Free Jim the Boy by Tony Earley Page A

Bill McKinney, you see — and anyway it was better than Sandy Bottom. So Granddaddy painted ‘Aliceville’ on a sign and climbed up on a ladder and nailed it to the side of the depot. It’s the same one that’s up there today.
    “Now Bill McKinney, when he heard about what was going on from his people, he didn’t believe it. The first time the train came through after Granddaddy put the sign up, he stopped and climbed down out of the cab to take a look. And, big as he was, Bill McKinney almost broke down crying when he saw it, he loved Alice so much. He told Granddaddy that as far as he was concerned, the flag was always out at Aliceville, and he was going to stop the train every day, going and coming, no matter what the superintendent said.
    “Things went on that way for a while, the train stopping twice a day even though it wasn’t supposed to, and one thing led to another, and pretty soon the superintendent gave in and put Aliceville on the regular schedule. Oh, that was good news. Everybody in town got together and planned a celebration, because now Aliceville was an official town, as much as Shelby or New Carpenter or Charlotte or New York City, and they asked Bill McKinney if he would bring Alice.
    “The celebration was set for a Sunday, and the train made a special run. Everybody came in from the country and brought their dinner and stayed the day. They had mule races and footraces and sack races and three-legged races and a greased-pig chase, and they had a greasy pole–climbing contest — which I didn’t do no good at, I was too small — and sometime in the middle of the afternoon we heard the train whistle, and we looked and saw the smoke coming in the distance, and everybody ran down to the depot. When the train came up to the depot and stopped, it was all shined up, and it had flags and banners hung all over it, and Alice McKinney, the girl they had named the town after, was up in the cab with her mama and her daddy. She must have been six or seven, just a little older than I was.
    “Lord, Jim, I can still see her. She was wearing a white dress and a little crown, and I thought she was the prettiest thing I had ever seen, standing up there in the cab and waving at everybody. We cheered and cheered. Granddaddy had covered the Aliceville sign on the side of the depot with a sheet, and Alice got down off the train with her mama and daddy and pulled a rope and the sheet came down and everybody cheered again. I was just five years old then, and I thought that was the grandest day there had ever been. I thought Alice McKinney was like a queen or a princess, something out of a picture book, and I couldn’t believe I was standing there looking at her. Everybody was so happy. Town seemed like a different place. It finally seemed like
somewhere.
    “But, one day not long after that, the train came through and Bill McKinney wasn’t driving it. A substitute man was. And the substitute man got down and told us that Alice had come down sick. She had the whooping cough or diphtheria, I don’t remember which. And as long as she was sick, people waited for that whistle, and when the substitute man pulled in, everybody stopped what they were doing and went down to the depot to see how Alice was. And every day he told us she was getting a little worse, that she was sinking a little lower. Women from here started frying chickens and making pies and cakes and sending them back with the substitute man.
    “Then one day we heard the train whistle start up way outside of town, long before it got to the crossing, just a continuous blast, and it got louder and louder, and it didn’t let up, and everybody ran fast as they could down to the track to see what was wrong. I remember running down the street holding Mama’s hand. Well, the train didn’t stop that day. When it came through, it was going so fast and the whistle was so loud, you could feel the ground shake. I’d never seen a train go that fast. And in the