Given Prime’s reaction to this news—he appeared suddenly satisfied, calmed—she decided against mentioning the abortion that had ended the pregnancy. Whereupon Mr. Prime thanked her sincerely, gave her a five-dollar banknote “to atone for my presumption and your inconvenience,” and strode out the door.
34
July 18, 1848
Indiana
BETWEEN NOISY, SOOTY, frantic Gotham and noisy, sooty, frantic little Chicago, they had traveled across a thousand miles of pristine waterways and bucolic countryside entirely by steam—that is, racing west inside screeching, jangling machines and stinking gales of cinders and smoke.
For their first hours in the stagecoach rolling through the meadows, marshes, and hills of Indiana, Polly and Priscilla felt not relaxed but anxious—the absence of tumult shocked their systems. Not that travel by stage is ever serene, with wheels bouncing in and out of ruts and thudding against stones, the four horses trotting and shitting a few yards away, the whole rig constantly shaking and swaying.
But when they stopped to change teams at a way station and the two women wandered off from the other nine passengers, out of the oak grove and down the road to stretch their legs, they felt as if they had suddenly been engulfed by nature. The sky and land were no longer parceled into little fragments of green and blue by the frames of the coach windows, and the clatter of town and travel was replaced by the oceanic whoosh of tall grass blowing in the breeze, the trills and whistles of sparrows and bobolinks and finches, crickets’ chirps, grasshoppers’ complicated clickings, and the soft buzz of cicadas. Three hawks circled high, high overhead. It had been a decade since Polly had set foot in such a rural precinct or ridden so long. Priscilla had never been outside the city, nor ever sat on flowered damask inside a big, bright red-and-yellow Concord coach.
After another hour of riding during which they saw no sign of man, Polly marveled, “One wouldn’t know that it is 1848 at all. It might as well be 1748 or 1448.” She took Priscilla’s hand. “I do believe,” she said in a whisper, “that our luck has turned.” With her other hand she knocked twice against the basswood wall.
Later in the afternoon, as they passed through the town of Raccoon, the driver blowing his horn as much to entertain as to alert the citizens, Priscilla spotted a magnificent Indian war bonnet of white and blue feathers hanging in the window of a dry-goods store. She pointed at it excitedly, exclaiming that they must finally be entering “Indiana Indian country.” The local man sitting across from them informed them that, in fact, “the very last of our natives, the Miami, were sent west to Kansas year before last, at Thanksgiving.”
When the driver announced they were approaching the intersection with the National Road, Polly thought of her father. When she was twelve, she had made an elaborate picture of a certain stretch of the road, drawn entirely from her imagination (“At Milestone 86 in Scenery Hill, Pennsylvania, the Site of a Prospective Lucking’s Establishment”), to illustrate his business scheme for building a chain of a dozen dry-goods stores along the whole length of the National Road, from Maryland to Illinois.
When their coach reached the road, Polly was surprised to see that it was gravel, not paved with brick or macadam. The coach was turning east for Indianapolis, and as the women disembarked, the driver informed them that “your Reverend Danforth’s farm is that way there.” He pointed down the narrowing dirt lane on which they had been traveling. “A walk of twenty minutes, maybe thirty. I never been down there myself.”
“And we shall see Lovely from the road?” she asked the driver, who had retaken his seat.
The man gave her a funny look. He didn’t understand.
“Lovely fronts the road directly?” she repeated.
“It’s pretty enough through there, I guess, sure. Flowers are up. Good afternoon, ma’am.” He flicked the reins, shouted “Heeyah,” and was gone.
