Inside the train, hours crawled by in weary sameness. A foul “convenience” bucket at the end of each car was barely shielded by a curtain. Ceaseless card games sometimes crumbled into fights and once a wooden bench was ripped out of the floor. When we finished the food we had brought, there was only the station cafés’ unvarying fare: thin, tough gray beefsteaks, weak beer, rubbery boiled eggs and potatoes fried in rancid oil. We wolfed these meals in minutes lest the train pull out without us. Twice we had to leave before the food we paid for had arrived.
“They’ll sell it again to some poor fool,” said a burly Irishman. “Don’t you know? The stationmasters make deals with the engineer and sell the same meal three times over, then feed it to the dogs.” Two days west of Chicago, chicken stew appeared on the menu. “Hah,” he scoffed. “That’s ‘furry chicken.’ The greenhorns always fall for it.”
“Meaning?” Molly demanded.
“Meaning, watch the prairies.” That afternoon we saw herds of sharp-nosed, puppy-fat little beasties pushing up through earthy knobs to sit on their haunches as we passed. “Prairie dogs,” the traveler explained haughtily. “There’s your ‘chicken stew.’ ”
Molly stared him down. “Could be your people would have been glad for any kind of stew when potatoes failed in Ireland. Am I right, lad?” She smiled in her wide-mouthed way and thrust out a hand. “No harm meant. My friends call me Molly, if you want to know.”
The man looked her up and down and smiled. “Mine call me Tom and you’re right, Molly. It was grass they were eating back home in the Great Hunger and songs they lived on when there was nothing else.”
“Well, then,” I suggested, “shall we try the chicken stew?” We ate it at the next station. The meat was fresh, at least. Molly and Tom, splicing their stories together, determined that their fathers could have sailed on the same ship out of Ireland.
The first days passed despite the stifling afternoons, shivering sleepless nights and the growing stench in our carriage. A young woman’s labor started early and the porter helped me cordon off a birthing space. I made a little nest of clean cloths and rags that Molly collected from the passengers and coached the mother’s breathing as Sofia had taught me. The babe was born just west of Omaha, a rosy black-haired baby girl the giddy parents named Mary Irma. The father lined a soapbox with a buffalo blanket he bought at the next station and Tom sang lullabies to her in Gaelic—“God’s own mother tongue,” he insisted.
Finally, the mountains! They rose from the plains in Colorado, rank on rank of peaks, enough to hold a thousand Opis with high meadows to feed a world of sheep. I never tired of watching sunlight splash the rock faces or clouds skim over hanging lakes. Our tracks cut through forests and topped bridges that seemed flimsy as spider webs. We entered the Wasatch Mountains under a crescent moon hung over a jagged range cut into the blue-black sky. A silver waterfall poured over a dark cliff that seemed to melt into the night, as if water tumbled from the moon. I shook Molly awake.
“Look! Did you ever see anything so beautiful?”
“A beautiful dream I was having,” she groaned, “about not being on trains. If these mountains are so wonderful, sew them, why don’t you?” I tried that, moving to a car near the back of the train where those who could not sleep passed the night reading or playing cards by kerosene lamps.
I was stitching a varicolored mountain range on a length of linen as a storm roared in from the north. A lid of thick clouds closed over the train. Driving rain poured down, turning icy. Lightning blazed across the valley and porters whispered anxiously to each other. They had cause, said one traveler, for we had entered the “killer miles,” deadly for the men who had laid these tracks and for those who ran trains over them.
We stopped in a mining town, where a brakeman was sent up to fix the coupling on a coal car. Perhaps the engineer didn’t hear his cry or see his lamp swinging in the driving rain. Perhaps the brakes didn’t hold. In any case, the train jerked forward and released, crushing the brakeman and then flinging him down the icy embankment.
They carried him howling into the caboose. I raced back, following his cries. They had laid him on a narrow cot that was quickly soaked with blood. Torn pants revealed a mass of gushing blood. “God damn engineers. We’re cheaper than dirt to them,” spat one of the men. “It’s me—Hank,” he said to the injured man. “We’re here with you, Bill. We’re not going nowhere.”
