Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  Charles crossed the red-and-blue-patterned rug, took the woman’s hand, and kissed it. ‘Jane,’ he said. ‘You’re looking more radiant than ever. The siren of Sacramento.’

  Collis stood by he door, his hat in his hand, and gave the woman a pursed, aknowledging smile. She reminded him quite strongly of engravings he had seen in the New York magazines of Queen Victoria, and she seemed to behave with the same imperiousness. There was no question at all in Collis’s mind that she was an unmitigated old boot. But he bowed slightly as Leland stepped forward, took her hand, and introduced Collis as ‘our new junior assistant, my angel.’

  ‘I’m pleased to make your acquaintance,’ said Jane McCormick. ‘You’ve come from the East, I presume?’

  ‘New York, ma’am.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Jane McCormick, as if New York were a rural village that was only one stage more civilised than Chicken Thief Flat, or Gouge Eye, or any other of the ramshackle mining towns that surrounded Sacramento. ‘You appear to be very sartorial for a junior assistant in a hardware store.’

  ‘I was a gentleman who fell upon awkward times, ma’am,’ replied Collis. It was as much as he could do to answer her courteously, considering that only a few months ago, in New York, he wouldn’t have given half a breath to speak to a pompous middle-class matron like this.

  Jane McCormick nodded in satisfaction. ‘I see. I hope you know how to work hard.’

  ‘I hope to learn, ma’am.’

  ‘You’re not too ambitious, I suppose? Ambition, in a junior person, is not really suitable, is it?’

  Collis gave a little shake of his head. ‘No, ma’am. Though one wonders, without ambition, how a junior person can ever aspire to become a senior person.’

  Jane McCormick blinked at him with her protuberant eyes. ‘If I had ever been blessed with a child of my own,’ she said, ‘I would have counselled him that hard work, and devotion to the catechisms, and consideration for others, would collectively have been quite sufficient to develop his character. Ambition is not the way to maturity, Mr Edmonds, any more than greed is the way to riches.’

  Collis lifted his eyes and looked out of the window at the street. It was growing dark now, that soft periwinkle dusk that settles over Northern California at night, and the lights of Sacramento were beginning to twinkle and shine on the valley floor. He heard a wagon roll by, and someone calling out. A black maid in a white apron came into the living-room and lit four or five oil lamps, so that the room suddenly took on the appearance of a theatrical stage.

  ‘You’re right, of course, Mrs McCormick,’ said Collis, looking back at her.

  ‘Is Mary gong to be here soon?’ asked Leland, unbuttoning his coat and sitting down in the largest smoking chair in the room. ‘I was surprised she wasn’t here already.’

  ‘She said she would come over by seven,’ Jane told him. ‘She had to finish arrangements for tomorrow’s social.’

  Charles sat down, too, and nodded to Collis to make himself comfortable in a red brocade armchair. ‘Mary,’ he said, quiet affably, considering that Mary was his wife and that Mary had not been here to greet him after his trip to San Francisco, ‘believes that the duties of a hostess are any woman’s supreme priority. Husbands definitely come lower on the totem.’

  ‘Charles and Mary have a marriage that was made in the Elite Directory, if not in heaven,’ said Jane, which was a heavy attempt at a joke.

  Collis managed a smirk in response, but it was clear that Leland neither understood his wife’s humour nor appreciated it. He laced his big fingers together and said: ‘I will have completed a year as a state senator in January. I’m thinking of running for governor again.’

  ‘I think you should,’ said Charles. ‘Do you have a drink, though? I’m parched after that boat journey.’

  ‘We have some Madeira,’ put in Jane McCormick. She turned to Collis and said, in a tone that he could only think of as over-explanatory, ‘We only use these apartments when business is very hectic. We have a house overlooking the river. A very fine house.’

  At length, after twenty minutes of awkward conversation, they heard the downstairs door open, and the rustle of skirts as someone came up to the hallway. All the gentlemen stood up as a stern, white-haired woman appeared in the living-room doorway, in an evening cape of dark-blue merino wool, and a severe, dark-blue bonnet. Her eyes were as small as screwholes in her pale, square cheeks, and her mouth was straight as a slit-open envelope. She carried a forbidding black purse.

