Even now, Frank imagines the screams and the twisted steel, the cold parallel rails stretching from north to south while cars jumped and plowed forward a length of two football fields through tobacco fields and stands of pines. The sound was deafening. The thin glaze of snow that would bring a rare white Christmas was an additional hindrance to those working to find the dead and injured in the darkness. The scene was beyond comprehension to those there, devastating, while seven hundred miles north, Frank was swaddled in sleep and the anticipation of daylight and all that it would bring to his life—a Captain Midnight badge, a canteen, a Christmas tree. His greatest worry was the inevitable shy distance he would once again feel when his father got home. “Hi, Pops,” he had practiced, imitating a boy in his grade, who always said that to his dad, who was a teacher in the school, but it embarrassed Frank to even try that out, not his voice at all. Hello, Father. Daddy. Dad. Hi, Dad. Welcome home!

A car honks. More golfers in fluorescent pants pass, and a glaring sun blinds him as he steers toward that place one more time, to stand where seventy-four years ago daylight had come not as a gift but as a glaring beacon of truth of all that had come to an end. He had read the accounts of what people saw there in the cold morning light: blood-soaked clothing and shoes strewn up and down the tracks, a wedding veil hanging from a tree, Christmas gifts and purses and luggage ripped and emptied, buttons and cigarettes and eyeglasses and watches. People would continue to find and pick up the pieces for months after, and even now, he knows that if one were to excavate beneath those tracks, there would be so much found, traces of lives that were turned over and buried, the lost meaningful detail someone had once attended, a hook on the neck of a dress or a necklace, a clasp to hold a tie, a penny returned when buying that day’s paper. He needs to stand there in that place; he needs to stand and allow himself the vision—of loss and destruction and of himself, ten years old, curled under a blanket in a comfortable house, his eyes closed against the cold northern night sky while waiting for all the good things promised with his parents’ return home. The canteen, the Captain Midnight badge, the Christmas tree he and his father would have dragged along the icy streets. Now it is hard to place himself back in his childhood bed and not think of how only twenty miles away, Lil had lain sleeping in her father’s house. What were the odds that they would find each other?

And why does he feel so close to that part of himself now? The young boy part. That ignorant, grieving part.

Lil

October 11, 2017
Southern Pines