Then she saw me. She came across the grass, fast, heels in her hand, and stopped at the barricade and pointed over it. “This is you.” I didn’t answer. “You had the county close a public road to sabotage a dedication?” She was breathing hard. “Do you have the first idea what this is going to cost you?” Clem Fetters said evenly that the closure was a departmental safety decision with his signature on it, not mine. She turned on him. “Safety from what?” “Ma’am,” Fetters said, “there’s a train coming.”
And Karen Brantley laughed. I want to be precise because I’ve thought about it a great many times since. She laughed out loud, genuinely, the laugh of a woman who’s heard something too stupid to be worth being angry about. Then she walked up onto the top step of her own grand entrance, stamped one bare foot on the asphalt, and pointed at it. “There is nothing under there,” she said, “but gravel.”
6:09. The horn came out of the rock cut before anything else did. Two long, a short, a long. The crossing signal rolling up the grade and bouncing off the stone face until it filled that whole hollow at once, and you couldn’t tell what direction it was coming from. Everything stopped. The tent crew stopped. Deputy Coye turned his head. Karen came off the step and stood very still in the middle of her own gateway with her shoes in her hand, and I watched her face do something I had never seen it do in eighteen months. It went blank. Not scared yet. Blank the way a face goes when the information arriving doesn’t fit anywhere in the room you’ve built inside your head.
“That’s 1804,” Ike said quietly. “Hobie’s got her.” Then the headlight came around the cut. Ike gave me the numbers later, flat the way railroaders do. Locomotive 1804, twelve loaded hoppers, right at fourteen hundred tons. Eighteen miles an hour. Sight distance from the mouth of that rock cut to my crossing six hundred feet. Stopping distance for that train at that weight on that grade something north of thirteen hundred.
Hobie Lansdale saw a limestone column standing in the middle of his railroad and did the only thing there was to do. I’d never heard emergency braking on a loaded train from two hundred feet away. It isn’t a screech. It’s a long tearing scream that goes on and on and doesn’t get quieter. And under it a deep grinding you feel through the ground and up through the frame of your truck. And the whole time, the whole time that headlight kept coming.
Karen ran. She got maybe thirty feet onto the lawn. 6:12. The pilot took the iron gate first and the gate went to pieces. Not swung, not knocked down. Pieces. The whole ornamental span shearing off its hinges and folding under. Then the north column. Fourteen hundred tons hit six feet of limestone over a concrete footing and the column did not resist for any measurable amount of time. It came apart. Facing stone went out across that lawn in fragments the size of dinner plates, and one of them took the marquee’s corner pole, and the whole tent came down slow, like something kneeling.
The guardhouse, that little shingled building with the sign-in book where Vanover kept his log, was hit square, came off its slab, turned halfway around in the air, and went down the track ahead of the locomotive in a rolling wad of studs and siding. Then the south column. And 1804 kept going, shoving all of it, plowing gate and stone and guardhouse and conduit and irrigation pipe down my grandfather’s rail, and slid three hundred eighty feet past the crossing before it stopped.
The horn cut off. What I remember about the next few seconds is how quiet it was. The diesel idling way down the track, a broken-up light ticking somewhere in the wreck. One white folding chair rolling on its side across the asphalt with a noise like a stick dragged along a fence. Limestone dust hung over the whole entrance. It got in your teeth.