Trains Rebecca Schamore (bio) Up the steep wooded hill behind my house in northeastern Tennessee lies an open field that has always reminded me of Bambi's meadow. I often wonder, as I watch them pass through, if the deer that traverse our woods stop at its edge and counsel their fawns on the danger lurking in that wide sunny spot. They forage here regularly on their way down from the mountain that is [End Page 22] the focal point of my Appalachian town. On the far side of the meadow behind a rusting chain link fence, railroad tracks wend westward through the neighborhood on their way to Kentucky coalfields. The tracks are generally quiet, but sometimes at dusk as the chickadees and titmice softly chatter in their hushed evening tones, and the last light dances through the summer leaves, I catch the rolling rumble through the trees, and I remember the trains of my childhood. I was still a child, five or six, when my grandmother first played her train records for me. I was mesmerized by the soulful complaint of the instrumental "Train Blues," but I was too young to manipulate her high fidelity phonograph by myself. I had to ask Grandma to set the needle on the records and turn them over to hear the other side. Because I loved to dance and pretend and because I was shy and self-conscious, I would only ask her to play the records when my sister and cousins were outside playing. All alone, I would spin around the room, a whirling dervish, as the train thundered down the track, then collapse in a heap at the sadness in the fiddle's lonesome song. The trains of my childhood were mythic trains, trains of story and trains of song. The 1954 edition of Watty Piper's The Little Engine That Could with its bright orange cover and its little blue engine spoke to me of kindness and optimism. I could not forgive the passenger and freight engines their haughty cruelty at leaving the toys and the broken-down train behind, nor could I understand the tired old engine's unwillingness to try. I adored the Little Blue Engine for pulling that broken train over the mountain and for helping deliver the toy animals and dolls, the picture puzzles, the big golden oranges, and the red-cheeked apples to the waiting boys and girls. That over the top moral lesson was not lost on five-year-old me. The Little Blue Engine was kind and helpful, she personified [End Page 23] my kindergartner's belief in who we should be. Best of all, she thought she could, and she did. If The Little Engine that Could was my song of innocence, my grandmother's records—those train ballads of Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, the Weavers, and so many others—were my songs of experience. I didn't need to understand the songs; it didn't matter. I knew enough, that there were trains, mines, and hardship. I knew that tarriers, whatever they were, had to "work all day for the sugar in [their] tay." And I knew, because Tennessee Ernie Ford told me, that you could "load sixteen tons" but all you'd get is "another day older and deeper in debt." The story that spoke most clearly to my younger self's sensitivity was "The Ballad of Casey Jones." All the other songs were simply a prelude. I acted out the story in my grandmother's living room. I wanted to warn Casey; I cried every time he said goodbye to his wife and climbed on that fateful train. I would stand in the great green chair by my grandmother's picture window and stare down imaginary tracks until I could see the train blocking Casey's path. I spent hours dancing and singing in that sunny room. If my grandmother or grandfather happened by and glanced my way, I would sit down so fast that sometimes I sent their oversized green footstool skidding across the floor. My play was private. I rode the Wabash Cannonball, took the night train to Memphis, and mourned the loss of that "brave engineer...