American Meteor

by Norman Lock

  “Where’s Chen?” I asked the German, his head bent low over his work. In the noise of the machine—a brittle rattat-tat like a Gatling gun—he hadn’t heard me. I asked again, this time shouting, “Where is Chen?”

  He stopped his pedaling, let the cloth rest, and raised his bleary eyes to me. He was older than Chen and looked worn, frayed, and wrinkled.

  “Dead,” he replied grudgingly, annoyed by the interruption. He was paid by the piece—and what did it matter to him that the railroad had lost a Chinaman? The coolie army had grown to thirteen thousand blue-jacketed men as the tracks leaped toward Utah, in advance of the fire-breathing dragons of the New World.

  “How?” I asked. He gave me an infuriating sauerkraut smirk that made me want to brain him. “What happened to him?”

  “He got a pain in his stomach, vomited, and died,” said the German brusquely, turning back to his work.

  I knew I’d have to put a stick of dynamite up this stiff-backed Prussian’s ass to make him talkative. I left him to his sewing and went to find the depot quartermaster.

  “He died of the ‘trembles,’” he said, with a shrug that consigned Chen to the hell reserved for heathens and infidels. You’ve heard of it, I’m sure, Jay. It comes from drinking milk from a cow that’s grazed on white snakeroot.

  He was in the middle of counting shovels and had no time for “Durant’s Puppy,” as I was known—with good reason, I suppose. The Irish called me “Durant’s Nigger.” They’d have had my liver on toast ever since General Jack had ordered me to blow reveille at five o’clock on any Monday morning I happened to be in Omaha. They would wake with thick tongues and big heads after a half day’s rest, which meant, for most, a booze-up in the Irish saloon. General Jack never missed an opportunity to needle the “worthless bog trotters” for proving themselves even lower than his yellow drudges.

  That night, I went to see the men who’d shared Chen’s room.

  “What happen Chen?” I asked in pidgin English. They stood like a quartet of Easter Island statues, poker-faced and inscrutable. I tried shouting next, as if their incomprehension were the result of ear wax. “What happen Chen?” They must have been used to bellowing white men, for they never even flinched. Frustrated, I impersonated someone with the shakes and a bellyache. The charade must have appeared comical to the Chinamen. They jabbered among themselves critically, and then one whose ear was a scorched stump laughed. Irked, I knocked him down. He was smaller than I, and I gloated to see his surprise. I left the room, haughty as a general delivering an ultimatum to a beaten foe. I was sorry for it later—that, and much else besides.

  Passing the cattle pens on the walk back to the depot, I suddenly recalled a conversation I’d had with Chen.

  “Are there cows in China?” I’d asked, betraying once more my ignorance of the wider world.

  He smiled tolerantly. “Yes, but we do not drink so much milk as you. I never do; it disagrees with me.”

  In the morning, I went to the infirmary to talk to the company doctor.

  “I want to ask you about Chen Shi,” I said.

  “Who is Chen Shi?”

  “The Chinese tailor who died of the trembles.”

  “Go on,” he said, hooking his ankles around the legs of the stool. The black hairs on his legs poked through his checkered socks.

  “Chen didn’t drink milk,” I told him. “It didn’t agree with him.”

  “There’re a hundred ways to die,” he said, with a shrug that looked like helplessness. He glanced at a sickbed where a man was pledged to one of them. “He could’ve been bitten by a rattler. Or maybe someone put white snakeroot or arsenic in his tea. He was Chinese; he was bound to have enemies.”

  Like a German tailor, I thought. Or the quartermaster, also German. History will show you can’t trust a stinking sauerkraut.

  The infirmary smelled like the Armory Square Hospital, where my fiction had been hatched, and I was itching to leave. There was nothing I could do for Chen. I wasn’t about to demand an inquest or to pursue the poisoner. I’m no Auguste Dupin.

  “Do you know where Chen’s buried?” I asked the doctor, who had unhooked his ankles from the stool and was listening to the dying man’s chest with a stethoscope. I considered the instrument superfluous. I could hear the croup and rattle of pneumonia from across the room.

  “In the ‘Chinese cemetery’ behind the train shed. Look for fresh-turned earth.”

