Heavenly Trout

Heavenly Trout

Martin Rasnake had been waiting under the train trestle over the Ripshin River since before sunset. Watching and waiting

for Wilma Ross to return to her sagging wooden house up the hillside in the ravine after Wednesday prayer meeting. His

nose full of the smell of creosote, he leaned against one of the tar-soaked beams of the trestle, pawed his crotch, and

wondered why he hadn’t thought to do this sooner. Easy as pie. Wilma had been alone out here in the little cabin by the

railroad trestle since last winter when her mother died and Wilma got religion. And not another house around for nearly a

mile. He could do whatever he wanted to her and no one would hear a thing.

“Easy as pie,” he muttered, grinning and rubbing his crotch again.

Dark began to settle into the valley as the sun fell further behind the ridge and Wilma Ross appeared on the wagon

path cutting through the ravine along the river to her cabin. The thinning band of light above the tree line yet provided just

enough visibility to see, and Martin Rasnake slipped behind one of the thicker beams and watched Wilma approach. She

walked with an agile, determined step, kicking up the hem of her skirt with each stride of her strong legs. She was alone

out here. And even if he was found out, no one would care much one way or the other. After all, she was Indian. One of

just

a few living in these hills, and about the only full-blood Cherokee left now that her mother was dead. Just a dumb, god-

fearing Indian too stupid to know she shouldn’t be around these parts anymore. Who would care, really? Maybe he’d just

kill her afterwards. Simpler that way. Easy as pie. He heard the rumbling approach of the train above as Wilma descended

the last slope on the path and hopped into the clearing in front of her house.

Rasnake would wait another minute or so. Wait until she was inside the house, until she’d taken off that silly bonnet

and begun to settle in a bit, and then he’d get her. Burst into the little house and catch her off guard. She’d never know

what hit her.

Wilma Ross stopped before entering and sat on the small porch of her house. She settled her ample behind into the

dip in the porch, bowed from weather and at least three generations of Ross rumps sitting there just like this. She pressed

her hands down on the boards beside her, leaned back, and gazed at the light over the trees on the ridge of the hill rising

before her. The evening was warm. She watched the fading light, the surrounding trees, and the trestle, waiting for the

approaching train to blast into view.

“What in hell’s that damned Indian girl doing?” Rasnake squeaked to himself. “Get on in there.”

If he went for her now, she’d see him coming. She’d have time to prepare herself, and taking her would be difficult.

Rasnake wasn’t a big man, and Wilma Ross was a healthy girl. The element of surprise would be important. He waited,

but it was getting hard to restrain himself. Wilma Ross removed her bonnet and let down her black hair. It nearly brushed

on the porch boards behind her. Her copper-colored skin glowed in the late light. She began to hum, her head swaying,

her feet tapping lightly on the step below her, right foot, left foot, alternating, each foot barely rising above the surface of

the worn plank. Damned if she wasn’t a pretty woman, for an Indian, Rasnake thought, and rubbed his crotch up against

the trestle. The sound of his fly buttons clicking against the tar-soaked wood was sucked into the air and lost as the train

chugged onto the tracks above and he heard the first support beams begin to snap and splinter.

Rasnake jumped back from his hiding place and looked up to see a rotten cross-beam buckle and shatter, raining

splinters the size of axe handles onto the rushing surface of the river. He shot a fearful glance through the maze of shaking

wooden beams and saw that Wilma Ross had jumped up from her seat on the porch and now saw the train, the quaking

trestle and Martin Rasnake, exposed and terrified on the other side of it. Rasnake saw her arm raised and pointing, her

mouth open and moving, but he could hear only the thunder of the train, the crumbling trestle, and the river.

Two more beams popped, and the tracks sagged and tilted. Rasnake jumped and stumbled frantically backward

through the streamside brush. Wilma Ross stood at what she hoped was a safe distance, one hand pressed against the wall

of her cabin, as if supporting it, the other hand still pointing toward Rasnake. Her mouth hung open but did not move.

Martin Rasnake stumbled and retreated, Wilma Ross watched, and the trestle exploded under the weight of the train.

