My sister Samantha is a single mother. She still lives on Granddad’s farm in Iowa, right in Granddad’s hundred-year-old farmhouse on the land where we grew up. I got out of there at 17 because of what I’d seen there one night in the summer of my youth. I vowed to all of them that I would never return.
Yet, here I am, driving a moving van up this long stretch of familiar dusty road, bordered on either side by miles and miles of soybeans and chest-high corn stalks. She’d managed to convince me to come when she called me the day before yesterday saying that she wants to move off the farm now too. It's all too much for her. She called me because she was overwhelmed and asked if I would come help. I told her to hire movers because I wasn’t going back there. Not ever.
My mind was changed when Samantha said that my nephew Jason was telling wild stories. Jason was talking about things that he couldn’t have known.
“He’s talking about the train. The one you and Ronnie saw. Scott, you need to tell me what actually happened.” Her voice quavered with the fear of the demand.
I’d never told anyone what happened to cousin Ronnie. After I did, she begged me until I agreed to come all the way out here.
Ronnie and I were the ones who saw it. Every night for a week, we chased the ghost train on Granddad’s farm.
For a farm, it’s on the smaller size at 174 acres…yet still big enough for three houses on the land. Each of them just far enough away from one another that you could avoid seeing one of your neighbors if you were mad at them. You couldn’t avoid them forever though, on account of being related to them. We grew up close friends because we were cousins, but also because Uncle Richie and Aunt Arlene and Ronnie lived just a stone throw away. Our family, Mom, Dad, my older sister Samantha and I lived in a second house; Granddad in the third. The train track spanning the center was from another era. Granddad said those tracks hadn’t been used in decades. That’s why nobody believed when we started talking about the ghost train.
Ronnie said that the disused tracks made perfect sense: that was why it was an old train we saw, one from the early 1900’s. It wasn't like the ones you see operating today.
Ronnie knew a lot about trains. He was obsessed with them. He collected books and pictures of trains the way other boys collected Hustler. I realize how that sounded. I meant it that way. I walked in on him in his room once. He was looking at one of his train books: naked. He acted embarrassed because I’d caught him…
You know the rest.
Whenever we’d talk about chasing the ghost train that week, more than once I’m pretty sure his pants bulged with an erection.
We never talked about his conductor fetish or whatever it was.
On nice summer nights Ronnie and I used to take a tent out to spots on Granddad’s farm. We’d watch fireflies dancing in the fields like etheral lights from another world. In late July that summer, the nights were balmy but we’d made a fire just the same. We spent half the night telling ghost stories. Ronnie always wanted to pitch the tent by the train tracks.
I realize how that sounded. I mean that in that way too.
“You don’t get to pick your family, you just got to love them.” That’s what my daddy said every time I used to tell him his brother’s son was kind of weird.
The first time we heard it, it was late, much later than we usually stayed awake; the whistle on the front of the train pierced through 3 a.m. fog, like a distant memory, recalled.
Toot tootttt!
Ronnie’s eyes glistened: excited as a fire inside of him grew. “Do you hear that?” He asked.
Ronnie said the train we saw was a Shay Locomotive, at least a hundred years old. We were baffled by the mystery of it as it approached that first time. Ronnie began running before it had even fully passed us–anything he could do to gaze at it for just a few moments longer.
As it made its way out of sight, I watched Ronnie duck into the bushes. He didn’t return for almost 40 minutes.
We stayed out there the next night, and the next after that. Each time, Ronnie and I would get a bit closer. Our tent was pitched out by those tracks every night for a week. Eventually we’d gotten close enough for Ronnie to reach his hand out to touch the train, expecting it to cut through it’s ghastly exterior like in the movies; like passing it through water.
The ghost train pulled him for 100 yards before ripping the arm off. His screams of agony echoed through the night. No matter how fast I ran, it could never have been fast enough. Granddad’s house was closest, but by the time we got back in his truck, Ronnie was dead from the blood loss. Ronnie died July 27th, 1997, right there on the tracks.
Nobody could explain how, why or even what happened; no trains had used those tracks for almost 50 years. Nobody would have believed what I’d seen so I just told them I was sleeping, awoken by his screams. I lied and said I didn’t know how or why it happened.
In his grief, and with Granddad’s blessing, uncle Richie had the tracks pulled up. The rails were sold as scrap. The wood was piled into a pyre to burn.
I told Samantha the story I had never shared and she understood why I’d stayed away from Iowa for so long. I only agreed to come back to help when she said she’s been having a hard time keeping her son away from where we used to play...those places where Ronnie and I pitched our tents and told those campfire tales so many years ago...waiting to hear the preternatural call of that train.
Samantha was bothered because Jason shouldn’t know about those tracks. They’ve been gone for almost 20 years. Uncle Richie and Granddad have been gone too--for Jason’s whole life. They died before Jason was even born. In my stubbornness, I didn't even come back here for their funerals. There’s nobody left to remember the tracks and Samantha said it was something she’d never shared with him.
I sit in the truck after it's parked in the driveway, still a bit too unnerved by how little this place has changed.
Samantha's phone call had changed my mind. I owed this to her after keeping this to myself after so many years. She said in my nephew’s tales, after midnight he’s been seeing a ghost train cutting straight through the fields with reckless abandon. He says he got closer to watch it pass and strangely there was someone inside. A lone passenger in the empty ghost train. A naked kid, right around his age. The young man’s face peered out at him from one of the cars. He was missing an arm. He cast a sweaty smile down to Jason where he stood. As the train rushed away, filling the fields with the fog that it disappeared into, the young man inside never broke his gaze. His glassy eyes were alight, burning with the throes of ecstasy.