Summer's sweet wine

         tRain

As I watch the backyards of the world

go crawling by, I raise a hand to help

myself, and find it holds a photograph,

I glance at now and then.

Trying to hide behind a time

as it fades into memory,

the emperor calls for his old clothes;

his day is bleeding sanity.

Now as then and always,

beneath the sun is meaningless.

Blindfolded philosophers 

are roaming in the roundhouse,

while prophets in the tunnel

predict light.

Chapter I   Blood On the Tracks  ##################

We got off the train in Hornepayne, a CN train stop and yards in Northern Ontario. My little brother Don and I stood with our suitcases and waited. I was 12 and he had just turned 11. We looked up and down the wooden station, expecting Aunt Audrey or Uncle Ewart to pick us up to spend the summer.

Looking from the right side of the station, we saw, nearing the station, a pickup truck on it's side, pushed by the cowcatcher of a steam locomotive. I immediately thought they were moving some junk in some sort of clean up. We walked west toward the scene. People were starting to yell and scream as a commotion was breaking out.

The train had hit the truck full of people and came to a stop before the station.

There had been five aboard the truck and all were dead or dying. As we walked the length of the train we could see a head, an arm, several torsos and various other body parts strewn along and underneath the boxcars.

We hadn't been there 15 minutes. I asked where our aunt and uncle lived and were directed up the hill. We ran and told our relatives what we had just seen. People were running and vehicles hurried down to the trackside.

Being about two blocks away the Aunt Audrey couldn't see and asked "What colour is the truck?" I couldn't tell her. Donnie too was speechless." Was it a red one, green,...What colour?" I could visualize everything, in amazing detail, the shape and age of the pickup, the pieces of people, but the colour I tried to remember but I just couldn't.

"Oh dear, let's go down!" We half walked half ran down to the scene quickly, my aunt covered our eyes but could not block out the screams. Stretchers hurried past. Reports of who was still alive circulated. By this time cousin Sharon was with us. The word came, all five were dead.

 We had all become acquainted at Grandma and Grandpa's place in Sudbury and again on a trip to Toronto where Ewart and Audrey lived. I remember spending the hot summer night sleeping out in their backyard. The big thrill for us kids was a ride over the cobblestone streets of Toronto in uncle Ewart's rumble seat!

 Although you would be hard pressed to get 100 people together in Horepayne at that time, there were people everywhere. We were sent to the house for Kool Aid. We drank a lot of Kool Aid that summer.

 My grandparents cared for Donnie and I while older brother Lorne lived with Dad in Thunder Bay, called 'Fort William' at that time. We were subsequently farmed out for the summer, probably to give them a break, for the princely sum of a dollar a day each. They, my grandparents, had already raised five kids of their own through the dust bowl of the 'Dirty Thirties' and had left the old homestead in Vantage Saskatchewan for employment with INCO in Sudbury. Grandma had come came up with her family from Michigan and Grandpa, RR Williams, had come up from South Dakota by horse and wagon, lured by a promise of free land.