  Charles stepped across and kissed her cheek. She was slightly taller than he was, or at least she appeared to be. She accepted the kiss in the same way that a statue accepts a bird perching momentarily on its shoulder: I am here, I have to be here, and so I suppose I have to put up with such minor indignities.

  ‘I don’t suppose you managed to call on the Milton Lathams, Charles,’ she said coldly.

  Charles coughed.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. They’re unbearably ostentatious anyway,’ said Mary Tucker, and stepped into the centre of the room so that everybody could admire her extreme plainness. Collis could see why Charles took Knickerbocker Jane out to the theatre, and why he paid for young girls like Elsie. After a month or two with Mary, the sight of a pretty feminine face must have been as welcome as a cold beer would have been now, if only the dour McCormick had kept some on ice; and between Mary and Jane, Collis could only conclude that his two Sacramento business associates had netted the two homeliest wives in California.

  Collis felt hungry, thirsty, and depressed. He wished now that he had stayed in San Francisco, and continued to make a modest living with cards. The memory of Knickerbocker Jane’s whorehouse on Dupont Street, and his small but private room, with girls and bottles of champagne whenever he desired them, seemed now, in the presence of the Tuckers and the McCormicks, to be a Western paradise. If only the goddam High Sierras weren’t out there in the darkness, challenging and strange. If only railroads had never been invented.

  Mary Tucker had approached Collis now, and so he gave her a small bow and took her hand.

  ‘Charles has told me so much about you,’ he said. He tried to keep his voice as concerned and as serious as possible.

  ‘I am the mainstay of Charles’s life,’ responded Mary. ‘If it were not for me, Charles would have no notion whatsoever of his social duties. But I have always been one to believe that to uphold society, and the social round, is a sacred task. I hope I can expect your support for my glee club, Mr Edmonds.’

  ‘I’m not sure at this moment,’ Collis answered. ‘Glee is a commodity of which I am a little short.’

  Mary Tucker gave a brief, unamused smile, and then turned to Jane McCormick. ‘Jane, my dear, you must ask your John for his recipe for that chicken stew. It would make a splendid Saturday luncheon for when the Reverend Spratt comes around.’

  Eventually, the black maid summoned them all to the dining-room, and for the next two hours they sat under the wavering light of ten candles, eating onion soup, roasted chicken with hominy pudding and pickled yellow beans, bacon and tomato slices, and apple pandowdy. Outside, the night grew blacker, until their candlelit reflection in the windows appeared like a supper of ghosts. Collis, tired from the journey and the unfamiliarity of Sacramento, felt more like his reflection than his real self, and he ate his meal and stayed quiet while Charles and Leland talked of coal and pitch and saltpetre prices, and while Mary and Jane politely tried to claw each other’s taste in Sunday hats to shreds of verbal millinery.

  At last, however, it was all too much. Collis was either going to establish where he stood from the beginning, or else he was going to be drawn down into the maze of provincialism, from which he suspected much brighter men than he had been unable to find their way out. If he socialised with the Tuckers and the McCormicks, and the Reverend Spratt, and joined the Sacramento Valley Glee Club, he would only be filling his life with more confusions and complications, and he could see his vision of a Sierra railroad being gradually obs
cured behind a forest of screws, singing, swinging stanchions, and community suppers.

  ‘I’m going to build a railroad,’ he said suddenly. ‘All the way from here to Nebraska.’

  Charles looked across at him, displeased. Leland, wrestling with a slice of bacon, frowned at his plate with noticeable irritation. The two wives, who were well behind with their meal, because they had been trying to outdo each other in the fastidiousness of their nibbling, both sat back in their chairs and stared at Collis as if he had belched.

  ‘Collis likes the idea of a transcontinental railroad,’ Charles said with unconvincing cheer. ‘In fact, he’s wagered quite a few people in San Francisco that he can have it surveyed and ready to lay in not less than five or six years.’

  Leland chewed his bacon, slow and deliberate. Then, swallowing, he raised his fork and pointed it across the table at Collis, waving it up and down to emphasise his words.

