The Law of Dreams

by Peter Behrens

  “I won’t forget anything.”

  “You watch out for them navvy kills, man. You’re small enough; they’ll put you on the horses. Watch your legs. The horse tip is the wildest spot on any contract — they are always murdering boys.”

  He kissed Arthur, and then went around the kitchen kissing them all, his chest tight with emotion, sorrowful now that he was actually leaving. Never before had he left where anyone had wanted him to stay. Such parting was sweet, in a way.

  “You’re a miserable, ungrateful cur for leaving, after all we’ve done for you.” Shea kissed him, then held open the door.

  Grave, excited, confused, he walked out into the smoke before he could change his mind.

  THERE WAS power in going forward, but it was vulnerable, it could be broken. The ferry flapping across the gray Mersey was packed with cattle. He studied the tramps leaning along the rail and smoking their pipes — tough men in greased hobnail boots, carrying their belongings in handkerchief bundles.

  After the ferry arrived at Woodside landing stage, he followed the tramps up past the slaughter yards to the railway station, where dozens of men sprawled on the platform, puffing pipes, dozing like bulls in the sun.

  After the train slid in, shrieking, he watched well-dressed passengers disembarking and boarding carriages. Gentlemen removed their shiny silk hats, too tall to wear inside. The engine leaked steam and an odor of iron and burned coal. He watched the tramps sauntering down the track, pitching their packs and bundles up into open wagons attached at the rear of the train, and climbing over the sides.

  A whistle whooped like a bird, and a boy raced along the platform, slamming carriage doors shut. The train shook itself, and Fergus heard the iron couplings banging, one after another, as it began to move.

  You throw yourself on the world like turf on a fire.

  Picking up his bundle, he started walking along the platform, conscious of the iron wheels rumbling and creaking, the scent of grease, and death so close. Glancing over his shoulder he could see the string of open wagons approaching, each one packed with men peering out over the wooden sides.

  He let the first open wagon go by. Walking faster, he flipped his bundle into the second, and saw one of the men aboard catch it. Grasping the iron ladder, he felt the hard power of the train, and suddenly he was running to keep up. His feet left the ground, and he hauled himself up the first two rungs then froze, disoriented by the complex motion, the ground spinning, the wagon trembling like an animal.

  A couple of tramps reached over, grabbed him, and roughly dragged him in over the side. He fell onto the floor but jumped up immediately, and a man gave him his bundle. They stood packed shoulder-to-shoulder. The wagon rocked and shook.

  Looking over the sides, he saw houses tumbling by, gardens, piles of bricks, ash heaps. A pen of sheep, a fellow waving a hat, a girl dashing liquid from a window. He gripped the flexing sides and stared at the world rushing past like an animal escaping, as though the train had torn a trap open.

  PART IV

  Red Molly

  NORTH WALES, JANUARY – MARCH 1847

  The Cutting

  HE TRAMPED THE COAST road for four days, out of Chester, singing to himself, light-headed, face burned by bright wind off the sea. Most of the time he was alone. He avoided Scotchmen and English tramps. He knew the Irish by the bent shapes of their hats, and sometimes joined a pack of men for a few hours, learning what he could from their talk.

  Thousands of navvies and horses were constructing the railway along the coast of North Wales. The work had been let out in sections, in dozens of separate contracts. Each river was being spanned with iron bridgework. The country was being smoothed out mile after mile in the railway’s quest for perfect grade. Cuttings were slashed straight through the Welsh hills, and tons of excavation dumped, spread, and compacted across every soft place, every dip, every bit of marsh.

  “A railway loves the level grade,” an old tramp told him one afternoon.

  They were smoking their pipes and watching a thousand navvies at work in a cutting, hacking with picks and spades. Fergus had wanted to know why they couldn’t lay the railway over the slight rise instead of cutting straight through it.

  “On a slope, iron wheels don’t have any purchase on iron rails — they spin,” the old tramp said. “Which is why we make cuttings and fill embankments — to make good grade. The world ain’t level, but the navvies make her so.”

