Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  He smoked a couple of cigars, on the principle that smoking would fumigate any fever that might be hanging in the air. But then he felt nauseated, and had to have a cup of cold tea to settle his stomach. He should have asked for a bottle of bourbon to help him while away the journey, and he thought enviously of Andrew Hunt. A half-hour had passed, and still Hannah hadn’t stirred.

  At last the train reached Ancón hill, overlooking Panama City itself, and the wide grey expanse of the Pacific Ocean. The engineer blew the whistle, and everybody clustered to the windows and leaned out. Looking back along the swaying train, Collis saw Maria-Mamuska, her long black hair streaming in the breeze. She didn’t smile or wave, or give any indication at all that she had seen him. He withdrew his head and sat down in the compartment again, and there must have been cinders in his eyes, because they were watering.

  He sat there for a while, feeling strangely bitter. But then he heard Hannah stir and moan, and he went over to her banquette. She had opened her eyes, and she was staring at him as if she didn’t know who he was. She was still strikingly attractive, even though she was ill, and the fever had given her complexion an added brightness, like an ailing ice queen. She whispered, ‘Is that you, Collis?’

  He took her hand in his. ‘Yes, it is,’ he said. His throat felt unexpectedly tight with emotion. ‘Would you like a drink?’

  She nodded. He poured cold tea from the jug, and then supported her head while she drank. ‘I’m so thirsty,’ she said. ‘I feel as if I’m burning and freezing, both at the same time.’

  ‘Do you have any pain?’ he asked her.

  ‘A headache,’ she said. ‘And my legs seem to hurt. Do you have any powders for a headache?’

  ‘Only smelling salts. The doctor up at Culebra wasn’t exactly over equipped.’

  ‘I couldn’t face smelling salts,’ she said. Collis smiled at her, and she gave him a wan smile in return.

  ‘Did he say what I had?’ she asked him.

  Collis poured her some tea. ‘Gastritis, I think he said. Something like that. A lot of people get it when they visit the tropics for the first time.’

  ‘Then it’s not too serious?’

  He shook his head.

  There was a short silence. She reached out and clasped his hand again. ‘It’s strange,’ she said, ‘but it feels more serious than that.’

  Collis watched her for a while as her smile came and went, like the shadows on a summer afternoon. Her eyes closed, and as the train covered the remaining few miles into Panama City, she slept. Collis waited until she was breathing deeply, and then he went to the window and leaned out again, so that he could see the Pacific through the trees, and smell the damp cool mist that rose from the sea. He was quite sure now that Hannah had yellow fever; and worse than that, he was convinced that she was going to die.

  The first he saw of Panama City was a blur of red rooftops through the flickering grey trunks of the palm trees. Then the train came out in the open, and he saw white crumbling buildings and brown cathedral spires, and a shallow bay of muddy turquoise in which steam tugs and sailing dinghies idly criss-crossed in each other’s wakes.

  The city itself was built on a curved spit of land which hooked into the Pacific, crowded and chaotic and hazy. Behind the city, in the grey sea, Collis could make out the misty shapes of several small forested islands, and the spare outline of a large steam vessel, the draught of which was obviously too deep for it to approach the shoreline. Up above, the sky was heaped with cumulus clouds, but they seemed to be rolling sedately north-west, back towards the mountains.

  Within a few minutes, the train was joggling and rattling over switches and junctions and slowing down into the railroad depot. It whistled once, but it was a despondent whistle, without an echo. The afternoon was too dull and flat for the sound to carry. The brake shoes squealed like dismally-slaughtered piglets, and the trans-Panama railroad train came to a queasy, shuddering halt.

  Collis opened the compartment door. Hannah was still sleeping, although she had mumbled something, and turned over on the banquette. Beside the train, three nuns were waiting, with white-winged coifs, attended by a Jamaican porter and a wheeled basket chair. Collis stepped down from the train and hailed them, and the nuns rustled towards him, starched and pale, their rosaries swinging at their waists.

  Unaccountably, Collis felt embarrassed. The nuns were so young and waxen-faced, and the porter so black and emotionless, and they had actually hurried to help a complete stranger who was sick of the yellow fever. When he thought how heroic he had felt at Culebra, offering to stay with Hannah, he felt ashamed.

