Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  Knickerbocker Jane had shrugged. ‘It’s up to you. I would have thought it more prudent to wait for someone else to bring her the bad news.’

  ‘Yes,’ Collis had said. The gilt clock on the mantelpiece had struck five. He had stood where he was for a moment, and then he had leaned over and kissed Knickerbocker Jane full on the mouth.

  ‘I’m sorry about your banker,’ he had said.

  She had looked away. ‘Thank you. I’m sorry about your shopkeeper. But life goes on for the rest of us, doesn’t it?’

  Collis had visited one more person before going back to Hannah at the International. Dan McReady, at the Eagle Saloon. Dan had been busy at the faro tables, relieving two bearded gold miners of seven months’ hard-earned profits, but he had asked one of the other dealers to sit in for him while he came across to the bar and talked to Collis.

  ‘Dan,’ Collis had said, in a quiet, confidential voice, ‘what do you know about Mr Kwang?’

  Dan had knocked back a shot of whisky, coughed, and pulled a face. ‘No more than anyone, I guess. A tough son of a bitch. But a man of his word. The kind of man who knows which way the world’s going to turn.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning he’ll do you a favour today, but he’ll expect a much bigger favour in return from you tomorrow.’

  Collis had stirred his stone fence with his finger. ‘That was what I was afraid of.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘It’s very easy. I should have thought of it before. When I went around to talk to Mr Kwang, I happened to mention Walter West. You know, Hannah’s husband. I told him that Walter West was an obstacle, just like the High Sierras.’

  ‘So what did he say?’

  ‘He said not to worry, to be tranquil, and my obstacle would disappear.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Walter West has been murdered. This afternoon, in his own shop.’

  Dan McReady’s eyes widened, and then he pulled a long, long face. An exaggeration of dolour and disapproval. ‘That’s real bad news. How did he die?’

  ‘Choppers, I guess, or knives. Whatever they were, they were sharp as all hell. They cut his guts out without even taking the buttons off of his vest.’

  ‘That’s Chinky business, all right,’ Dan had said. ‘They kill people the same way they cut up their food. A white man would’ve used a gun, and just blown his head off.’

  Collis had tipped back his drink. He had paused for a moment, and then held out his glass for another one. ‘It seems to me that Mr Kwang has done me a favour. Very friendly of him, wouldn’t you say? All I’m worried about now is what he expects in return.’

  Dan McReady had puffed out his cheeks. ‘He’ll tell you, when the time comes. Meanwhile, if I were you, I’d count your blessings, and hope that the good Mrs West doesn’t take the intelligence too hard.’

  ‘I’m afraid of that, too,’ Collis had said. ‘But I’m sure she will.’

  And that was why he was sitting in Hannah’s room, with the lamps unlit, while Hannah herself paced around, a handkerchief twisted between her hands, her eyes reddened from crying, and why his throat was dry from too much bourbon and too many hours of talking in a low, sympathetic voice. He was tired now, and his mind was swimming in whisky, and all he really wanted to do was to go to bed and sleep it all off. But Hannah was alive with nervous energy, questioning, questioning, and clenching her fists, and trying with frustrating and useless persistence to understand why, why, why Walter should have been sacrificed this way, and whether it was her fault, or whether it was nothing more than one of the horrors of fate – that fate which always strikes down the unlucky, and leaves the lucky unscathed.

  The news had reached her before Collis. A small boy had been sent to the International with a message, and he had waited for his bit tip while she read with blurry eyes that her husband was mortally injured. She had stared at the boy after she had finished reading, and for some reason she had believed that he was the son that she and Walter had always talked about having. She had whispered, ‘Christopher,’ but the boy had simply frowned back at her through the jiggling prisms of her tears.

  Her face had been white as a menu when Collis had knocked at her door.

  ‘You didn’t go to see Walter,’ she had said. Her voice had sounded odd, like somebody talking into an empty cup.

  ‘I, er, no. No, I didn’t, I wanted to talk to you first. I mean, talk to you some more. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to –’

  Her look had silenced him. ‘A boy came, with a note. He’s been murdered.’

