Chapter Entry:NANOWRIMO Novel 2007

From Mary at the Old Railroad Trestle, 2007 NANOWRIMO novel, set May 14, 1911, Mother's Day

          My name is Mary, and I am the Old Trestle Bridge Princess.

          My daddy’s name was Stratton Hicks. He was a shopkeeper in our town, Cameron’s Crossing. Daddy owned a general store and sold dry goods in a room off to the side. Daddy’s older sister is Aunt Grace, who married a Colonel from the War of Yankee Aggression, Custis Haskell. Uncle Colonel Custis died the year before I was born, and his and Aunt Grace’s only son Jamie was killed in the war with Spain when I was only a year or so, so I didn’t know the neither of them. Not living, I mean.

          My Mamma is very religious but the Good Lord hasn’t seen fit to make her very rich; my Aunt Grace has so much money and she owns so much land that her husband, Uncle Colonel Custis Haskell, left her. Uncle Colonel Custis owned a lot of property; he owned the store downtown where Daddy sold dry goods and foodstuffs and hardware, and he owned the land our little sharecroppers’ house is built on, the plantation next to us where the big plantation house burned down in ’77 (and that was way before I was born) and the farm Aunt Grace still lives on and the corn fields all around us and across the road and up to the north of us too.

          Some people say Uncle Colonel Custis even held title to both sides of the river where the New Massaqua River Train Bridge was built, to accommodate all the train traffic that couldn’t go through on the Old Trestle any more after ’08, when the May flood took out half the bridge and the train that was on the Trestle right then fell half off smack into the water.

          I do not rightly remember that well, but I do think that maybe a whole lot of people were killed; well at least the engineer and the brakeman and the stoker! I know all the town kids, and some of the farm kids too, ‘ceptin’ they don’t often have very much time, like to run out on the Old Trestle on a double-dog dare and scare themselves silly whether they can stop in time and not run smack on off the broken ends of the Trestle, I know.

          I know I can stop at the end of the Trestle; I have done it many a time. The Old Trestle is all run up by weeds and rushes and high grass, cause it’s been three years since the flood took it out. It’s way down below the southern edge of town where nobody goes anymore, except those silly boys and their double-dog dares; and it’s really hard to see from town, because of the way the river curves back just north of it. So you kind of have to be walking right to it and knowing it is there or you are not even going to see it at all.  When the Old Trestle still stood intact, it made a curve to the left toward the far bank and touched down just where the river makes a sharp curve and a cove. I do not know why the railroad went that path; seems it made the engineering so much more difficult. That is what I would like to be when I grow up-if I grow up-an engineer. But I am a girl, supposed to be dainty-like and delicate, not worrying about how to construct a bridge or a building or a dam. Well, I do worry! It was the bad construction on the New Massaqua River  Dam when it was built back in 1905, when the owners persuaded the engineers to put sand into the concrete in some places, just to save them money, that caused the dam to bust up in the tornado of 1908 that May, and that sudden flood. And then it killed the engineer and the brakeman and the stoker too. And that stoker you know was my brother Billy Raife. And the  brakeman, he was Wilson Strothers, who was Aunt Grace’s nephew, by her sister June Nancy Strothers, who passed away a long, long time ago from some kind of women’s cancer I guess, so she didn’t have to live to see her son die cause the flood took the train on the Old Trestle that day in May of 1908.

          So I think I got reason to know all about engineering, what works and what doesn’t and about big companies and small-minded business owners who think they know everything and really they don’t know what is right or what is going to get them to heaven or what is going to make their time on earth any sweeter. All they know how to do is how to make money and the New Massaqua River Dam  Corporation, them that owned and built and operated the New Massaqua River  Dam, well that ‘un was the brainchild of my same old Uncle Colonel Custis Haskell, him that owned up all the land round these parts so much so that my daddy used to joke that Uncle Colonel Custis might’s well own the town itself, not just be its Mayor, cause he was the biggest property owner here. And it was Uncle Colonel Custis’s bought-and-paid-for dam-building and mining business that cut all those corners and built cheap and sorry and built up a dam that collapsed and caused a flood that wrecked the Old Trestle and drowned the engineer and the brakeman and the stoker, them that was Miz June’s boy Wilson, Uncle Colonel Haskell’s wife’s very own nephew, and my own brother Billy Raife, Uncle Colonel Haskell’s wife’s very own nephew also. So he lost two of his wife’s kin on count of that dam busting up as it did.

          I talk a whole lot about history, don’t I just? My own and everybody else’s—but see that’s all we have around here in this little town, Cameron’s Crossing, history-and gossip-and church services and socials-and dirt paths-and corn. The railroad does not even run through here any more; now it’s way up north of town and past our place.