Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2)

by Steven S. Drachman

  Seneca Village was their Eden, a pretty little hamlet of ex-slave landowners. They grew tomatoes and beans there, and they raised cows, and they were happy.

  “Well,” she admitted, “children are not always happy, I suppose, but that is how I remember those few years. A great, warming happiness that I thought could never end.”

  Her father was a sailor, and he would return home every six months or so to her mother’s smiles and Hester’s hugs, bringing back his pay and usually a formidable haul from the trip, sometimes fruit or vegetables for the family to sell, sometimes turkeys. Once even a bull. But in 1855, while her father was at sea, Hester and her family were forcibly evicted from their homes, moved out so the government could build the Central Park, and the police gave her mother a clop on the head with his club as compensation for their house. Their Village emptied out in an afternoon, and destroyed over the following week.

  “And then my father’s ship just didn’t come back,” she told me in a whisper, “as though he knew he would no longer have a home to return to. I used to wish that meant that he had deserted us, that he didn’t love us anymore, that he and his shipmates had killed their captain and taken to the high seas as pirates. Anything was better than believing that his magnificent life-fire had been extinguished by the sea, which of course is what happened. Thinking of us, he held his breath for as long as he could as he sank beneath the rocky Atlantic Ocean waves, and then at last he breathed seawater into his lungs, and he was no more, and he was never seen again.”

  When the money ran out, Hester’s mother obtained employment in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and she staggered along without the husband and home she loved for another two years until the tuberculosis took her, and then Hester was all alone. She went to work at the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue as a teacher’s helper, and, after the riots, she fled New York altogether. A while later, she made it out West.

  “And then a while even later,” she said, smiling faintly, finally, “I broke down your unexpectedly flimsy door.”

  Then she changed the subject quickly, and it wasn’t for a long time that I realized that she’d skipped half her life, from fleeing New York in 1863 to breaking down my door in 1878, which was the part of her life she didn’t want to talk about, I reckon, and she went on for a while about her plans for the money. She said that even back on the African continent, her ancestors in their local village had already been refugees, expelled thousands of years earlier from a glorious golden kingdom at the far-fabled end of the world, which existed now only in memory and in a scribbled drawing at the very edge of the primitive map scrawled on the wall of their hut, an heirship to which they clung and which they cherished even through a hundred years of captivity in the New World, and upon obtaining their freedom, they looked again to their ancient, treasured homeland, and they continued their planning, as though uninterrupted. Upon the death of her mother and father, Hester was left to carry on the family dream alone, to achieve what had been so close to her parents’ hearts, and of which her grandparents, and great-parents, and on and on, had been dreaming for millennia, longing only to travel across the sea with a great army of her fellow dark brethren and retake the golden, magical kingdom. She saw it whenever she shut her eyes to sleep. Even when she shut her eyes just for a moment, just to blink the sun from her eyes – there it was, shining in her imagination.

  “And thus,” she concluded, almost breathlessly, and smiling as though she realized suddenly that it all made no real sense at all, that all this was more like a particularly vivid fairy tale than a sensible plan for one’s life. “I need money to restore a kingdom, and so I am robbing a train.”

  “I think that maybe the Sidonians were an afterthought for you.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “A way to convince you to help J.P. Morgan, and hence to convince J.P. Morgan to help me. I would not have cared whether the Sidonians were to rule the world, so long as I were free to live in the kingdom of my ancestors. But by now, your pain is my own, and I hate them as do you.”

  I am not certain why this did not bother me. But it did not. She had waited for just the right moment to confess that she had tricked me.

  I said that her cause seemed an excellent one, and an excellent use of her earnings, though I didn’t really understand anything she had said about her age-old quest, but most of what she said just floated a bit in the air and then evaporated in the snug darkness of the little cabin, because all the time that she was speaking, I was picturing myself sitting with Hester by a jungle stream, somewhere in South America.