The driver had never heard of Lovely because that had been the name of the community only briefly. In fact, the place had been rechristened several times since its founding five years before by the Reverend James Q. Danforth and his sixty followers. Originally they’d called it Boza Kokapo, based on the reformist scheme devised by the late Stedman Whitwell, an English socialist who had been a member of the community of New Harmony, Indiana. Whitwell believed that the names of American cities and towns were dull and arbitrary. His code converted the degrees and minutes of latitude and longitude for any location to letters of the alphabet, generating a unique new name, according to a rational system, for each place on earth. New York City thus became Otke Notive, and London was Lafa Vovutu. Danforth and company calculated that the center of their four hundred acres in south-central Indiana was latitude 39 degrees, 32 minutes north, and longitude 86 degrees, 58 minutes west—which translated to Boza Kokapo. The local people had figured it was an Indian name, like Wabash or Kankakee. After a year the name had been changed to Equilibria, then Aspire, then Danforthia, and then Lovely.
After walking for half an hour, Polly and Priscilla saw two men and a woman at the edge of a field of sweet corn carrying baskets, picking ears. They were all dressed in shades of red and pink. Polly called out, “We are in search of Lovely.”
The men put down their corn and wiped their hands on the bibs of their crimson overalls. Both smiled and waved. The woman looked pleased to see the female strangers as well, but her attitude seemed closer to relief than enthusiasm.
“This was Lovely,” the older of the two men told them. The other, a blue-eyed, sweet-faced boy of eighteen or so, never stopped shifting his glance back and forth between Priscilla and Polly as if they were two different, irresistible flavors of ice cream. “But since the spring we have been Glee. I am Harlan, and these are two of my consociates, Billy and Presence. Welcome to Glee, friends.”
“Welcome, friends,” said Billy and Presence.
“I am Mary Ann Lucking,” Polly said, shaking hands with each of them, “and this is Priscilla Christmas. We have come from New York to join your community, if you’ll have us.”
The woman nodded. The two men grinned. “Welcome,” they said in unison.
“Presence,” said Harlan, “will take you to Persephone Spring to cleanse yourselves of filth—”
“To wash,” Presence amended.
“—and then to the Hive, to confer with James.”
on the Hudson River
DUFF AND BEN both relished railway travel, and had planned their trip for maximum speed. But the Hudson River Railroad’s present terminus was only fifty miles upriver from the city, and the rail lines west started another hundred miles north in Albany. Thus they boarded a steamer at dawn. The Isaac Newton, named after the president of the People’s Steam Navigation Company, was enormous—broader of beam and much longer than Cunard’s America. The roar of boilers and engine and the paddle wheel’s splash made conversation on the deck difficult, but both men were keen on sightseeing, so they stood together on the upper deck in the shade of the stern, taking turns staring at the eastern and western banks.
Duff was in a bonny mood, and not only because he was making his escape. The Herald believed the letter he had written two mornings earlier, and published it on the front page today. It was a confession to arson and suicide. “So my conscience is all clear with the good firemen that my actions might have troubled,” it said, “I need to tell the following, which is the d—straight truth: I am the one who burnt the Granville distillery last winter and the sugarhouse in Duane in the spring and some other arsons too. And tonight I am going to set a blaze at Enggas Bakery in Greene St., because Enggas is a d—cheap & lofty cuss…and I plan to die there in the flames.” The letter was dated July 15 and signed “Francis Freeborn, member, United States Hose Company No. 25.” The Herald reported that since the confessed arsonist, known to his friends as Fatty, could barely write, Enggas’s insurance company was looking for the scrivener who must have produced Freeborn’s letter for him.
“Does it surprise you,” Skaggs had asked Duff
at their farewell dinner the previous night, “about Freeborn? He did not strike me as the type. That jumbo was a thug, surely, but a maniac?”
“I always figured him for nutty,” Duff had replied.
“I must say,” Skaggs had said, “to me he appeared no more crackbrained than half the young chuckleheads in this city.”
Ben was thinking of their adieu as well. Near the end of dinner, Skaggs had grasped his hand and Duff ’s. “Now: swear to me,” he had said, “that if on your journey west you should come across the ladies—in whichever God-besotted encampment in whichever godforsaken backcountry they’re hiding—that after you accomplish the rescue you will return here? I am too old to make new friends to replace you.”