  The depot was a large, arched building, with murky skylights and flaking white-painted walls. It was in a constant hubbub, but in a minor key; a depressing sound of escaping steam, arguing porters, angry passengers, and clamouring children. Over the noise, Collis said, ‘She’s in there. I believe she has the yellow fever. La fièvre jaune.’

  One of the nuns, a thin girl with pale-blue eyes and translucent skin, gave him a nod of acknowledgment and directed the porter, in patois, to lift Hannah down from the train. The porter had a gold ring through one ear, and scabs on his legs. He stepped up into the ladies’ compartment and carried Hannah down as if she were a small frail child. Collis could only watch.

  ‘Does she have papers?’ asked the nun with the pale-blue eyes.

  ‘I guess so,’ Collis said. ‘They’re in her bag, more than likely. Her name’s Hannah West. She was going to join her husband in San Francisco.’

  The nun nodded.

  ‘You’re going to take her into hospital?’ asked Collis.

  ‘Yes. It will ease her suffering.’

  ‘You think she’s going to die?’

  The nun paused. Hannah was lifted carefully into the basket chair, her face white and fitful, her hands drawn up in front of her as if she were fending off some imagined animal. The drone of noise in the depot seemed to grow worse, and more irritating, and the locomotive let out a hideous bellow of steam.

  ‘She has the yellow fever,’ said the nun. She sounded French, or Belgian. ‘With her constitution, there is no doubt what her fate must be. But the Lord will have mercy on her soul, and give her peace in heaven.’

  For the first time, Collis understood that Hannah might actually be dead within a few days. He put his hand to his forehead, but his face felt frozen, incapable of any expression. He was detached from himself, someplace else altogether, listening to this strange nun in a building that was as close to Purgatory as he could imagine. He saw the Jamaican porter wheeling Hannah away, accompanied by two of the three nuns, and it was just as if a whole part of his own life were being carried off in front of his eyes, whole days and weeks of possibilities, of possible love and possible sympathy, of shared meals and shared laughter, of kisses and murmurs and tears.

  Standing there, in the depot of Panama City, he abruptly burst into tears. It was partly the strain of staying with Hannah, and Maria-Mamuska’s hostility. But it was also a desperate feeling of loss. To see Hannah taken away from him was like attending her funeral, and he didn’t even have a flower to lay on her grave. He turned away from the nun who had remained behind, biting his lip with grief; but the nun touched his hand with her hand, cool and damp with perspiration, and he calmed himself and took a couple of deep breaths.

  ‘It was brave of you to stay with her,’ said the nun. ‘Perhaps you had better come up to the hospital for a day or two, to make sure that you haven’t contracted the disease yourself. It spreads so quickly.’

  Collis wiped his eyes and nodded.

  ‘I suppose you meant to sail on the Pacifica,’ said the nun. ‘It leaves this evening, so you will miss her. But the California is expected here shortly, and if you are well, you can take her.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Collis.

  Without another word, the nun led the way out of the depot. Collis followed behind her, watched by the curious eyes of his fellow passengers. He looked around for Maria-Mamuska,
but she seemed to have left the railroad station already. Andrew Hunt was there, although he stayed well away, and gave Collis nothing more than a resigned shrug, as if to say, ‘You put your neck in the noose, brother; don’t expect me to do the same.’

  The nun spoke briefly in Spanish to the train’s conductor, instructing him to send Collis’s trunk up to the Hospital of the Sacred Heart. The conductor nodded, eyeing Collis suspiciously. Then he called, ‘Zambo!’ to a black who was squatting beside the locomotive smoking a broken clay pipe, and passed the instructions on. The nun led Collis out through the depot to the Avenida Central, a wide street of peeling whitewashed houses which led away up to the cathedral plaza. Under a dull, cloudy sky, carriages and mule carts bustled backwards and forwards, porters carried steamer trunks and bags on their backs, hurrying this way and that like worker ants, and the usual collection of beggars rattled their tin cups and displayed their diseased and mutilated limbs. Not far way from the depot entrance, a plain black-painted donkey trap was waiting, with a young Spanish boy seated on the box, and the nun led Collis towards it. Collis helped her to climb aboard, and then stepped up himself, and seated himself on the narrow wooden bench. The Spanish boy clicked his tongue, and the donkey plodded across the rough unpaved street. Collis smiled at the nun uneasily, but in return she simply lowered her eyes.

