The Old Days When the Dead Stuck Around, Part Two

I live in a prairie town and at night one can hear the freight trains running eastward from Kansas across Iowa their long mournful whistles calling over the fields. Hunched in bed I think of Huddie Ledbetter, otherwise known as “Leadbelly”–murderer and blues singer and song writer who wrote the most famous railroad song of them all, “The Rock Island Line”. The Rock Island Line is out there, just beyond my bedroom window where the Iowa wind is moaning and the engineer pulls his whistle in three long blasts as Leadbelly said he always would:

 

I Got cows.

I got corn.

I got meal.

 

And then he pulls five long blasts:

 

I got whole live stock.

 

And the sound of that freight train in the night and the spirited, playful talking blues of Leadbelly roll me gently in my bed, the engineer is still out there bragging about his transported bounty that’s coasting into Chicago and then ever east. I think of how we’re a vast country and how we’re down on our luck and that the songs are first local before they become anthems. Ghosts in the night are calling out the names of things that will feed people far away and god damn it if there isn’t a moody poetry echoing in the Iowa fields and damn it all if Leadbelly could be here he would know it instantly. And then because I get to make the story I say Leadbelly is here.

 

And another train that’s coming from the east calls back in greeting as Leadbelly said it does:

 

I thank you.

I thank you.

 

S.K.