  Morgan returned to his home on Madison Avenue at two o’clock in the morning. I don’t know the reason why. Perhaps he had been wandering the streets, hoping for a visit from a dead young woman. Perhaps he had visited a mistress on a tree-lined enclave in Greenwich Village, on the third floor of the fourth house on the left, and he would now return to his home, pretending (if Fanny were to meet him on the stairs) that he had gone out for a midnight stroll to clear his head, to gather his thoughts on the nation’s imminent return to the gold standard. Or perhaps, in truth, he had gone out for a midnight stroll to clear his head, and he had honestly spent the entire walk considering the implications of the gold standard. I just don’t know. I can imagine all manner of interesting activities for Morgan to be involved in during those early morning hours, from political intrigue to sordid liaisons, but I cannot know everything. And if I were to hazard a reckless guess and present it as fact, that would be doing a disservice to you, my readers, to whom I have promised the truth.

  Morgan had just taken off his left shoe and laid it gently in the inner foyer, caked with mud from the rainy night outside, when he heard Louisa crying out from her second floor bedroom. Morgan tossed off his right shoe and bounded up the steps, where he found little brown-haired Louisa – the shy 11-year-old who was his favorite child – shaking and shivering in the dark night. He touched her hand, and she melted into his arms.

  Once she had stopped shaking, his daughter lay back in bed, and he put his hand gently on her cool forehead.

  He was sweaty and a little bit drunk, and he knew that his little girl could smell the gin on his breath, but he tried to radiate fatherly dignity and balance. She did not seem to mind the gin on his breath, and he realized that this might be a redolence that would remind Louisa pleasantly of her father for many years to come, and that it might be a perfume that she would unconsciously seek out in the man she wished to marry. After a moment, he thought, well, why not let the poor bastard drink?

  “I’m not frightened,” she said, and she tried to shut her eyes.

  “It’s all right to be frightened,” Morgan said gently. “I’ve been frightened for most of just about every day since I was born.” And then a moment later, he wondered whether this was a reassuring thing to tell the little girl, when she was lying in the dark, shivering from a bad dream, hoping to sleep.

  “You are frightened?” she said.

  He nodded.

  “But I will always protect you,” he added. “There is no reason for you to be frightened. Let me worry about things.”

  “What are you afraid of ?” she asked him.

  I fear always saying the wrong thing, he thought to himself, and doing the wrong thing, and becoming a person I was not meant to be.

  But instead, Morgan shrugged and smiled, and he tousled his little girl’s hair.

  “Truly,” she said. “Are you afraid of ghosts?”

  He shook his head.

  “I welcome ghosts,” he said. “If ghosts are real, then we can see people who are gone, who we would like to see again. Or discover for the very first time.”

  He met her eyes.

  “Don’t be afraid of ghosts,” he said, “my little Louisa.”

  She smiled, and she shut her eyes and tried to sleep again.

  “You’re afraid of dreams,” he said.

  She nodded, her eyes still shut.

  “Dreams are just make-believe,” Morgan said. “They are ju
st you, talking to yourself. They are nothing to be afraid of, unless you are afraid of yourself.”

  He nudged her chin.

  “Maybe tell me about it?” he asked. “Tell me about it, and we’ll figure it out together.”

  Then she told the story of her dream, the story of a magical city in a valley surrounded by mountains, a place where all you might wish would come true, a happy land shattered by a war that came and left blood in the meadow.

  “And in my dream,” she said, in her embarrassed little girl’s voice, “there was a young woman who wants to take you away from me. A young woman, just in her twenties, very pretty … and she was walking through the blood stained valley, calling your name.”[14]

  A haze came to Morgan’s eyes.

  But he blinked it away, and he kissed his favorite child on the forehead.

  “What an imagination you have,” he whispered gently. “What a vivid imagination.”