  Unlike Aspinwall, which resembled a decaying American frontier town, Panama City was entirely Spanish in character. It had a cathedral, and several churches, and it was crowded with white houses with red-tiled roofs and arched verandahs. The air was less fetid, although the roads were just as rutted and strewn with garbage, and most of the houses were cracked and flaking. Collis tried to look inside some of the open windows as he passed, but the interiors were too shadowy for him to make anything out. He had to cling to the brass rail around the donkey trap to keep himself from sliding about too much.

  As they passed the Bóvedas, the old Spanish sea-wall, with its wide view of the misty bay, they saw a ghastly apparition. A handcart was being pushed along the promenade by a Jamaican in a tattered shirt. Sprawled across the boards of the cart was a naked dead man, half covered with a dirty sack. His ribs protruded and his skin was slack and yellow. Worst of all, his eye-sockets were empty, where his eyeballs had been picked out by buzzards. Collis had to turn away and hold his handkerchief to his mouth, and it wasn’t until a few minutes later, when they were out in the fresher air of the ocean, that he was able to suppress his nausea.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s a common sight,’ said the nun. ‘The rains have been very heavy this year, and when the rains are heavy, the yellow fever is bad.’

  ‘I don’t know how you have the nerve to stay here.’

  The nun smiled. ‘God protects us from the fever until He is ready to take us into His arms.’

  ‘Have many sisters died?’

  She nodded. ‘I have been blessed with a long stay here. I came here in 1855, when the railroad was finished. There were twelve other sisters with me, all from Antwerp. Only three of those twelve are still alive.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Collis. He could hardly believe her quiet resignation, and what, to him, seemed like suicidal folly.

  ‘Sister Agnes,’ she said simply. She kept her hands in her lap. They were small, heart-shaped hands, but they were rough from cleaning and working. Her face, in her wide-winged coif, was almost pretty; but it was sallow with tiredness and ill health. Collis watched her with sympathy, but he didn’t know what else he could say to her. He wasn’t used to talking to women with whom it was impossible to flirt.

  There was a small group of women sitting on the sea-wall, close to where it ended. They were smoking, and laughing among themselves. They wore flounced skirts of striped muslin, tied tight around their bare brown waists, and loose-fitting white muslin quipil, sparkling with gold and silver paillettes, over their bare breasts. Several of them wore crimson or yellow flowers in their hair.

  As the black donkey trap passed, the women waved and called out greetings to Sister Agnes, who gave a modest wave in return. ‘May the Lord bless you, señoras,’ she called.

  ‘You seem to know everybody,’ Collis said.

  Sister Agnes nodded. ‘Two years is a long time to stay alive in Panama. After the first year, when they’re sure you’re going to survive for long enough to make it worth their while getting to know you, you’d be surprised how friendly they are. But so many die in the first month.’

  They approached at last the grounds of the Hospital of the Sacred Heart, overlooking the bay, on a small hill. The hospital was surrounded by a high white wall with a tiled top, and its gardens were serene and quiet and shaded by trees and plants. The building itself had been converted from an old mission, with a wide porch, and a red-tiled verandah that ran around it on three sides. The windows were open to catch the sea winds, and inside Collis could see rows of iron beds where the sick lay dying, or hoping not to die, or gradually recovering.

  Collis helped Sister Agnes down from the donkey trap. She led the way inside, through double oak doors into a gloomy tiled hall-way. On the wall directly ahead of them hung a large crucifix, with a mahogany Christ suffering on the cross; and beneath it, on the dark Spanish-oak chest stood a brass jug filled with yellow tropical flowers. There was a smell of soap and boiling vegetables, as the nuns prepared the patients’ evening meal.

  ‘Your friend Mrs West will have been taken to the Gethsemane Ward, which is for white ladies,’ Sister Agnes said. ‘I expect that you will be able to visit her later. But meanwhile, I will have you shown to your own accommodation. We have a small cottage in the garden which we usually give to visiting priests, but it is empty at the moment. It is very plain, I regret.’

