Silence the Dead

by David Crossman

  The boat was made ready. The old name was expunged and a new name – Jenny – painted on her transom, and in exchange for their last ‘souvenir’ sovereign and Flanagan’s saddlebag, a horse of sorts was purchased in town. Thomas took over the boat.

  During his transactions with the coal merchant – a harried, pear-shaped man named Cumberstone, whose bald crown gave way to the most prodigious mutton-chop sideburns Sadie had ever seen – the Orchards stayed in their compartment below decks to avoid any association with sickness or pestilence. Cumberstone, while protesting that he was being robbed, agreed to let them transport his anthracite on consignment. He had little choice as the trains were booked for all they could handle, and there was no telling when the first freeze would hit, closing the canals down for the winter. He suggested a fair market value for the shipment and the percentage he required, after lock fees and tariffs for the side-wheel steamers that would tow them along the rivers, which were to be charged to his account. Whatever Thomas managed to negotiate over and above that, verified by notarized receipts, would be his to keep.

  Before shaking hands on the deal, Thomas went quickly below to present the particulars to Roland. “That’s shrewd, but fair,” the captain acknowledged. “But before you agree, ask the fella if he’s a Quaker; if so, take the deal. I’ve found Quakers I couldn’t out-deal, but never one I couldn’t trust.”

  Thomas had heard of Quakers, but wouldn’t know one from his grandmother’s fourteenth cousin on his father’s side. As he put the question to Cumberstone, he gave him a quick once over, trying to perceive any physical irregularity that might set him apart from his fellow man. There were none. “I am,” said Cumberstone, with a stern dignity befitting Yahweh.

  Thomas held out his hand. Cumberstone seized it, shook it, and flashed a quick smile. “Done.”

  “Done,” Thomas echoed.

  “I’ll have you loaded within four hours.”

  Thomas was excited. The tautly secured tarpaulin running nearly the length of the barge swelled, pregnant with cargo and the possibilities it suggested. He felt that, at last, the true journey westward had begun.

  Patrice and Sadie together acted as teamsters, but as it turned out, the horse, though well advanced in years, had apparently had long experience on the canal and required little supervision. Thomas, determined that some vestige of his sister would go west with them, named the horse Pinch.

  Pleasant weather and a leisurely pace afforded the women ample time to talk, while Matthew Adam frolicked and cavorted in a tight little orbit of which his mother was the gravitational hub. Otherwise, the murmur of their chatter was broken only by the comforting plop and swish of the rudder, and now and then, a titter of girlish laughter.

  “I never thought I’d hear that again,” said Roland from his chair, placed just beyond the sweep of the rudder where he would live out the days left him in comparative comfort, carefully imparting all his knowledge of rivercraft to his young protégé. “How old’s your Sadie?”

  “Fourteen,” Thomas replied, with shaky confidence. “Fifteen. Your Missus?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Mm.”

  Roland watched the women for a while, a prospect that brought a smile to his lips. “Sadie’ll do her good.”

  Steering the barge was both more exacting and more gymnastic that steering a ship on the open sea, and made more difficult by the fact that they didn’t have a bowsman. The constant tug of the tow rope from shore, while propelling them forward at three or four miles an hour also tended to pull toward the banking. Constant counter-measures on the part of the oarsman were required to keep the craft more or less in the middle of the canal. The difficulty of the task was further compounded by twists and turns in the watercourse, which either magnified or diminished the intensity of the tow rope’s pull, depending whether the turn was to the right or left. This, too, needed perpetual adjustment so that Thomas spent most of the day jumping from one side of the massive tiller to the other or sitting briefly astride it in a constant effort to keep a steady course. Far from being the easy float down the river he’d imagined, it was twelve to fifteen hours of exhausting work.

