Bright and Distant Shores Page 9

  When the commotion died down, Argus went in search of his rowboat and found it dragged into the woods. In the morning, after the victory feast, he would begin rowing, pulling himself between islands, looking for work in a mission school or house. Perhaps he would return to the Presbyterian island of Nimburea to see if a new preacher had arrived. He still had a complete set of clean clothes in his portmanteau and he would camp wherever the locals allowed him, reading Exodus and David Copperfield by candlelight. He saw his sister coming down the beach with her woven bag over her shoulder. He could tell from her determined step, from the way she swung her arms and held her head, that she was going to abandon her dying husband and avoid the penance of widowhood. There was no waiting until the morning. They would have to leave while the pile houses still burned.

  III

  BY RAIL AND BY SEA

  9.

  Owen and Adelaide were saying goodbye at the train station when Jethro Gray and his farewell party arrived with a caravan of luggage. Hale Gray and his wife, an entourage of cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, all of them dressed as if for the races, fanned out behind a grumbling porter as he parted the crowds with a cart of kidskin valises. Jethro trailed behind, hands in pockets, walking under a straw kady with a red club stripe.

  “That must be the heir,” said Adelaide, forcing a smile.

  “God help us,” Owen said, glancing over.

  They fell in behind the procession and made for the outbound platform. The air brimmed with steam whistles and the smell of burning coal. Passengers and well-wishers milled, waited, held hands, kissed, sang anthems, waved kerchiefs like tiny white flags. Owen and Adelaide walked toward the Union Pacific’s Enterprise, a predominantly immigrant train that would change to Central Pacific rails in Utah, carrying hundreds of Europeans westward on wooden benches, toward the promise of California. Up ahead, Owen saw the Gray party stop beside a Pullman sleeper car that had been appended to the dining compartment at the rear of the train. The sleeper was funereal in its splendor, something lifted from a statuary yard—a chassis like greened copper, punched through with rivets, the sash windows opaline with the midday light. From what Owen could ascertain, there were a dozen first-class sleeper passengers and they gave each other curt nods as the porters, harried as coolies in a plantation field, scrambled to load their suitcases, tennis rackets, and fishing poles into the baggage car. Hale Gray, smoking a meerschaum pipe in a fawn-colored peacoat, a train schedule rolled in one fist, turned on his heels and made eye contact with Owen. Jethro stood next to him, thin, tall, fingers idling beneath his raglan sleeves, following his father’s gaze.

  “Ah, Mr. Graves, we were wondering when we might see you,” said Hale, letting the pipe shank rest on his lower lip. He swiveled thumb and forefinger to point the pipe at his offsider. “Jethro here is champing at the bit to get moving. A few of us took the liberty of adding a Pullman and a dining car to the back of the old iron horse. Hope that suits.”

  Owen looked down at the porter clambering through a doorway with a giant trunk.

  Hale said, “Jethro’s packed along a few cameras and books.”

  “So I see. This is Adelaide Cummings.” A brief pause. “My fiancée.”

  Hale leaned into a shallow bow but looked a little surprised. “Delighted.”

  “Very pleased to meet you,” said Adelaide.

  Jethro pursed his lips in a polite smile, wiped his hands down his shirtfront. “Pleased to meet you both. I’ve saved you a seat and a berth, Mr. Graves. I have some maps I’d like us to look at together. I sent away to the National Geographic Society.” The son was bread-faced, ash blond, high in the forehead and pink in the cheeks, had a small, nervous mouth that seemed uneasy about the excursions of the tongue. He licked his lips between sentences—a country parson on the brink of his first sermon.

  “Please, call me Owen. That’s very kind of you but I’ll be riding second class.” He shot his gaze from son to father, tightened his hold on Adelaide’s elbow.

  “Up with the Polacks and the chickens, Mr. Graves?” said Hale, amused, letting his words ride a plume of pipe smoke. “How noble.”

  “I’ll feel right at home,” said Owen.

