Mending Horses

by M. P. Barker

“I know,” Augusta said.

  “Aye, that you do.” Maybe that was what kept him coming to her door: knowing that there was a hole in her heart that matched the one in his own. An impulse seized him, perhaps born of all this talk of wanting. He stepped closer to her, put a fingertip under her chin, tilted her face up, and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

  “I’m no better than all this.” His shrug took in the tumbledown house around them, the slop-strewn streets outside, the boundaries of his world. “But you are, lass. And don’t you be believing any different.” And then, because he didn’t trust himself not to tell her any more of what he was wanting, he turned and left her there, her amber eyes wide with surprise and her lips trembling with unasked questions.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Monday, September 30, 1839, West Stockbridge, Massachusetts

  “Hear that?” Mr. Stocking slammed down the lid on one of the compartments in his wagon. The sound echoed off the walls of the wagon shed. He opened and closed two more bins with the same hollow clatter. “That, my friend, is the sound of success.”

  “Empty?” Daniel asked.

  The peddler nodded. “Almost all of ’em. I got maybe a dozen pieces of tin left. There’s mostly notions and elixirs now, and I can sell ’em in the evenings out of my trunk.”

  “No more selling after the show,” Daniel said. Mr. Stocking’s smile broadened like that of a smug boy. Daniel grinned back, thinking of all the extra time he and Billy would gain for working with the ponies or practicing their tumbling.

  For the peddler, Daniel hoped there might be time for afternoon napping. The added labor of practicing with the band and teaching new songs to Billy, performing with Phizzy, helping Mr. Chamberlain manage the show, and helping Daniel train Ivy and the ponies was wearing on him. Mr. Stocking’s vests no longer strained to meet across his belly, and his broadfalls gapped at the waist. His face seemed a bit less round, his eyes a bit more shadowed. Although he had energy enough to fiddle and sing or confer with Mr. Chamberlain long into the evenings, any time he had a quiet moment to sit still, he’d nod off to sleep. Daniel and Billy took turns riding in the peddler’s wagon as they traveled from town to town, so he could doze without tumbling off. Aye, a few empty hours in the fellow’s day wouldn’t come amiss.

  “There you are, Jonny!” Mr. Chamberlain crossed from the hotel to the shed in long strides, briskly rubbing his hands together.

  “What is it?” Mr. Stocking asked. “You’re grinning like a fox who just found the chicken shed door ajar.”

  “Saddle up, friend,” Mr. Chamberlain said.

  “I got something to show you.” He jutted his chin toward Daniel. “You can come along, if you like.”

  “Shall I fetch Billy?” Daniel asked.

  “No need,” Mr. Chamberlain said. “Your friend’s having a juggling lesson.”

  “So what’s this phenomenon we’re going to see?” Mr. Stocking asked.

  The conjurer patted the peddler on the back. “The future, my friend. The future.”

  “There.” Mr. Chamberlain made a sweeping arm motion, as if the sight before them were something he’d conjured up rather than something that had likely been there for months.

  A scar of broken earth and shattered rock stretched across the landscape, extending east and west as far as Daniel could see. A stream of men gouged the land with pickaxes and shovels, and hauled dirt and stone away from places that were too high or toward those that were too low.

  A dozen years ago, Daniel’s da had sweated away his days digging alongside scores of dust-caked men just like those down below. They’d laid the foundations for mills in Lowell, Cabotville, Indian Orchard, and Westfield, and dug the canals to hold the water to power them. They’d built row upon row of brick boardinghouses for the Yankee girls who’d worked those mills. But there’d been no brick tenements for the builders, nor any wooden ones either. The Irish had been left to cobble together their own shanties from warped boards and clinker bricks and other construction refuse, and God help them if a Yankee foreman chose not to turn a blind eye to their scavenging.

  Daniel had no doubt that the men laboring below were Paddies like himself. There’d be no mills rising from their work, though, but a road of wood and iron. Somewhere there’d be makeshift Paddy camps, far from town to avoid offending decent Yankee folk.

  Mr. Stocking whistled. “Didn’t know the railroad was building out here in West Stockbridge yet.” He and Daniel dismounted and dropped their horses’ reins.