  Curiously enough, Thomas discovered, the easiest time was going through the locks that intercepted the canals every mile or so and which, given that their width was merely inches wider than the barge itself, he’d expected to be the most difficult. What he hadn’t anticipated, and was profoundly glad of – was the assistance of the lock-keepers, generally sure-footed men of wiry composition and helpful dispositions who, hopping from the lock to the barge, fore and aft and back again ‘til they seemed four places at once, would, with their long poles, nurse, nudge, and coax the vessel through the watery womb and into the open canal at the opposite end. Often the procedure was accompanied by a running commentary by which the lock keepers and barge captains absorbed and dispensed gossip of noteworthy events up and down the waterway.

  In this way, news was effectively, if not always accurately, disseminated throughout all the canal divisions, from the Delaware in the east, through the Susquehanna, to the Beaver in the west, and not a lot transpired along the waterways and their attending townships that wasn’t common knowledge for the whole fourteen hundred miles.

  Times of rest were afforded by those all-too-brief stretches of river when the barge would tie up to a steamer to be tugged to the next canal. During those times, the women and Matthew Adam would join the men at the stern. Pinch, for reasons known only to herself, would stand in the bow, still as a statue, staring down at the water passing under the vessel.

  When Roland’s store of information relative to what bargemen called ‘dry-land sailing’ and making a living on the canal was exhausted, Thomas probed him for stories of the west.

  The memories of his experiences seemed to revive Roland. He would clamp his pipe, which he no longer smoked, between his teeth, fold his hands behind his head, and talk for hours while Thomas flitted back and forth. Sweat poured from the young Irishman’s brow and his eyes focused keenly on the waterway ahead, but all the while his imagination was painting fanciful masterpieces from the descriptions the former frontiersman conveyed.

  To hear Roland tell it, the train journey across the plains to Colorado Springs had been, after the first day or so, pretty uneventful. They had heard stories of recent robbery attempts and Indian raids, but had seen none. Once they saw a cloud of dust on the horizon that the conductor assured them, was a herd of buffalo, but they had to take that on faith. Otherwise, in Roland’s estimation, that part of the trip had been boring. “You’ve never seen so much flatness in your life. Day in and day out, as far as the eye can see, nothin’ but grass and flatness.”

  Thomas, recalling Uncle Theo’s accounts of his trip west, asked about the wagon trains. “Oh, they’re a thing of the past,” said Roland. “Or soon will be.” He hacked and spit overboard. “I’ve heard the last one’s leavin’ Junction City come spring.”

  “The last wagon train?”

  Roland nodded. “That’s what they say. No need of ‘em anymore, now the train’s runnin’ out that way. A lot faster. Less dangerous. More comfortable. Why would anyone want to go all that way in a covered wagon anymore, if they don’t have to? Near three month’s agony compared to a week’s mild discomfort!”

  Thomas imagined copies of the poster of him and Sadie tacked up in every depot between there and Colorado Springs – wherever that was. “What if you don’t want to take the train?”

  “Well,” said Roland stoically, “I guess this would be your last chance.” He puffed habitually on his pipe. “From what I hear it’s more a tourist excursion than a real wagon train. Lot of folks takin’ it just so they can say they’ve done it. I guess some who’ve done it before wantin’ to do it one last time. That sorta thing.”

  He laughed, and coughed, and spit. “Me? I’d say if the railroad’s no picnic, a wagon train must be hell on earth.”

  ‘You’ve never crossed the Atlantic on the Crimea,’ Thomas
thought, but didn’t wish to contradict his companion.

  “Nope,” Roland continued. “For me, never’d be too soon, an’ once would twice too many!”

  “Spring?”

  “Sure. No wagon train’s going to head out with winter coming on.”

  Spring. How would they survive the winter? Thomas felt disappointment creeping in. How big was this country, anyway? Maybe he and Sadie would be better off in Pennsylvania, or Boston. He could work in a mine, or on a barge. She could . . . well, who knew what she might do? Thing was, his boots hadn’t worn through yet. What a damn stupid promise that had been! Maybe he could just find a place he liked and walk around in circles ‘til they wore out. But that wouldn’t be true to the spirit of the thing, would it? It had to be west. Something out there was calling him.