  Hale said, “I give you until Nebraska before you come back here for the feather pillows. One time I slept all the way through the Middle West. Woke up in the Black Hills of Wyoming and was promptly handed a glass of rye on ice. Luxury is good for the economy, Mr. Graves.”

  “Well, once we’re on the ship we’ll be living like sardines. Might as well get used to it. If you take a water closet and turn it on its side—that’s about the parameters of a seaman’s berth.”

  Jethro worried the space beneath his cuffs with his nail-bitten fingers.

  The conductor bellowed all aboard, walking down the platform, and the passengers began taking to the footboards. Mother and son said goodbye and Jethro was passed through a receiving line of stout uncles and their teary wives. Owen guessed the heir was less than five years younger than himself, but he could pass for a gangly adolescent.

  Hale leaned close to Owen, his breath smoky with tobacco and single malt. “Hope you have the list. And remember, no double-dealing. Nothing off this voyage can go to the chalk burners at the Field Museum. We have an understanding on that front and you’ll find it stipulated on page twenty-two of the contract.” He offered his hand and they shook. “Don’t let the scarecrow fall overboard or get murdered by a savage. He’s the only son I have and I intend to see him rise to the occasion.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Owen said.

  Hale turned to the familial sobbing and farewells. “Enough tears! Let the boy board the train!”

  Owen took Adelaide by the arm and said I’ll see you aboard as he passed Jethro. Let him wonder whether he meant aboard the train or aboard the ship in San Francisco. They made their way toward the engine, catching sight of the mail and baggage compartments, the reefer-holed boxcar said to be carrying fruit and supplies, up along the immigrant cars that were clad in peeling timbers. Faces and hands pressed against the smoky windowpanes of the second-class cars. Goodbyes in a dozen languages. Owen threw his duffel bag over his shoulder and kissed Adelaide on the mouth.

  Adelaide toed the platform with one shoe, blinking back tears. “Eat plenty of limes and keep off the island women.”

  “Will do.”

  “My parents will come for the wedding. A year from now in the spring. Do you think you’ll remember?”

  “I have a feeling you’ll remind me once or twice. We’ll write as before?”

  She said, “I’ve already written the first letter in my head.”

  He felt her arms through his coat, an insistence at his rib cage. The steam whistle blew shrill and loud and they kissed again. He turned for the footboard just as the train rocked and began. He jumped into the carriage, leaned out the doorway, arms folded, watching Adelaide diminish in the farewelling bustle. This had been their pact: no warship waves or hand-blown kisses and no trotting alongside the moving locomotive. They wanted to downplay the goodbye, reduce its status and therefore the coming absence. She adjusted her hatpins, elbows reared, looking slightly put out by the mob scene. People hurried and funneled around her, ladies in satins, velvets, chintzes, furs, hats topped with ostrich feathers, giving her a wide berth, creating a traffic island where she stood in her pale gray frock and simple felt hat. It was a Sunday afternoon in August and she was on her way to teach unmarried Bohemian girls how to sew.

  The Enterprise rattled through the shoreline switchyards, jolted and clanged through a hundred strands of interconnecting trackage, the brakemen watching for drifters and hobos, surveying every standpipe, signal box, roundhouse, and water tank for a potential ambush. No free rides was company policy and the conductor was docked for unticketed passengers. A trio of newsboys moved through the cars for an hour, selling the afternoon papers, gum, lollipops, cigarettes, cigars, bricks of soap, alighting at a station on the thinning cusp of the city. The trai
n gained momentum then sped out of the urban rim, out from the hundred-acre skirt of stockyard, slaughterhouse, and foundry, where the gray-stone and redbrick factories gave way to cattle sheds and cedar barns. The smells turned to alfalfa and the heady ammonia of fertilizer and dung. To keep the air circulating most of the windows had been opened in second class and an occasional up-slant of dust or a flurry of concession tickets and leaves was drawn inside. Blasts of coal smoke and the shudder of the boiler rushed in from outside. Owen sat with his feet on his duffel bag, slumped on a bench beside a sleeping Dutch girl, her head bouncing against his arm. The parents sat opposite, a mustached father peering over horn-rims at a homeland newspaper, a bonneted mother knitting and occasionally looking over to ask in halting English if the girl’s head was getting too heavy. Owen assured her all was fine and stared out at a field of high and tasseled corn.

