Lemons and Train Wrecks We moved from Cassville, Ga to Acworth, Ga in 1953, when I was 9 years old. My Dad went in as a partner with his uncle and they bought a little store about a mile and a half outside of the little town of Acworth. It was a real small store and it sat on top of the cinder-block house that we lived in. It had cubby holes along the walls that held the groceries. I guess each little cubby hole would hold 6-8 regular size cans and there were some shelves below them for things like flour, sugar, lard; things like that. Lard was the 50’s version of liquid cooking oil, like Crisco in cans, that we have today. In the back was a meat case, white with a glass front, and glass shelves in the back of it that slid open and shut. There was always a long, red-colored stick of bologna in it, some ground sausage that Dad made, some hamburger meat, maybe a cut-up chicken, a few pork chops, just a small and very basic version of today’s meat departments; with small being the operative word. Gene Brooks must have bought 50 pounds of bologna while Dad had that store., Almost every day he would ride up on a bike that had to have had 50,000 miles on it, lay it down outside, come in and ask for a “nickel’s worth of “lony” and a coka coler.” The case was, maybe, 6-7 feet long, and 4-5 feet high. On the wall to the left was a small wooden produce case. The top was divided into little compartments about 8 inches high and each one held a different kind of produce—onions, loose potatoes, tomatoes, lemons, cabbage, bananas, just some basic produce. 50 pound bags of potatoes were stood up against one side of it, usually 4-5 bags of them. Sometimes there was a wooden case of ears of corn; “roasting ears” most people called them, on the floor. Mama never roasted them as far as I know. She would either boil them or cut the corn off the cob and make creamed corn. One of my jobs was to check the produce every day and pull anything out that had started to rot, take it outside, and put it on the pile of whatever it was that we were going to burn. This pile of stuff was right across the road at the bottom of the bank the train tracks were on. From the front door of the store to the railroad track couldn’t have been any more than 100 feet. The tracks were about 20 feet above the road and the trains came by pretty regular, lots of stuff moved by train back then. There were passenger trains and freight trains going by all the time. One of my favorite things to do was throw rocks at the freight trains and, once, at a passenger train. Evidently the windows of passenger trains were reinforced somehow because the rock just bounced off; already having seen that the rock was actually going to hit the window, I was headed towards a small shed in our back yard and didn’t come out from behind it for about 15-20 minutes later, long enough to figure that the train wasn’t going to stop and back up and people start looking for me. I remember that it was summertime and about mid-morning when I took some produce out to throw away and I heard that train coming. Not wanting to be right under the train when it came by, I was waiting in front of the store when I looked down at the little box of produce and saw the lemons I had put in it and then saw the train coming down the track—a freight train! I grabbed the 3 lemons that I’d put in the box, dropping the box so I could just really wind up and knock that old train right off the tracks. I waited till the engine had passed by, not wanting to do what Leon had done. Leon was so blind, even with his glasses on; he couldn’t tell if he was throwing at the engine or the caboose to start with. A couple of weeks earlier he had waited for a train over by his house and had let fly with a rock that he said went right through the open window of the engine and hit the train driver. I asked him how he could see what the rock did, him being blind as a bat anyway, and he said he knew it hit the man because he hit the brakes and sat down on the train horn. I asked him what happened then and he said he didn’t know because he was already running for his house. Back then, no matter what we did, we always figured that if we could make it to our front porch we were safe because our Mama’s wouldn’t let nobody hurt us. That got shot down later that same summer when Leonard let go with another rock and hit this big old boy that lived in the mill village. He hit him right upside the head, too; Leonard was bad to throw rocks, he was the rock throwingest kid I ever saw. Him being blind as a bat didn’t help either. Soon as that engine came by, I let the first lemon fly. It had this big old black place on one side and it was real soft there so that when it hit it just busted wide open, right up against the side of a boxcar. Grabbing the second one, I let her go and, dang if I didn’t just throw it right over the top of that train; never even touched it. Down to one lemon now I wound up like I was going to throw it right through the car I picked out; it was one about halfway through the train. The thing was, this lemon didn’t have anything wrong with it. I could tell when I let it go, it didn’t have a soft spot anywhere, and you could always tell where they were when you wrapped your hand around the lemons; you could feel you fingers sort of pushing in through it and you’d have a little of the black part on your fingers and lemon juice on your hand. This wasn’t a problem because you’d just wipe it off on your shirt, if you had one on, or wipe it on your shorts if they were all you had on. Mama’d just wash them next wash day and they’d be good as new; well, they’d be as new as hand-me-downs could be. I was probably 5-6 years old before I ever knew they actually made new clothes…I had lots of cousins just a little older than me. I saw that lemon hit the train so hard you could hear the bang it made. Right after the train had passed by; I went across the road and poured the other produce on the pile of stuff waiting to be burned. I was coming back across the road when I first heard the noise; it sounded like bunches of metal hitting against each other and then I heard the loudest screeching and banging I ever heard, then it got quite as a church after everybody had left and gone home. I looked to where the noise had come from and then I saw this hugh bunch of smoke and dust going way up in the air. About then I saw Crazy Gene coming towards me on his bicycle, just flying. We called him Crazy Gene because everybody said he wasn’t right in the head, been that way since he was born. He must have rode that bicycle 20 miles a day, just riding and singing as loud as he could. He was in his 30’s and he could hear a song one time and sing it back just like it was played. I could hear him way before he got close to me, hollering as loud as he could, “the train wrecked, the train wrecked, hit jumped the tracks, she’s a laying on her side.” That’s when my whole body just tightened up like a rope you keep twisting around and around. I was more scared than I had ever been in my life; a train wreck and I had caused it when I threw that last lemon. I knew it wouldn’t take long for somebody to see where the lemon hit the side of the car and then they would figure out where the only place close that had lemons was and then somebody would come to the store and tell Dad about it and then Dad would tell me, “Bobby, I’ve told you and told you about throwing things at trains and now see what you’ve done.” All this just flashed through my mind before Crazy Gene flew by me, still hollering about the wreck. I wondered if he already knew that I had thrown the lemon that had knocked the train off the track. Lord I was scared, so scared that I wouldn’t even go see the wreck because I knew that the first person that saw me would point at me and say, “that’s him, that’s the boy that done this. Everybody knows that Bobby Jarrett is always a’ throwin’ something at trains.” That’s when I decided to hide in the little building behind our house. Me and Donna had been playing “house” in it yesterday and her mud pies were still laying on the table we’d made. It had one window in it and about every 5 minutes I’d ease up to the side of it to look out and see if they were coming for me. I stayed there till Mama called us in to eat supper. I knew that if I could just stay out of sight for a while that, maybe, everything would die down. That’s why I told Mama that I was sleepy and was going to bed, never even thinking that she would find it strange that a 9 year old boy would go to bed about 6:30 in the evening, especially in the summer. Then Mom and Dad both started asking me what was wrong and it didn’t take long for me to go ahead and tell them that the reason the train wrecked was because I hit it with a lemon and knocked it off the tracks, but that I didn’t mean to. I can still hear Dad laughing every time I see a train go by.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:25:21 +0000
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