  “You know who I was raising a glass with while you were hawking your scrap metal?” Mr. Chamberlain asked. “A fella by the name of Alexander Birnie, who’s an engineer for the Western Rail Road. He wrote this up for me.” He drew a paper from his coat pocket. Flapping it open with a flourish, he laid it on a nearby boulder. The paper was a map showing Massachusetts and part of New York. Someone had written on it with a heavy black pencil: lines and X’s and words that were nearly illegible to anyone except the person who’d written them.

  “It’s a map of our future.” Mr. Chamberlain pointed to a thick black line that squiggled from Springfield to Pittsfield, indicating the railroad’s future path.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Mr. Stocking said. “Be a great way to transport your museum, won’t it? You won’t get any use out of it this year, though. I heard it’s only finished as far as Springfield. They still got the Connecticut River to bridge.” He lowered his spectacles with one finger and peered into Mr. Chamberlain’s face. “You want to catch a ride on one’a them cars, we’ll have to go all the way to Springfield to do it. That’s a good fifty, sixty miles from here. Besides, you don’t know what sort’a accommodations you’d need for all your peripatetic paraphernalia, never mind how much it’ll cost to haul.”

  “It’s not Springfield we’re going to. It’s here.” Mr. Chamberlain pointed to the town of Chester. There was a cluster of X’s a fair distance from the center of town. X’s were also clustered at several other places along the railroad route. “According to Birnie,” Mr. Chamberlain continued, “they’ve got work crews all the way from here to Springfield.” His eyes gleamed with an excitement that Daniel couldn’t fathom.

  Apparently Mr. Stocking couldn’t, either. “You could’a told us that back at the hotel, ’stead of dragging us out to the hinterlands.”

  Mr. Chamberlain made a tsking noise. “Don’t you see the possibilities?” He gestured toward the work site. “Look at ’em. Hundreds of men right here, and Birnie says there’s thousands more camped out in Chester and Middlefield.” He thumped Daniel on the chest. “Your people, boy. They’re hauling ’em in by the boatload.”

  Mr. Stocking chortled. “You think those fellas have money to spare for your circus?”

  “Museum,” Mr. Chamberlain corrected indignantly. “Those fellas’ wages are burning holes right through their pockets. What else have they got to spend ’em on?”

  Mr. Stocking’s eyes flickered toward Daniel. It wasn’t hard for Daniel to guess what he was thinking. Liquor, that was what they’d spend their money on, had they any to spare. He thought about the rowdies in the pit who heckled Mr. Stocking and made lewd comments at Francesca, who’d called Mr. Sharp “darky” and “nigger,” the louts who taunted Mr. Lamb’s animals until the teamsters had to throw them out of the menagerie tent. He shuddered at the idea of a pavilion full of such men.

  “Birnie says they can’t camp near the towns, so they have these shanty villages out in the middle of nowhere,” Mr. Chamberlain said. “Those camps ought’a be as good as a mill town for drumming up an audience. Better, ’cause there won’t be any preachers railing against us.”

  “Or any constabulary, should things get out of hand,” Mr. Stocking said.

  “When has a constable ever been on our side? I’ll bet we can fill that tent twice a day for a week if we follow that railroad line.”

  “We’ve already got four weeks of shows booked from here to Vermont and back. You want to cancel all those ve
nues and head east instead?” Mr. Stocking shook his head. “Our advance man’ll be apoplectic, trying to redo it all.”

  “No, no. We’ll tack some more shows onto the end.” Mr. Chamberlain traced the route they were meant to travel for the next month: a loop that ran north into Vermont, then west into New York, then southeasterly back into Massachusetts. “We’ll keep on same as we planned until we hit Pittsfield.” His finger moved from Pittsfield eastward along the railroad line. “We’ll add one more week along the railroad and finish with a coupl’a days in Northampton or Springfield. That’ll give us another ten days of showing, and we’ll wind up in a good-sized town to boot.”

  “It’ll be mid-November by then,” Mr. Stocking said. “Might be a bit cold for folks to sit in a pavilion to watch a show.”

