‘What happened?’ asked Collis.
‘What happens to any of them? If they’re lucky, they die right away. He was wounded at Manassas Junction, after Bull Run. A Confederate shell landed close by, and took half of his head off. I don’t even know if he understands English anymore. He never speaks.’
Collis waited for a few minutes. Then he said to Mr Whitworth, ‘I guess there’s no point in my staying here.’
‘Not really,’ said Mr Whitworth.
Collis rubbed his eyes. He felt as if he hadn’t slept for a week. He left the living-room, with Mr Whitworth following a short distance behind, and let himself out of the front door.
‘There’s enough money, is there?’ he asked Mr Whitworth.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Whitworth. ‘The doctor doesn’t expect him to last longer than six or seven months, and there’s plenty.’
Collis reached into the pocket of his coat and handed Mr Whitworth a card. ‘That’s my address in California,’ he said. ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d write me when he dies.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Whitworth.
Collis walked down the steps and across to his cab, which was waiting for him at the kerb. It was one of those warm, strange afternoons when you feel as if you’ve somehow stepped through the wrong door, and the whole world has altered without your knowing it. He looked back at Mr Whitworth, and for some reason Mr Whitworth was waving.
Collis and Theodore spent the next three days trying to raise money for the Sierra Pacific Railroad Company. They spent hours in echoing bank offices on Wall Street, waiting for bank presidents to finish their lunches and talk about finance. They talked to brokers, investors, adventurers, and gamblers. They talked to engineers and steelmakers. They talked to anybody who would listen.
Towards the end of their first week in New York, they knew what they were up against – indifference, caution, and sheer disbelief. Many investors simply wouldn’t believe that a transcontinental railroad could be built; or that, if it could, that anybody would want to ride on it. Others frowned and asked them to come back when the war was over. Still more just blinked at them over their desks and shrugged.
One bank president told them fiercely that he had once travelled by express train, and that at forty miles per hour it had been impossible to read, or think, or hear himself speak. Even when Collis assured him that Sierra Pacific trains would travel at twenty-five miles per hour at the very most, he firmly repeated that men were intended to travel on foot, or on horseback, but certainly not by steam locomotive.
‘Man was not meant to be tugged around the continent like a toy, by a monstrous teakettle on wheels. It isn’t natural.’
Collis had an unnerving experience on Second Avenue one afternoon when he glimpsed a woman who looked just like Hannah. He called the cab driver to stop, and jostled his way through the crowds for two blocks before he saw the woman standing on the corner of Stuyvesant Square, about to cross the street. She was blonde, and there was something about the uptilt of her nose that reminded him of Hannah, but that was all. He walked back to his cab with embarrassment and bottled-up grief. Hannah was dead, he told himself. And even if she weren’t, she wouldn’t be here in New York. Not unless her spirit was trying to make contact with him through another woman. But that was insane. At least he hoped it was.
The most disturbing moment of all, however, was when he saw his mother. He had just spent a vexing lunch hour with A. G. Harriman, of the Harriman Investment Trust. They had eaten an impossibly heavy meal at the Collamore Hotel at Broadway and Spring Street – a bowl of thick pea soup, followed by salted cod in brandy and hot meat pie – and even after cakes and brandy they were still no nearer reaching an agreement on how much Harriman’s should invest in the Sierra Pacific. So they shook hands on the steps outside the hotel, and agreed to meet in two days’ time, and as they did so Collis saw his mother walk obliviously through the hotel lobby on the arm of a strange man.
His first reaction was to step forward and greet her. But then he took hold of A. G. Harriman’s pudgy hand and forcibly pulled him around, like an overweight ballet dancer, so that the banker’s bulk would obstruct his mother’s view.
‘What the devil are you doing?’ demanded Harriman.
Collis touched his finger to his lips and said, ‘Sshh.’
