I was nine when the train hit the boy in grade two.
By the time we got to the tracks on our way to school, the police were there.
I realize now that mom held us back a bit, waiting to see the response.
The screech of a long freight train trying to stop has stayed with me.
Some grownups were clustered at the crossing. I dropped back and watched.
Way up at the front of the train I could see another cluster of grown ups. I strained to hear conversation and watched the police officer help my classmates over a coupling between two freight cars. He was almost frighteningly gentle.
As I scuffed my way back toward the train I looked down in the ditch.
There was a foot in a shoe, a small shoe and a small foot, cleanly severed.
Even the sock had been sheared.
I walked up to the officer and tugged at him.
“Um, his foot is over there, you don’t want the little kids seeing that.”
He turned white and said, “Show me.”
I did.
There was scrambling and strong arms lifted me between the cars.
“Thank you. You did the right thing. Go straight to school.”
His voice was shaky.
I remember how kind everyone was at school. We had an assembly. There was lots of crying, and not much work got done. I remember my teacher talking a lot. I didn’t know then that the school had been told what I had found and they had called my mom.
When I got home I blurted out “Mom, why wasn’t there any blood?”
God love her, she was a difficult woman but her medical training stood her well and she taught us to be pragmatic and practical.
She got out a surgery book. She explained bones, muscles, tendons, veins, arteries, skin and amputation.
“He wouldn’t have felt anything it was so fast,” she said.
“The train wheel probably severed his foot like a surgeon would. It was so fast, there wouldn’t be much blood.”
And she left me with the textbook.
There had to have been blood, I guess trying to be grown up and trying to absorb the death of a classmate I didn’t see it in the colours of the fall.
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I’m SO sorry that you witnessed that at such a young age. It would be a difficult thing at any age but nine years old…how awful. It sounds like you were very brave. Nine-year-olds shouldn’t have to be brave. The fact that you were interested in protecting other children from seeing something so disturbing makes me think that this wasn’t the first time you needed to be brave.
Maybe…hopefully…I am wrong.
I hope at some point in your young life there was more than a text book to comfort you.
That is very kind Deb…it was not the first time I ‘had’ to be brave.
I didn’t know any better.
I pray I do now, especially when I see ‘brave’ bookish nine year olds.
Blog on!
Sometimes we spend so much time being brave that we forget to cry when needed. Thank you for sharing this story. I hope that you were somehow, somewhere, able to learn how and when to cry.
Wow — powerful stuff, Bene. Thanks for sharing that. (I mean it — as morbid as it sounds.) I have an 8-year-old in second grade — just about the same age as you were — so maybe that was why it impacted me the way it did. I can’t imagine him witnessing something like that, or how I would explain it. And the previous commentator was right — you were very brave!
I’m grateful for your kindness.
I wrote colours of the fall to go with the post below; pieces of people.
How many 9 year olds saw the bombings yesterday?
How many were hurt, or lost someone they love?
Maybe we can’t be ‘influential’ players on a world stage, but we can pray, we can find ways to help, we can think of the realities for people in a news clip.
Blogging gives us an opportunity to relate a news item to our humanity, to see beyond our experience or to share them.
I believe with all that is in me that God can give us a love beyond our borders and our comforts, whether it is to the people of Russia, or Nepal, Viet Nam or Palestine or Isreal or…
You just proved it. Blog on!
Hey Bene — Since Blogger doesn’t have a “trackback” feature, I just wanted to let you know I referenced this posting and your “Pieces of People” posting on my blog (giving you the credit, of course)….Thanks again for the thought(s) they provoked…
B.D.
My Dad was 10 when a classmate of his stepped off the bus and was hit by a car–in front of the whole bus load of children. When he tells the story, he remembers, like you, the gentleness of the grown-ups. How they entire school was taken in buses to the funeral. How the parents who could came to school the next day and everyone gathered in the gym to cry and hold each other.
You know, on spiritual gifts tests (like you can test such a thing!), I always test lousy on mercy. But mainly it’s because I have this overwheming drive to protect the children. When I think about what’s going on in Russia, or the bombings everywhere, I become so upset at the grown-ups who should know better, subjecting the children to such horrors, I just want to rip the heads off of the adults. It’s just the mama bear in me, wanting to protect the cubs–all the cubs.
What a tramatic experience for you! I’m speechless. I hope you have found comfort and healing as time went on.
Your mother was very astute/wise Bene.
Intellectualising is a quite effective way of distancing yourself from horror of this nature. By looking at it in an intellectual manner you have the opportunity to put aside all the emotion for a while to enable all the cognitive processing to happen.
The processing of all the emotional stuff must happen but it can happen more gently over time.