Coal Truck Wreck on the Mountain

© 2003 This was published in the Birmingham Arts Journal http://birminghamartsjournal.com/pdf/baj2-3.pdf

Coal Truck Wreck on the Mountain 

Rebecca Carroll 

I remember eyes–just eyes–no noses or mouths, but eyes of children looking at me through the school bus windows. Their eyes all traveled together as the bus moved forward. I remember that I was wearing a frail cotton dress. My mother would tell me later that she had sewn it for my older sister, but it was too small for her. I remember the bicycle, its shiny red paint still new, my haste in throwing it down when the black came, and my haste in jerking it off the ground to put it in the garage. I remember standing at the front door with my mouth open but no words coming out, and Mother looking at me with fear on her face. I remember the swing set and how the neighbor children and I swung higher and higher, thinking we could swing over the top, in a circle. Pam fell off the swing and broke her arm. Her mother swished her off down the highway to the doctor.

I don’t remember the smell of the brakes on the truck as they ground through metal. Or the sound of screeching tires as they left their prints far up the highway. I don’t remember the way a fully loaded coal truck sounded as its driver instinctively braked and steered hard enough to send it off the road into a yard. My yard. I don’t remember the sound of coal spilling out onto the pretty green grass, black dust swirling in the early fall morning, around my head, settling onto my blond hair.

The neighbors all came. Brownie cameras snapped. Everyone had to hear the story of the little girl almost buried by coal. No one hurt, except the truck driver who sprained his ankle when he jumped from the cab of the truck as it lay on its right side. It was a day.

My mother gave me the details over and over through the years. I would beg, “Tell me the coal truck story.” She would tell me again how my sisters had just stepped on the bus when the truck came speeding down the highway, and the driver realized he was going to hit the bus. He chose to crash in our yard. The bus went on to school, and my sisters told their grandmother, a teacher at the school, their small tale of horror.

“Rebecca was standing right there,” they said.

“Was she hurt?” Grandma asked.

They didn’t know. The bus had pulled out.

For months after, even though someone came and cleaned up the coal, Mother would take us out in the yard and we would find small chunks of coal. We put them in water and maybe some other liquid in aluminum pie pans, and in a day or two, the water turned beautiful colors. Sometimes, I drive by the house, no longer owned by family, and I want to take a spade and dig a little and find a piece of coal. I know it’s there.

The coal truck wreck, as it forever came to be known in our household, was the deciding factor in my parents’ decision to move away from the busy highway to a more rural area. There were, and have been since, many wrecks with fatalities on that stretch of highway.

When I drive by, on occasion, my mind sees a small girl waving at her sisters. I look to where the swing set stood, and I hear the untroubled laughter of children as they swing towards the sky.

It was a day.