  Mr. Chamberlain shrugged as he folded his map and returned it to his pocket. “If the weather gets bad, we’ll cancel.” He gave Mr. Stocking a friendly punch in the shoulder. “Come on, Jonny, where’s your sense of adventure?” He slapped Daniel on the back. “You can be your Irish self, boy. Those Paddies hear we got a couple of their own on display, and we won’t be able to beat ’em off with a stick.” Before Daniel could respond, the conjurer collected his horse’s reins and put one shiny black boot in the stirrup. “You think on it, Jonny,” he said, swinging up into his saddle. “There’s got to be two, three hundred right there in front of us, and hundreds more farther down the line. Not bad at two to four bits a head.” He put his heels to his horse and cantered off toward the hotel.

  “I don’t know, Dan’l,” Mr. Stocking said, shaking his head. “You get that many workingmen in one place with no civilizing influence around ’em and a little liquor in their bellies, there’s no telling what could happen.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Tuesday, October 1, 1839, Springfield, Massachusetts

  “They’ve all gone mad,” Hugh said, watching Ferry Street fill with people shoving against each other like sheep driven into a pen. “What’s it about, Eamon?”

  “Is it the moon you’ve been living on, that you don’t know?” Eamon said.

  “If they was all Irish, I’d think the Pope himself was come to town.”

  Eamon put an arm around Hugh’s shoulders. “ ’Tis a fool I am, Hugh. How would you be thinking of aught but your own troubles, with your lads laid to rest but a few weeks ago?”

  Hugh suppressed a shudder. It had been a mistake, seeking Eamon out. Oh, the man meant kindly, that he did, and Eamon’s Katie had been the soul of sweetness and consideration, never mind that they’d only two rooms to fit themselves and their four girls, without adding Hugh to the household. But every sympathetic glance and soft word, every kindness they did him was another stone on his chest, a reminder that he was a coward and a liar and no fit man to be taking advantage of their generosity. It was only the drink that kept him from feeling crushed entirely under the weight of their sympathy and his own guilt.

  It seemed hard for Eamon to stay in a somber mood today. The crowds packing the street laughed and joked with a festive air. Eamon found their mood infectious, his eyes sparkling like a boy’s on holiday. “It’s the railroad, man,” he said. “It’s opening this very day, and the governor and all here to celebrate.”

  “Aye,” Hugh replied. “I’ve heard.” He’d have needed to be dead himself to have missed the talk. How many of his mates had traded their jobs digging canals and building mills for the promise of better wages laying track? They said even a Paddy had a chance of working his way up to foreman or higher, if he didn’t work himself to death first. “But it’s naught to do with me, so I never minded the day it was to be done.”

  “Done?” Eamon said, dragging Hugh with him as he wove through the crowd. “Why, it’s hardly begun. It’s open but from here to Worcester. It’s still building through to Albany. The tracks’ll be laid out like spiderwebs across the country before long. Some day it’ll be but five days from Boston to Saint Louis. Imagine! ’Tis the future, cousin. The future at our very doorstep.” The excitement in Eamon’s flushed and grinning face was mirrored in the faces of the men around him, jostling to be the first to the new depot.

  The future, Hugh thought, listening to the talk that swirled about him, words light with curiosity, optimism, hope, talking of this new railroad the way folk back to home had talked of America: the opening of a door to a golden future of prosperity and progress. So he’d felt when he and Margaret had first arrived in Boston with Liam still in nappies. He’d not been such a fool as to expect riches, but he had dreamed of a decent wage for a day’s work, a proper home for his family, and no landlords to answer to. He’d expected America to give him everything he’d ever dreamed of, but instead it had taken away everything he’d ever loved.

  A brass band played over the noise of the crowd as he and Eamon turned the corner from Ferry Street onto Main. The new depot with its sloping walls and square corner towers rose above them, as imposing as a massive ancient shrine. He shoved his way through the crowd, trying to keep sight of Eamon’s threadbare jacket.

  The ground shuddered and rumbled, and the crowd’s motion shifted, some pushing forward harder, some falling back, not sure they wanted to be quite so close after all. In the shift, Eamon and Hugh found an opening and slipped into the forward rank of people.