  ‘We’re Californians,’ he said, in the tone of a man addressing the state finance committee. ‘Whatever we do, whatever we invest, should have a direct benefit to the state of California and those who live here. You can’t tell me that a transcontinental railroad would benefit anybody at all in California, not financially, and not socially. All it would do is drain our resources eastwards, and encourage an influx of tourists, scavengers, criminals, and adventurers.’

  He paused, then added, ‘I’ve heard this talk of a transcontinental railroad before, from Theodore Jones, and one or two other irresponsibles. Well, I don’t want to hear any more of it, Mr Edmonds, not if you want to work here, because to my mind it’s both reckless and fantastic.’

  ‘It could be done, though, couldn’t it?’ said Charles, trying to defend Collis against Leland’s sombre pronouncements.

  Leland put down his fork. ‘It could, Charles,’ he said patiently. ‘But those who invested in it would lose their shirts and I daresay their underclothing besides, asking the ladies’ pardon. It would cost millions of dollars, and it would take years to construct, and it would rob California of her greatest political asset, which is her holy isolation from the East.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re scared,’ Collis said.

  Leland looked at him with contempt. ‘I’ve no need to fear the impossible, Mr Edmonds. Now, Charles, what were you saying about those pumps?’

  Collis kept his eyes fixed on Leland’s hard, straight profile. ‘Changing the subject will not change my destiny, Mr McCormick.’

  ‘Your destiny, Leland replied, ‘tomorrow morning, and for a great many tomorrow mornings after that, is to make a complete inventory of all of our stock. I am perfectly aware that changing the subject will not alter that.’

  Collis spent the next two weeks with a notebook and a pencil in his hand and a cheroot clenched between his teeth, pale-faced and irritable, counting valves and fuses and barrels of gunpowder, and noting them down, and then counting round-point shovels and screw dies of rubber belting, and noting them down. He was bored and he was angry, most of all at himself, for having to spend the whole day confined in this greasy hardware store, performing such menial work; and even at seven o’clock, when the store closed, his boredom and anger didn’t abate much, because he would have to return then to Charles Tucker’s red-and-green painted frame house not far from Sutter’s Fort, and sit at Mary Tucker’s dining table for mushy Brunswick stews and flavourless Indian puddings, while Mary talked monotonously of church socials and ladies’ tea parties, and Charles grunted in a variety of keys to suggest interest, surprise, sympathy, or disapproval, without actually saying a word. After dinner, Collis would have a smoke on the veranda, and then go to bed: brass, narrow, and abstinent.

  Sitting on a keg of saddler’s tallow on the store’s veranda on his third Thursday in Sacramento, in shirtsleeves and a white wide-brimmed hat which he had bought for working outside, Collis wondered why he had come here at all. For all Charles’s enthusiastic promises in San Francisco, he now seemed to have no intention of promoting Collis beyond the post of general help, and neither had Leland, whose interminable pomposity was leavened only by moments of dire moroseness, during which he would wander around the store bumping into things and complaining about God’s plan.

  None of this seemed to be bringing Collis any nearer to realising his vision, although he reluctantly had to admit that he now knew the price of sleepers and spikes and railroad ties, the price of English steel rails ($60 a ton, delivered on the East Coast), their length (15 feet) and their weight (39½ pounds to the yard). He had read through the heaps of hardware and engineering journals stacked at the back of the store, and learned to his surprise that the Union boasted 27,000 miles of railroad, costing over $920 million. He had found out something about locomotives, too, and how they worked. In his cream-painted bedroom on the third floor of Charles Tucker’s house, while Charles and Mary softly snored in their separate bedrooms beneath him, he had frowned for hours over pictures of double-flue section engines, spread trucks, and wagon-top boilers.

  In the early hours of this morning, while it was still dark outside, he had wakened up to find his lamp wick burned down, and a diagram of Bissell’s new swivelling-truck patent still lying open on his worn patchwork comforter.