  Collis hadn’t tried to act. He had been too tired for that. Instead, he had simply stood in Hannah’s room while she poured out her guilt, and her grief, and her grief at not feeling more grief than she did. It was only when she had utterly exhausted herself, when she had cried her eyes dry, and when she was simply talking for the sake of not having to think, that he reminded her of the simplest and most telling fact of all.

  ‘Hannah,’ he said, ‘you’re a widow.’

  She stared at him. It was so gloomy in the room now that they could scarcely make each other out.

  ‘Perhaps if you’d gone there, you might have saved his life,’ she said.

  Collis made a face. ‘I might have. But then again, I might have been killed along with him.’

  ‘Don’t say that. I can’t bear it.’

  ‘Hannah – I can’t bring him back. I can’t change the course of history. I didn’t go to see him today, and that’s all. I don’t know why he was murdered. Maybe he had some business enemies you never even knew about. Maybe he owed people money.’

  She went to the corner of the room, with her back to him.

  ‘I shall have to mourn,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘In Boston, it would have been a year. But, under the circumstances, I think six months should be sufficient.’

  ‘These are modern times, Hannah. Fast times. Six months can see a whole lot of changes.’

  ‘I know, Collis. But my husband is dead, whether I loved him truly or not, and I shall mourn him.’

  They buried Walter West four days later, on a Tuesday, at the Lone Mountain Cemetery. From the Presidio, coincidentally, came the sound of a bugler practising taps. It was a cold, brisk day, and the mourners walked along the neat cultivated lanes of the cemetery with their breath escaping in intermittent puffs. There were some friends of Walter’s there, mostly storekeeprs, and a portly representative from the merchants’ association, who kept taking out his heavy gold watch and staring at it. Collis stood bareheaded by the grave for a while, with Dan McReady a little way off, and Kwang Lee, in a shiny black top hat, remaining politely beside a newly planted cypress.

  Andy Hunt was looking for Collis at the cemetery gate, in a vivid heather-coloured tweed coat. His cheeks were red and he was out of breath.

  ‘Andy,’ said Collis, taking him aside. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’ve just been down on the Embarcadero,’ Andy told him. ‘There’s news from the East, just come in on the Sonora. John Brown attacked Harper’s Ferry in Virginia, with a band of twenty men, and held the United States armoury for a while, trying to set off a rebellion of slaves.’

  ‘What happened?’ Collis wanted to know. ‘Did any of them rise up?’

  Andy shook his head. ‘Brown was surrounded by marines, and captured, and two of his sons killed. Looks like they’ll hang him, too. Just a case of trying to take the whole slavery issue into his own hands, and not having the wherewithal to carry it off. But the way it’s set the South afire, it looks as though we might have secession at last.’

  Hannah was waiting for Collis a few yards away, on the arm of a tall homely woman called Freda McPherson. Collis put his hand on Andy’s shoulder to calm his excitement. ‘I’ll talk to you later. Right now, I have a funeral breakfast to attend.’

  ‘But you know what this means,’ hissed Andy. ‘If the South secedes, and there’s a war, the
n they’ll have to build the railroad, and build it on our route, too!’

  ‘You’re very pepped up about the railroad all of a sudden,’ said Collis. ‘The last time we spoke, you were all shrimp camps and imported lumber.’

  ‘Collis,’ said Andy, grinning, ‘never let it be said that Andrew Jackson Hunt, with a name like Andrew Jackson Hunt, is too blind to read the writing on the wall.’

  ‘You know what the writing on the wall actually said,’ put in Collis. ‘It said, “Mene, mene, tekel upharsin.” Which means, “You have been weighed in the scales and found to be wanting.” ’

  Andy’s grin only widened. ‘There’s only one thing I’m wanting, Collis, my friend, and that’s the profit we’re going to reap from this railroad.’

  Collis hesitated for a second. Then he saw how impatient Hannah was growing, and he simply shook Andy’s hand in a formal way, as if Andy had been doing nothing more than offering his sympathies. He walked over to Hannah and held out his arm to her. There were tears in her eyes which may have been caused by nothing more than the cold wind.

