John awoke to the horrendous sound of metal clashing and banging together. The train’s brakes screeched like an amplified chorus of death, and all at once he thought about his life in segments. Time had become a leaking faucet rather than a raging river and in the last seconds of his life his heart yearned for the family he once knew. He remembered his journey. He once was a small boy named Johnny, who was born in 1945 to a large family, near Greenville, South Carolina. There were four other boys and two girls. At age three old his youngest sister was born. His parents never gave him much attention, the older children raised him. John grew into a young man of insignificant stature, in both his physical size and spirit. He was a gruff man,
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It was as if all his sufferings, and there were a good number according to john, were washed away by the sweet, salivary antidote otherwise known as bourbon. At fifteen years old, he became especially fond of the tawny pick-me-up. One night he considered all the plights of this life, and came to a verdict about it all. He decided that he would live his life with the wind at his back always, and he leapt in a boxcar to see where it would take him. With a satchel of clothing and jerky, and a flask full of bourbon, he disappeared from his …show more content…
It was the last moment of peace John would ever feel, as he dreamt of being reunited with his family, and being held by his mother again. The no. 52 northbound train from Atlanta, Georgia to Greenville, South Carolina would on no occasion reach its last stop (Barnett 2015). As the boxcars toppled off the tracks like a line of dominoes tipping over, some of them twisting like a pretzel, his body slammed against the boxcar and was broken into pieces. Comparable to his prepubescent life, the boxcar was derailed. His body diffused into the metal shards. Time began to speed back into a normal flow. His thoughts raced through the faces of each of his family members and he came to a painful awareness far greater than the physical pain he was experiencing. He would never see them again and death was the only adventure he had left. He closed his eyes. John died at the age of 20, in Clemson, South Carolina just thirty miles from the home he grew up in, in the Great Clemson Train Wreck of 1965 (Barnett
It was as if all his sufferings, and there were a good number according to john, were washed away by the sweet, salivary antidote otherwise known as bourbon. At fifteen years old, he became especially fond of the tawny pick-me-up. One night he considered all the plights of this life, and came to a verdict about it all. He decided that he would live his life with the wind at his back always, and he leapt in a boxcar to see where it would take him. With a satchel of clothing and jerky, and a flask full of bourbon, he disappeared from his …show more content…
It was the last moment of peace John would ever feel, as he dreamt of being reunited with his family, and being held by his mother again. The no. 52 northbound train from Atlanta, Georgia to Greenville, South Carolina would on no occasion reach its last stop (Barnett 2015). As the boxcars toppled off the tracks like a line of dominoes tipping over, some of them twisting like a pretzel, his body slammed against the boxcar and was broken into pieces. Comparable to his prepubescent life, the boxcar was derailed. His body diffused into the metal shards. Time began to speed back into a normal flow. His thoughts raced through the faces of each of his family members and he came to a painful awareness far greater than the physical pain he was experiencing. He would never see them again and death was the only adventure he had left. He closed his eyes. John died at the age of 20, in Clemson, South Carolina just thirty miles from the home he grew up in, in the Great Clemson Train Wreck of 1965 (Barnett