D E LTA C H I L D In Delta Child, author Talya Tate Boerner draws on her Mississippi County childhood to deliver readers back to a simpler time when screen doors slammed, kids tromped cotton, and Momma baked cornbread for supper every night. Boerner, a fourth-generation Arkansas farm girl, has been published in Arkansas Review, Ponder Review, and Writer’s Digest. Her award-winning debut novel, The Accidental Salvation of Gracie Lee, is also set in northeast Arkansas. Follow her blog Grace Grits and Gardening (www.gracegritsgarden.com) for more tales of Arkansas farming, gardening and comfort food. Her second book, Gene, Everywhere, will be available March 2020.
by Talya Tate Boerner
The Saturday Trail
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aturday afternoons were for running errands with Momma and getting stuck behind the train in Osceola. The railroad tracks cut straight through downtown between all the good stores — Newcomb’s Drug Store and Sterling’s on one side; Belk’s and Silverfield’s on the other. I remember the flashing lights and clanging bells and the way Momma stopped the car right away. Even when the train was a whole block away, she never tried to rush over the tracks. That’s one of the things about Mommas. Sometimes when I’m back home visiting, I drive downtown just to go over the train tracks. Just to remember the Saturday morning train. Even in the dead of winter, I can see summer’s heat hovering over sidewalks and streets. I can hear Nancy Sinatra singing These Boots Are Made for Walking. Momma would turn up the radio, and my sister and I joined in, trying with all our might to memorize the words to the song. Our desire for go-go boots grew stronger with each singing of the song. Cars were bigger back then, and the seats in Momma’s Oldsmobile were as long as church pews. While the train passed in a rhythmic blur, my sister and I counted the boxcars from our front-row view. Some boxcars hauled grain. Some hauled coal. Other tanks flashed by with warnings of flammable contents on board. A few empty boxcars passed, their side panels open wide. Never did we see a hobo, although we looked every time. Would the caboose ever go by? It seemed to me that while the locomotive must surely be pulling into the city limits of Luxora, the caboose was just passing the cotton gin in Wilson. And as for us? No matter which side of the tracks we were on, we needed to be on the other side. One Saturday, while the train thundered along, I asked Momma, “Have you ever seen a penny flattened by a train?” “I don’t think so. Have you?” “Yeah. Last week, a boy at the swimming pool showed
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me one. It had been squashed so flat President Lincoln’s face had been smeared. Almost erased even.” I thought of the penny he’d dropped onto my palm and even let me hold for a minute. “Do you think a flattened penny would still buy a piece of bubble gum at Big Star?” I asked Momma. “I don’t know. It probably depends on how bad the coin is damaged.” That day at the pool, I’d asked the boy why he would want to ruin a perfectly good penny. He’d shrugged and looked annoyed. “I was trying to make the train jump the track. But it didn’t work. The train kept right on going,” he’d said. I thought that was a mean idea to want to wreck a train. I gave the coin back to the crazy boy and stayed away from him for the rest of the summer. Today as I think back on those days, I doubt my sister and I ever successfully counted all the boxcars of a single Saturday morning train. Distractions of one sort or another always disrupted us. Conversation led to giggling. Songs on the radio led to singing. Or, we simply stopped counting when the train juddered to a halt and began backing up. Oh, the backing up of a train… To this day, I consider it one of life’s great mysteries. We pressed hands to foreheads and moaned and groaned, but really, it was all part of the fun, the waiting to see if it would stop, knowing it would, and feigning exasperation when it happened. Although the process of backing up never lasted very long, for a little while, time stood completely still. I had the same fleeting thought every Saturday — what if we are stuck behind the train for the rest of our lives? Finally, with a wave to the caboose, usually red, but sometimes not, we bumped over the tracks and went on about our day. The train gave us a lonesome whistle goodbye. It moved on with its day too, delaying other people in other places. Probably Blytheville. Maybe even all the way to St. Louis. •
Front Porch
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ARKANSAS FARM BUREAU • WINTER 2020