  But as he sat outside the store just after ten o’clock, adding up bushels of staples, he was coming to the conclusion that he could have picked up all of this technical information just as easily in San Francisco, at the Mercantile Library or the Mechanics’ Institute. The practical business experience for which he had agreed to come to Sacramento was being denied him, by both Charles and Leland. Charles, now that he was home, was not half so cheery and helpful as he had been in San Francisco, and Leland was openly obstructive. Maybe they were jealous, or plain unimaginative; who knew. It didn’t really matter. What did matter was that Collis urgently needed to acquire the skills of a manager, and they were giving him nothing but the chores of a coolie.

  He had just put down his pencil, with a mind to going inside the store and talking to Charles about his feelings, when a sulky came trotting along K Street, driven by a young bearded man in a long morning coat, and drew up not far away. The young man tied up his horse, straightened his hat, and then came across to 54 K with his eyes screwed up against the late-October sunlight.

  ‘Can I help you?’ asked Collis.

  The young man gave a brief smile. He looked well bred, and quite self-assured, with pale and penetrating eyes. His beard had been meticulously clipped, and his moustache was brilliantined.

  ‘I was looking for Mr Charles Tucker,’ he said. The young man extended his hand. ‘My name’s Theodore Jones. You’re new here, aren’t you?’

  Collis stood up and firmly put out his own hand. ‘Collis Edmonds, out of New York. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.’

  ‘You have?’ asked Theodore Jones. ‘Has my reputation spread that wide?’

  ‘Charles told me something about you. It seems that you and I have an interest in common.’

  Theodore raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re not interested in a transcontinental railroad?’

  Collis suddenly realised why Theodore was looking so sceptical. Here Collis was, sitting outside of a store on a tallow barrel, in a dusty hat, looking like nothing more than an underpaid clerk. He couldn’t have appeared to the railroad pest like the stuff of which heavyweight investors are made.

  ‘I’m helping out at the store,’ Collis said. ‘I’m a friend of Tucker’s, you see. But I do have some finances of my own. Or at least I will have, when I get back to San Francisco and realise my assets.’

  ‘You’re really interested in a railroad?’ asked Theodore cautiously, with one foot on the veranda step.

  ‘Mr Jones,’ Collis told him, ‘I came across the isthmus, and nearly lost someone very dear to me from the yellow fever.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it. She’s recovered now, I hope?’

  Collis glanced away. ‘I guess so. Yes, she is.’

  Theodore gently stroked his beard, loo
king at Collis with care. He had obviously been ribbed and teased in his time, and he seemed to want to make sure that Collis wasn’t just another practical joker. Although he had a personality that struck Collis as warm and ingenuous, he didn’t seem to have much in the way of a sense of humour. Collis could understand it, in a way. The vision of crossing the Sierra Nevada by rail didn’t leave much room in anyone’s brain for casual fun.

  ‘Look,’ Theodore said, ‘my business with Charles isn’t desperately urgent. Can you spare a half hour to talk?’

  ‘Sure. I was about to down tools in any case.’

  ‘That’s good. If you want to go get your coat, I’ll meet you across the street in the Sutter House.’

  Collis went back into the soap-smelling shade of the store, where Charles was sitting at a stool, his sleeves held up with armbands, working on the month’s accounts. He took his black morning coat down from the peg and said, ‘I’m taking a half-hour break.’

  Charles looked up, his eyes bright and fixed. But when he saw that Collis had already shrugged on his coat and was reaching for his hat, he said, ‘Very well,’ in a testy voice, and went back to his lines of figures and his metal spikes crowded with bills.

  Across the street, the Sutter House was a boarding establishment and dining-room, with a high reputation for hash browns. It was run by a former wagon-train cook called Bilton, a hugely fat man with only one eye. The other eye, he claimed, had been lost when a spit-roasted pig, in a posthumous gesture of defiance, had spat hot lard at him. Bilton modestly announced that he could cook anything, from squirrel to horse, and make it fit for a hungry man.

  Collis crossed the boardwalk and pushed his way in through the double doors. Inside, the dining-room was fragrant with meaty grease and the smell of freshly-brewed coffee. Theodore Jones was sitting in the corner against the light-green wooden dado, his legs neatly crossed, stirring a cup of chocolate.