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"It was the greatest train wreck the world had ever seen," Grandfather said, as he fumbled with the Mail Pouch envelope for his chaw. "Just imagine two 35 ton locomotives, each pulling 7 boxcars apiece, roaring down the track toward each other at more than 60 miles an hour."
He knew he had us hooked. A twinkle crossed his eyes and a smile curled under his Santa Claus beard and moustache, He made that little chuckling sound he always made just before the real beginning of a story. My cousin Tom, and no less than a dozen of our friends were seated in a semicircle around him on the screen porch of our house. As for me, I carried a tray with ice-cold glasses of lemonade sweating dewdrops, one for each kid there, Grandfather and me.
"Old 999 was one of the two engines that crashed that day," He began, spitting a glop of tobacco juice into the Maxwell House can Grandmother insisted he keep for that purpose. "The other engine was No, 1001. They were both locomotives of the line belonging to the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway Company, commonly known as 'the Katy.' "
"At 5 p.m. the afternoon of September 15, 1896, nearly 50,000 people had gathered together on a wide stretch of Texas prairie near Waco. They weren't out in the hot sun by accident, mind you. They'd come to see a show. The greatest spectacle of all time had been promised them by William George Crush, a passenger agent for the railroad, and they'd come from as far away as New Orleans and Amarillo, paid five U.S. Dollars to ride the Katy to that location."
Grandfather spat without retrieving the can this time. We marveled at his accuracy and at the satisfying little ping sound it made on impact.
"50,000 people all showed up to see a train wreck." Said Grandfather emphatically. "Some of them had been there for days and even weeks prior to the moment of truth. The genius of it put P.T. Barnum to shame as a promoter."
Now I'd heard many a whopper of Grandfather's, being that I'd lived under his roof my whole life. And I suspected that he'd saved this one special for my cousin Tom, come all the way to South Carolina from Cincinnati, Ohio, on the other side of the Smoky Mountains, because he never once had ever hinted to me that such a story as this had ever happened. My lemonade long since gone, I was sucking ice cubes as he continued.
"Now no town would ever grant a permit for somebody to crash two trains into one another at top speed," he said, lowering his voice conspiratorially. "So right there out on the prairie, in the middle of nowhere at all, old Willie Crush set up his own town, calling it Crush, Texas, after himself, no doubt, and perhaps with just a touch of demented humor, seeing as he was about to destroy 70 tons of cast iron right there in front of God and most of the population of the Lone Star State."
He paused to take a deep breath after such a powerfully spoken string of sentences and then plunged into it some more.
"Most promoters would have charged admission." Grandfather lobbed another tobacco bullet into the can. "But old Willie, he played it coy. Katy officials had for months been announcing, up and down the tracks, that this, the greatest show in history would be stone cold free. Now true enough, there would be the rail fare, but Willie Crush personally promised that food vendors would sell lunches at reasonable prices, and that containers of 'fresh Waco water' would be abundant and free."
Grandfather laughed aloud. "The truth was not too far from the promise. And the public flocked to the place like geese to bread. Excursion trains were so packed that some people were obliged to ride on top of the cars for lack of room inside. It was the last great adventure of the 19th century."
During the telling of this first part of the tale, Grandfather pretty much drew all the juice out of that wad of mail pouch. He paused for a moment to spit it into the can, then picked up his as yet untouched glass of lemonade and slowly drained it of its golden contents, right down to the last nearly melted ice cube.
"So what happened, Grampa?" My cousin Tom said impatiently. A Yankee, Tommy didn't have much of a clue about the fine art of storytelling and the delicate pauses required for emphasis.
"It was a hell of a party." Grandfather began anew. "All day, folks had eaten and drank and picked out the best spot to watch the Great Train Wreck. There were hills overlooking the tracks and almost everybody grabbed his or her self a prime spot, for the most part, at a common sense distance away from the mayhem."