  In some places, the line was almost finished, and he heard the crack of hammers and watched men driving spikes, fixing the iron rails on timber sleepers.

  Driving spikes was work looked down upon by the tramps, who said the track-layer gangs were composed of poor Welsh shepherds paid meager wages, drawn down off their black mountains by the promise of hot food.

  Making grade — cutting open the hills, laying a streak of perfect level across the old, soft world — was the work the tramps respected.

  “No skill or risk in pounding iron,” the old tramp said scornfully. “Nothing glory. There’s no battle in it. Making grade is our work — a navvy likes to fight the ground.”

  He understood this. Making grade was a powerful act.

  In Ireland the ground had betrayed them all, poisoned their food.

  Grade was theirs, human. Grade was like a thought made hard and real. It might last a thousand years.

  Grade showed the navvies as strong as the world.

  MOSTLY THE weather was clear and hard, but flurries of snow swept in from the sea, rattling the road, scratching his cheeks.

  He encountered packs of navvies on the tramp, moving in both directions along the coast road. Contractors were always trying to lure the tramps into hiring on — they were fed at the contractors’ beer shops, and slept on clean straw in their sheds. All along the Chester & Holyhead, contracts were shorthanded. Men quit casually, shifting from one contractor’s camp to another, staying clear of the Welsh villages, where they were not welcome.

  Offered wages at Aber cutting, he kept walking.

  At Conwy, the contractor wanted rivet boys on the bridge that plunged like a sword across the neck of the river. Offered two shillings sixpence daily wages, he was stunned, and tempted, but still did not feel like stopping.

  Days tramping the coast were short and cold. The sea on one side, like a green glass eye. It was easy enough living inside your head, absorbing the sky, and thinking only of the weather, the next feed.

  Tramping was strange and addictive, a kind of perfection, but there came a time you had to stop, or you would walk right out of yourself. It would be easy.

  * * *

  “I AM needing tip boys. Ask anyone — I treat my fellows square. Here, man, taste this.”

  The contractor had been standing in the road, waiting with a cart and a cask of beer, willing to hire any tramps that came along. Drawing a pot of beer, he offered it to Fergus. “Wages paid once a month, regular. Three shillings per day. Coin of the realm.”

  Sipping the tawny beer, Fergus looked across fields lightly flavored with snow to a cutting where hundreds of men with picks and shovels were gouging a right-of-way.

  Looking the other direction, he watched the sea smashing the coast. It seemed yellow, so angry in its foam.

  “Samuel Murdoch is my name.” The contractor wore a straw hat tied under his chin with a ribbon and an old swallowtail coat, weathered purple. Pantaloons were tucked into the tops of horse boots spattered with mud. He watched Fergus sip the beer. “You’re a good Irishman — where are you from?”

  The days of the Dragon fell away and he saw his sisters and parents, and the white faces of dead girls — Phoebe and Luke — so strangely composed.

  Feeling the contractor staring, Fergus looked up slowly.

  Man, I’m from Hell. I am dosed in death.

  But you had to shove all that down. Conceal it. It was poison to you, possibly a hanging.

  “Limerick,” he said.

  Murdoch nodded briskly. “I’m Carrickfergu
s, myself. All my fellows are Irishmen, pure and pure, excepting a few little black Welsh and one or two Cornwall miners that don’t cause any trouble. I pay coin of the realm, no scrip, and I treat my fellows fair. Is that good beer?”

  “It is.”

  “You’re my man, then.”

  Fergus hesitated, clinging to the freedom of the road. So far his head had been clear, but if he kept on any longer, alone, bad thoughts would return.

  The dead unburied, pecking him.

  Four days of solitude was enough.

  “All right.”

  “Good man. Finish that up and go see my timer, he’ll set you down in his book.”

  THE CUTTING was a notch in the hill. Hundreds of navvies were digging it wider and deeper, filling horse carts with the excavation.

  The camp sprawled over muddy ground adjacent to the right-of-way. He crossed a field where dozens of spare axles, cartwheels, wooden wagon-tongues, and barrels of grease were arranged in neat rows and stacks. In other fields there were dumps of gravel and yellow sand; stacks of building lumber, and timber sleepers; black mountains of coal. A park of wrecked horse carts neatly arrayed had been picked over for salvage.