“Let me see him,” I said. Bill’s right leg was crushed and left arm twisted out at the elbow. The side of his face was a pulp of pebbles and ice. I looked in his eyes as Sofia had taught me. The pupils were dilated and his pulse weak. Bruises covered the chest, but I dared not touch him, for perhaps an organ had been pierced. The day before, at a station diner, I’d heard passengers ask advice of a kind-faced man called Dr. Windham, who traveled first class. I asked the porter to fetch him.
“I’m sure he’s sleeping, miss. He might be angry.”
“Ask anyway.”
I carefully cut away Bill’s pants leg, but didn’t touch the white bone or shredded flesh. I could clean his face at least. “Do you have any bandages? Sheets?” I asked the men.
“Sheets? They don’t give us none,” Hank spat again.
“Rags then, as clean as you can.”
Bill opened his eyes. “My leg. What happened?” His voice rose. “Somebody! Why can’t I feel it?”
“There was an accident, Bill,” said a gentle voice behind me. “I’m Dr. Windham. Let me take a look at you. Give this man some whiskey,” he told Hank. “If you’ve got any.”
“Don’t have sheets, but we sure got whiskey. Hold on a minute, Bill.”
Bill watched avidly as Hank found a bottle, filled a cup and lifted his head to drink. In this lull, Dr. Windham set down a tooled leather case and stepped toward the cot, keeping his fine kid boots clear of the widening pool of blood.
“Doc, don’t cut my leg off.”
“There now, son, nobody’s cutting. You rest easy, I’ll give you something for the pain.” The doctor opened a vial of morphine and prepared a needle, speaking slowly as he injected. “Breathe in and out for me now, Bill. Good, very good.”
“Don’t leave me,” Bill muttered.
“We’re here,” Hank repeated. “We’re all here.”
“You won’t amputate, sir?” I ventured, when Bill’s eyes closed and his head fell heavily to one side. “Because if there’s an infection and gangrene—”
“You’re a doctor, young lady, or a nurse?”
“No, but I worked in a clinic back in Chicago.”
“Miss—?”
“Vitale.”
He pulled me clear of the men closing around Bill’s cot. “Miss Vitale, the best London hospital couldn’t save that man and for sure we can’t save him on a moving train with the tools in this bag. I was a surgeon for the Union army at Antietam, Gettysburg and Chickamauga. After four hundred seventy-three amputations you come to know who’ll survive and who won’t. There is doubtless cranial bleeding. You saw the abdominal bruising?”
“Yes sir. I was afraid of—”
“Internal injuries? Certainly. They will be massive.” He slipped between the men around Bill’s cot, put his stethoscope to the heaving chest and came back to me. “Water in the lungs already, possibly pre-existing pneumonia. Many of these men have it, working in all weathers, breathing that coal dust. The heart’s badly weakened. He won’t last the night.”
As Bill’s shivers deepened to convulsions, the men tucked their blankets and jackets around him until only his head was visible under the mound.
“Weight on the chest—” I began, but Dr. Windham raised his hand.
“Let them be,” he whispered. “This is all the funeral he’ll have.”
“Fine brakeman,” said one of the men.
“Flyin’ Bill.”
“That blizzard in seventy-two, crossing the Divide, you saved us all.”
“God be with ye, Bill.”
The men broug
ht us stools and we sat by the bed as the men made their quiet ministrations. Dr. Windham described his battlefield surgeries and I told him about Sofia’s clinic and my hopes to study at the dispensary. When Bill moaned, Hank brought a flask and lifted his sweat-soaked head to help him drink. I tucked my stitched mountains in his whitening hand.
Bill died near dawn. When the cloth dropped to the floor, Hank asked me for it. “Mountains and trains kill us like that,” he said, snapping his fingers, “but us brothers on the Pacific line, where else we gonna go?” They wrapped Bill in the rain slicker that shrouded so many railroad men. Nobody knew his family. “The crew at the next station will bury him along the tracks,” Hank explained. “Close enough to hear our whistle blow.”
