The Roswell Railroad Through Cotton

Lyrics

The air's thick enough to weigh.
Creosote and mule sweat. Late afternoon.
August, 1892. The sun is a hammer.

Here they come up the dirt track to the siding.
Iron-rimmed wheels grinding the red Georgia clay to a fine dust.
A wagon bed stacked high, groaning on its axles.
The driver's face is a deep shadow under a sweat-stained hat.
He doesn't give a name. Nobody ever asks.
Just another load for the platform, before the light fails.

Heave it up on the platform.
Roll it into the narrow-gauge car.
The Roswell Railroad breathes it all in.
Another fifty bales before the sun is gone.
This crossing's not a town yet.
Just a platform for the cotton. And the train.

The burlap smells of the field.
Of the rain that fell in June and the sun that burned in July.
And the hands. The hands that are not here.
The sharecropper hands that pulled this white fire from the stalk, row by aching row.
Their names are not on the stencils.
Not in the postmaster's book of accounts.
Just the weight.

Heave it up on the platform.
Roll it into the narrow-gauge car.
The Roswell Railroad breathes it all in.
Another fifty bales before the sun is gone.
This crossing's not a town yet.
Just a platform for the cotton. And the train.

I saw the freight ledger once, in a dusty county box.
Page after page of farm names, weights, and dates. Clear as day.
But one entry… it caught my eye. Just initials.
Forty-seven bales, marked only "J.W."
No farm. No last name.
Just forty-seven ghosts in burlap, bound for the mills up north.
Who were you, J.W.?

The car door slides shut. A final, heavy iron sound.
The wagons are gone, back down the track.
The dust settles on the empty, splintered wood.
The platform just waits for morning.