The Train

A short story about the rumble of a locomotive

I grew up in a very poor, rural town in the deep south of the US. You could ride a bike to school or the grocery store without ever breaking a sweat. Everything was close. Nothing felt that way.

For most of my childhood and into my early high school years, I lived in a two-story red house on what people in town called the “good side.” My parents had divorced early, and life had a habit of shuffling people in and out of my world. But certain things held still long enough to anchor me.

This town, like so many in that part of the country, didn’t have rich and poor. It had poor and poorer. The dividing line between them was a set of train tracks, with a freight train that rolled through what seemed like every single day. The red house sat close enough to those tracks that you could hit the passing train with a baseball without hurting your arm. More than a light lob, but not much more.

The back porch was where we lived in those years. My friends and I would sit out there for hours, listening to music, laughing at stupid jokes, and smoking cigarettes we’d stolen from the unobscured cartons that every parent in the neighborhood seemed to leave in plain sight. When the train stopped on the tracks, we’d sneak over the fence and down a small hill thick with oak trees and those thorny little vines that seemed to grasp for your legs and become intertwined with your shoe laces. We’d lay pennies and nickels on the rails and wait for the train to…