When he walked me back to Molly, the card games paused. “Hard, was it?” Molly asked. I nodded. A porter brought me breakfast from the first-class dining room with Dr. Windham’s compliments, but I couldn’t eat and gave the tray to Molly.
“It’s strange. You can see patients all day,” Sofia once said. “The sick, the wounded, children you know will die. You think you’re strong, that you can do your best with each case and then go on to the next. Then one case comes along, no different from the next and you don’t know why, but it’s just so hard.” This time, Sofia would have been wrong. There was something different about Bill. In the flickering dark, his bristled hair, deep eyes and long nose had slowly become Carlo’s. Careless, cocky and quick to anger as he was, who would have covered Carlo with blankets when his luck ran out or passed a flask to ease his dying?
“Hard as all that?” Molly asked. “A lot of blood?”
“He reminded me of my brother.”
“Ah,” she said and set the dinner tray aside.
Later that morning Dr. Windham sent back a letter of recommendation for the Pacific Dispensary. Molly folded it carefully in my book while I stared out the window into the rainy dark above the Rocky Mountains.
Chapter Fourteen
In the Dispensary
The storm weakened and snow patches shrank as we neared Sacramento. After days of fried steak and old potatoes, we dove into the apples, oranges, and huge purple grapes that farmers sold at the stations, ravenous for the color, sweetness and juicy crispness of fresh foods. “California!” cried Molly, lofting a gleaming orange. “Where gold grows on trees.” If only Zia could have seen this land.
We reached San Francisco on a clear bright day in November 1883. Flecks of foam sprinkled the blue bay and soft hills surrounded us like waves of green velvet. The city’s gaudy bustle thrilled us both, but Scribner’s hadn’t mentioned the dizzying prices out on America’s rim. The rich reaped boundless profits from mining, timber, hides and shipping. But how did the poor live here? In the hulks of rotting ships moored in the bay, men and even women rented berths for the night. The Italian blocks of North Beach were clogged with newcomers from Genoa and Calabria. We found no boardinghouses that were hiring and not even any decent rooms to rent.
I suggested we spend our first night on the ships, but Molly refused: “I didn’t come so far to sleep with drunks and sailors.” We rested on Market Street, sharing a loaf of soured bread that the baker swore was the finest in the world and in any case was all he had. “We only need one room,” Molly repeated. “One room in a decent boardinghouse where I can work and do my business and the landlady won’t notice that I’m buying her out. That shouldn’t be hard to find, if it wasn’t for these hills,” she said, panting. “I hope you’re liking them, Irma Vitale,” she said, grasping my arm on a steep ascent. “Because they can go to the devil for all of me.”
At last we found a boardinghouse near Van Ness Avenue, roughly made and still unpainted. Room and board cost twice what I paid in Chicago, but the Irish widow who owned it needed a girl to cook and clean, and agreed that if I helped in the evenings, she’d charge me two dollars less each week. By the third day Mrs. Sullivan wondered aloud how she had survived without Molly’s skillful economies and two-handed cleaning. She even paid me to make new curtains for the parlor, but refused Molly’s suggestion to buy the adjoining house and expand the dining room to serve more men. “If the lady’s got no gumption, why not stay home in Donegal?” Molly grumbled.
Yet by the end of the first week she had gained one more concession: Mrs. Sullivan let Molly rent space to store furniture she could sell to newcomers. The linens Molly brought from Chicago fetched such high prices that they nearly paid her passage west. “Now I start saving for a boardinghouse,” she said, buying a fresh calendar for her San Francisco plan.
My own plan proved more difficult. The morning after we came to San Francisco, I put on a clean, pressed dress. With letters from Vittorio and Doctor Windham and Sofia’s record book under my arm, I walked to the Pacific Dispensary on Taylor Street, confident I could present these letters, ask to enroll and certainly be admitted. I would fit as easily into the school as a sleeve sets into a well-cut bodice.
“May I speak with Dr. Bucknell?” I asked a servant who answered my knock, the first Chinaman I had ever seen. Gravely astonished that I had no appointment, he left me in an antechamber thick with potted palms and ferns and glided away on felt-soled slippers. He had offered no chair, so I stood, straining to unravel words wafting from a nearby classroom. I caught only “sepsis” and then “thrombosis” before clicking heels announced an elegant woman in a starched shirtwaist dress fastened with a line of brass buttons as small as nails. A sleek gray pompadour perched on her head.
