Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  ‘What should I say?’ he teased her.

  ‘Anything!’ she snapped. ‘Anything, apart from “Hm”!’

  Collis reached into his coat pocket and took out his silver brandy flask. ‘How about “Have a drink”?’ he asked her.

  She pouted and refused to answer.

  ‘You can just drive on,’ she said.

  Collis took up the reins again. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘How about “Will you marry me?” ’

  There was a second in which he wondered if he hadn’t played her along too far. She stared at him, her eyes glistening, and he couldn’t read her expression at all. But then she swallowed back her tears, and gave him a nod, and he knew that everything was fine. He suddenly found that his own eyes were ridiculously watery.

  ‘That’s it, then,’ he said. ‘That’s that business concluded. Now, what do you say we go deliver these gutters?’

  There were many times, before they were married, when he sat and wondered about the mystery of his relationship with Hannah. He would sit on the porch of Theodore’s house, while Theodore pored over his charts and his logs and drew endless maps of the Sierra foothills, and he would smoke a cigar and think to himself: Why?

  Why had they been brought together, and why had destiny turned itself inside out to accommodate their selfish desires? Their love for each other had been oblique from the beginning, a love that was felt in sympathetic nuance rather than open and hungry passions. Yet because of that it was all the stronger, and all the more disturbing.

  He even asked Theodore one evening what he thought about them, but Theodore had simply unwound his wire-rimmed spectacles from his ears, laid down his compasses, and given Collis nothing but a friendly and baffled smile.

  Collis and Hannah had announced their engagement a week after their ride out to the Vallejo farm, and they had set their wedding date for mid-March, 1860. As far as Theodore was concerned, they were going to be man and wife because they’d taken a liking to each other and that was all there was to it. He didn’t share Collis’s feelings of fate and destiny. Man made his own destiny, as far as Theodore was concerned, by hours of hard work and by bribing as many Congressmen as possible.

  In the first week of March, Theodore called around at the hardware store and laid a roll of charts out on the counter. Leland and Charles were both there, and Collis, too, and they gathered around the drawings like men who have paid out good money for oil paintings, sight unseen, and now were going to get the chance to see what their investment had brought them.

  ‘There isn’t any doubt that the trace is gradual enough, and straight enough, and sufficiently workable to take a railroad,’ Theodore told them. ‘There will be very little bridge-building, although I suspect I might have to span the Little Bear River, and there will be very little tunnelling, too. The most difficult tunnel will have to be at the summit of the mountains, just below the Donner Pass, where the road will have to be cut through fifteen hundred feet of solid rock.’

  ‘Fifteen hundred feet doesn’t sound like too much of an obstacle,’ Leland remarked.

  Theodore shrugged. ‘It depends on the consistency of the rock. I haven’t surveyed it in any detail yet, of course, but from what I saw when we first climbed up there, it looks like flawless granite.’

  ‘What happens once we’re past the summit?’ asked Collis.

  Theodore stood up straight. ‘Once we’re past the summit, there will be six or seven more tunnels to cut at the very least. We’ll have to cut into the sides of the mountains, too, so that we don’t have to follow the emigrant trail around every wiggle and every waggle along the way. But the summit tunnel will be the crucial achievement. Once that’s complete, we’ll be able to take all our workers and all our heavy equipment up into the High Sierras by rail, and the building of the road into Nevada should go forward at speed.’

  ‘How soon can we file this route with the government?’ asked Leland. ‘It seems to me that we’ve had our money invested for quite a while, without much prospect of any returns.’

  ‘I’ll have to carry out a completely detailed survey before I can file,’ Theodore told him. ‘That means weeks, even months, up in the mountains.’

  ‘And how much will it cost?’ Leland enquired.

  ‘Another twenty thousand dollars at least. That’s on top of what all of you have already invested.’

  Charles pushed his hands into his vest pockets. ‘Twenty thousand dollars? Where are you going to find that?’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Theodore, ‘we are all partners in this railroad. The question is, where are we going to find all that?’

  ‘Senator Stride?’ asked Collis.

