Canaan

by Donald McCaig

  In that dusty attic, lit by narrow windows at either end, Sallie didn’t know why she was crying. A new beginning—wasn’t that what she wanted for herself, her husband and children?

  They bought horse harness, shovels, axes, and two Winchester repeating rifles. Sallie wrapped her crockery in newspapers and packed each piece between sawdust layers in an oak cask. They bought horsemans’ dusters and broad-brimmed hats. At the bootmaker Aunt Opal behaved as if being fitted for riding boots happened every day.

  In August, Duncan and Sallie went home to Stratford.

  Jack Mitchell met them at the depot and as their buggy negotiated the familiar road, every turn refreshed memories. Gangs were cutting corn and Duncan’s hand curled instinctively as if holding a corn knife: twist the ear, snap the stem, slash the husk, toss the ear onto the golden heap in the wagon bed.

  “Husband, will we ever return?”

  “I wish I thought so.”

  Jack said, “We is sinners. We enjoys to sin. Old Adam and Eve, when they left that garden, they takes their sinnin’ ways with ’em.”

  “Jack, you are a wellspring of encouragement.”

  “Plenty coloreds takin’ themselves away. What good it do? What they gonna find we ain’t got at Stratford?”

  The fences had been repaired and the mill was painted. Sheep and a dozen cows grazed behind the barn. The mill wheel was turning and the air vibrated with the whine of the saw.

  “General Mahone has paid his arrears?”

  “Don’t rightly know. Master Gatewood, he keeps the accounts.”

  In a checked vest and trousers slathered with saw oil, Samuel was supervising sawyers cantdogging a log into the whirling four-foot blade.

  Duncan asked a young black his name.

  “I’m Lockridge, Master. Pearly Lockridge.”

  “You look a lot like Rufus. Partisan rangers killed him in ’62 or ’63.”

  “Mama say Rufus was my daddy.” The young man paused. “Mama say Rufus wanted to be a farrier. He wanted to better hisself.”

  Rufus’s face filled Duncan’s memory as vividly as if Rufus had just walked into the mill. He felt his throat constrict and thought: Everything here is connected to everything else. He said only, “Yes. He was a good man.”

  After the log was turned for the next cut, Samuel wiped his hands. “Jack,” he said, “I leave you to it. Doubtless the men prefer your supervision.”

  Cousin Molly had supper waiting: smoked ham, new potatoes, beans, coleslaw, and peach pie. Molly complained the raccoons were climbing the peach trees for the ripest peaches, breaking laden branches as they climbed. “We chained Old Buck in the orchard, but those scoundrels calculated the reach of Buck’s chain and rioted just beyond his reach. Poor dog barked himself hoarse.”

  While the ladies were cleaning up, Duncan and Samuel went to sit on the porch roof. “Remember—” Duncan mused.

  Samuel cut him short, “I could spend the rest of my days remembering.”

  Mahone was paying current accounts, but Eben Barnwell was financing Stratford’s improvements. “Barnwell is speculating in gold,” Samuel said. “Everybody is speculating in gold. At the county seat, men of probity are paying a fearful price for it. It is this infernal telegraph. We hear more than we need to about matters which do not concern us.”

  That night Sallie and Duncan lay in the bed where years before the boy Duncan had dreamed of war and glory and horses.

  THE NEXT DAY, it was raining and cold when they left.

  They joined Aunt Opal, the children, and Joe Lame Deer in Baltimore. Joe Lame Deer slept in the horse pens. “Hell,” he told Duncan, “my people’d kill for one of these ponies.”

  “We depart on the morning express,” Duncan said.

  As Aunt Opal was taking the children off to bed after evening prayers, her reticule clunked the door frame.

  “Aunt Opal, what on earth?”

  The black woman pulled an ancient pistol from her bag. “Them red devils come for these childrens, they wish they hadn’t.”

  They left at six A.M. Two days to Indianapolis, two more to Chicago, where they paused to rest the horses off the cars.

  Chicago was a one-story town with wide dirt streets. Young Catesby gaped as a wooden house on rollers, its owners sitting placidly on the porch, was drawn solemnly down the street.

  Joe Lame Deer was fascinated by the stockyards. “They got a machine where a hog walks in one end and comes out canned pork!”

