chunky was riding on the train and it was his very first trip anywhere. In fact he couldn't ever remember his mother or his daddy ever going a trip involving a real locomotive and he was so excited to be going some place he was sitting just under his mother and sisters on the edge of the hopper style coal car mother had kept scolding him about his sliding down the stack but the way the old coal car rattled back and forth on the track he just couldn't help but to slide down, his mother and sister with him chunky had asked his daddy many times while they had lived in the big coal yard in West Virginia; Just when he and his sisters had come into this big old world he tried to recall how he and his sisters had come to be too, but all his mother would tell them is they were a chip off their fathers block whatever that meant he didn't know the train engine went toot toot whiz and then toot toot again chunky was riding on the last coal car before the caboose there were more cars than he could count ahead of the car he was in and the old steam engine was rounding the curve and just before the engine got to the river the old locomotive started to cross the river onto the old wooden, clacketty clack clacketty clack went the cars as they passed over the tracks toward the river there was one of many coal cars being pulled by the locomotive each one swaying dizzily back and forth a bump on the old steel track would cause big and small lumps to fall from the cars from time to time the locomotive was already past the bridge and the car his family was riding in was about in the center of the bridge now when suddenly chunky heard his mother and sisters let out a yell stop stop the train help we’re falling chunky who was by now on the edge of the car tittering and tottering on the edge of the railing looked down and saw his mother and sisters falling out of the car plop plop plop went his mother and three of his sisters into the river just about then the coal car hit a bump and Chunky too bounced and was suddenly falling too down toward the river as well help dad help im falling but Chunkys daddy could not help his son or any of his family because not only was he just a lump of coal his daddy was settled firmly into and among many other boulder size lumps of coal in the middle of the car