  Chapter 7

  We all met in Sheriff Wesley’s cabin in northern Nevada, just a few miles south of the Idaho border, and a few miles north of the Central Pacific, the target of our planned crime. It was just a lean-to, nothing fancy, and we plotted by lantern light. Wesley was the ringleader. Not really, but he wanted to be called the ringleader, so we called him the ringleader. At the first meeting, he said, “I’m basically the ringleader of this operation.” And we all nodded. “Ringleader Wesley,” I said cheerfully, and I raised my flask in a little informal toast. It was better than calling him Sheriff, which seemed to make him feel guilty and regretful about abandoning and betraying his official duties and his oath of office, and so we called him Ringleader instead. It was important to keep Wesley in good spirits, as he was central to our plan of action.

  There were just four men in our gang, plus a few moles scattered throughout the country, and two women, which included Hester and also another woman whose name was Anichka. Anichka was from Khabnoye, a beautiful, 15th century city in Ukraine on the banks of the Uzh River, and how she got out West she wasn’t saying, and I knew better than to ask. She was the angry wife of a failed and now not-very-mysteriously deceased gold miner; she was a tough woman, but she knew explosives from her years unsuccessfully blowing rocks out of the ground, so she had a role to play. She was in her early thirties, worn down by the life out here, wiry and muscular, a little weathered, with the crookedest nose I’d ever seen on a woman, and even though I could barely understand a word she said, she had enough dash-fire in her to join our outlaw gang. (Plus, as I have said, she knew explosives. I just had to picture her husband’s body blown up into the clouds and through a couple of neighboring territories to see the value she could add, and I hoped she could do the same to the train’s safe, and maybe to any Sidonians who might get in her way.)

  Hester outlined the division of spoils, and she briefly explained the Chapman method of train robbery, named for John T. Chapman, a Sunday school teacher who remained particularly humane when he turned to train robbery (nabbing $40,000 from an express car near Verdi), which was the main reason that Anichka had little use for him. A secondary reason for her contempt was that Chapman had failed to steer clear of prison. So he had a “method” to his name, but neither a red cent nor his freedom. Anichka preferred the “wrecking method,” which doesn’t require much explanation on my part, but Hester explained that the wrecking method probably involved killing people, which had the drawback of possibly killing the poor sap who knew the combination.

  I stayed quiet. I was with Anichka on this one. I hated the train and everyone on it, and I wanted to kill not only every Sidonian aboard, but I wanted to kill the train. Only my ghosts, and their help and loyalty and their moral compass, would hold me back when the moment arrived. But I truly hated it, this dark train from my city of death. I stayed quiet. Maybe Hester knew anyway.

  Anichka sneered, but that seemed to be the end of that for her, at least for a while. Hester described only as much of the plan as she considered absolutely necessary to reveal. We memorized our roles, adjourned, and we all walked out of Wesley’s cabin into a night thick with humidity, danger and intrigue, and we rode our steeds in opposite directions, vanishing into the moonless darkness.

  The next day, Hester rode into Reno, which at the time was a small, remote railroad town. She crossed the tracks, and then she rode up Commercial Row, past Reno Mercantile, The Wine House, The Oberon, and The Palace. At the end of the short street of brick and wood framed businesses, she stopped at a small hotel with a “room available” sign in the window, took a cheap room in the back, where she waited for word of the shipment.

  Because I remained a wanted criminal, we both figured that I should avoid the city, and so I set up camp in the woods just to the North and tried to keep out of sight. I hunted rabbits and deer, occasionally even killed one, and roasted it over an open flame at night when the stars came out. A week later, after a visit to the market across Commercial Row from her hotel, Hester mounted her horse and galloped out of Reno to my little campsite. She brought me some coffee, a little whiskey (enough to stave off a full detoxification, with all the side effects that would likely entail, but not enough to fully satisfy my addiction, though I understood why she intended to limit my imbibing), some bread, vegetables and potatoes, a passable supply of dried meat. It was good to see her. We sat by the fire and watched the embers burn down, and we talked almost until dawn. Then she mounted her horse and rode back to Reno, and I fell asleep as the hot sun rose. After that, when Hester brought me supplies, she spoke little and stayed briefly. And so our life went, until one day three weeks later, Mr. Stanton Hugson, a clerk in San Francisco who worked for the Wells, Fargo company, skipped his lunch and ran across the street to meet Fenton Derby, a young man with whom Mr. Hugson would never be publicly associated, and to whom no connection would ever be drawn. (This was because Mr. Hugson and Mr. Derby were in love, and from the moment of their first meeting to the last, would never admit to knowing each other, even tangentially.) Stanton Hugson was tall and dark, smooth and elegant, and Fenton Derby was slender and excitable, with blazing red hair, pale blue eyes, and pretty red lips; thus, not only did they complement each other physically, but Mr. Derby would never be mistaken for Mr. Hugson, which was important to our scheme.

