(The following story by Gary Pettus appeared on the Clarion-Ledger website on July 12.)
JACKSON, Miss. — A widow with seven children, Genny Cain had prayed for the “perfect” man to find her. And he did.
On Sunday, five weeks after their wedding, she lost him, too — her second husband in three years.
Mark Cain, 52, was one of four people killed when two freight trains collided Sunday morning in Yazoo County. He was the engineer on one of two Canadian National Railroad trains that crashed in the Anding community head-on (and a member of BLET Division 203 in Jackson, Miss.).
“He was on a call job,” Genny Cain said on Monday. “He was asleep when they called him. I woke him up; he packed his lunch, kissed me and told me he loved me, and I didn’t see him again.”
About three years ago, Genny Cain lost her first husband Charlie Bohrer to a heart attack, at age 51.
He was the father of their children, now ranging in age from 6 to 17: two girls and five boys, including a set of 12-year-old twins. Seven children Mark Cain had been eager to embrace almost as soon as he’d met Genny, and so soon after he’d lost one of his own to suicide.
“My children are taking it hard,” Genny Cain said. “It’s going to be hard for them to understand and see God in it. I let them fall in love with him. I wanted that. I had told him, ‘It’s not just one relationship you’re building, it’s eight relationships,’ and he took the time to do that. Their hearts are breaking, too.”
As of Monday afternoon, the railroad had not found her husband, she said. “They told me they were in a recovery mode, not a rescue mode.”
“It’s killing me,” she said Monday. “I want him back. (Sunday) I wanted to die. But this morning I had peace. I’m not OK with it. But God has given me this strength and calm. I have to take it one breath at a time. I don’t have a choice.”
Although Jenny Cain lives in Kosciusko, home-schooling her children on a farm that offers eggs and goat’s milk for sale, she had been planning to build a place in nearby Sallis — on her new husband’s land.
“As if it’s not bad enough, her brother-in-law, who had once been a kind of surrogate father to her kids, is in a hospital with cancer,” said Mark Thornton, publisher of The Star-Herald in Kosciusko, which once featured Genny Cain in a Mother’s Day story.
“She is a very sweet woman, a very faithful person. The Cain name is well-known around here.”
But Genny Bohrer and Mark Cain didn’t meet until he showed up one day to buy goat’s milk from her. It was soon after Charlie Bohrer had died.
“Charlie and I had been snow skiing three weeks earlier. He hadn’t been sick or anything,” Genny Cain said. “Then I woke up one morning, and he was gone.”
Some nights later, recalling the Psalmist’s description of God — “a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows” — she prayed.
She asked for the “perfect” man to come into her life. One who was good with goats and horses. And with her children.
“I sort of joked with God, too,” she said. “I said, ‘And if I could have anything else, I wouldn’t mind someone with dark hair and blue eyes, and who looks good in a cowboy hat and blue jeans.’
“Within two weeks, Mark showed up on my doorstep. He had dark hair and blue eyes and was wearing blue jeans and a cowboy hat.”
Still, she said, “it was too soon to give him my heart. I was still hurting.”
But Mark Cain’s heart was already gone, said his friend, Martin Frazure of Durant. “I remember him telling me, ‘The first time I saw her, I knew she was for me.’
“It seems like the Lord just put them together.”
Mark Cain moved fast, but not too fast, Genny Cain said.
“When we needed him, he was there, fixing fences so the goats wouldn’t get out, taking the horses to pasture. And when he needed to back off, he backed off.
“He knew grief, too. ”
But her children weren’t ready for him then, she said. “He got ‘you’re not my daddy’ a lot. But nothing rattled him. Nothing was too big for him to handle.”
It helped that he didn’t claim to be a replacement for their father, Genny Cain said. “He just told them, ‘I want to be there for you,’ and he was.
“You have to be certifiably insane to get involved with a woman with seven kids. Most men don’t want a woman with just one.
“His family thought he was crazy. I told him he was crazy. I said, ‘I’m going to turn you in.’ He said, ‘Don’t; I’m having too much fun.’ ”
If one moment shattered Genny’s doubts about re-marriage, it was the day he brought home her children in his truck, their wind-blown hair streaming from the windows, their faces dripping with melted ice cream. And Mark Cain said, ” ‘Yep, this is the life.’ ”
They were married on June 4, at Sallis Baptist Church, a planned outdoor wedding moved inside because of the rain.
The bride was given away by her five sons.