Wilma Ross cowered and held her hands to her ears and Martin Rasnake lost control of his bladder and the ravine

reverberated with the scream of steel rails and spikes bending and tearing from rotten wood, with the torrent of shattered

wood pounding the surface of the river and the booming crack of train cars bursting their couplings. The first three cars

of the train, the engine, fire car, and a boxcar filled with cured tobacco, made it across the trestle, jumped the shuddering

tracks, and slid down the hillside of the ravine. The last three cars, a caboose and two box cars specially fitted with

aquarium tanks—carrying, between the two of them, some fifty thousand young brown trout from an eastern hatchery

destined for western rivers—dropped over the edge of the collapsing trestle, broke apart, and plummeted into the river

below. The first boxcar flipped over and smashed onto a huge gray boulder in the middle of the river, the second boxcar

and the caboose crashed into the first boxcar, then the boulder, and a shimmering cloud of wood and metal, water and fifty

thousand brown trout erupted over the riverbed and ravine.

Rasnake laid on the riverbank, shaking in his piss-soaked trousers, under a shower of flying trout. Wilma Ross

picked up a bucket from beside the door on her porch and stepped cautiously into the clearing before her little house,

watching the last bits of the wrecked train and trestle settle into the riverbed. The rushing water had already marked out

new paths around the sudden changes in the streambed. Wilma tip-toed through the bodies of flopping trout, stopped, and

set the bucket on the ground. She scooped a fish into one of her hands, held it out before her, then spread her arms. She

gazed up from the fish and the train wreck to the receding light on the ridge. One outstretched hand opened and closed in

a steady rhythm; the other continued to grip the squirming trout.

From where he sprawled on the bank, Rasnake could just see Wilma in the fading light. One hand clutched a

desperate, writhing trout, the other seemed to fan the evening air. Her lips moved, but he could still not hear her words.

The vision of the Indian woman, clutching a fish and speaking to the night sky, the black-haired, copper-colored Cherokee

Christian woman who only a minute before had been his targeted prey, shook Rasnake. He brushed three fish from his

chest and scrambled to his feet, his breath coming in rapid, shallow bursts. Grabbing one of the shivering fish from the

ground beside him, in imitation of his vision, Rasnake, too, clutched a fish in his fist, pressed hard on it, raised his hands to

the sky, and knelt. One knee landed on another fish, but Rasnake did not feel the small body squish under his weight. He

was transported. He had been saved, redeemed from the path of evil. God had sent a copper-colored woman, a train

crashing from the sky, and a shower of heavenly trout for the sole purpose of salvaging his rotten soul. Kneeling in his

soiled trousers, he pledged, to Wilma Ross, to the wreckage before him, to the ravine and sky above him, and to the fish

nearly dead in his hands—he pledged to devote himself to the work of God and nothing else for the rest of his natural life.

Lost in the throes of his conversion, he failed to notice that Wilma Ross had already ceased her brief devotions and was

quickly gathering the scattered trout into her bucket.

By the time Martin Rasnake had avowed his pledge for the third time, the engineer and his fireman were already dead

beneath the tangle of their engine. The man in the caboose had managed to crawl halfway up and out the rear door of his

car,

only to collapse. Wilma Ross dropped her bucket of fish and hiked up her skirt into a knot. She dropped down the

riverbank

and waded through the current and the train wreckage to a boulder in the riverbed. From that rock she climbed to

the larger

one the caboose had crashed on and against which its rear portion had come to rest. From her place on the

second boulder

she could just reach the fallen man draped over the upended rear of the caboose. She called to the shadow

of Martin

Rasnake.

“You there. Help us. I need help. He’s alive here, but I can’t get him out by myself. You there.”

Rasnake didn’t respond. He was still praying. Kneeling on a dead trout, praying and promising. He was still praying

and promising as Wilma Ross, one foot planted on the boulder, stretched her other foot out to the wrecked caboose and

grabbed the man’s hand. Straddling the gap between the boulder and caboose, a woodland acrobat frozen in mid-leap,

she strained to pull the man free.

“You there. Help us,” she called again. “I can see you. Please help us. You there.”

But Rasnake remained oblivious to Wilma’s plea and continued his streamside prayer as the man’s hand slipped from

her

grasp and he tumbled back down into the interior of the wreckage to die a few seconds later. And Martin Rasnake still

prayed

and promised his life to God as the thousands of trout that hit the water and survived the crash fled downstream,

seeking

more accommodating, less explosive water in which to live.