  The press of human bodies and the low wooden ceiling of the carriage reminded him of quarters below deck. Up above the seats were crude couchettes, plank-board bunks cantilevered from the wall and suspended with iron rods. A few passengers, mostly women and children, lay in these tiers with brought-along bedding and straw pillows they’d purchased from a trackside vendor for a dime. Feet, arms, fingers, every now and then a child’s drowsy face, appeared over the bed railing. Two teenage sisters played a game of cribbage and gossiped at the end of the carriage, leaning into the aisle from their bunks, two griffins holding forth above the door to the convenience. At the other end of the car was a rusting anthracite stove that was mercifully unlit, but come suppertime Owen supposed there would be a steady stream of improvised dinners, skillets, and frypans emerging from underfoot. His plan was to buy his meals from the immigrants who’d brought along hampers and pails of food. The train would stop briefly for the second-classers to purchase dinner, but for a few coins he was told he could obtain enough bread, hash, onions, sausage, and eggs to see him through the night.

  Just before nightfall some of the wooden blinds were lowered but Owen kept his open, watching the Iowa farms pass by, the split-rail fences and grain silos, the plain houses coming alight in the growing, hemispheric darkness. A New York Irishman was passing around a bottle of bourbon and Owen took a swig, avoiding the clucking stares of the Dutch couple across the way. The girl was still asleep on his shoulder. He drank from the bottle slowly, careful not to wake her, then handed it back into the aisle. Some Germans started up with a fiddle and there was a bout of singing. Owen bought some pork sausage and cold rice from a woman selling food from a tin pail. He felt himself drift toward sleep, his reflection framed in the window, the blackened prairie unbroken by farmhouse lights. He pulled the blind shut and leaned against his coat as a makeshift pillow.

  Somewhere in Nebraska, not yet midnight, Owen was jolted awake by Jethro, lank and stooped, shaking him by the shoulders.

  “It took me half an hour to make it back here. Crossing between cars is a feat of courage, let me tell you,” Jethro said. He was still wearing his punter’s hat.

  Owen could see that Jethro was drunk, pink-cheeked. Someone hollered keep it down from an overhead couchette.

  “What are you doing?” Owen sat up.

  The Dutchman gave him a brimstone stare, his head angled against the shutter.

  Owen stood and the daughter immediately stretched horizontal across the bench. He led Jethro to the back of the carriage. They stood, rocking, by the door that opened out to the groaning coupler head.

  Jethro said, “I nearly got into a wrangle in the Chinese car. I stepped on somebody. Entirely an accident. Scuffle avoided, however. Good thing I was runner-up in the varsity boxing championship. Welterweight, in case you’re wondering what class.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m deep in a winning streak.” He drummed his fingers in his trouser pockets and jounced on his feet.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Poker in the first-class lounge. I’m up fifty dollars.”

  “Jesus, you woke me for that?”

  Jethro took his hands from his pockets and raised them over his head, touching the ceiling, breathing to a silent count, as if he’d crossed a dozen cars for some calisthenics. “Between games and needed a stretch. Clears the head. Would you mind coming along to watch?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Shoulders squared, conspiratorial, he said, “One of the players—I saw something under the table . . .”

  “Legs?”

  “The banker’s son has lost nine hands in a row.” Jethro glanced down the corridor of hanging limbs and shifting bodies, suddenly appalled. “I think he has a pistol attached to his ankle.”

  Owen waited for more information but when none came said, “And?”

  “Well, I suspect having someone else on the home team might be the way to go.”