  The family took rooms at a depot hotel. About midnight, bawling cattle pulled Sallie from sleep and she went to the window. Under a full moon, the stockyards stretched as far as Sallie could see; as if cattle, hogs, and sheep had built a beasts’ metropolis.

  The next day, Duncan secured berths in one of Mr. Pullman’s sleeping cars and the horsecar was coupled behind. At nine o’clock Wednesday morning, September 8, 1869, they departed Chicago for the West.

  The Pullman car had mirrors and an ornate coal stove. At night its seats could be converted into berths, like a ship’s berths. Those ingenious devices intrigued little Catesby greatly.

  They were an hour out of Chicago when one of the car’s wheels ignited; a bearing had failed and set the oil in the wheelbox afire. The train waited while the crew put the fire out with blankets and sand. Not twenty minutes later, another wheel burst into flame and was extinguished.

  After a third bearing failed, the engine abandoned Mr. Pullman’s car. The passenger cars had been crowded before the Pullman passengers piled in, and despite his objections, little Catesby rode in his father’s lap.

  The boy quieted when the train rolled sonorously across the great wooden bridge that spanned the Mississippi.

  On the western shore of the river they entered the Great Plains. A few farms were scattered here and there, but there were long spaces between them. Ducks and geese covered marshy sloughs and startled deer bounded away from their train.

  Another Pullman car was waiting at Cedar Rapids, but the conductor warned that this car was the worst on the line and that spring floods had eroded the track ballast. “Might upset,” he announced cheerfully.

  Sallie slept with Aunt Opal and the children in the lower berth.

  Though the train did manage to stay on the tracks, it lurched and bumped horribly. Nobody slept well, and at dawn the weary travelers were sitting in the Pullman’s parlor watching the horizon redden.

  The conductor pointed. “Them’ll be Council Bluffs. I guess we didn’t upset after all.”

  “Next time I ridin’ in the horsecar with the redskin,” Aunt Opal said.

  THE CEDAR RAPIDS & Missouri Railroad terminated at the Missouri River, where their baggage and horses were ferried to Omaha City. Joe Lame Deer said the horsecar had been comfortable; he’d slept in a manger of fragrant timothy hay.

  Omaha City had more tents than wooden dwellings. The only hotel was a two-story building whose stairwells and rooms were so filthy, Sallie removed the straw ticks off the beds as a precaution against fleas.

  Joe Lame Deer never left the horses, which became more valuable with each mile west.

  While they waited for the thrice-weekly train, they met fellow passengers in the hotel lobby. They would be sharing their Pullman with “the Honorable Algar and the Honorable Snellie.” Snellie was a wispy man who longed to hunt buffalo; Algar hoped to kill a grizzly.

  Their youngest traveling companion was a boy, accompanied by a negress. Although the pair kept to themselves, young Catesby Gatewood refused to honor their preference and when Aunt Opal closed her eyes Catesby was tugging the boy’s shirtsleeve.

  “Why, hullo. Haven’t you anyone to play with?”

  “Master Jacob,” the boy’s servant warned, “you was told by your mama—”

  “Not to consort with disreputable strangers. Yes, Kizzy. But this boy seems reputable. Can you do sums? How is your spelling? Can you spell ‘indian’?”

  Young Catesby set his thumb in his mouth, considering.

  His mother
intervened. “Oh, dear, is he bothering you?”

  “Oh, no.” The boy assured her that he was glad to make the acquaintance of young . . .”

  “Catesby,” Sallie furnished.

  “I am Jacob Omohundru, and this is Kizzy. We are traveling to San Francisco. Do you think our train will be attacked by indians? I certainly hope so. Have you a rifle, sir? Sir, are you unwell?”

  AS DUSK WAS extracting the last dim light from the western sky, Sallie and Duncan trudged the boardwalk that fronted Omaha City’s main street. “I suppose there can be no doubt who he is,” Sallie said. “He favors you.”

  “He seems well brought up. Christ, Sallie! Why now?”

  “Dearest, taking the Lord’s name in vain can’t change the fact that that young man is certainly your son.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who believes, as I discovered after you fled so ingloriously this afternoon, that he is the son of Silas and Marguerite Omohundru; his father was a businessman and his mother is the daughter of a Bahamanian parson. Jacob intends to visit the Bahamas one day. I doubt Kizzy remembers me. We only met once.”