  I took Jericho, determined to play taps over Chen’s grave. I could be a vain and pompous ass in those days. There were only a few graves; most of the Chinese workers died in California and Nevada, dynamiting through the Sierras—blown to bits or buried beneath tons of American rock. A sad ending for those who’d dreamed, once, of gold ingots. Each grave had a cross for decoration. Was it ignorance or malice to have buried them like Methodists? Or did a high-minded evangelist with a shovel intend to convert the misbegotten heathen when they could no longer object? I knelt—it might’ve been the first time in history that a white man had knelt before a Chinaman, quick or dead. Not knowing any Chinese prayers, I said a Catholic grace: “We give Thee thanks, Almighty God, for all Thy benefits, and for the poor souls of the faithful departed; through the mercy of God, may they rest in peace. Amen.” I crossed myself, and then I blew taps. I couldn’t have done better if it were Abraham Lincoln himself lying in the ground before me. I was so moved that tears started up in my eye. Seized by a fit of generosity, I took off my medal and laid it at the foot of the cross. I brushed the loose dirt from my white-capped knees and left the corpses to go about their ghastly business. I hadn’t walked fifty yards when I changed my mind and went back for my medal. Who knew? I might need it yet.

  I never found a man of any race to replace Chen— excepting you. You’ve been decent and a friend. On Sunday afternoons, Chen and I would walk the length and breadth of Omaha, although, in 1866, there was nothing about it you’d call picturesque. Omaha was a machine for slaughtering, packing, and shipping cattle. For all its monotony and stink, the town had its share of amusements—drinking holes and whorehouses, naturally, but I’d have been embarrassed to be seen in either place with Chen. What I mean is, I’d have been ashamed of myself. He had more of a civilizing effect on me than all the high-and-mighty, holier-than-thou con men I’d known in my wanderings. China has an ancient civilization. It was bound to have seeped into Chen at birth and to have changed me a little during the time I was steeped in him, so to speak.

  He tended to spice his remarks with epigrams. One I remember was “Stars that outshine the rest are the first to disappear.” I don’t know if it was Confucius’s saying or Chen’s own. Product of a self-effacing race, he disapproved of my inclination to show off, which he attributed to shallowness and insecurity. I was hardly more than a boy! He thought it a dangerous folly to wear a snow-white uniform in a wilderness peopled by the Irish and the Indians. Chen’s gift was to fit himself to circumstances. I’d advocate it, if his life hadn’t been cut short.

  With nothing to do anymore in my idle hours, I undertook my education. I wish I could tell you that I had Chen’s example in mind. But the truth is, I became an avid reader by chance. I was searching the depot warehouse for a case of scotch that Durant had ordered from New York, when I found a crate of books intended, by some eastern philanthropic society, for Omaha’s circulating library. A library, circulating or otherwise, had not yet been thought of for a town consisting mostly of illiterate Irishmen, foreigners, and cowboys herding steers into cattle pens by waving their Boss of the Plains hats and making their own version of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp.” I gave a coolie two bits to haul the crate to the tool car hitched behind Durant’s traveling boardroom, where I had my quarters; and in the long evenings when I wasn’t licking boots and kissing backsides, I read. In the three and a half years remaining to me as Durant’s Puppy, I read The Scarlet Letter, Silas Marner, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Pride and Prejudice, Gulliver’s Travels, The Marble Faun, Moby-Dick, Knic
kerbocker’s History of New York, The Red Rover, David Copperfield, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Woman in White, Adam Bede, The Age of Fable, Bleak House, illustrated by Phiz, The Origin of Species, which could have found its way into the crate only by chance or spitefulness, and The Diary of a Superfluous Man, whose title spoke to the situation of a boy no more central to the great events in which he found himself than a gnat in the halls of Congress. I had fallen in my own estimation since leaving the army, but I’d be sitting in the catbird seat once again.

  With no formal education and little experience in reading (beyond Durant’s private papers, which I would pull from his briefcase and peruse), I could never have wormed my way through all those books if it hadn’t been for Patrick Landy. He’d been sent by an eastern newspaper to write an article deploring the Johnson administration’s neglect of the Lincoln parlor car: a “national disgrace” and “the final quietus to the man who saved the Union.” I met Landy the month following Chen’s murder (for so I swear it to have been), when he visited the Union Pacific shed. One of my duties was to scare off trespassers and vandals. Personally, I did not think my face or manner could scare a boy on his way to a Baptist picnic. But the car had been “egged” once already by die-hard secessionists, and Durant insisted I keep watch. This was his price for letting me stay in a corner of the tool car—dirty with pigeon droppings and grease. When I suggested he furnish me with a firearm, he replied fleeringly that my bugle would be enough to intimidate any mischief makers and, if I were overrun, to signal for help. So I met Landy for the first time with Jericho at the ready.