  Leland puffed out his cheeks and slowly shook his head. ‘I doubt if your Senator friend will want to commit himself much further. Not with things the way they are in Washington.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ Theodore said, ‘that I’m not getting much financial support from anyone around here, nor in San Francisco. The local traders want to wait until we’ve got full approval from the government, and a few miles of track laid, and the San Francisco business establishment is about as hostile as it could be. Sam Lewis promised me money when we found a route, but even he’s backed out.’

  ‘You can’t simply file these maps?’ asked Charles.

  Theodore shook his head. ‘They’re not sufficient. I haven’t even measured the grades, or costed the construction.’

  ‘Well,’ said Leland, clearing his throat, ‘what are we going to do? We can’t stretch our own credit any further.’

  Collis sat back on the edge of the counter thoughtfully. ‘I have an idea,’ he said.

  ‘A twenty-thousand-dollar idea?’ Charles asked him.

  ‘Maybe a thirty-thousand-dollar idea. Or even more.’

  ‘Where are you going to get that kind of money?’ Leland scoffed. ‘You hardly make enough in the store to cover the cost of your keep.’

  ‘Just listen,’ said Collis. ‘It seems to me that there are two key men who can help us, individually, or even jointly. The first is Senator Stride, who’s already been prepared to put ten thousand dollars of his own money into the railroad, and under the right circumstances might be persuaded to put in more. The second is Laurence Melford.’

  ‘Laurence Melford would gladly see us, and our proposed railroad, toasting in hell,’ said Charles. ‘Surely you don’t expect any support from him?’

  ‘He’s the key, though, isn’t he?’ Collis put in. ‘He’s the richest man in San Francisco, after Parrott, and he’s the social leader bar none. If he can at least be pressed into giving the railroad the nod, then there’s no question at all that the business community will advance us whatever we need.’

  ‘You’re talking rot,’ said Leland, with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘You could no more press Laurence Melford into approving a transcontinental railroad than you could catch fleas with a butterknife.’

  Theodore, however, knew the workings of Collis’s mind better than Leland and quietly said, ‘All right – supposing it’s possible to win Melford over. Not his support, perhaps, but at least a withdrawal of his out-and-out hostility. What about Stride?’

  ‘Stride’s in a delicate political position right now, but he offered to help us before, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t ask him for more help now.’

  ‘What if he refuses?’ asked Leland.

  ‘Then the Washington newspapers get to hear a most unpleasant story about him – about how he took in the destitute daughter of an old friend whose business had been ruined by the crash of ’57, and how he sold that poor innocent girl to another Senator, as a slave, and a drudge, and for his carnal amusement.’

  Theodore stared at Collis. He knew that Collis was talking about Delphine, and he could scarcely believe what he was hearing.

  ‘What stuff and nonsense,’ Leland said. ‘You can’t –’

  But Theodore interrupted, ‘You wouldn’t. Would you? Think what such a story would do to Delphine. It would ruin her. And
it’s not even true.’

  ‘It’s mostly true,’ said Collis. ‘It’s true enough to show Stride up as the venal character he really is.’

  ‘But Delphine’s reputation?’

  ‘She’s sleeping with Carslake, isn’t she? Half of Washington must know about it already. And she’s nothing more than a governess, and general help about the house. What kind of a reputation is that?’

  ‘I’m talking about her moral reputation!’ shouted Theodore, shocked. ‘Did she drag you down in the dirt, when you were destitute, and she was still wealthy?’

  ‘I offered to take her away,’ said Collis edgily. ‘I offered her everything.’

  ‘And because she said no, you’re quite happy to use her however you will? Even if it means destroying the poor girl’s life?’

  Collis took a breath. ‘Theodore,’ he said, ‘it won’t be the first life this railroad’s taken, and by God you know as well as I do that it won’t be the last.’

  ‘The railroad! The railroad! All I ever hear from you is the railroad! You’re obsessed! You talk about it as if it were some kind of God! You talk about conquering the High Sierras as if it were more important than humanity itself – your own humanity, or anybody else’s!’

  Theodore stood facing Collis, and he was breathing hard.