  Collis reached out his hand, palm upwards. In the shadowy hall-way, Sister Agnes appeared younger, and he could see for a moment what she must have looked like when she sailed from Antwerp, fresh and full of enthusiasm. She laid her hand gently in his, and her eyes, when she gazed at him, were lambent and understanding.

  ‘I admire you very much,’ he said. ‘It is very kind of you to have me here.’

  She answered, ‘What you did, too, was admirable. You were the Good Samaritan.’

  There was a moment’s silence. He kept hold of her hand.

  ‘I’m not really used to talking to women like this,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I usually flatter them, and tell them how pretty they are.’

  ‘I am a bride of God,’ said Sister Agnes quietly. ‘Perhaps if you were to treat me as if I were married, that would make it more comfortable for you.’

  He looked away. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Sister Agnes asked, with great delicacy, ‘Mrs West?’

  He glanced back at her. ‘You’re very understanding.’

  ‘It isn’t all praying and burying the dead, being a sister here,’ she told him.

  Collis smeared the sweat from his forehead. It was cool inside the hospital hall-way, and his perspiration had turned unpleasantly chilly. ‘Do you think a priest might help?’ he asked. ‘Do you think a priest would grant her absolution for what she’s been thinking about me?’

  ‘If she’s truly penitent.’

  ‘And do you think that might give her a little extra strength?’

  ‘It’s possible. It may have the opposite effect altogether. But mental strength is always an asset when someone is fighting la fièvre jaune.’

  Collis coughed. ‘I don’t know. I think she’d be better off if she felt certain of what her future is going to be. At least, with her husband, she’s going to have security. With me, well, anything could happen. She’d be divorced and disgraced, and apart from all that I’m almost flat broke.’

  Sister Agnes nodded. ‘You’d have to help,’ she said plainly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s quite simple. If you have both been harbouring thoughts of adultery, then it is not enough to expect her to repent of her thoughts alone. You must do so, too, and tell her tha
t you have done so.’

  Collis bit at his nail.

  ‘I know that it will be painful,’ said Sister Agnes.

  ‘Yes. But if you think it could help her to live … well then, it had better be done.’

  ‘I’ll send for Father Xavier.’

  Collis attempted to look cheerful. ‘That’s that, then. Perhaps I’d better go to my cottage.’

  Sister Agnes came across to him and raised her hands before him, without touching him, but as if she were blessing him, or bestowing on him some traditional and tender grace. Their eyes met, and there was a complicated exchange of feelings between them which neither of them could completely interpret. It had mainly to do with sympathy and with understanding, but it also involved apprehension, and affection, and with the mutual mysteries of a woman who could be pretty and yet celibate, and a man who could have a conscience and yet be adulterous.

  Sister Agnes went to the wall and rang a small bell.

  ‘Anthony will show you the cottage,’ she said. ‘I hope you will be comfortable. I hope, too, that the Lord will keep you safe.’

  Collis had almost forgotten his exposure to yellow fever. He looked towards the double oak doors with their heavy Spanish locks and hinges, and it occurred to him that he might never walk through them again.

  At about seven o’clock, when the evening air was a curious grainy blue, there was a rap at his door. He had been stretched out on his rigid bed, his hands under his head, thinking about Hannah and San Francisco and Sister Agnes, while the mosquitoes danced around his lamp, and painted statuettes of the Virgin Mary and the disciples regarded him silently from small wooden plinths on the whitewashed walls. Barefoot, but still dressed, he padded across the tiled floor, opened the cottage door, and said, ‘It’s time?’

  ‘Si, señor,’ replied Anthony, the Jamaican handy-man. ‘Father Xavier, he come right now.’

  Collis laced up his shoes, put on his light-grey coat, and followed Anthony through the garden. The sun had gone down only a few minutes ago, and the moon would soon be up. The garden, with its neat rows of plants and flower-beds, appeared in the twilight like a dream from the Arabian Nights. Each plant was set in a pottery bowl filled with water, to prevent the umbrella ants from devouring it, and around each bowl of water a small cloud of mosquitoes swarmed. One or two eccentric professors had tried to suggest that the mosquitoes themselves were carriers of disease, but experienced Panama hands knew that it was the warm south-east winds, and the damp, which spread the fever.