  When the boardwalk ended, they continued down the dusty street. Lanterns illuminated tent saloons and tent faro parlors and men weaved and hallooed and one drunk tipped his hat to Sallie.

  “What will you do?”

  “I cannot tell him who I am; I would expose his mother as a colored woman who could not have married Silas Omohundru and has no rights as his widow. I’d as soon put a revolver to his head.”

  “Then, dear, you must not tell him,” Sallie said firmly.

  THE PULLMAN PALACE Car Express contained sleeping cars, a dining car, a parlor car, and an open observation car. Joe Lame Deer and the horses would follow with tomorrow’s freight. Duncan wanted to travel with the horses, but Sallie’s smile was gentle and implacable. “Dear, you have often spoken about your son, lost to you as an infant. You have said you hoped to see him again.”

  THEIR TRAIN CROSSED the Platte River flats, a dreary featureless prairie interrupted only by brief stops for wood and water at stations guarded by soldiers.

  The Pullman cars were the latest model and the parlor car had a pump organ upon which, after supper, the Honorable Snellie played and sang music-hall ditties of a nature unsuitable for children’s ears. After Aunt Opal and the children retired, Duncan and Sallie sat up as Snellie’s organ wheezed and blackness slipped past the windows.

  At breakfast in the dining car, Jacob Omohundru marched to their table. “Sir, I must apologize if I said anything to distress you back in Omaha. Mama says my manners leave much to be desired.”

  “Jacob Omohundru, you’ve done nothing wrong. I was suddenly . . . indisposed.”

  “Oh, that’s grand! Oh, not that you were indisposed, but Kizzy said I must have been rude because you left so precipitously. Are you well again? Isn’t it splendid out here? I’ve seen forty-three antelope and I thought I saw a buffalo, but Kizzy says it was a rock.”

  At Sallie’s suggestion, they went to the observation car. The open car’s leather benches were dusted with the same cinders that crunched under their shoes. “Did you lose your arm in the War, sir? My father was killed in the War. Mama says that he defied the yankees to the end. I’m not sure that was a good idea. Defying the yankees to the end, I mean. If he’d compromised I should still have a father. Where are you bound, sir?”

  Duncan said they would leave the train at Medicine Bow and take the Bridger Trail north to Montana Territory.

  “Will you prospect for gold, sir? Mama says that gold is being bid up by speculators, that Mr. Fisk and Mr. Gould have a corner and own so much gold that if anyone wants gold they must buy gold from them. Look, sir, that is a wolf on the ridgeline. He is my first wolf ever. Isn’t he splendid?”

  As he stood on the seat, the wind blew the boy’s hair off his face and Duncan gripped his son’s leg to steady him.

  Duncan said, “Men are buying gold because President Grant is friendly with Fisk and Gould. Grant’s brother-in-law, Corbin, is in with Gould.”

  “That may be so, sir, but Mama says Grant doesn’t like Gould as much as everybody thinks he does. Mama says Grant will release gold from the Federal Treasury rather than see Gould own it all.”

  “Your mama—is she always right?”

  “About money, yes, sir. Always.”

  Duncan said he wasn’t looking for gold but for land suitable for a ranch where he would rear horses.

  “I think I should like that sort of work. Mama won’t let me play or go to school with other boys. I must have tutors. Mama says I learn my lessons better from tutors. I believe I could learn my lessons and still play with other boys. What do you think?”

  “I wouldn’t wish to argue with your mama.”

  Jacob nodded. “She usually bests those who try.”

  “Yes,” Duncan said, remembering the ferocious little slave girl he’d loved so many years ago.

  After a time, Kizzy came, worried that Jacob might be bothering the gentleman. When Duncan assured her he was enjoying the boy’s company, Kizzy plumped herself down with her knitting.

  His mother had sent Jacob to San Francisco to Mr. Leland Stanford, who had constructed the western segment of this railroad. At a critical time for that enterprise, when others balked, Mrs. Omohundru’s Farmers and Merchants Bank had provided financing. “Mama says Mr. Stanford may be of service to me one day,” the boy explained. “I must be on my best behavior.”

  In the late morning, they stopped in Cheyenne for water. The boy was fascinated by the trappers, traders, and blanket indians on the platform. “Aren’t they magnificent!”

  “I don’t know,” Duncan said. “They look like loafers to me.”

  The boy settled into his seat. “I’m sure you’re right, sir. I shan’t admire them.”