His mother was sweeping along more self-importantly than ever, and even if Collis had walked straight up to her and taken her hand she probably would have needed reminding who he was. Her attention was quite obviously all on herself, and on her flamingo-pink dress with matching cape, which made her look florid and fussy and strangely masculine, like a man dressed up as a woman.
The man beside her was bulky and tall, with shaggy muttonchop whiskers in a vivid shade of Myron Parker’s Hair Dye (‘any colour from brown to jet black’). He wore a grey morning coat and carried himself with great pomposity. As they reached the sidewalk, he raised his cane, and a private brougham drew up beside them, decorated in a particularly offensive maroon livery. Collis kept hold of A. G. Harriman’s hand and watched his mother over the banker’s shoulder as she was assisted into the carrage (smiling and nodding and smiling and nodding in the manner which she had always thought was the height of gentility), and as the bulky man climbed in after her. He was so bulky, in fact, that the carriage displayed a distinct list to starboard as it was driven away.
‘I wish you’d tell me what’s going on,’ said A. G. Harriman crossly, twisting his hand free.
‘I wish I knew,’ said Collis, and for the first time since he had heard of Hannah’s death, he felt amused. He wondered what his sister, Maude, was doing, and decided that she was probably living in a row house on Second Avenue with a stiff-collared Episcopalian husband and complaining bitterly about the influx of poor immigrants into the avenue during the war. Maude had always had plenty of faith, but very little hope, and no charity at all.
Back at the bridal suite of the St Nicholas, he found Theodore sitting at the bureau, writing a long letter to Annie. Theodore covered the letter with his hand when Collis came in.
‘You look cheerful,’ Theodore had said. ‘Did you do well with A. G. Harriman?’
‘I did badly with Harriman,’ Collis told him, pouring himself a drink. ‘But I did particularly well with my mother.’
‘You saw your mother?’
‘Yes, but she didn’t see me. And that was just the way I wanted it.’
Theodore scratched his beard with his pen. ‘You’re an odd one, Collis. If I didn’t distrust you so much, I think I could even learn to love you.’
They returned to Sacramento in August – weeks of steaming down the East Coast under a glaring sun, days of delay in the jungle of Panama, and then more weeks of steaming northwards on an ocean the colour of pewter plates. Five passengers died of yellow fever; one went mad and threw himself overboard. A dark-haired Mexican girl kept eyeing Collis through the black tracery of her shawl, but he ignored her. He was keeping his thoughts for Hannah.
Jane McCormick and Mary Tucker were waiting for them on the levee when their paddle steamer docked in Sacramento. Annie arrived a few minutes later, breathless and apologetic.
‘I’m sorry, Collis. I can’t tell you how sorry I am,’ she said.
Collis took her arm. It was midday, and the sun was so bright and hot that nothing seemed to have any colour or substance. Even the shadows shrank out of the sun. ‘You gave her a Catholic burial, I hope?’ asked Collis.
Annie nodded.
Later, Collis went to the Catholic church on J Street, swinging open the white paling fence and walking across the baked soil of the graveyard under an afternoon sky as black as a Bible. He found the marker around the back of the church, under the scant shade of a small tree. There were some wilted flowers lying on the mound, and an empty urn. Collis knelt down and straightened the urn, and then slowly reached out and traced with his fingertips the letters that had been carved in the wood of the marker.
Hannah Amelia Edmonds.
Beloved Wife of Collis. 1862.
Underneath, already curled from the sun and the rain, somebody had pinned a text from Revelation. ‘And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.’
When Collis read these words, his mouth shuddered with grief, and his eyes filled with tears.
‘Hannah,’ he said, out loud. ‘Oh, God, Hannah.’
On a wet January afternoon the following year, 1863, they gathered on the outskirts of Sacramento to dedicate the beginning of the Sierra Pacific Railroad. Leland, who had been elected the first Republican governor of California after eleven years of Democratic administration, was even windier than the weather, and full of his own importance to the point of explosion. He stood on a raised wooden platform in his tall black silk hat, his whiskers beaded with rain, and directed everybody to his place.
