THE MOURNFUL WAIL of a distant train whistle pierced the afternoon calm as eleven-year-old Eddie Sherlin and his brother, Bo, two years his senior, struggled to pull a heavy 4´ × 4´ wooden pallet along the track.
“Hurry up, Eddie,” Bo urged, “or we’re gonna get caught.”
The two brothers had just stolen the large pallet from the storage area of the local shirt factory. They were hauling it to their backyard, more than two miles away, where they planned to hoist it onto a pole and use it for a basketball backboard. The pallet wasn’t worth much, and had they asked the manager if they could have it, he might have given it to them for nothing. But that would have meant going inside the factory and searching out the shift foreman—something Eddie was far too shy to do. Besides, the boys figured it would be easier to seek forgiveness than ask for permission, so they opted to steal the used wood.
Although the pallet was too heavy and bulky to carry, Eddie and Bo had managed to drag it to the railroad tracks, where once they hoisted it onto one of the rails, they could slide it along the shining track as fast as they could walk or run. As long as they kept at least part of the cumbersome pallet on the rails, it skimmed along. But when the pallet slipped off, the friction from the coal and dirt between the railroad ties quickly grabbed the pallet, jerking it out of the boys’ grasp, slicing their fingers or stabbing their hands with rough splinters.
Another wail of the approaching train split the air. The sound was clearer and the train much closer.
“Hurry, Bo! It can’t be far away,” Eddie prodded his brother, just as the pallet skidded off the track again. Eddie reached down and grabbed the left-hand corners of the pallet, lifting and dragging it back onto the rail at the same time. The pallet rotated slightly, and for a moment Eddie thought it was going to twist his entire wrist with it, but quickly, Bo took the pressure off by grasping and lifting the right-hand corners. The boys precariously balanced the pallet on one rail as they yanked it farther up the track and toward a trestle, where the rails and railroad ties formed a bridge over the creek below. They could have pulled the pallet down into the thistles and briar patches on one side of the tracks, but that was sure to be painful, so with a hastily exchanged glance, both boys knew what they had to do.
They tugged and strained with all their might, hoping to get the pallet over the trestle before the train came. Nothing but empty space and air were on either side of the trestle. Nowhere to dive into the weeds should the train come around the turn before the boys got the pallet to the other side and back onto solid ground.
“Pull, Eddie!” Bo yelled, his eyes wide.
Eddie glanced back toward the warehouse. Around a large tree-covered curve, he saw what had prompted Bo’s outburst. The cowcatcher of the locomotive had just rounded the bend and was fast approaching, less than a couple hundred yards away. Struggling to keep his feet from slipping between the railroad ties spaced about twelve inches apart, Eddie tugged on the pallet with every ounce of his strength. He cast a wary glance to the dirty creek waters swirling below the trestle.
“I’m pulling, Bo! We can do it. Only another ten or fifteen yards to go. Come on!” Eddie looked over his shoulder. The train was in full sight now. The engineer was leaning out of the side window. He sounded the shrill whistle, warning them to get off the tracks.
Eddie knew there was no stopping the locomotive. They were running out of time. The train had picked up a head of steam coming around the bend and down the straight stretch. Even if the engineer slammed on the brakes, the train would roll over him and Bo if they didn’t clear the tracks.
The engineer laid on the train whistle, its steady blast urging the boys to run faster, to get off the trestle and away from the track.
The whistle screamed as the train bore down on Eddie and Bo. “Five yards, Bo!” Eddie yelled. “Just five more yards. Don’t give up. Don’t let go. We can do it!” Splinters from the rough-hewn wooden pallet pierced Eddie’s fingertips as he clutched the wood, dragging it down the vibrating rails. They had hauled it this far; he wasn’t going to let it go now.
“Almost there!” Bo grunted, his words barely audible over the roaring locomotive. “Roll to the right!” he called to his younger brother.
With one foot still on the trestle and one off, Eddie gripped the pallet and lunged.
Bo gave a mighty heave of the pallet, lifting it off the track and toppling it in Eddie’s direction as both boys dove for the weeds and rolled down the embankment just as the train’s cowcatcher cleared the trestle, thundering past them. The long line of boxcars clacked along the tracks as Eddie and Bo scrambled to their feet and began tugging thistles off their clothing.
“Whew! That was close. You okay?” Bo said.
“I think so.” Eddie studied his bloody fingertips. “My set shot’s gonna be a little rough for a week or so, but I’ll live. How’s the backboard?”
Bo trudged up the embankment where the pallet was lying on the ground, just clear of the tracks. “Looks like it’s still in one piece. C’mon. Let’s get it home.”
“Help me get it back on the track,” Eddie said, “and we can slide this thing all the way to the house.”
“Yeah, I don’t think another train will be coming through for a little while.”
The boys lugged the pallet back onto the rail and resumed dragging it toward their home.