Fifty years later, no first-hand account of that evening remained—the train wreck, Rasnake’s original intentions toward

Wilma Ross and his riverside conversion, Wilma Ross’s reverent and dynamic response to the catastrophe and the shower

of fish from the ruptured aquarium train—all vanished in the rushing waters of time and the Ripshin River. The railroad

company salvaged what little was worth their time and money to retrieve of the wrecked train and trestle, including the

three bodies of the crew, then left the area. The trestle was never replaced and the company abandoned the secondary

system of tracks through the ravines and mountains of southern Appalachia for more profitable routes. The rest of the

debris had either been carted off by those who made the trek out to Wilma Ross’s house to gawk and gather free tobacco

or had long since been washed away in the high waters of the spring run-off. Martin Rasnake never told a living soul about

the details of his coming to Christ, but he kept his promise to God. He sold his rotten soul to the church, became a deacon,

married a timid but durable girl in his congregation, fathered six children, and eventually became the acting pastor of his

church in the valley and an itinerant preacher and streamside baptizer. He had pledged his soul to God, and he kept his

word, making every effort possible to bring other lost and rotten souls like him to Christ, whether they wanted to be saved

or not.

Fifty years after he messed his pants in the presence of a locomotive-god on the banks of the Ripshin River, Martin

Rasnake had a heart attack while baptizing a new batch of believers eight miles upstream in the same river. He drowned in

the holy waters before his congregation realized he wasn’t thrashing about from the presence of the Holy Spirit. After his

death, his children, and their children, carried Rasnake’s relentless Christianity in their teeth, with all the terror and

resentment such a heritage spawned.

Wilma Ross married Ethan Zeek, a young farmer with two fingers missing on his right hand, and began the process

of diluting pure Cherokee blood with the fluids of white men. The young farmer was kind and simple, nearly as god-fearing

as Wilma, and she was happy and grateful to be taken into the life of such a man until she died during the birth of her third

child. Forty-three years before his own death, Martin Rasnake loudly offered to cleanse the souls of those in attendance at

the funeral of Wilma Ross.

One month and three days shy of the seventieth anniversary of the train wreck and Martin Rasnake’s salvation, the Army

Corps of Engineers completed construction on the dam that would regulate the flow of the Ripshin River, block and hold

the waters to generate hydroelectric power and create the Ripshin Reservoir and Recreation Area. Sixty-three years after

her death in childbirth on the Zeek family farm, the waters behind the new dam began to rise over the crumbled remains of

Wilma Ross’s cabin in the ravine. After the reservoir had filled and settled behind the dam, some people claimed that if you

took your boat out toward the middle, on a real clear day, and if you looked real hard, you could see the outline of an old

cabin at the bottom of the new lake.

When Martin Rasnake was still sitting quietly and humbly in the lap of his new faith and before Wilma Ross had given birth

to the young farmer’s first child, fishermen in the valley were already talking about the fish that had been rocketed from the

aquarium train into their waters. Odd, flighty, devilish, scrappy, damned tricky to catch, with a strange and troubling

upward tilt to their eyes. By the time Martin Rasnake had been fifty years dead and the Army Corps of Engineers’ dam

was beginning to show signs of age, the brown trout that had rained down on the piddling convert and his vision of grace

had become the stuff of comical local legend. Train-fish, they came to be called. Every fisherman in the area had a story

about catching one, which of course escaped, because it was the biggest, strangest, most ferocious trout he had ever seen

in all his years. The stories persisted because such tales must persist. And no one in the valley really believed that

descendants of those mad, terror-stricken, train-wrecked fish actually inhabited these waters, above or below the dam.

At least once a season, old Tommy Ansley claimed to have caught one, the biggest one ever.

“Honest to ever-loving God. I swear,” he would say. “Had that crazy look in its eyes. A train-fish for sure.”

But nobody believed him any more than they believed any other fool or liar who made claims of extraordinary and

memorable experience along the banks of the Ripshin River.

__________

"Heavenly Trout" appeared in the September 2003 issue of

Words of Wisdom.