“It was a real lesson in goodness,” Preston had told him when they stood in this very place all those years ago. “Everyone in the community turned out: doctors, nurses, veterinarians, guys like me.” He told how he had brought tobacco baskets and ties, which were used to make gurneys, and how even children had brought food and water, the older ones running back and forth with information to be telegraphed to families far away. Coffee and food were delivered, and all public servants worked for hours and hours. The small brick hospital in a nearby town was filled to capacity, and so other spaces were used. People opened up their homes. The dead filled every morgue in the area, people slowly identified by their clothing and scars. Many were decapitated. When Preston told that part, he closed his eyes as if to will it all away. And then he stopped talking, turned the conversation to the tracks themselves and how they were constructed, and how he had grown up right there in that same place, always knowing those tracks and the sound of the train passing.

It was that day that Frank dared to ask about his dad, his hands filled with loose snaps and buttons he had picked up as they walked to the site. He had seen a speck of silver and, after digging, found a Captain Midnight badge—it belonged to a child or maybe one of the servicemen; maybe it had been sent to someone as the lucky charm that would bring them home. Maybe it had been among the many gifts that were scattered in the trees in the aftermath. Maybe it was his. His mother had told him they would bring him something, and when he found it, it occurred to him that it might have been his, but when he asked his mother, she just shook her head no; she didn’t think so.

She said it was hard for her to remember, maybe because she was pregnant, but she did recall the yellow shirt his dad bought and how they had eaten conch. She told him she had a beautiful huge conch shell she was bringing to Frank—that was it, a conch shell—but it was lost there with his father. Still, the day Frank saw that flash of silver and pulled the badge from the dirt, he was struck by the coincidence that the night of the wreck he had listened to Captain Midnight on the radio, there in the living room his parents had furnished together, in the big brown chair where his father had sat, the back of which smelled of the oil he used in his hair. Frank had stood looking out at the cold December night and imagined his parents on the train. He was in the fifth grade at Oakland School, and his father had agreed to help with the science fair in February.