trains

So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?

Mr. Okamoto: That's an interesting question...

Mr. Chiaba: The story with animals.

Mr. Okamoto: Yes. The story with animals is the better story.

Pi Patel: Thank you. And so it goes with God.

[Silence]

Yann Martel, Life of Pi

I come from a family that never put much stock in what actually happened. Both of my parents were born amid hills and railroad tracks. One generation back and there were dirt floors and unaccounted for children: nameless great aunts and uncles, cousins. I do not know my great grandmother's maiden name. No photographic evidence exists, no names are written down in public records. There are no yellowed letters home hidden in attics. You can not trace my ancestors back to anywhere: they simply stop midair and drop off into nothingness.

I used to believe that everyone grew up this way. It was not until much later that I learned that other families pass down things: names or albums or teapots or chairs. Unsmiling relatives behind glass, dates scrawled on the back of each picture.

Without these artifacts, we have done what we can. We have stories.

As a child, I collected these scraps of information and perhaps they got embellished even more in my mind and my brother's mind when we sat and repeated them. We retold them and nobody corrected us, there was nobody there to correct anything we said and we crafted things we heard and things we read into a story we told each other. There are things I believe are true, even if they are not, and who is to say now that everyone is dead and put in graves without gravestones what story is more real.

My father once preached a sermon on the importance of fairy tales.

I've never really believed that anything happens to my brother the way he tells it happened. Sometimes, I don't believe it happened at all.

When I was a child, we vacationed for a week each year at my Aunt Sue's cabin along the river. I would shoot tin cans out of the crooks in trees and wake up before sunrise to fish alone on the dock. I'd catch brim barely the size of my palm, and my father would filet them and fry them anyway. At night, I'd lay in the top bunk and imagine myself on a prairie. I'd listen to the rumble and whistle of a train somewhere in the distance and wonder where it was going. I did not yet realize that trains no longer carried people.

In the daytime, we would ride down the river. In some spots, the algae was so thick that it looked like pale green carpeting. Once, our dog jumped out as we stopped to fish thinking the boat was on solid land. My mother wore a red bandana around her head, the same one my brother and I wore when we pretended to be bank robbers. If we stayed on the river long enough, we came to a spot where a bridge started out across the river and then stopped, planks rotting and splintered, a gaping emptiness between the banks on either side.

Those, my mother said pointing overhead, are the tracks of the Ghost Train.

She told us that a train had been traveling across the river when the bridge collapsed, sending the passengers to the bottom. Even in the muggy Florida heat I shivered when I pictured the trapped passengers: pale blue faces floating up to watery windows, women with hair undone, men's top hats rising with water above their heads as they pounded doors and glass. I will always picture train passengers in long dresses with cameos at the lace throat. I always picture that the ground they hit drowning is wave ridden and sandy and shell-covered. Good-bye, Good-bye, Good-bye.

I thought to myself that the passenger cars would be under the water still. If I looked hard and deep enough into the lake, I might see something and I tried not to do it, not to look down.

After that day, I was scared to go under bridges in the boat and scared of going over them. I still hold my breath when I cross them. I still don't look out or down, only straight ahead.

Years later, I returned to the cabin and went past the bridge of the Ghost Train Tragedy. With adult eyes, I noticed that the skeleton of the bridge could have never supported train tracks: a small footbridge maybe, but nothing more than that. I realized that the water was not deep or wide enough to submerge a train. I called my mother and confronted her I saw the bridge. There was no Ghost Train.

My whole life, the Ghost Train has followed me. It is there whenever I lay in bed and hear a train whistle in the distance. It does not matter if I am not on the river, or in a different state all together; the Ghost Train comes back. I picture the conductor in his striped hat frantically reaching for the brake and the yellow light from the windows plunging into the depths of dark water. Always, for a moment, I can't breathe.