  “What about this Colorado Springs, then?” Thomas asked tentatively, not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

  “Ah! Now that’s where the story begins!” said Roland enthusiastically. He leaned over the water, expelled blood and mucous from his lungs, and began to tell it.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Things are changin’ fast out there, Tommy. Railroad. Telegraph. Indians aren’t much of a problem anymore, mostly on reservations. Towns growin’ up like daffodils in spring time. Gold mines! Silver mines!” He was starting to sound like the broadside Thomas had been given by the man with the handlebar moustache in Boston. “You know what all that means for us . . . well, for you? Opportunity! Look at my brother, Jimmy. Had two strikes against him.”

  “Strikes?”

  “You don’t know baseball?”

  Thomas hadn’t heard of it, but as Roland described it, decided it was a game more or less like rounders. Not much like cricket, though some of the terms were the same.

  “Anyway,” Roland continued. “First of all, he starts life named after our uncle – in hopes of gettin’ on the old man’s good side, ‘cause he was suspected to have a little money tucked away – only come to find out he’s a mass murderer.”

  “A murderer?”

  “Mass murderer,” Roland corrected. “Back in Mauch Chunk. Now in prison for the rest of his life, and welcome to him.” Uncle James was summarily dismissed as a hefty disappointment and family embarrassment. “Second, when he struck out for Colorado, all he had, young Jimmy, that is, was money for fare – didn’t even eat on the train. Five days without food! That’s how poor he was. But now? His pockets jingle when he walks and folks tip their hats to him. He’s a respected businessman, supplying the army with meat.

  “I was hopin’ to join him,” said Roland. He brightened somewhat. “Maybe you can!” He lowered his chin a bit. “If you can find him. I just can’t figure why he hasn’t written back. Somethin’ must’ve happened.”

  Roland had a tendency to get easily depressed, understandably, so Thomas wanted to get back to the original thread of the narrative. “So, you like Colorado Springs? What’s it like?”

  “Ah!” said Roland, shaking off the descending curtain of gloom. “‘Little London,’ they call it. It’s a shock is what it is. You get on a train in St. Louie, head out across a few thousand miles of land that God forgot, thinkin’ you’re goin’ to end up amongst the outlaws, Mexicans, and savages that you read about in penny dreadfuls, and what happens a week later? You step off the train onto a proper platform in a proper train station the equal of any in the east, and if you’ve got the scratch,” he twiddled his fingers, so Thomas quickly took the meaning, “you get into a hansom cab pulled by a pair of white horses right along cobblestone streets smack into the lobby of the Antler’s, the grandest hotel you’ve ever set foot in. Built by General Palmer himself.”

  Thomas, never having set foot in any hotel, grand or otherwise, groped for a mental image, but the closest he could come were the severe-looking pillared houses on the hillside in Cork, or the great brick mansions on Beacon Hill. As for General Palmer, he’d never heard of him, but he didn’t want to interrupt the narrative to ask.

  “His company’s one of ‘em building the railroads out there, Tom. The Denver and Rio Grande. D and RG, they call it. The other’s the Acheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe, an’ the two of ‘em go at it like cats an’ dogs. A regular war.”

  Another war, thought Tommy. In Ireland, it was the peasants against the landlords, the Catholics against the Protestants, or the Irish against the English. In Boston, everybody against the Irish and the Irish against the world. In Pennsylvania, the miners against the mine owners. Out west, so he’d heard, the Indians against the settlers and now, further west, one railroad against the other. When would it end?

  “It’s a surprisin’ city. A real oasis after a long, bleak ride through hell’s backside. Real civilized. Patrice loved it, but . . . ”

  “But?”

  Roland tossed a sideways glance at Patrice, who was deep in conversation with Sadie, and lowered his voice. “Civilization isn’t what a man goes west for, is it? Civilization is nature tamed and cut up in squares with a lamppost on every corner to make a place you can live cradle to grave an’ never have to face anything out’ve the ordinary.

  “I’ve got nothin’ against it, mind. Civilization suits some folks fine (between you an’ me, it’d probably suit Patrice down to the ground), but it’s not for me. Not for my son, anyway. It isn’t Chama.”

  Something about the foreign-sounding name pricked Thomas’ ears. “What’s Chama?”