  Heavy drays were squishing along the road in and out of the camp, loaded with casks and crates, bundles of iron tools, burlap sacks of meal.

  Despite the abundance, there was an air of meanness to the sprawl. Horses standing bleakly in an icy field stared at him walking by. Looking up, he could see shanties, tents, and shebangs where the men lived, terraced on the muddy slope just below the cutting.

  The heart of the camp was equipment sheds, repair shops, and barns, all built with green lumber. Mud alleys between flimsy buildings were deserted except for drays and teamsters unloading stores. He heard a blacksmith hammering and smelled the sour tang of hot iron. Passing an unpainted wooden church, he saw every window was hollow, framed with shards of broken glass.

  Every structure in the camp looked temporary, ready to buckle in a hard wind. The air smelled of iron, wheel grease, and pine lumber. He passed a bootmaker’s tent, with a pair of old boots dangling from a pole, and a barber’s, with a red-and-white sheet flapping in the wind. He met an old man pushing a barrow of apples and asked for directions to the timer’s hut.

  It stood at the center of the camp, next to Mr. Murdoch’s beer shop, which had plate-glass windows and looked light and fragile, as though it might lift from its footings and sail away. The timer’s hut was a squat cabin, roofed with a sheet of iron. A brass bell hung outside. He gave it a pull, and a voice yelled at him to enter.

  Inside was warm. The timer sat at a rolltop desk. “Close the door, you devil.” He spoke without looking around.

  A fire glowing in the nickel stove.

  Fergus waited, absorbing the heat of the room.

  The timer spun around in his chair. A crab-like youth in a dingy white shirt, wearing steel spectacles. “Hiring on?”

  “I am.”

  The timer reached to a shelf and took down a ledger. Opening it on his desk, he dipped his pen, made an entry, then offered the pen. “Step up and make your mark, you heathen.”

  While Fergus made his scratch, the timer started drawing a pot of beer from a cask in the corner. The scent filled the warm hut, and Fergus suddenly felt dizzy. Had been right after all to stop? Perhaps his fortune was to keep walking.

  Walk until you come to the end of the country.

  Walk into the green sea.

  There is nothing holding you in the world.

  “Look smart!”

  Blinking, he looked up. The timer was holding out a pot of beer. “Drink up! Mr. Murdoch’s best.”

  “I can’t pay for it. Don’t have the money.”

  “Mr. Murdoch treats them signing on. Drink up.” The timer took out a paper ticket from a drawer, marked it, and slid it across. “Your sub ticket — subsistence, worth nine shillings, deducted from wages. Find a shanty taking lodgers, and exchange your sub for a week’s board. After one week, you may draw another. Pay is made, last Saturday of the month, at Mr. Murdoch’s beer shop in the camp. If you are thirsty, you may always take a drink at Mr. Murdoch’s — the barmen will mark it against wages. Stay away from the shops in the village — Welshmen are thieves.”

  Fergus stared at the slip of paper in his hand, feeling overwhelmed by warmth, beer, and an inchoate sense of everything lost.

  The sense of spinning.

  Like a dead leaf whirling from a tree.

  “Try Muck Muldoon’s shanty,” the timer suggested. “He ought to have a crib to spare. His wife’s the pretty red doxie.”

  * * *

  THE SHANTY camp on the Welsh hillside resembled the baile on the mountain, if the mountain were thoroughly peeled and stripped, every stream caked over, every well forgotten, every cabin slathered into the ground.

  Muddy paths were lined with shanties that had no proper roofs or walls, only scraps of whatever would stand.

  The terrain was barren and brown, stripped of turf, trees, gorse, animals. No potato plots. No patches of well-drained limestone ground. Nothing could be raised in such a slickness of mud.

  No mysteries. Everything had been scavenged from somewhere else. The whole hillside could have been the ruins of one enormous, tumbled cabin, a giant hump of greasy clay, marled with stones, scraps of canvas, and bits of lumber. Slowly losing its shape, dissolving under the rain.

