just off the master bath. A solitary place where a person could stand naked if they wanted because no one could see through the overlapping slats of the dark fence. And wearing only his underwear, a sight I had come to see a lot of in his last days, a man seemingly unaware or unconcerned with his personal state, he put the shotgun to his chest and pulled the trigger. It was a small caliber shotgun and my guess is that the shot itself did not kill him right away. There would have been a lot of bleeding, choking on one’s own blood and then consciousness would cease. I heard none of it.

But I did wake early that morning. I lay in bed. What was it I heard? Why are Mom and Dad up? Something is not right. But, I honestly did not want to know. Then my bedroom door opened and the shadows of two people entered. One was Mom. Something was not right. The second shadow was much larger than my father. The dark shape belonged to the minister from the church we had started to attend. They told me and then I listened as they went to tell my brother. I remember sitting on the sofa talking to the police – there were questions to be asked and answered. There was the feeling of the world suddenly upside down, my head on the brown carpet with my feet spinning in the air. Then there was my Mom walking around the house, trying to be functional, but completely lost. She was wearing a nightgown and at some point I noticed my father’s watch hanging loosely around her wrist. Something wasn’t right. I took it from her. There were specks of my father’s blood on the watch. It needed cleaning. He was, apparently, also wearing his watch, the same watch that is wrapped around my wrist as I type this post.

It’s all murky, that morning. With the passage of years it has become even less clear. And, I could not tell you then or now, for sure, if I heard the train that morning, but something in me says I did. I’ve lived many places since that morning. And in quite a few, there have been trains. And every time I hear one, somewhere inside, a signal is sent. There is a wail in the air, a scream, a cry . . . “this is life, this is life.”