Ben had hedged. “It is not our intention to abandon New York for good.”
“Oh, ‘not our intention,’” Skaggs had said. “I understand.” His eyes had moistened. He had nodded. “You, Mr. Knowles, are as slick as snot on a doorknob.”
BEN HAD ASKED Duff to identify several sites, and once again tapped his shoulder, pointing to a large marble building on the right bank. “A university?”
“No, Sing-Sing.”
“Which is?”
“A prison.”
After that, they traveled mainly in silence. Ben faced west. The view of bluffs and mountains and dense woods, all glazed gold by the morning sun, made him realize that the painting he and Polly had seen in the gallery last spring—the picture of a wooded Catskill ravine at sunrise—was not really exaggerated or sentimental.
A remarkable new sight came into view on the left—a stream falling a hundred feet down into the river. Ben touched Duff ’s arm again, directing him to behold Buttermilk Falls. Duff acknowledged them with a nod, but then pointed right. There a locomotive and train had appeared, gaining quickly on the Isaac Newton. A few minutes later, as the river narrowed and the boat slowed and steered toward the landing at Garrison’s, Ben pointed again, back across the river.
Atop the high, broad plateau on the western bank, dozens of tents were pitched in neat lines. A company of two hundred men—each dressed in short gray coat, white linen pants, black leather cap—marched north to south. They reminded Ben of the toy soldiers he played with as a child, the Second Royal North British, lithographed wood-and-paper men on springs, perpetually charging toward Napoleon. Some distance upriver of the drilling cadets, a line of cannon, aimed away from the river, were firing one at a time.
“West Point,” Duff said loudly, over the steamer’s din.
Ben did not know the name.
“The Academy.”
Still Ben did not understand.
“The United States Military Academy,” Duff hollered just as the captain cut the engine, “for the army’s goddamned officers.” The nearby passengers all turned to look at the red-faced young man who had bellowed a curse against the U.S. officer corps.
Duff ’s mortification mixed with sudden fear. He had forgotten they would pass West Point. He knew that one of his officers in Mexico, Lieutenant McClellan, had returned to the academy to teach other young Protestants how to use picks and shovels and powder to blow up poor Catholics. What would Duff do if McClellan happened to board the boat? Or some other West Point officer who recognized him and knew what had happened after Vera Cruz?
“Excuse me,” Duff said, “I need to check on my luggages,” and disappeared below deck. Ben thought he had been driven away by embarrassment over his shout, but Duff did retrieve his bags, and from the bottom of the larger one dredged his folding bowie knife and put it in his coat pocket. He also pulled out his shiny black six-shot revolver. He could not very well carry the Colt’s in his pocket—men in the East did not go about armed, and the thing was enormous. But he wanted it loaded and handy in case worse came to worst. He placed it at the top of his valise, which he proceeded to carry with him until they landed in Albany, finished dinner, and locked the door of their room for the night.
SKAGGS INSTRUCTED HIS cab to stop at every hotel along State Street. It took only half an hour to find the right place.
As he put down his bags and knocked on the door to the room, he could not suppress a smile.
The door opened two inches.
“Timothy?”
The door swung open wide.
“Indeed, it is I, young traveler,” Skaggs replied, stepping into the room, “your Daniel Boone, come to guide you greenhorns west. Rise and shine, boys.” Duff Lucking, dressed only in underclothes, held a huge pistol at his side. Ben Knowles was in bed.
“You—you are joining us?” asked Ben.
“Unless our friend here shoots me dead.”