  Hannah’s arrival in Sacramento, white-faced and dressed in black, was the final indignity for Jane McCormick. True, Hannah was discreet enough to rent rooms at the Wallis House on H Street, a quiet and respectable hotel run by a one-time Baptist preacher who had been thrown down a flume out at Rich Bar by miners who had taken exception to his sermons, and broken his back. And true, Hannah hardly saw Collis at all, apart from their taking lunch together from time to time, and spent most of her days reading, or pushing her landlord in his wicker wheelchair. But it seemed clear enough to Jane that she had been superseded in Collis’s affections by this pretty, demure blonde in black, and that Collis had been toying with her feelings from the very start.

  Leland, who had never been particularly fond of Collis in any case, soon sensed his wife’s freshened hostility and took it as tacit permission to be as awkward and objectionable to Collis as he knew how.

  Only Charles Tucker’s enthusiasm for the railroad kept Collis’s spirits up. Charles had been increasingly difficult and morose over the last year. Mary had kept him at home in Sacramento, and he was missing Knickerbocker Jane ‘like a bagful of fleas’. But with the news of John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry, and with the mounting expectations that the South was going to secede, Charles began to believe that the railroad might actually be started, and that even if they drove it no farther than the silver mines of Nevada Territory, it would bring him prestige, profit and better still, a means of putting Mary in her place.

  Railroads weren’t hardware stores, and railroad camps weren’t ladies’ front parlours. Railroads were men’s business. Railroads were Milholland locomotives with seven-foot drive wheels, grease, steam, and anthracite. Railroads were blasting and cursing and digging and laying track.

  With a railroad to build, Charles would be free to express his appetite for bluster, hard work, whisky, oyster loaves, and girls with fat bottoms. Not just on occasional trips to San Francisco, either, but all the time. Whenever they talked of railroads, Charles would wink at Collis, and Collis, secretly amused, would wink back, and between the two of them they’d know what Charles had in mind. Their friendship improved with every political bulletin from the East – the more alarming the better.

  Theodore kept in touch with Washington by letter, writing almost every week to the allies they’d made among Republican Congressmen – the men they’d fed, or paid, or actually befriended. The news was that the Democrats were severely split between ‘hard-shell’ pro-slavery supporters, led by John Breckinridge of Kentucky, and ‘soft-shell’ moderates, led by Stephen Douglas. On the other hand, the Republicans were still being treated warily by the Northern business establishment. They were, after all, outrageously radical. Yet Northern workers were gathering around to support the Republicans in encouraging numbers, and something else had happened, too.

  The Dred Scott decision had roused into political action a young attorney and ex-Congressman named Abraham Lincoln. Infuriated by Chief Justice Taney’s opinion that the black people had no rights to speak of, Lincoln had taken up the leadership of the Illinois Republicans, and was campaigning hard for the Presidential nomination for 1860.

  Theodore had been involved in a brief flurry of correspondence with Lincoln in 1857, after one of Lincoln’s most-publicised hearings. The owners of the Mississippi paddle-steamer Effie Afton had been taken to court for ramming the bridge which carried the Rock Island railroad over the river at Davenport, and Lincoln had appeared for the railroad. The deeper implications of the case hadn’t been lost on those who had heard it. It had been the first naked struggle between the economy of the South, whose prosperity depended on river traffic bringing down the Mississippi to St Louis and Memphis and New Orleans all the food and timber and livestock of the Midwest, and the economy of the North, whose expansion depended on railroads running goods across the continent through Chicago and New York.

  Lincoln had argued in court that railroads had as much right to cross rivers as steamboats had to paddle up and down them, and that it was the manifest destiny of the American people to forge their way west. Theodore had dug out his own notes of his hearing when it first looked likely that Lincoln might win the Republican nomination, and he had put it under Collis’s nose with a meaningful tap of his finger.

  ‘There’s our man, Collis,’ he had said. ‘If Abraham Lincoln’s nominated, and elected, then we’ll take ourselves off to Washington right away, and by God we’ll get our railroad.’