  Overtaking a woman lugging a sack of coal, he asked her the way to Muldoon’s.

  Red Molly

  A RED-HAIRED YOUNG WOMAN was boiling wash in a kettle in front of Muldoon’s shanty. Fergus watched her stirring the clothes. Small nose, small hands, wearing an old blue gown.

  “They said you take lodgers,” he called.

  She looked up. Full lips, freckles. “Got your sub?”

  He nodded.

  “Let’s see.”

  He walked up and showed his ticket.

  “Show us your tongue,” she demanded.

  He stared at her freckled face.

  “Come on, man,” she said impatiently. “Open up, or go away.”

  He stuck out his tongue as rudely as he could.

  She glanced at it, then nodded. “Come along, I’ll show you what it is.”

  He followed her inside the shanty, resenting her brusqueness.

  “There is three rooms. Muldoon and me has the one. The other is lodgers. This here is the cozy, where we eat.”

  A table and benches on an earth floor. A battered armchair and a couple of three-legged stools in front of the fire, where an iron kettle was seething on the hob.

  The girl rapped her knuckles on the table and pointed to a stain in the wood. “Can you guess what that is?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Blood. That’s where they laid out Kelly.”

  “Who is Kelly?”

  “Kelly was killed Christmas week.” She touched the stain with her fingertips. “Broke like a bowl of eggs. The fellows brought him in here, laid him on that table. They used to say he was rough, but he wasn’t, not really.” She rapped her knuckles on the wood. “Come, I’ll show you your crib. You get a pot of beer with your supper. If you want more, it’s sixpence.”

  He followed her into a sleeping room where clothes hung from nails on the rafter. The crib she showed him contained a straw pallet and a blanket.

  “Was it Kelly’s?”

  “It was.” She was small and quick in her movements, smoothing the blanket. She didn’t bother looking at him. He sensed her impatience.

  “What happened with Kelly?”

  “They say he must have slipped while his nag was pulling, and the truck cut off both his legs. Muck found him on the line. I was getting the dinner, nine bits of mutton on string, boiling away. Except they carried in old Kelly, and laid him out on the table. I’ve scrubbed but it don’t go away. Do you want the lodgings or not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give it over then.” She took his sub. “The fellows will be back soon.
Mutton for supper, spoileen. You get porridge with milk in the morning, and your dinner to carry along. I will sell you some tobacco, if you want.”

  “What is your name?” he asked

  “Molly they call me.”

  “Fergus I am.”

  “The basin for washing is outside, and the jakes.”

  She left abruptly, and he sat down on the bed, trying to remember what had brought him out here. Mostly the pure, sick desire to keep moving, which he had felt ever since that morning in the snow.

  As he lay back on the bed he could hear the girl, outside, stirring the wash.

  He stared up at the shabby sticks that were rafters, and the planks and scraps of canvas forming the roof, and knew it could all come down in a good knocking wind, burying him. He could feel the weight pressing his chest, but he made himself stay flat in the bed, though he wanted get up, run outside.

  The only true thing is how alone you are now.

  You can’t run from it or you’ll never stop.

  IT WAS dark when he awoke. The fragrant steam of boiling meat made him hungry, and he got up and went out into the cozy, where Molly had lit oil lamps and was kneeling by the fire, stirring the kettle.

  She looked up and grinned. Her eyes were green — sea green. Water and light.

  “Sit down, man. They’ll be in soon enough.”

  Sitting on one of the three-legged stools, he took out his pipe. Now that it was settled where he would live and eat and work, he should feel relieved, but did not. He felt the gloom closing around him and wished he were on the tramp again.

  He searched his pockets for tobacco, then remembered he had nothing left.

  “I can sell you backer,” she said quickly. “That’s what you want, ain’t it? Sixpence a good handful. Straight backer, too. No junk in it.”

  “Don’t have the money.”

  “I might advance you enough for a smoke. Would that suit you?”

  “It would.”

  She disappeared into the other bedroom and came out with the tobacco. “You’re hired for a tip boy, I reckon?”