Rest in Peace

David A. Sorrell

The following story is taken from a self-published book by former Raymond resident, David A. Sorrell, called “As I Remember.” The book features Mr. Sorrell’s recollections about the early days of Raymond. The stories appeared in a weekly column in The Raymond News from 1963-1972. This particular story, about a man who was killed on the railroad tracks, took place in the early 1900’s.  

One hot summer afternoon I was there on Main Street, perhaps having been sent on an errand to one of the stores when suddenly some boy yelled, “There’s a bum been killed down there on the railroad bridge.” 

I knew that the bridge was the one across the small creek that ran through Pepperdine’s pasture there just outside of town. After hearing this about the bum, I took off at full speed or as fast as my bare feet would carry me across the long depot platform, past the depot, past the mail catcher there at the end of the platform’s end, past the section house and on past the elevator and the stockyards, the light plane, the Joel Benning place, the village green, and Kit McClurg place, Luther Martin’s home, the Pepperdine place and a bit father on to the bridge. Quickly, I slid down the railroad bank and then underneath the bridge and saw what looked like a heap of old clothes. Slowly I approached and then I saw the face of the old bum that seemed to just be laid on top of the old clothes. Some of Sam Miller’s boys said later that they were out in their pasture by the railroad as the five o’clock fast train came along and the bum seemed to be down crawling across the long bridge and was about in the center of the bridge when the train struck him.

The next morning as I was playing around in our front yard, I saw the undertaker, John McMillan, go by with a wooden coffin box in a spring wagon. I hurried down to the cemetery just a block away and when I got there, Sexton Joe Chambers and undertaker McMillian were lifting the coffin box from the spring wagon and placing it across boards that laid across the open grave. Next, they passed two long web straps under each end of the coffin box and then Mr. McMillan asked Oscar Williams who had ridden with him, to pull the boards from under the coffin as it was slightly lifted. Now the body of the poor tramp was slowly and carefully lowered into its last resting place. This done, the web straps were pulled up and rolled and put into the spring wagon. This done, undertaker McMillian and Oscar Williams climbed into the wagon seat and drove off.

The funeral of a tramp. I think of it now, sixty years later, there was no fine coffin, only a pine box. There was no ornate black hearse to bear him to his last resting place, only a plain spring wagon. There was no church were the coffin rested in front of the pulpit and the friends filed by to have their last look at him. There was no music by a quartet, there was only one small boy watching the three men who laid his poor broken body in the earth. There was no music but that of the birds singing in the gnarled oak tree that stood close by his grave. There were no flowers except the wild flowers that grew there in the neglected “Potters Field,” and so the poor tramp was buried and forgotten except for the small boy who now remembers all this happened in these two days of so long ago and sets it down here for others to read.