  The track looked like a gleaming ladder of iron and wood laid on the ground and stretching forever to the east, and west to the river. Folk packed in on either side of it—more than Hugh imagined Springfield could contain. Although the ground trembled beneath Hugh’s brogans, the train was still a small, smoking black coal off in the distance.

  An Irish child’s shout shrilled over the crowd’s rumble. “Mam, Mam, when’s it coming?”

  A woman on the other side of the track tried to manage two squirmy, grimy-cheeked lads. She clutched their jackets to keep them by her, the way his Margaret used to do with Liam, the way she’d have done with Jimmy and Mick, had she lived to see them into trousers. The way the lads jostled and poked each other minded Hugh so much of his own lads that he almost headed across the track to help the woman. Her face was partly hidden by the brown plaid shawl she’d draped over her head, just the way Margaret had worn hers. The wind tugged a spill of yellow curls across her cheeks, and Hugh’s heart lurched. The blood pounded in his ears, crashing against the noise of the crowd and the band and the approaching train, a churning roar that battered and dizzied him.

  “Margaret? Is it you, love?” he asked. Had she come back to forgive him or to damn him? He shouted her name, and the woman raised her head, looked at him with eyes blue as flax blossoms. “Margaret,” he said again, this time a groan. But before he could cross the track to take her in his arms, a metallic screech slashed through the roaring in his head, and his vision was filled with black iron and steam.

  “Good God, Hugh, is it altogether mad you are? I feared you aimed to walk out in front of the train.” Eamon grasped Hugh by the shoulders, hauling him around to look at him face to face. “You could’a been crushed!”

  “It was Margaret. Did you not see her?” Hugh gestured wildly across the track, where the crowd had broken ranks in the wake of the bright yellow coaches clattering behind the engine toward the depot. He tried to pick out the woman’s brown plaid shawl, but there was no finding it among the boil of hats and bonnets and coats surging away from him.

  “What’re you saying, man?” Eamon shouted in Hugh’s ear.

  “Margaret, by God! She was there, with Jimmy and Mick tugging at her skirts.”

  Eamon shook his head slowly. “Hugh, no. Don’t be doing this to yourself.” He clutched Hugh’s elbow, dragged him away from the press of the crowd.

  Hugh rubbed his eyes and forced a laugh as jagged as broken glass. “Just me mind playing tricks is all. A lass with yellow hair, and she put me in mind of me own Margaret. An idiot, I am.”

  Eamon draped an arm across Hugh’s shoulders. “I know how it is, man. When me own da passed on, didn’t I go fan
cying every bit of wind blowing through the cracks in the walls was himself whistling for me?” He reached in his pocket and drew out his flask. “Still do sometimes, and it’s a dozen years gone he is and me across the ocean from his grave.”

  Hugh nodded his thanks and uncorked the flask. The empty places inside him welcomed the warmth of the rum.

  “Come along,” Eamon said, his arm still around Hugh’s shoulders, their heads together so they could hear each other over the crowd’s din. “We’ll go down to the square and watch the parade, take your mind from your grieving.”

  Hugh let Eamon lead him, but he knew that noise and music would not be enough, just as the drink was never enough. Aye, he’d follow Eamon to the parade and festivities, but it’d take more than brass bands and a wondrous new machine to draw his mind from his heart’s rue. He needed to leave this place entirely, to start fresh.

  That was the railroad’s promise, wasn’t it?

  “It’s still building, you say?” he shouted in Eamon’s ear and gestured toward the track.

  Eamon nodded. “Across the river and west to New York.”

  “They’re still needing hands to work it, then.”

  “Thousands, they say. It’s hard work, I’m told, and dangerous.”

  That was his answer. He could work hard, and as for danger, well, what did he care, with no one to miss him? He would lose himself in the new work, leave memories and demons behind, make himself into a new man. He squared his shoulders and hugged Eamon in silent thanks for giving him hope. His heart began to warm to the music and festivity of the day.

  But his eyes still searched the crowd for a woman in a brown plaid shawl.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Thursday, October 17, 1839, Bernardston, Massachusetts

  “We’ve still not given ’em new names,” Billy said.