“I am Mrs. Robbins,” she announced. “Dr. Bucknell’s assistant. The doctor is in Denver, but you may tell me your business with the dispensary.”
“My name is Irma Vitale. I’ve come to study nursing. I have—”
“Unfortunately, young lady, courses have already begun. You might apply for the next term. You have a high-school diploma, I presume.”
“No, madam, but I can read English.”
A thin eyebrow arched up. “Perhaps, then, you might have read our requirements and saved yourself the journey.”
“I thought—”
“Ah, but a good nurse does not ‘think,’ she knows.”
I had not felt so much a greenhorn since begging Mrs. Clayburn for work. “Here are two letters of recommendation and our clinic record book,” I persisted.
“In Italian,” Mrs. Robbins observed curtly, glancing at Sofia’s fine script. I reminded her of Sofia’s correspondence with Dr. Bucknell. “What other work can you do, miss?” she asked, her voice just barely edged with kindness.
“Fine dressmaking and embroidery.”
“Excellent. There is a great need for your kind in the city. You could go to high school in the evenings and get a diploma.”
“When may I speak with Dr. Bucknell?”
“Perhaps next week, or the week after,” said Mrs. Robbins. “And now if you’ll excuse me, Miss Vitale, my students require me.” She turned crisply and clicked away, the gray pompadour disappearing behind a high palm.
I went to the dispensary the next week and the next, but still Dr. Bucknell had not returned. On my third visit, Mrs. Robbins offered me a job scrubbing tables, washing bandages and tools, sweeping and cooking: servants’ work. But I would be carefully observed and perhaps judged worthy to enter the school “at some later date” without a high-school diploma. “Given your persistence, we may stretch a point,” she conceded. Yes, I told her, I would take the job.
On Market Street I bought a small notebook that fit in my apron pocket, two Dixon lead pencils and a small penknife to sharpen them. That way, I explained to Molly, I could copy every word on the blackboards before washing them, bits of lessons overheard, the names of tools and labeled bones of a skeleton dangling in the classroom. I bought a dictionary on Market Street and began translating Sofia’s records into English. When Dr. Bucknell returned, I would be ready.
Despite the long hours of those days, there were pleasures in San Francisco. On weekends Molly and I explored the city, drinking its beauty
in gulps: the grand new houses on Nob Hill, gardens brimming with vivid bougainvillea, bright winter sunlight twinkling on late roses and elegant Spaniards on horseback. South and east of the city, fruit trees and vineyards fingered through the hills. We watched fog lift over the blue basin of San Francisco Bay, revealing lush green islands and took streetcars out to the wild ocean edge, which reminded Molly of Ireland but brought back the Servia for me. Gustavo’s face rose over the waves, I heard his voice in the steady breeze and felt the cool slickness of the whalebone he carved for me.
“There are plenty of sailors here,” Molly scoffed, “and you know where they go.” Yes, I had seen them hurrying off their ships and streaming into taverns, brothels, opium dens and gambling halls in the squalid blocks along the bay called the Barbary Coast. They caused little enough trouble in the rest of the city, she reminded me. “Everything they want is in Barbary. And supposing his ship did just happen to dock in San Francisco? What then, Irma? Would he even remember you?”
The next day, at the dispensary, folding strips of gauze into bandages for hours, I imagined Gustavo coming down the gangplank, dropping his sea bag and blinking in the sun. He would know me, even in my American clothes with a new-fashioned fringe of curls on my forehead. “Irma!” he would say. “How well you look. Why didn’t you answer my letter?” And I would explain that thieves had stolen my envelope with his address. “Never mind,” he would say, “let’s walk in the city.” And we would wander through Nob, Telegraph and Russian Hills and gaze across the windy strait at the rolling green of the Marin Headlands. I would smell the salt on his sea coat and we would walk at night by the water. He would be nothing like a Barbary sailor.
When We Were Strangers Page 25
