On The Blue Comet

On The Blue Comet

Chapter 1

We lived at the end of Lucifer Street, on the Mississippi River side of Cairo, Illinois. Black spruces lined our sandy road. My heart quickened as I watched my dad lope home over the fallen needles. Bouncing along on his shoulder was a red cardboard box labeled Lionel Company, Rochester, New York. In that box was my birthday present, the Blue Comet. The Blue Comet was the queen of all trains.

I waited for him under the porch light. The forty-watt yellow bulb made a Grand Central Station for flapping moths and zizzing june bugs above my head. In the kitchen, our dinner was warm and fragrant on the stove.

The house at the end of Lucifer Street had been my mama’s great joy. She fixed it up so pretty when I was just a baby, all yellow curtains and shiny white trim. We have a lone portrait, its edges curled, of me, Dad, and Mama. I was just a skinny, freckled little boy of three in that Brownie camera snapshot, with a cowlick pointing straight up out of the top of my head.

Mama was the bookkeeper in the Lucifer Fireworks plant until one day a bolt of walking lightning shot right through the shipping-room window, stopping the clock and sizzling into a box of Roman candles near her chair. Everyone would say afterward she had not known or felt a thing in that half-second explosion. All I remember seeing was a fire truck out the window of our kitchen and my aunt Carmen, who had appeared from nowhere, covering my eyes with her hands.

What was left of the Lucifer factory was declared unsafe and closed down soon after. You might think my dad would want to move away from Lucifer Street and the terrible reminders of the accident. But in the end he could not bear to leave the yellow curtains and white trim that Mama had painted herself. He certainly did not wish to move into the Chateaux Apartment Village as Aunt Carmen, his in-town sister, suggested. Aunt Carmen was always telling Dad what he ought to do.

“Get your life back on the tracks and find a good woman, Oscar,” Aunt Carmen whispered loudly to Dad every time she had the littlest chance. “The boy needs a mother, and you need a wife to keep your hair short and make you some casserole dinners.”

“That goes double, Carmen,” my dad always replied. Aunt Carmen lived alone in a little house full of bisque figurines. Squirrel silhouettes were cut into the shutters. It was explained to me that Aunt Carmen had never married because the Great War had taken the lives of so many young men that there were not enough to go around.

“A good man is a darn sight harder to find than a good woman,” Aunt Carmen always answered my dad with a sniff.

Oftentimes a picture floated through my mind of the wife that aunt Carmen had in mind for us. She looked like the lady on the Coca-Cola calendar, black hair parted on the side, dress with the stripes going across diamond-wise, big red lips showing off her white teeth.

“I will never be so lucky again as to find anyone like your mother,” Dad said.

Copyright © 2010 by Rosemary Wells