Even Leland was upstaged by the locomotive, however. It was a wood-burning 4-4-0, with a huge megaphone-shaped smokestack, and a bell that was suspended in curlicues of polished brass. It had been burnished up for the ground-breaking ceremony, but the wet cold weather had given its boiler a silvery metallic bloom, and its driveshafts and couplings sparkled with greasy droplets. The engineer and the fireman worked busily and importantly in the red-painted cab, and every now and then they would let out a little toot of steam from the whistle.
It was around the magnificently splayed cowcatcher and the huge wheels of the locomotive that the crowd had gathered, with their umbrellas shining as black as a colony of beetles, and their shoes smothered in mud. It was the locomotive which embodied the wild and breathtaking idea of the Sierra Pacific Railroad, not Leland McCormick, for all his oratory. And this was in spite of the fact that the locomotive had nowhere to go, for Collis had been able to lay enough track only to accommodate the steam engine itself, its tender, and one passenger carriage which still hadn’t arrived from New York.
Collis himself stood at the back of the platform, bareheaded, his hat in his hands. He was looking thin and drawn, and his sidewhiskers were now smudged with grey. Theodore was standing beside him with Annie, and after years of travelling to Washington and back, after endless hours of struggling for his dream of a transcontinental railroad, Theodore’s appearance was startling. He was bowed, and unhealthily plump, and his beard seemed ragged and unkempt, making him look like a mangy dog.
Andy Hunt was there, in an unexpectedly sober suit; and Charles, with Mary on his arm, smiling at everybody who passed. There were also several uncomfortable-looking gentlemen in the crowd who had obviously been sent from various banks and transportation companies in San Francisco, to report back on the opening ceremony to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and to Wells Fargo, and to interested parties like Laurence Melford and Arthur Teach. Later, Collis sent Kwang Lee around to each of these men to give them a good cigar and fifty dollars in gold.
The editor of the Sacramento Union wrote of the ceremony, ‘It was both festive and alarming; for while we could not help ourselves from being awed by the prospect of beginning a railroad that will stretch all the way from Sacramento to Omaha, and excited by its commercial possibilities, we realised at the same time that we were witnessing an irrevocable change in the course of our lives and in the history of the nation.’
Not many Californians agreed with him. They had all turned out to see a new steam locomotive, and to hear some of Leland’s speechifying, but for the most part they were disinclined to believe that Collis and Leland and Andy and Charles were actually going to go so far as build this railroad all the way over the Sierras. One critic had written in the San Francisco newspapers that the Sierra Pacific was ‘nothing more than a swindifulous scheme to milk money out of innocent investors, and the State of California, too.’
Leland in particular had refrained from answering such criticisms. At Jane’s suggestion, he had recently persuaded the California legislature to grant the railroad $10,000 for every mile of track laid within the state boundaries, and he had used his influence as governor to coax the county authorities along the railroad’s right of way to subscribe half a million dollars in bonds. Now he was drawing up a proposition for a state bond issue which would give the company $600,000 in cash – and this would go before the voters of San Francisco in April, so Leland wasn’t exactly keen as mustard to get into a messy public scrap about swindles or confidence tricks.
Nonetheless, the Sierra Pacific was already running dangerously short of money. In 1863, the greater proportion of native Americans had never travelled further from their homes than a good day’s walk, and the notion of riding in a train for days on end at twenty-five miles per hour was too fantastic to be imagined. Even railroad experts were sceptical, particularly in the East, where the vast expanses of the western frontier seemed as remote as the moon. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was in the middle of taking over the New York Central and Erie Lines between New York and Chicago, said, ‘Building a railroad from nowhere to nowhere at public expense is not a legitimate enterprise.’
Even as the first Sierra Pacific locomotive whistled a shrill note of celebration, and the wet bunting snapped in the cold afternoon wind, Theodore stood with his gaze directed at nothing further away than the damp planks of the platform beneath his feet. Annie held him as if she were supporting him, keeping him up under the great weight of his disillusionment and exhaustion.
