I hear the bells ringing in the church towers every night, but it’s the sound of the whistling train near the river that carries me back to being a little boy following after my older brothers near the tracks of my childhood. After all, we had churches where I come from, but no bells or towers.
My Papa Creel lived in the country, and beyond the big brown lake the trains passed by from the Gulf of Mexico heading to who knows where. Our visits usually coincided with a family reunion. Daddy would drive us up and down the bumpy roads that seemed to go nowhere — that is, until I saw the little brick house on the hill and my aunts toting food up the long dirt road.
Aunt Trucine, Aunt Merline, Aunt Pauline and Aunt Christine kept me entertained, sometimes by their fashions, always by them yelling at us kids from the screen door. Then there was dear Aunt Janice who made the best sweet tea I ever tasted. I always wondered how they came up with “Janice” among all those “ines.” My older brothers Richard and John were usually hollered at by Mama, too, for swimming in the dirty waters of the lake. Our cousin Tammy could do a backflip like no other from the makeshift diving board, and all the aunts and mamas were determined not to lose one of the grandchildren to a water moccasin or a stray locomotive.
My brother Tony, the one closest in age and mischief to me, could care less about all that, and all I cared about was hanging out with him as we shuffled our feet along the path beyond the lake and the noises of children splashing and carrying on all the way to the big train tracks. You see, we would collect pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters and even the occasional silver dollar from our daddy when he wasn’t looking and lay them on the tracks. I’m not sure if “collect” is exactly the right word. We laid them on the tracks and scrambled back down in the brush nervously waiting for the sounds of the whistling train. It seemed as though that train would shake the living daylights out of us both, and I can’t imagine how Tammy focused on her backflip with the ground shaking.
We could hear Mama up the hill shouting to us, using our whole given names to punctuate her degree of concern. We waited until the train was completely out of sight before running back to scrape our smashed pocket change from the hot tracks. We did that over and over again until our pockets were full of misshapen metal treasures with Mama threatening to “git a switch to us.” She probably should have, but as you might imagine, never did.
Now, I lay here all grown up, listening to the trains sounding off, first soft and in the distance, then louder as they travel through town. I imagine who I might collect another quarter from, but I don’t do it. Much like the memories of my brothers, the trains come and go, a reminder that as we grow older change is inevitable. Just like those coins we wasted on the tracks of my youth, how we relate to each other around the edges changes, but not what’s on the inside.
Maybe those coins were well invested after all.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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