boom.
The price was staggering, and so was the weight. Leslie and his grandfather tried to move it but couldn’t.
“Lord, it’s heavy,” the old man groaned.
“Must weigh a ton,” Leslie grunted.
They had to step outside and corral six other men to help before they could position it tastefully in the showroom. Weeks passed, then months, and though death took its steady toll, therewere no customers rich enough to afford glass interment. Leslie’s grandfather sank into despair.
“We’re never going to be able to sell it,” he told Leslie.
Then, hope: news that Sam Reever had died. Everybody knew bootlegging was one of the richest businesses in the county. Leslie and his grandfather collected Sam and carried him to Lovettsville. Close behind came his widow, Liz, determined to put Sam away in dandy style.
“Now here’s a really wonderful coffin,” Leslie’s grandfather said, after showing her the pauper’s pine model to rouse her appetite for higher quality. “Look how heavy this glass top is.”
He and Leslie demonstrated that two men could scarcely budge it.
“And look all around the edge of the lid here,” Leslie said. “That’s a rubber gasket, just like you use to seal the cap on a Mason jar.”
“When you seal it up with that gasket in there,” said his grandfather, “it’s completely airtight. With a coffin like this, Sam’ll look as good a hundred years from now as he does the day you bury him.”
The widow would have nothing else. Maybe it was the gasket sealing the glass that sold her on it. Maybe she saw the esthetic beauty of burying Sam in the symbol of his profession. Like most country bootleggers, Sam bottled his moonshine in canning jars. When they took him to the graveyard the mourners approved of the fitting way in which Liz, as a grace note to his life, had him buried in the fanciest Mason jar ever sold in Loudoun County.
Beyond Lovettsville, on the outer edge of my universe, lay Brunswick. I first walked in that vision of paradise hand-in-hand with my father, and those visits opened my eyes to the vastness and wonders of life’s possibilities. Two miles north of Lovettsville, across the Potomac on the Maryland shore, Brunswick was as distant and romantic a place as I ever expected to see. To live there in that great smoking conurbation, rumbling with the constant thunder of locomotives, filled with the moaning of train whistlescoming down the Potomac Valley, was beyond my most fevered hopes.
Brunswick was a huge railway center on the B&O Main Line, which linked the Atlantic coast to Chicago and midwestern steel centers. Approaching it was almost unbearably thrilling. You crossed an endless, rickety cantilever bridge after pausing on the Virginia bank to pay a one-dollar toll. This was a powerful sum of money, but Brunswick was not for the pinchpennies of the earth. As you neared the far end of the bridge, its loose board floor rattling under the car wheels, the spectacle unfolding before you made the dollar seem well spent.
In the foreground lay a marvelous confusion of steel rails, and in the midst of them, on a vast cinder-covered plain, the great brick roundhouse with its doors agape, revealing the snouts of locomotives undergoing surgery within. Smaller yard locomotives chugged backward and forward, clacking boxcar couplings together and sending up infernos of black gritty smoke which settled over the valley in layers.
If the crossing gate was down, you might be treated to the incredible spectacle of a passenger express highballing toward glory, the engineer waving down at you from the cab window, sparks flying, cinders scattering, the glistening pistons pumping with terrifying power. And behind this hellish monstrosity throbbing with fire and steam, a glimpse of the passengers’ faces stately and remote as kings as they roared by in a gale of wind powerful enough to knock you almost off your feet.
Between the mountains that cradled the yard there seemed to be
The price was staggering, and so was the weight. Leslie and his grandfather tried to move it but couldn’t.
“Lord, it’s heavy,” the old man groaned.
“Must weigh a ton,” Leslie grunted.
They had to step outside and corral six other men to help before they could position it tastefully in the showroom. Weeks passed, then months, and though death took its steady toll, therewere no customers rich enough to afford glass interment. Leslie’s grandfather sank into despair.
“We’re never going to be able to sell it,” he told Leslie.
Then, hope: news that Sam Reever had died. Everybody knew bootlegging was one of the richest businesses in the county. Leslie and his grandfather collected Sam and carried him to Lovettsville. Close behind came his widow, Liz, determined to put Sam away in dandy style.
“Now here’s a really wonderful coffin,” Leslie’s grandfather said, after showing her the pauper’s pine model to rouse her appetite for higher quality. “Look how heavy this glass top is.”
He and Leslie demonstrated that two men could scarcely budge it.
“And look all around the edge of the lid here,” Leslie said. “That’s a rubber gasket, just like you use to seal the cap on a Mason jar.”
“When you seal it up with that gasket in there,” said his grandfather, “it’s completely airtight. With a coffin like this, Sam’ll look as good a hundred years from now as he does the day you bury him.”
The widow would have nothing else. Maybe it was the gasket sealing the glass that sold her on it. Maybe she saw the esthetic beauty of burying Sam in the symbol of his profession. Like most country bootleggers, Sam bottled his moonshine in canning jars. When they took him to the graveyard the mourners approved of the fitting way in which Liz, as a grace note to his life, had him buried in the fanciest Mason jar ever sold in Loudoun County.
Beyond Lovettsville, on the outer edge of my universe, lay Brunswick. I first walked in that vision of paradise hand-in-hand with my father, and those visits opened my eyes to the vastness and wonders of life’s possibilities. Two miles north of Lovettsville, across the Potomac on the Maryland shore, Brunswick was as distant and romantic a place as I ever expected to see. To live there in that great smoking conurbation, rumbling with the constant thunder of locomotives, filled with the moaning of train whistlescoming down the Potomac Valley, was beyond my most fevered hopes.
Brunswick was a huge railway center on the B&O Main Line, which linked the Atlantic coast to Chicago and midwestern steel centers. Approaching it was almost unbearably thrilling. You crossed an endless, rickety cantilever bridge after pausing on the Virginia bank to pay a one-dollar toll. This was a powerful sum of money, but Brunswick was not for the pinchpennies of the earth. As you neared the far end of the bridge, its loose board floor rattling under the car wheels, the spectacle unfolding before you made the dollar seem well spent.
In the foreground lay a marvelous confusion of steel rails, and in the midst of them, on a vast cinder-covered plain, the great brick roundhouse with its doors agape, revealing the snouts of locomotives undergoing surgery within. Smaller yard locomotives chugged backward and forward, clacking boxcar couplings together and sending up infernos of black gritty smoke which settled over the valley in layers.
If the crossing gate was down, you might be treated to the incredible spectacle of a passenger express highballing toward glory, the engineer waving down at you from the cab window, sparks flying, cinders scattering, the glistening pistons pumping with terrifying power. And behind this hellish monstrosity throbbing with fire and steam, a glimpse of the passengers’ faces stately and remote as kings as they roared by in a gale of wind powerful enough to knock you almost off your feet.
Between the mountains that cradled the yard there seemed to be
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