Forty years ago, the sky was full of trains. Derailed in the middle of Crescent City, the cars skidded and sparked and ignited the propane tanks. After the explosion, parts of the train were found in cornfields, on roofs, inside barns. In one photo, Irma Hill and Ruth Storm stand inside a hollowed-out tank. Their hands clasped in identical poses. The dark car swallowing their white dresses.
And here we are, in a town where everything passes through. So many trains, the geese flying home, love gone south for the winter. In September, you told me you could marry this one. Now, everything's colder. Now, the breaking. Annie, sometimes I think our hearts are lying in the grass, watching the sky blow away. Other times, I think they're wire cages, that they must have caught something. Even these whistles, filling up the sky. Even the debris.
2.
My grandmother told me that after the trains fell, the town closed entirely. No one could drive through, no one could call in or out. Sometimes I think of the townspeople huddled together around the burning barns, the mothers counting their children again and again. The town drawing its curtains around them, tucking them in, saying Stay. No one died in Crescent City. And nobody left anyone behind.
Annie, are trains falling where you are, too? I have found eggshells and bird bones in the yard, but not as yet a wheel, a tie, an engine. I expect they will come any day, and silently, the way snow blankets in the night. I will wake up half-bedded in a train, the way I melted into the blue cars of the Mahabodhi Express. Days I spent curled up in that bunk, drinking chai and watching the light move over the Indian countryside. And did I tell you how I leaned out the open car doors? Annie, there was so much sky it almost hurt.
3.
The stars were still out in Arizona when Ernest A. Grove saw the news of the train wreck on his TV. He had moved away from Crescent City the year before, and he said, Everything was beautiful, but I was still lonesome and homesick. It took the sight of his home on fire for him to tell his wife they were going back to Illinois, back to the town named after the moon.
Sometimes it seems like love is on the opposite side of the world, and Annie, sometimes he is. I remember looking up at the sky from Bihar and not being able to find the constellations. They were there, but I couldn't piece anything together, and my love was too far away to point to the sky, trace the Dipper. Annie, sometimes even a sky full of trains feels more like home than this heartbreak. Sometimes even a town on fire.
4.
The falling trains woke the whole town up. Veterans thought the sound was an airplane crash and remembered their friends falling from the sky. Sgt. Charles Struble watched the trains explode into what looked to him like an atomic bomb. You looked up under that mushroom and felt like the fire might drop down on you, he said. Gaylord Bruniga, a WWII vet, said that the sky was raining propane, that all the leaves in the town were spotted with holes. He held out his burn-dappled hands, said, Look.
Annie, I've never been to war, but I have seen the sky explode. In India, after the villagers built and blew up the giant Ravana statue for the festival, explosives were everywhere. Back-alley firecrackers sold on street corners. Little boys throwing sparklers at our feet. So bright, I stopped needing a flashlight to find my way home. And I thought of you, how you said you wanted to be full of shine. How, when we recited, These, our bodies, possessed by light, we meant every word.
5.
Doris Gocken recalled fireman after fireman showing up at the hospital, burned straight through their gear. She said that after they were discharged, they stood out in the night with no shirts. Bare under the moon, their clothes left in a smoky pile in some ward. I thought someone should have at least given them a blanket, she said. It was June, but after all that fire, any blue night would freeze. She could see them shivering.
Annie, are you keeping warm? It's getting colder here, and there never seems to be enough time to wrap up the way we want. To cocoon. I've seen my love run out into the snow unbundled, the same way he rushed out into the yard when tornado sirens blared. No regard for a cruel sky. Sometimes I worry he will fall asleep looking at the moon, that I will find him frozen over in the morning. Or wandered away. Because sometimes love gets on the southbound train. Sometimes even the train doesn't stay on the tracks. Whole towns go missing.
6.
After the fire died down in Crescent City, the church pews were black with smoke. Though most of downtown was flattened by the blast, the townspeople scrubbed the pews for days. Because when there is nothing left, even the ruin must be made holy. Because, really, what else were they supposed to do with their hands?
You and I have sat in many churches. We have opened our hands to bread, bowed our heads to blessing. I have to believe that if every church burned down, we would still sing something. Surely we could call the sky a steeple. Surely we could say that the moon is a kind of mercy. Because when the trains fall, we're going to have to leave everything we own. I can only hold one thing, and Annie, it's going to be you.
7.
Much of what remained of the town had to be thrown away. One resident wrote, I remember walking down Highway 24 crying as hard as I ever remember crying and thinking that they were taking our town out and dumping it brick by brick, load by load. In the debris: the post office, Horton's Piano Tuning, Jenkin's Barber Shop, Diane's Beauty Shop, the Villiage Inn, nearly thirty homes. My grandmother gave me a book that lists them off, saying, He did not rebuild; the building was not rebuilt; they moved away from town; he did not rebuild.
I remember reading a poem about tsunamis, how the villagers said, We will build new homes away from the sea. Annie, I hope you will never have to move away from the land you love, threatening as the sky may be here in this corn-locked town. When the trains fall, we will return and keep returning. Because I have been on the other side of the world, and I can tell you there is no sky like this one. No better place to rebuilt a heart.