"Come 5 in the afternoon, the two big iron horses, each trailing an identical 7 boxcars, squared up, cowcatcher to cowcatcher, like angry buffalo meeting horn to horn. Great puffs of steam billowed into the air and the two whistles shrieked like the banshees of Ireland on a dark night."
"Pictures were taken, then the two trains each backed up exactly two miles from the starting point. At the right moment, the signal was given and the throttles were opened all the way and locked. Each engineer stepped off onto the ground as the locos began to speed up, each letting off one ten second whistle that cut the air like a knife."
"One photographer," Grandfather scratched his head and wrinkled his face as if to remember details, "set up his camera on a bluff, really close to where the engineers had calculated the impact would take place. He wanted to get a good shot of the collision because a newspaper back east had promised to pay him 20 dollars for that particular shot."
Grandfather leaned the rocker toward us now and lowered his voice almost to a whisper. "Those two trains just kept picking up speed," He said. "Steel wheels biting hard on the steel rails. By the time the two trains came into full view of the multitude, they were barreling toward each other at a combined speed of more than a hundred twenty miles an hour."
He leaned back into the rocker and spread his hands apart, then drew them slowly together. " Imagine 50 thousand Texans and others, all dead silent at the wonder of it as the two trains, locked in a struggle to the death, drew closer, and closer and closer"
He continued to illustrate the impending crash with his hands, which he brought into contact with a resounding <smack>, while at the same time shouting the word "BOOM!" at the top of his lungs, startling everyone, even though we really should have seen it coming.
"Boom!" Grandfather shouted again, then, "BOOM!"
"At the exact instant of impact," he went on in a hushed, almost sorrowful tone, "One of the boilers unexpectedly exploded."
He studied us for reaction, and then said, "The concussion from the blast was equal to 2 tons of dynamite. And if that had been all there was, the whole thing would have been a great success. But there was more."
If he'd stopped the story there, I think we all would have had a fit. So I said quickly, "What else was there, Grandfather?"
"Shrapnel." Grandfather proclaimed triumphantly because we had not been able to guess. "Both those engines and their tenders were made of iron, as were the boilers, including the one that exploded. Bolts and scraps of iron and debris were hurled hundreds and hundreds of yards, some landing well up into the spectator area. One large boiler bolt hit that photographer, who was only 40 or so yards from the tracks. Killed him instantly. There were hundreds of people hurt, including one boy about your age whose leg was cut right off by a flying wheel."
"And then, just like that, it was over." He said this sadly, as though personally a little let down by the knowledge. "Within just a few hours, the Katy cranes came in and hauled away the larger debris; souvenir seekers took care of the rest. The town of Crush, which that earlier that afternoon had been the second largest city in Texas, by midnight was a ghost town, just grass and prairie dogs."
We sensed the end of the story and stirred to get circulation back into our tortured legs, which had gone to sleep on nearly all of us.
"What happened to Willie?" Tom wanted to know.
The old man laughed heartily. "A lot of folks wanted to hang him for murder." He smiled. "The railroad fired him loudly and publicly, but then they quietly called him back and he was rehired the next day. He spent the next 57 years working for the railroad."
"Tom said, "Grampa, how do you know all this?"
I retorted hotly, "Because he was there, right Grandfather?"
The old man gently reminded us that the incident took place more than a hundred years ago, certainly well before he was even born.
"So how do you know it really happened, " persisted Tommy.
"Well, boys," Grandfather said, that twinkle back in his eye once more, "to be perfectly honest, and because I promised your grandmother that I would never tell you an out and out lie. . ."
He stopped in mid sentence and just let it hang there like a cold winter breath.
We erupted in raucous protest, banging stirring spoons on empty lemonade glasses.
He brought his finger to his lips to quiet us down, opened the Mail Pouch envelope and retrieved an enormous chaw, which he stuffed into his cheek.
We were pleading with our eyes for relief when he said, with a little chuckle, "I Googled it."
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