Shelton Family Saga

Chapter 5

Vanessa Shelton
Sat, August 05, 1961, 1:17 a.m. 

Red, white and blue flashing lights lit up the entire area at the intersection of Cromwell and Piedras St. That's because there was more than one set of them. Every police car in town was at the scene, and it didn't take long for the only ambulance, along with the lone fire truck in town, to arrive in sequence. The area around the crossing at the railroad tracks was a bloody mess. Blood, glass, burnt rubber and automobile parts. The same area displayed the train's boxcar that was barely dented along with what was left of an old beat up 1946 Dodge D-24. The whole passenger side of the car had been smashed in flattening the car's mid section like an emaciated flapjack from one door over to the other, and the only thing that was still intact was the backseat and rear end of the car, thanks to the longer wheelbase of its design. Because of this, the ambulance on the scene loaded two adult bodies on separate stretchers. The body of a man on one and a woman on the other. The woman on the stretcher laid motionless with very faint breathing. She was conscious, but barely. Through heavy laden eyes she did her best to make sense of the chaos surrounding her. Her mind rested in a fog. Where was Johnny? The young fella with nappy plats and a crusty sightless eye covered by a black patch. He wasn't her husband, but rather an ol' boy from her side of the tracks that liked to get drunk and hang out at the hole in the wall juke joints like she did. They'd spent many of their nights like that, down at Ratty's and Smokey Joe's, getting wasted off a cheap bottle of Sunny Brook Whiskey followed by dancing in the street and watching folks fighting over things of minuscule importance. They usually followed that up by grubbing on greasy chicken wings bought from the club owner outside from 'round back of the club. Luckily, on this night after leaving the club, they'd had to swing by Tonya's to pick up Vanessa's two year old daughter before heading back to Johnny's place. Tonya was Johnny's younger cousin and she'd agreed to babysit earlier that day for some beer and a small stack of diapers for her own baby. After picking up her daughter, Vanessa just stayed in the back seat since it had taken so much effort to get the carseat strapped in. Fortunately for her, it's what saved her life. Johnny had gotten a RCA Victor record player installed in his car earlier that week. He'd did it right after payday when he'd gotten his check from the packing house. The packing house was a factory job in Sheridan that was hard to come by, so once someone got hired on at the packing house, they usually held on to their job until they died, which was exactly what happened in Johnny's case. Him and Vanessa were headed back to his place after a good time out that night. They'd spent much of the earlier part of it down at Smokey Joe's Cafe. Vanessa had spent her time laughing with some girls she knew that stayed down the street from her daddy's house on Wagonwood Street. They'd talked about everything from who could roll pink sponge rollers the tightest to who could hula hoop the longest. They talked about the best way to stir powdered milk to get the clumps out and the thickest anybody could slice a block of government cheese at home without getting in trouble. They swigged from their cans of beer and laughed loud and hard enjoying their time. Across the room, Johnny was back and forth in and out of the club hanging with some fella's who often got into trouble. They all made their way walking back and forth between Smokey Joe's Cafe and Ratty's shooting dice and playing records on the jukebox. Before the night had come to an end, Johnny had bought a bag of greasy chicken wings before him and Vanessa packed up to leave and head back to his place. On the ride back to his place, they'd been talking about one day getting out of Helmsville and going over to the state of Georgia. They often talked about leaving Wyoming  for a better way of life, and this particularly time in the wee hour of early morning they were feeling real nice and had the music going with Ray Charles' Georgia on my mind blaring. It was a hot tune at the time. A very popular Motown hit that had them carelessly dreaming out loud. So much so, they neglected to hear the train's horn as they attempted to cross the tracks. By the time Vanessa looked out the window to stare straight into the huge headlight of the train fast approaching, it was too late to do anything. Just like that, in the blink of an eye, the train slammed into Johnny's car with the impact of eternity leaping through the universe in a home-run slide. The kaboom of it seemed to shake the entirety of small town Helmsville, and within a matter of minutes, it seems every resident of the small community were at the scene. The manner in which the ambulance careened in through the crowd, along with everything else taking place was incomprehensible madness. It all happened so fast leaving Vanessa confused, and by the time they'd gotten her situated on a stretcher with an IV solution of normal saline running through her veins, the jaws of life had finally been able to cut Johnny from what remained of the car. From her stretcher, Vanessa watched as the paramedic pulled the white sheet over her lover yelling to her EMT partner, this one's D.O.A. signifying Johnny was already dead on their arrival. When a totally different paramedic approached her stretcher and draped a white sheet over her feet and started pulling it over her body all the way up toward her head, she panicked. She thought she had died, too. She screamed, "Oh shit, I'm dead! No, I'm alive! Damn, I'm dead! No, I'm alive!" Her mind raced in ubiquitous chaos as she screamed again, "I said, I'm not dead, damnit, I'm not dead!" Only problem was no one could hear her, cause although she was conscious in her own mind, she was unconscious to the outside world around her. In the back of the ambulance, a frail Barney Fife looking policeman worked tirelessly on Vanessa's toddler performing C.P.R. at a steady rate. He eventually garnered a pulse and signaled to the paramedics he had a positive response of life from the toddler and they needed to head out to the hospital. This would be the beginning of many trying times to come for baby Vaniti. At just two years old, she clung to the strings of her almost non existent life. The train wreck had taken the life of her mother's lover Johnny, but spared both her own life and that of her mother Vanessa Shelton, whose name she would later utilize as the building block of her epic legacy in the equestrian world.