  Collis had been sitting in the Jones’s living-room, after one of Annie’s best meat-pie meals. ‘Lincoln?’ he had asked. ‘What’s our benefactor William Stride going to say if we court Lincoln?’

  ‘I don’t think that Senator Stride’s opinion is going to matter,’ Theodore had said, sitting down in his rocking chair and crossing his legs. ‘Because if Lincoln’s elected on his anti-slavery platform, it’s a railroad to a red cent that Jeff Davis and the rest of the South will secede in weeks rather than months. And where, I might ask, will that leave Senator Stride, with his substantial interest in a northern-route railroad?’

  As 1859 turned, as the Sierra snows thawed, and as spring began, Collis began to see more of Hannah. He took her out to a merchants’ hall dance, where amid laughing and clapping and furious fiddling, they showed off their fancy Eastern dance steps to the stiff-legged storekeepers of Sacramento. Hannah still wore a black ribbon on her arm, but Collis had been right. Modern life moved too fast for a widow woman to keep up her mourning for the full year, especially if she was young and energetic, and had a suitor as popular as Collis.

  The news came at last that John Brown had been hanged. And the same afternoon, Collis and Hannah were taking a drive out of town in Collis’s new wagon, northeastward as far as the old Vallejo farm, to deliver a load of pitch and guttering.

  It was the last day of January, 1860. The sky was clear and sharp, and the wagon wheels ground noisily over the rutted track. Collis was wearing a flecked tweed suit in grey and white, and Hannah was dressed in a dark-brown cape, and a brown bonnet. Her pale hands lay in her lap like two birds.

  ‘How is the railroad?’ she asked. ‘Any news?’

  Collis shook his head. ‘Not since last week. Mind you, John Brown’s execution might help us.’

  ‘You don’t really want the North and the South to go to war?’

  ‘It’s not a question of what I want. It’s inevitable. If it was just a moral issue about slavery, it wouldn’t happen. If it was just a political issue about who controls Congress, it wouldn’t happen either. But it’s a financial issue, an issue about money, and when men find their gold is threatened, they will go to war.’

  ‘And war will help you?’

  ‘War will be the making of us.’

  Hannah looked out over the flat landscape of the valley. The distant mountains appeared strangely close, as if they were a model. ‘I have decided to come out of mourning,’ she said.
r />   Collis glanced at her. ‘You mean it? When?’

  ‘Today. Now.’

  She turned to him, her eyes liquid and wide. Then she tugged off her black armband and threw it away. One of the wagon wheels ran over it, and left it on the trail, crushed and dusty.

  Collis reined back the horses, and the wagon clattered to a halt. The only sound was a faint northwesterly breeze, and the occasional stirring of a horse’s hoof. Collis stared at Hannah for a long time, unsure of what he should say.

  ‘You don’t think of Walter anymore?’

  She shrugged. ‘Sometimes. But when I do find myself thinking of him, I try to remember how it felt in that notions store on Montgomery Street, with nothing ahead of me but years of measuring percale, and of Walter’s unceasing humility. I realised when I met you, Collis, that I am not a woman who can care for humble men.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Collis.

  There was a very long silence. The wind whistled between the spokes of the wagon wheels. Then Collis snapped his whip and released the brake, and the horses started off again. Hannah, surprised, had to hold on to the seat tightly to prevent herself from falling.

  ‘Is that all?’ she demanded. ‘Is that all you’re going to say?’

  He looked at her, but didn’t answer.

  They rattled on for half a mile or so, and then Hannah suddenly reached over and seized the reins. The horses reared and jostled, and the harness jangled, and the wagon came to a stop.

  ‘Is that all you’re going to say?’ Hannah wanted to know, her cheeks flushed with anger and embarrassment.

  Collis shook his head. He was enjoying this. At last, with Walter dead and with Hannah’s mourning over, he could treat her the way that she really ought to be treated: as a spirited, pretty woman, with a mind of her own. He loved her. He loved her so much that he hadn’t slept with her since he had brought her back to Sacramento. He had been saving himself for this very moment, the moment when Hannah herself had been obliged to wait for so long for more of the passion she had tasted at the International Hotel that she couldn’t wait any longer.