  ‘Collis, I believe in the railroad more than anything,’ he went on, his voice quieter, but still shaking. ‘I’ve lived and breathed the railroad for year upon year, even when I’ve been mocked and ridiculed. The railroad pest, that’s me. And proud of it. But, sweet Jesus, Collis, I can’t match what you feel about it. You feel something about it that I can’t even begin to understand.’

  Collis looked around at his partners. Leland was standing with his hands clasped in front of him, stiff and curious. Charles was open-mouthed, as if he were waiting patiently for a fly to buzz past. Theodore was still staring at him, with sweat on his forehead, his eyes dark from hours of drawing and reading.

  ‘The railroad will make us great,’ said Collis, in a very soft voice. ‘It will make this country great, too; and no greatness is achieved without sacrifice.’

  ‘Voluntary or involuntary, I suppose?’ asked Theodore bitterly.

  ‘We may not have to resort to such measures,’ said Collis. ‘But if this railroad isn’t going to die of starvation, and of neglect, and of general obstinacy, then we’re going to have to fight for whatever we can get by whatever means necessary.’

  Theodore angrily gathered up his drawings and his maps. ‘You can contact me when you’ve raised the twenty thousand,’ he said. ‘But please don’t tell me how you managed it, because I just might feel constrained to abandon this project once and for all.’

  Collis lit up a cigar. ‘You’ll have one consolation, Theo,’ he said, as the engineer turned his back and walked towards the store door. ‘When the railroad’s finished, and you’re riding along its tracks, you’ll be able to reflect that however it was built, whatever it cost, you alone were guiltless and lily-white.’

  Theodore paused, without turning around.

  Collis puffed smoke and added, ‘Are you sure you still want that station named after you?’

  There were three clouds in the sky on the day Collis and Hannah were married. It was a simple, direct ceremony, carried out by Justice Boardman in his front yard on I Street. An unseasonably hot wind blew from the south, and ruffled Hannah’s pale-blue silk dress. She looked pretty but tired as she walked on Collis’s arm from the white-picketed yard to the varnished carriage which was to take them around to 54 K for their wedding breakfast.

  A photograph showed them about to mount the carriage, with Charles holding Hannah’s elbow, and Collis, bareheaded, frowning against the sunlight. Leland was posed with his thumbs behind the lapels of his morning coat. Mary was as rigid and white as the angel on a badly-sculpted tombstone. Jane McCormick was not there. A sick headache had obliged her to remain in her drawing-room with the blinds drawn, her pet dog snuffling and letting off wind in the corner.

  Kwang Lee set off firecrackers as the wedding carriage rolled away, as well he might have done. Charles called for nine cheers, and found himself cheering the last five of them on his own. It wasn’t that Collis and Hannah weren’t popular. It was simply that the plain folk of Sacramento found Collis too intense these days, too highly-charged, and Hannah too withdrawn.

  The three clouds stayed motionless in the sky. Annie Jones waved her hat from the roadside as the wedding carriage went past, but Theodore kept his eyes on the ground. ‘Is he still mad at you?’ asked Hannah, holding tight on to Collis’s arm.

  Collis nodded. ‘He won’t be for long. Wait until I rustle up the money he needs to finish his survey.’

  The wedding breakfast had been prepared by Zeitman’s, the bakers, under Mary Tucker’s supervision. Thus although it was excellently cooked, it was good solid food with very little of the fancy about it. Twenty of them sat around the table in the upstairs dining-room at 54 K while three Chinese boys served stuffed cabbage, veal birds, lamb shanks, and rutabaga pudding. They drank steam beer, sweet white Napa Valley wine, and sherry, and drank more toasts than they could count. Leland made a speech which lasted nearly twenty minutes, and referred to Collis several times as ‘our esteemed expeditioner to distant summits’.

  Collis, rising to reply to their toasts, said, ‘I wish to thank all of you who have had faith in me, here in Sacramento, and even those who haven’t. You all know that my colleagues and I have embarked on a difficult and controversial enterprise which, if it succeeds, will bring fresh prosperity to this town of ours, and momentous changes to the whole of the nation. We need all the support and encouragement we can get, and I’m happy to say that, today, I have acquired one of the finest supporters and encouragers that any man could hope for.’