  “I’m not partial to bugle music,” he said disarmingly when I had answered his knock on the old parlor car’s back door.

  “What do you want?” I asked with as convincing a show of grit as I could muster. I couldn’t have been more surprised by the burly man’s abrupt appearance if he’d been a grampus heaved up on my doorstep by the night tide.

  By now you know I was never brave—not as a boy, not as a man. I’m not saying I ran from trouble (at least not always), but I would feel something inside my nerves and gut give way at trouble’s approach, making my gorge rise, as well as the little hairs on my neck. Antagonism did not come naturally to me, unless the other party to the conflict happened to be a smaller man. Landy must’ve seen my apprehension in the way I shuffled and fidgeted with Jericho, but he had tact enough not to belittle me.

  “I’m a reporter for the Chicago Daily Tribune,” he said in a peaceable voice belied by his robust presence. “Mind if I take a look around?”

  I didn’t see any reason to bar entrance to a gentleman of the press or to blow Jericho for reinforcements, so I opened the door wide and let him come in. Reading by the light of a single candle set on the table, I hadn’t noticed when the shadows engulfed the narrow car. I lit the wall sconces, and their reflected light bloomed suddenly, gilding each windowpane. Mr. Lincoln’s funeral coach still retained its opulence; the varnished wood of the coffered panels and carved furniture gleamed, the crystal shone, and the tapestried chairs and sofas caught glints of light in their shiny threads.

  “People back east think it’s a shame the car that bore Abe Lincoln to his tomb ended up a pleasure coach for rich men,” he said, putting his hat on the table in a disdainful way that would prove his worth to these same men had they been there to see it. “Lincoln was a man of the people, and his parlor car rightfully belongs to the people. I was sent out here to write a piece about the car’s employment by a gang of plutocrats who don’t give a damn for sentiment or democracy.” He held his horses a moment, studying a bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey, like an ornithologist beholding an exotic bird landed on a steaming pile of Barren Island “putrescibles.” Conscientiousness carried the day over liquid temptation—imported, you would have thought, expressly for his ruin. “You’re an Irish lad, by the look of you.”

  “I am,” I said.

  “What does your mother call you?” he asked, shunting down a spur from the main track of his thought, like a locomotive when the points are changed.

  “She called me Stephen. She’s dead.”

  I was reclining on a horsehair sofa in order to prove my own equality and democratic pluck. Besides, I was not obliged to wait on newspapermen without an appointment.

  “My condolences. A Dublin girl, was she, during her days in God’s second Eden? I’m not one of those traitors who call Ireland His most fantastic mistake. They were whelped by an angry god.”

  “Dún Laoghaire.”

  “I’m pleased to hear you call it by its given name instead of Kingstown. Goddamn the British Empire!” His gaze shifted again to the bottle in token of his patriotism, but he quickly broke its spellbinding thread with a shake of his heavy jowls, broken-veined by drink, as if to disabuse himself of a mirage. “What are you reading?”

  “Silas Marner.”

  “There’s a tale of penny-pinching greed Durant and his fellow robber barons should be forced to eat raw and uncooked!” he bawled.

  Here now, I thought, is the true timbre of the big blustering Mick. I admit I found his performance entertaining and, hoping for more, baited him.

  “You should see the steaks and oysters they throw down their gullets,” I said. “Chased with the best whiskey.”

  I recalled the hard bread, salt, and coffee we had eaten in the field and wished that Durant and his cronies would choke on their luxuries. The wish, no more than a spark, cooled, and the comedy continued.

  “I wouldn’t mind a drop.”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Landy!” I said, jumping up to fetch General Jack’s bottle of Irish.

  “There’s nothing like the sound of good whiskey falling lightly in a glass,” he remarked appreciatively when I poured him out a double jigger’s worth. He smacked his lips, raised his glass, and saluted me with the ceremony of Grant doffing his hat to Lee at Appomattox Court House. “May you be in heaven a full half hour before the devil knows you’re dead.”

  He drank it off, and I stood poised to pour him another. But he turned his shot glass upside down.