  Mr. Hugson slipped Mr. Derby a heavily coded note as they passed each other in front of a little restaurant with yellow curtains in the window, which stood on the corner of Halleck and Sansome Streets. Each continued on his way, respective face flushed, respective heart pounding, Mr. Hugson walking Southwest to the Wells Fargo office at Post and Montgomery Streets, and Mr. Derby marching East to the telegraph office on Battery Street, where he wired Hester Smith an unnecessarily passionate love letter, which between the ardent sentiments contained in code the precise schedule of the treasure train from San Francisco, which carried a million dollars in gold shipment from the northern Sidonian mine, as well as (allegedly) the ancient secret of the Red Eyebrows.

  Hester received the cable at her hotel room in Reno. The purplier passages of the message raised goose bumps on her skin, from her neck to her ankles, and for a moment she was swept up in the artificial drama, but then she calmed herself down, left the hotel without indicating anything amiss to the clerk, and she rode out of town, to my campsite, where I was asleep in the lingering heat of the day, under a tree.

  On their way out of Dawsey, Allen Jerome and Darryl Fawley stopped in the town’s only grub-shop, a little place off Flatt Street. The body odors of the farmers mingled with the smell of overcooked steak and deliciously fresh eggs. Allen Jerome stuck a fork in the steak and scowled. Darryl Fawley, in his wrinkled suit, with its built-in dust, seemed to belong here; the well-groomed Allen Jerome did not.

  “I wouldn’t shoot a baby in the head,” Darryl Fawley said. “For the Cause, I mean. Or for any reason. I would not set fire to a house with a family inside.”

  Allen Jerome ignored this remark. He already knew this, and Darryl Fawley knew that he knew it.
<
br />   “I’m a mathematician by training, and a failed mathematician by circumstance,” Allen Jerome sighed. “My specialty in academia was geometrically knotted non-closed curves, and on Wall Street my specialty was pretending that the trading models I designed actually worked, although all the while doing little more than bribe people for information. Do you believe that my trading models predicted that I should sell all my gold on September 23, 1869, because the next day the Treasury Secretary would announce sales of federal gold that would deflate the price and inevitably destroy the fortunes of bankers all over Wall Street? That’s quite a sophisticated financial trading model.”

  “Stupid it down’ to my level, Allen.”

  In mathematics, Allen Jerome told his colleague, 1 plus 1 equals two. Everything on one side of the equal sign equals everything on the other side of the equal sign. On Wall Street, the numbers to the right of the equal sign must be greater.

  “Have you heard the sad tale of Mr. Quilford,” Allen Jerome asked, “and his red rubber bouncing balls?”

  Darryl Fawley said that he had.

  (I imagine even you, faithful reader, have heard of Mr. Quilford’s scandal.)

  Mr. Quilford invented the finest red bouncing ball in the world. In its first twelve months on the market – 1861 was the precise year – every boy and girl in America who could afford it purchased Mr. Q’s red rubber bouncing ball. With proper care, it would last three years. When a child grew too old to appreciate a fine rubber bouncing ball, he gave it away to his younger sibling. Every three years, sales would bounce (so to speak) then fall for two years. Mr. Quilford found himself celebrated, then reviled, then celebrated again. Every third year, his stock price would rise, then it would fall.

  When the stock fell for the third time, investors did not merely castigate him, they had him murdered, or so it was said. His body was found in the Hudson River in the wintertime, pleasantly well-preserved.