  Everyone applauded and cheered. Even Theodore tapped his spoon handle on the table and smiled across at Annie. As Collis sat down, however, it was to Hannah he looked first, and he was struck by the expression on her face. She was so calm, so self-possessed, and she was smiling with such obvious certainty about her new position as Mrs Collis Edmonds of Sacramento that Collis found himself wondering for a moment just who had married whom.

  Charles stood up, swayed a little, and raised his glass. ‘For myself,’ he said, ‘I would like to say that Collis and Hannah Edmonds have both brought new life and new hope to Sacramento, and that I shall look forward eagerly to the birth of their first two progeny. The child, first, of course, but quickly afterwards the infant railroad! And when these arrive, all in the fullness of time, the Edmondses will be the only couple in Sutter County who have one baby which cries at night, and another which whistles!’

  Collis, smiling, glanced at Hannah again and took her hand. She looked prettier than ever in the reflected sunlight of noon, proud and elegant and strong. He thought to himself as he caressed her fingers, and the new gold band which he had given her only an hour ago: I don’t know you yet, Mrs Edmonds. I don’t know you at all. But I feel sure that I’m going to find out.

  He looked across the table, across the silverware and candles and decanters of wine, and caught Theodore’s eye. Theodore held his gaze for a moment, and then deliberately turned away.

  His rooms on J Street he had never really thought of as home, until tonight. His landlord’s wife, an impossibly talkative woman who always wore an old-style Shaker bonnet, year in, year out, inside the house or out, had ‘prettified’ the sitting-room and the bedroom for him and his bride, with fresh flowers and wax polish, and put up a rather depressing print of Daniel Boone leading settlers through the Cumberland Gap, which she and her husband had given to Collis as a wedding gift.

  Collis carried Hannah over the threshold, and set her down, a little short of breath, on the sofa. She smiled and reached up her arms for him, and he leaned forward and kissed her on the lips.

  ‘Well, Mrs Collis Edmonds,’ he said.

  ‘Well, Mr Collis Edmonds,’ she answered him.

>   He sat down beside her. ‘Would you care for a sherry? Or I could ask Mrs Hawkins to bring up some tea.’

  Hannah shook her head. ‘Right now, my darling, the only refreshment I need is you.’

  He kissed her again. ‘If all your talk for all the years of our marriage is going to be as pretty as that, then I think I’m going to be happy.’

  ‘You think?’

  He grinned. ‘I know for certain.’

  He stood up and walked across to the window. Outside, on the dusty sidewalks of J Street, a group of children were playing hop-and-jump, and laughing.

  ‘We didn’t talk about progeny, did we?’ he asked. He turned so that she could see he was only half-serious. ‘I mean, before we decided to marry, we didn’t even give them a thought.’

  She stood up, too, and walked across the patterned rug to stand beside him. She linked her arm with his, gently, as if she had been doing it for years.

  ‘They’ll come in time, if the Lord wills it,’ she said.

  ‘I was kind of surprised that you didn’t – well, that you and Walter didn’t have any. You were together for nearly two years, after all.’

  She lowered her eyes. Her eyelashes shone blonde in the late sunlight. On the figured walnut table beside her, a vase of spring flowers cast a shadow like an old woman’s silhouette.

  ‘Walter – wasn’t very good at that kind of thing,’ she said, in a tone as soft as the sunlight.

  Collis cleared his throat. ‘I see. Well, let’s not speak of it anymore. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.’

  She lifted her face to his. ‘You didn’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t pretend that I haven’t been married before, and lain with another man, any more than you can pretend to me that you haven’t lain with other women. We’re old enough, aren’t we, to talk of such things freely? We’re husband and wife, as well as lovers.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Collis answered uncomfortably.

  She smiled. ‘If you want to talk of progeny, then of course we shall. But my feeling is that Charles was right. We shall have two children – our natural son, and our railroad. And if you want to know which of those is most important to me now, then I am bound to say the railroad.’