  “They probably aren’t so bad,” Duncan relented. A drunken indian paraded along the platform, whooping. “He looks happy enough.”

  The boy set his mouth. “We are not meant to be happy, sir,” he said. “We are meant to be good.”

  They passed through Sherman, which, though only a water tank, was, according to Crofutt’s Guide, the highest point on the Transcontinental Railroad, eight thousand feet above sea level. As their train descended through narrow canyons and trestled rushing mountain streams, the boy stuttered with delight. “Look there, sir! Look there!”

  The boy ate supper with the Gatewoods. “I hope to see Chinamen in San Francisco,” Jacob said. “I have read about the Celestial Empire.”

  At dusk, they stopped at Medicine Bow, the rough railroad camp that was the head of the Bridger Trail. It didn’t take long to unload the family and their luggage. The engineer blew his whistle in farewell.

  The wind was cold. Baby Abigail was fussing.

  The boy leaned out of the observation car. “Remember what Mama said about the gold,” he cried.

  “God bless you,” Duncan shouted. The train grew smaller and smaller and vanished around a bend.

  A man and wife, their two children, and a middle-aged negress stood on the empty platform on what seemed like the edge of the world. Wind-scoured sagebrush covered the hills behind a tiny settlement of shacks and dugouts.

  “Dear husband.”

  “Dearest wife.”

  CHAPTER 43

  BLACK FRIDAY

  Telegram from Eben Barnwell to Amos Hayward,

  8:02 a.m., September 24, 1869:

  MUST KNOW WHAT G INTENDS STOP BARNWELL

  Hayward to Barnwell, 8:33 A.M., September 24, 1869:

  G AND B MET THREE HOURS LAST NIGHT

  STOP HAYWARD

  To Hayward (8:34 A.M.):

  MUST KNOW WHAT G INTENDS STOP BARNWELL

  To Barnwell (8:35 A.M.):

  NO NEWS YET EXCLAMATION POINT HAYWARD

  EBEN BARNWELL DROPPED THE CRUMPLED TELEGRAM ONTO THE littered floor of the Broad Street telegraph office. George Nutley, Eben’s partner in the venture, gripped his shoulder and hisse
d, “Sir!”

  Eben forced a smile. “Nothing yet, George. Would you breakfast?”

  Nutley cackled. “You can eat? God, how I wish I could. I keep nothing on my stomach, Barnwell. Nothing.” Bumping past speculators and messenger boys, he stumbled out of the crowded office.

  Nutley’s nerve was breaking.

  At 8:35 on Friday morning, September 24, 1869, with gold prices at one hundred fifty dollars an ounce, Eben Barnwell was holding contracts to deliver twenty-three thousand ounces—one thousand four hundred and forty pounds—of gold, at one hundred thirty dollars per ounce. Eben’s contracts were to be fulfilled at twelve noon Friday, October 1, 1869. Eben had bought his contracts on margin, ten percent down, with money loaned him by George Nutley’s brother, Joseph, chief teller of the New York Bank for Commerce. A messenger boy had just informed Eben that Joseph Nutley was seeking him “on a matter of considerable urgency.”

  As security, Eben had pledged his house, his trotters, his securities, even a call mortgage on a remote Virginia plantation. Eben’s gold contracts were in the safe in the office he shared with George Nutley. Eben could not bear to look at them.

  The Broad Street Del’s was so crowded Eben couldn’t find a seat at the bar. He ordered champagne.

  A stranger punched his shoulder. “I am buying,” he pronounced. “One fifty and a half.”

  “Who is selling gold today?”

  “Hah! I will find that seller. Fisk and Gould can’t buy all the gold in America!”

  In April when Jay Gould began buying, gold had stood at 130. In June Jim Fisk jumped into the market—June being the same month Fisk and Gould invited President Grant aboard Fisk’s private steamer from Boston to Providence. En route, naturally the financiers explained economics to the new President. Patiently, Fisk and Gould mentioned the value of open markets, that gold must float and that the invisible hand of the market would set a fair price. Certainly Grant mustn’t release gold from the U.S. Treasury. On the first of July, President Grant enjoyed a performance of La Périchole from Jim Fisk’s private box in Jim Fisk’s opera house, and in September the President graciously accepted the loan of Jay Gould’s private railcar for the vacation he and Mrs. Grant so richly deserved.