Leland raised his hand for silence and said loudly: ‘Ladies and gentlemen of Sacramento … and visitors, surreptitious or otherwise …’ at which there was general mocking laughter. ‘I shall not speak for long, because of the vagaries of the weather … but I do wish to say that this day marks a practical beginning to the greatest social and mechanical enterprise ever undertaken by man … This locomotive is only the first of a whole fleet of glittering iron horses which will draw passengers and valuable freight into and out of this city of Sacramento … and later into San Francisco … these few feet of track are only the first of miles of shining rails which will span deserts, canyons, mountains, and rivers …’
Leland went on for ten minutes, and Collis listened in silence. The fine rain ran down his face and made it look as if he were crying. Actually, he was thinking about Leland’s boasts of building up a fleet of trains, and of crossing the West with track. They were fine boasts, but the truth was that the war had led to massive inflation and chronic shortages. The small locomotive which chuffed and steamed in front of them now had cost him $13,688 – compared with the pre-war price of a big ten-wheeler of $10,000. A ton of rails which had previously cost $60 had risen to well over $112, and that was the price he had to pay in Boston. Freight charges around Cape Horn were extra, and punishingly high.
Shovels, wheelbarrows, picks, rail spikes, explosives, and signalling equipment were all in desperately short supply, and there was the ever-present risk that they would be requisitioned by the army for use against the Confederacy.
Collis had tried only yesterday to sell a block of S.P. securities to a syndicate of Sacramento businessmen; but after ‘due discussion’ they had decided to ‘wait and see how far the railroad goes.’ If every potential investor reacted the same way, Collis doubted if the railroad would stretch any further than Roseville, only a few miles outside of Sacramento. Going over the company accounts the previous night, he had estimated it would cost them over $12 million just to extend the tracks a good buggy ride out of town. Leland’s $600,000 would pay for little more than a couple of miles of track.
Charles had blown out his cheeks in resignation and said, ‘We’re going to have to work damned hard, that’s all, Collis. If people are hesitant about investing, we’re just going to have to peel off our coats, jump off the dock, and say, “Come on, boys.” ’
Collis had closed the accounts. ‘Right now,’ he had told Charles, ‘I’m tempted to take a clean shirt and get out for good.’
Theodore had said nothing at all.
Leland now stood
with one hand raised, and the other clutching his lapel. This was a recognisable sign to anybody who had been obliged to suffer his oratory before that he was reaching the climax of his speech, and that he would mercifully soon be finished.
‘My friends,’ he said, ‘from this day forth, California and Sacramento can do nothing but prosper, for the Sierra Pacific Railroad will in one adventurous stroke bring the peoples of America, East and West, in almost instant communication with each other, and out of that can come nothing but happier understanding, flourishing commerce, and human progress towards that ideal society which is Paradise on Earth.’
There was a light patter of applause, and then Leland said, ‘I name this locomotive the Governor McCormick, and I ask the Lord to bless her endeavours and to keep safe all those who travel with her.’
Collis glanced at Jane. She had been promised that the locomotive would be christened for her; but at the last moment, Leland had declared that it would not be ‘protocol’ for the governor of California to have a locomotive named for his wife. It would smack of nepotism, or something like that; and in any case he was president of the railroad. Collis hadn’t argued about it. The locomotive would be too small for long-distance hauls, and would probably end up ingloriously shunting freight cars around, and that struck Collis as a fitting finish for anything called the Governor McCormick.
The rain slicked the locomotive’s boiler, and the wind blew the dark smoke out of its funnel and across the street. A small silver band, which had been sheltering in a striped marquee, struck up with ‘Clear the Way!’ and Leland joined in, in a wavering baritone.
Collis left the platform and walked across the churned-up street. He had almost reached his carriage when someone called his name, and he turned around to see Mrs Pangborn making her way towards him, her skirts lifted out of the mud, her bonnet stained with damp.
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