Then we went on, walking along the tracks beside the train. Ahead of us we could see that there were people gathered around the smashed Buick. It was shoved free of the train now, into the ditch below the engine. There were men and women peering inside the car and talking to one another.
“You had better take photographs of that,” my dad said. “But stand up here so you can get the side of the train in it.”
I crowded the boxcars and snapped photographs of what I saw through the camera. Then my dad took several pictures too, to be certain he had something suitable for the front page. Afterward he gave the camera back to me and we went on.
When we arrived at the car it was standing upright in the ditch weeds on its bent rims. The driver’s door was crushed in, shoved against the passenger’s side. In the door there was the deep impact, as in a clay mold or a piece of tin, where the train engine had hit it. All the glass had been popped out and scattered.
Off to the side, George Foley, who was a barber in Holt and who lived near the tracks, was explaining to two or three other men what had happened. My dad and I stopped to hear what he was saying.
He was saying in the night how he had heard a sudden bang and immediately afterward a continuous screeching; he had gotten up to see what it was. The train had almost stopped then, he said, but down the tracks in front of it there was a car that was caught and the car was still being shoved along ahead of the engine and there were sparks flying off into the air. So he had gotten dressed and had run outside down the tracks to the head of the train. By then it was stopped completely. “But it didn’t make no difference,” he said. “It was already too late. He was already dead.”
“How do you know that?” my dad said.
“What?”
“How do you know that he was already dead?”
“Well wouldn’t he be?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to think he was anyway.”
“That’s what I mean. If a goddamn freight train hits somebody in the middle of the night and it’s going sixty miles a hour—if that don’t kill him outright, I don’t know what else will.”
“Probably,” my dad said. “What else did you see?”
“Plenty,” George Foley said, “I saw enough.”
He told us the men were already out of the train engine by the time he ran up to the car. They were moving about, trying to pull the car away from the front of the engine by hand, but it was stuck fast, enmeshed with the engine, and meanwhile the big headlight still worked back and forth above them, shining down the tracks into the snow. Then he looked inside the car.
“And my god, he was just meat. That’s all he was. He was just hamburger with clothes on. And his clothes, why they was just bloody rags.”
Then he told us that the police had arrived. However, there was still some confusion about what to do. It would have been faster to have used cutting torches, but there was gasoline dripping out of the car and they were afraid of starting a fire. Finally somebody thought of hydraulic jacks. Just before morning, then, by working in shifts they were able to pry the car loose and to remove the body. They brought it out in pieces. The police took what they could of it over to John Baker at the Holt Mortuary to prepare for burial.
“And I seen it all,” Foley told us. “I seen everything.”
Then he was finished. There were others walking along the tracks toward us to look at the car: Ed Taylor and Mrs. Taylor, who had come into town to attend church; they were dressed up. Foley walked over to them and began to tell them his story.
My dad watched him for a moment. “That’s the trouble with eyewitnesses,” he said. “They just think they’ve seen it all. And every time they tell it they think they have to improve on what they’ve already told somebody else.”
“Didn’t you believe any of it?” I said.
“Maybe. But George Foley likes to hear himself talk. It’s how he makes his living.”
“I thought he was a barber.”
“He is.”
“Oh,” I said.