The train tracks stretched all the way through the boys’ hometown of Gallatin, Tennessee, passing within twenty feet of the Sherlin family’s backyard, behind their two-bedroom home at 225 Morrison Street. Eddie and Bo, along with their two younger sisters, Delilah and Debbie, heard trains rattling down the tracks so often, even at night, that they rarely paid them much attention. Eddie loved hearing the trains at night. In fact, the clacking sound of a train rolling past his bedroom was a soothing balm, a reminder that all was well with the world, even when things weren’t so good at home, which they often weren’t.
Just short of their house, Eddie and Bo lugged the pallet off the railroad track and over an embankment. The boys picked it up and slowly walked it through the brush and trees behind the Sherlin home, inching their way along, shifting their grips every thirty seconds so the splinters wouldn’t catch in their hands. They finally dragged the pallet to a light pole their dad had installed near the garage at the end of the gravel driveway. That pole was going to be the brace for the Sherlin boys’ new backboard.
Bo found a ladder in the garage, and Eddie grabbed a hammer and some eight-penny nails from the toolshed. “Do you think these nails will hold it up?” Eddie asked. “That pallet is pretty heavy.”
Bo eyed the nails skeptically. “I guess we’ll find out. Is that all you can find?”
“These are the biggest nails Dad has. There are a few spikes in there too. They’re a little longer, but we only have a couple of them.”
“Better grab those too,” Bo said. “We’ll probably need them. This backboard is going to take a beating, so we need something strong to hold it up there on the pole.”
The boys slid the heavy pallet up the pole, carefully measuring so that the spot on the wood where they planned to attach the basketball rim would be ten feet off the ground. They secured the backboard to a makeshift crossbar and then attached the whole thing to the light pole. They nailed it from every angle, making sure the backboard wouldn’t fall down.
When the pallet seemed strong enough, Eddie scampered down the ladder and grabbed the basketball rim. “Now we need to make sure this is level with the ground.”
“I know, Eddie. You think I’m a dummy? It needs to be ten feet high and parallel to the ground. No problem. Now, hand me the bolts so I can attach the back of the rim. You hang on to the net until I make sure the goal is strong.”
Bo drilled three holes in the pallet and tightly fastened the base of the rim to the wood with strong bolts. “This baby ain’t goin’ nowhere.” He flashed a grin at his younger brother. “Toss that net up here, Eddie.”
As though unwrapping a priceless gift, Eddie slowly removed the nylon net from the plastic package. They had never owned a net for their basketball hoop, so it was a precious commodity. He and Bo had been saving their lunch money for several months so they could purchase the new net. The old rope nets never lasted long in the outdoor elements, and this new nylon net was supposed to last until the boys graduated from high school. Eddie passed the net up the ladder to Bo, who carefully attached each loop under the corresponding metal hook.
“How’s that, little brother?” he called down to Eddie.
Eddie looked up. He’d never seen anything so beautiful as that white net hanging from the rim. “It’s perfect, Bo. Come on down. Let’s give this baby a try!”
Bo replaced the ladder in the garage as Eddie bounced the ball on the grass in front of the backboard. The grass deadened the bounce, but Eddie didn’t mind. He knew it wouldn’t take long before they’d wear the grass down to the dirt and be playing on hardpacked Tennessee clay. He dropped back fifteen feet or so and lofted a shot into the air.
Swish! Eddie fell in love with the sound of the ball slashing through the nylon net. It was the first of thousands of shots Eddie would fire through the net over the next few years.
“Feed me,” Bo called as he ran out of the garage toward the goal. Eddie retrieved his rebound and tossed the ball rim high. Bo leaped into the air and tipped it into the basket. Bo was an incredible athlete. A great baseball player and a budding star in football, basketball, track—any sport he put his mind to, and Eddie idolized him. He hoped that someday he’d be half the athlete his big brother was.
Eddie was already well on his way to surpassing Bo. Eddie could run faster, and his natural physical abilities went far beyond Bo’s, but Bo was the big brother—the standard against which Eddie measured himself.
Bo grabbed the ball before it hit the ground and fired it back to Eddie. The younger Sherlin dropped back another five feet and effortlessly lobbed a set shot from twenty feet out. Swish!
“Good shot, Eddie. You keep working at this thing, and you just might make a good ballplayer one of these days.” Bo smiled as Eddie fired the ball back at his brother.
“Come on, superstar. Let’s see you hit a twenty-footer,” Eddie challenged.
Bo slid smoothly to the exact spot where Eddie had shot from, bounced the ball once, and put it in the air, banking it high off the backboard and into the net.
“Do you mean like that?” he asked good-naturedly.
“Yeah, somethin’ like that. Too bad you needed some help from the backboard, but I’ll give it to you.”
The brothers laughed and kept pouring in shots from all over their makeshift court. Not yet in his teens, Eddie Sherlin was already one of the best basketball players in Gallatin, Tennessee.