  Owen let his eyelids close for a second. “This isn’t a regatta.”

  An old lady, trying to sleep nearby, let out a mortal sigh.

  “Please,” Jethro whispered. “The steward is staying up just for the game. The banker’s kid is paying him hand over fist to keep the food and anti-fogmatics flowing.”

  Owen turned away, unable to look at him. “Aw, Jesus, I feel sick in my guts. I don’t even know where you’ve come from. Have you ever been on a boat?”

  “I rowed as well as boxed in Cambridge.”

  “I may be ill.”

  Jethro placed a collegial hand on Owen’s shoulder. “Just sit in a chair and watch.”

  “I’d rather jump off this train than watch two rich boys gamble their fathers’ money away.”

  Jethro gave his trouser pleats a tug. Nothing jangled and Owen guessed that he didn’t bother carrying change. Copper and nickel were beneath him.

  “If I come down there I intend to get dealt into the game. Understand?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  Owen opened the door and stepped out onto the bridgeway where the metallic bawl hit him in the chest—the undercarriage grinding along the steel rails, the concussive tamping of the air brakes, the boiler and smokebox rasping from behind, unseen, barreling them through moonless Nebraska. Below his feet, Owen could see a spindrift of hot sparks against the chip-stone ballast and he thought briefly of wreckers soldering, of the tin and lead patchwork that his father sometimes did to prevent a truss from falling on his men. Churning machines always reminded him of his father. The smell of scorched oil. A life spent tied to the turning wheel.

  They passed in and out of the immigrant cars without talking, stepped through the tunnel of human limbs and wool blankets. Between each car was a five-second slat of rushing dark and steel, Owen in front, Jethro off-balance, clutching his straw hat with one hand. They passed through the stately dining car and arrived at the Pullman sleeper and lounge with their hair wild, jackets disheveled, dustings of soot on the lapels. The sleeping compartments were drawn behind velvet curtains and they gingerly made for the far end of the carriage. Four men sat at a table in the lounge area. It was hard to believe this was the same train, that this tube of mahogany and velvet was being wrenched through the Midwest by the same blackened boiler. It was a drawing room in miniature—heavy drapes, ornate mirrors, plush carpets, wicker chairs, a barrel ceiling with carved moldings. The movement of the train seemed inconsequential, a distant, clicking pleasantry. The sour-looking steward, a tray in one hand, stood by the double doors that were open at the absolute rear of the car and train. A trackside balcony hung over the flashing rails and he stared down at them, perhaps contemplating his life in the diminishing ties.

  “Scotch, please,” Jethro said to the steward. The middle-aged man moved slowly to the liquor cabinet.

  “Would you make that two?” Owen added.

  Jethro said, “Ah, gentlemen, this is Owen Graves. Head trader for my voyage. He’d like to join us, if that meets with no objections.”

  They nodded, turned their drinks.

  “Twenty-dollar buy-in,” said the youngest and Owen
knew right away he was the banker’s son. He sat in his shirtsleeves, collar open, face freckled and burning. His ginger sideburns drew attention to his pointed jaw.

  Owen took out a twenty-dollar bill and threw it on the table. A barrel-chested man in a Stetson changed it out and handed him small banknotes. The steward approached with their drinks and they moved a few paces away from the table to meet him. Jethro gave Owen some brief, whispered details of the men: Clarence Milford, rancher from Abilene, wealthy by dumb luck, has a tell like a Fourth of July parade, watch the fingers on the Texas A&M class ring; Arty Bloomberg, department store baron, sore at losing but with a decent bluff; Winthrop Kronen, undertaker and owner of a funeral parlor consortium, has been trying all night to sell the Texas kingpin a plot to call his own; Wilson McCarthy, heir to a banking empire, and at some point take a look and confirm that’s an ankle holster under the table. They returned with their drinks, sat between Clarence and Arty. Clarence was talking about some recent dental work he’d had done.