Photograph from the Montgomery Bell State Park in Tennessee

Between Madrid and Barcelona

Yesterday I started another Painting of the little town we went through going from Madrid to Barcelona. There is just something about that small town that fascinates me. The photos were taken from the train as we passed through but still is was a compelling landscape to witness.

Painting, Entering the Placa, 2009

One Saturday Morning

Death is a distant rumor to the young.

..........Andy Rooney

One Saturday morning when I was ten, I awoke to my Mother screaming, “Oh my God, oh my God!” She was running from window to window on the front side of our house. She was rattling and shaking the Venetian blinds as she looked across the front yard into the street where there had been a terrible accident at the intersection in front of the house. On this early, already steamy morning in small town Alabama an ancient and fully loaded Pepsi Cola truck was passing under the green light just in front of our residence. A young woman in an old Pontiac with her infant child on the front seat speeding from the other direction raced through the red light and smashed into the truck! The resulting crash was enough to wake the dead, or so I was told. I slept through the worst accident that had ever happened in front of our house and there had been a number of them. This intersection had been such a problem site that it caused the city to install a traffic light earlier in the summer. After several more accidents at this perilous site they put in a four way stop, later another traffic light replaced the stop signs. It went back and fourth over the years and the intersection continued to claim lives and cause horrible accidents. The last time I went through the intersection (fifty eight years later) it was a traffic light again.

Getting out of bed I ran to the window and looked out. There in the middle of the intersection was the body of an obviously dead woman with her print skirt thrown up around her waist.There was also a piece of the woman’s head about four feet from her body, blood everywhere. At first I could not make out what it was I was seeing. The woman was very still and looked as though she had been carelessly thrown aside, like a rag doll tossed in the corner by a child, like she had suddenly fallen asleep. Mother continued scurrying through the house making small whimpering noises. There was an unbelievable amount of blood splattered across the pavement under the red light. People were already beginning to gather and stare at the carnage. Blood mixed with Pepsi Cola! Hundreds of bottles were scattered randomly across the scene, some broken, some whole. This surrealistic scene just beyond our tall Magnolia trees in the front yard left me breathless and yet I continued to peer out the front window, either unable or unwilling to stop. It was gruesome and repellent and yet I continued to look. The woman’s baby was in the front yard across the street having been thrown from the car, still wrapped in its blanket. It had survived the crash and was crying, as I was. The old grey haired man who had been driving the Pepsi Cola truck walked among the wreckage in the street rubbing his hands together as though he was trying to remove the skin from them. He would stop every few steps and pick up one of the unbroken bottles and put it into the pocket of his blue overalls. Later when I walked out to the scene, after the body had been removed a policeman standing near the curb said, “This is the worst god damned thing I have ever seen in my life.” Even though I was embarrassed by his language I thought he was right. Someone said later that one of the neighborhood dogs had carried a piece of the woman's head back to it's yard. I never knew if this was true or not but for a long time I was very careful where I stepped.

Later that same day after the wreckage had been removed, the street sprayed down with water from a fire truck and most of the debris cleared away I saw Jimmy, the boy who lived across the street on the other side of the road from us and spoke to him to see if he had seen the accident. “Did you see all the blood in the street before they cleaned it up?” I questioned. “Yeah I saw it” he said, “what’s it to you?” He replied. I wanted to appear grown up and knowing something that I really should not have known, maybe to impress him. “Nothing “I said. “Go home,“ he replied. He was fifteen years old and seemed much older, very tall for a child his age and handsome with black hair and very straight teeth. I always respected him, mainly because he had the ability to throw a football further than anyone else in our neighborhood. He ultimately became the captain of the High School football team and the star scholar. Several years later when Jimmy was a senior in High School he was riding home after school on his red Eagle motorcycle and was hit and killed by a drunk driver at the same intersection where the woman in the old Pontiac hit the Pepsi Cola truck. They said that when Jimmy was knocked from his scooter his head hit the cement curb and his skull was crushed. I saw Jimmy’s body and heard his mother screaming. They raced him to the hospital where he was pronounced dead later that night.

Everyone I suppose, has demons that haunt them in the night and ghosts that circle around in their heads when they cannot sleep, this is one of mine.

The End

Painting, The open Gate 2009

Photo, Magnolia grandiphyllum