At first Skaggs joked about why he had impulsively decided to come along—the city heat, the mosquitoes, the end of oyster season, the fact that no one but the two of them would buy him drinks. But over breakfast he became more earnest. Ninian Bobo was demanding that he work as the editor of his new spiritualist magazine in order to pay off the back rent he owed on the Ann Street studio. And he realized that he needed “a restorative period in the country air to feed the creative fires.” Indeed, he had decided that a stint of temperance would be good for his brain, and that New York’s 4,528 licensed saloons and “equal number of friendly druggies” made such a trial regimen impossible in the city. “For all the glorious hubbub, my life in New York has grown…stagnant. I feel immured in the erstwhile city of my dreams. I require novelty and surprise. Therefore”—he spread his arms wide, palms out—“I come unto you.” He checked his watch. “And if I’m guessing correctly, we have a westbound Albany & Schenectady Railroad train to catch in an hour. Good fortune is all in the timing, eh?”
35
July 21, 1848
Albany and points west
THEIR DEPARTURE WEST would be delayed, they’d learned at the depot, by a crash. Somewhere beyond Utica, the smoking, battered wrecks of two locomotives and their seven derailed passenger coaches were being cleared from the tracks and roadbed. Neither engine had been running at full steam, so only two people had died. (An elderly passenger on one train had collapsed in terror, and the stoker of the other had been pinned and roasted beneath two hundred pounds of hot coals that poured from his furnace.) As with most railway collisions, the cause was not mechanical failure but human confusion concerning schedules—a regular problem given the endless disagreements and contradictions among all the various local times and railroad times.
“What?” said Duff, incredulous, after he listened to Ben commiserating with the ticket agent about the competing systems of time. This was news to him. “It can’t be.”
“Look at the timepieces here,” Ben said, pointing at the three big clocks mounted around the depot, each owned by a different railroad and each showing a different time. The main ten-foot-tall iron clock of the Albany & Schenectady line reported the current time as eleven minutes past eight, which agreed with Duff ’s watch—but according to the brass clock of the Auburn & Syracuse Railroad, it was 8:20, and on the clock owned by the Attica & Buffalo the time was already 8:31. Each line kept its own time, according to the hour at its headquarters. “I believe you now follow 144 different times in this country.”
Duff struggled to come to grips with this new disillusionment. How could the very incarnation of the new America, of progress itself—the rail-roads—be conducted in such a reckless and stupid way? “It is the capitalists’ greedy doing, isn’t it? They think they own time, too.”
“A reasonable point, well put,” Skaggs replied.
“In England,” said Ben, trying to calm Duff, “the discord was solved only this past winter, when the railways agreed to abide by a single observatory time. I am sure the practical-minded citizens of America will correct the problem soon.”
Skaggs shrugged. “Practical-minded to selfish ends, since we are pigheaded as well—liberty means having one’s own way, doesn’t it? Charleston will not agree to Boston’s ideas concerning slaves, nor will Detroit agree to New York’s idea of the correct time.”
“And among certain Americans, I suppose,” Ben teased, “the nostalgia for the old days, before railways and the telegraph, is another impediment to progress in this regard.”
“Mind your own business, foreigner,” Skaggs replied.
They finally left around noon. Before they reached Buffalo the next day, they would change trains six times and pay fares to seven different lines that ran on schedules geared to four different timekeeping schemes.
Ben was alert, as ever, to the national peculiarities. As in England, most of the trains included five or six passenger carriages—“cars” in the local vernacular. However, the American cars were distinguished not by first, second, and third class, but according only to sex (several gentlemen’s cars, two ladies’ cars) and race (a car, painted black, reserved for Negroes). What’s more, the passengers could roam from car to car, and each one was enormous, big enough for coal stoves and seats running along both sides of a passageway.
As their train stopped west of Schenectady so that a dying sheep could be pulled off the track, Ben opened a window. The car filled with the sweet, spicy aroma of the pink blossoms that stretched out to the south as far as they could see. He inhaled deeply. “A peppermint farm!” he said.
Sometime later they passed a gang of men who had just finished levering and hoisting a two-story house from its foundations near the track onto a gigantic wagon. “Hearth and home shoved aside for the sake of this machine,” Skaggs said. As the house began to move forward, pulled by more oxen than it seemed possible to harness together, its chimneys crumbled and fell to the ground.
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