  Roland smiled. “Prettiest place you ever saw. A bend in the river at the head of a long valley in New Mexico. A few ranches. Sheep stations. Logging outfits. Not much of anything else . . . yet.”

  “Yet?”

  “The train’s on its way to Chama, Tommy, a spur down into the San Juan Mountains off the D&RG line, and when it gets there, Chama’s goin’ to be the ‘X’ that marks the spot. I tell you, the whole southwest’s gonna open up like a bride on her wedding night. You’ll have to close your eyes, stick your hands in your pockets, and go to sleep just to keep from makin’ money!” The laughter following the pronouncement precipitated another fit of coughing, which Thomas had gotten used to, but which elicited concerned stares from Patrice on the towpath. “That’s what Jimmy says.”

  “Shama?”

  “Chama,” Roland corrected.

  “How do we get there?”

  “Simple as pie. The railroad’s lookin’ for men . . . ”

  “To cut ties!” Thomas said excitedly. He dug through his trouser pockets and eventually turned up the notice he’d been given in Boston. He handed it to Roland, who read it.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “In Boston.”

  Roland shook his head, crumpled up the paper, and threw it in the canal.

  “What are you . . . !” Thomas made a motion as if he was going to jump into the canal to save the document.

  “Leave it!” Roland snapped. “Someone was trying to hoodwink you. And whoever it was won’t be the last. There’s more confidence tricksters between here and California than you can shake a stick at, an’ I’d like to take a stick to most of ‘em.” He stared at Thomas for a moment. “I hate to tell you this, Thomas, because it might mean you leave us . . . I would if I was you. The railroad’s givin’ free boxcar passage from St. Louis or Chicago all the way to Durango to the family of any able-bodied man who’ll contract to stay on the job one year.”

  Thomas couldn’t believe his ears. A ticket all the way to New Mexico, assuming Durango was in New Mexico. It had to be close, anyway. Free for the taking and, because of those posters, he couldn’t take it!

  Come to that, would he be able to work for the railroad when he got there? Surely by that time, he internalized, they will have stopped looking for him. In fact, maybe they will have called off the search by the time they reached St. Louis. A quick scan of the notice board in the train station would tell them that. Then, maybe they could take the railroad up on its offer! Of course he wasn’t about to abandon the Orchards. But in three weeks, they’d deliver the
coal. Another week to St. Louis. Five days to Colorado Springs.

  “How far from Colorado Springs to this . . . this Chama?”

  “By train? Well, you can get as far as a place called Antonita that way. After that, they’re just startin’ to raise the grade.”

  Six weeks he could be in New Mexico!

  Fate had other plans.

  Conllan Ranch

  Canyon Ridge, New Mexico

  March 10th, 1957

  “I don’t know why, but apparently he and Sadie had run afoul of the railroad police for some reason. Must have been pretty serious, whatever it was, because they took a barge through Pennsylvania,” said Regan. He placed checker pieces on the corners of Tiffin’s – now Thomas’ – diary, the edges of which, having been rolled, unrolled, and re-rolled countless times, refused to flatten. “That’s like taking a slow boat to China, compared to the railroad.”

  “Didn’t he ever say?” Maryellen wanted to know. “Mrs. Conllan, you must have known him. Didn’t he ever talk about how he got here?”

  Becky was preparing supper in the kitchen, but could easily hear the conversation. “Gramp never talked much about that part of his life before he came to Chama. I did hear him say once that life didn’t really start ‘til he got here. I get the feeling there was a lot of sadness along the way, and he just tried to put it behind him.”

  Whatever Becky was cooking, it was producing an aroma unlike anything Maryellen had smelled before. “What is she making in there?” she whispered, leaning across the table.

  “Tortillas and brown,” said Tiffin. “With hot melted butter and red chilis. One’ve my favorites.”

  “Well . . . I know what butter is.”

  Regan laughed. “A tortilla is a Mexican flatbread.”

  “And a brown, or German brown, is the best fish you ever tasted. Fresh caught in the Brazos River this morning by yours truly.”