  “Thank you, but I don’t want to forget the reason why I’ve come.”

  This is no ordinary Irishman, I said to myself, marveling at his restraint in the presence of Dublin’s most celebrated mash. He composed himself, cleared his throat rhetorically, and then asked to hear me recite my history. Except for how I’d lost my eye to my own carelessness, I told him the truth. I don’t know why I was mostly honest with him, unless his repugnance for crooks and fakes encouraged me to be factual. As I told my tale—it took me some time to gather the threads and, frequently having dropped them in befuddlement, pick them up again—Landy would nod, his spectacles flashing with candlelight a semaphore of compassion or indignation, appropriate to each pitiful incident.

  “And did you know Mr. Lincoln?” he asked when I’d finished talking.

  “I knew him dead,” I said, “better than anyone else, including his wife, who was prostrate in Washington during the twelve days it took to take him home. I kept him company during the long, silent nights the train traveled between wakes. I’d sit in this car, with only the candles on the two coffins to shoulder the darkness, and I’d think all the grand and terrible thoughts that go through the mind of a person contemplating a corpse. I had two corpses to ponder: one short, the other extra long.”

  “It would have scared the bejesus out of most!” Landy said, his whistle wet with remnant booze his shockingly pink tongue had leached from his mustache.

  I was pleased with the courage I’d shown, though I hadn’t recognized it until now.

  “I met Walt Whitman,” I said. “The poet.”

  “A scurrilous man! He violates the conventions of metrical poetry and decency.”

  Ignorant of poetry, I felt it prudent to change the subject.

  “And General Grant. He gave me this.”

  I showed him the medal.

  “If I can fit you into my article, I will,” he said. “What’s the last name
?

  “Moran.”

  He wrote down my name in his notebook, or pretended to. “Stephen Moran,” he said grandly, composing with his index finger a headline in the air: THE BUGLE BOY & HIS LONELY VIGIL.

  I never saw my name or story in the Chicago Daily Tribune. But Landy was instrumental in my education. The paper kept him in Omaha to report on the railroad’s westward progress. In the evenings when I was in town, I’d sit and read in a corner of his office. He’d help me over the words I didn’t know and through the tangle of thoughts I could not, at first, pick apart into sense.

  The crusade to save the Lincoln funeral car failed, naturally. The railroad continued to use it to supervise construction. I lost track of it after I left the Union Pacific in 1870 to traipse across the Wasatch with my camera. I have it on good authority that it ended its days a curiosity in Minneapolis, until a prairie fire reduced it to a burned-out wreck.

  Life went on, as it must till the last breath escapes us and mingles, according to the laws of natural science, with the ether. Whether it will transpire, at time’s finale, into the bosom of Abraham, who showed a willingness to slaughter his son, none can say. And Abraham Lincoln? Many say he ought to have been more careful of his sons, who went to the killing fields by their tens and hundreds of thousands. In my opinion, Lincoln was a good man. If a man can be good. What is a good man if not one who does not believe in himself to the exclusion of others? I saw his face, remember. Not even the mortuary art could erase it entirely of gnawing doubt. Beneath the artful rouge and chalk, I saw the marks left by the demons—his countrymen’s and his own—wrestled unto death. (I wish I could have photographed that face!) He was asked to bear what cannot be borne—what should not be borne. I hope never to be so tested, for I have it on the best authority that I will not bear it.

  Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, May 10, 1869

  On the tenth of May, in 1869, the final track was laid and the last spikes hammered home—one gold, one silver, one an alloy of gold, silver, and iron—to celebrate the “wedding of the rails”: the meeting of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads, nearly a mile above sea level, at Promontory Summit, north of the Great Salt Lake. There’s nary a Chinaman to be seen in A. J. Russell’s famous photograph, although the final ten-mile stretch of track had been laid by a special crew of cone-hatted, blue-jacketed coolies, famous for their speed. Soon a person could travel by train from the Missouri River to Sacramento and onward by paddleboat to San Francisco Bay. If, as Durant once told me, the transcontinental railroad would be a great artery transecting America’s continental empire, then the tainted blood of the East could flow, unobstructed, into the healthy body of the West, carrying religion and civilization the way conquistadores brought God and syphilis to the Indians and the Mexicans. The natives, buffalo, riches, and gods of the Old West would drown in blood. On that May day, the West began its long, slow dying.