Make Me a City

by Jonathan Carr

  The warriors were naked but for a loincloth, their faces and bodies decorated by lines of paint—red, black and vermilion. Their heads were shaven, except for a scalp lock adorned by bird feathers, and their dark eyes were fixed in hallucinated stares. Sweat foamed on their shoulders. They prowled forward, their bodies twisted low until they were almost squatting to the ground, one foot flung forward and eased slowly back as the other foot advanced, a pattern of staggered steps interrupted by frenzied jumps into the sky that seemed to reach higher and higher. And, worst of all, each Indian bore a club or tomahawk with which he mimed act after gruesome act of slaughter.

  Eliza brought her hands together in prayer. She reminded herself that although we human beings may be very different in our behavior, yet we are all equal before Heaven. We are all the children of God. She thought about her husband, who had gone to pray in the church. She thought about Mr. Wright.

  The procession stopped below the window. Only a few timbers separated them, a few feet and the nothingness of air. The heat was unbearable. Eliza was damp with perspiration. She felt she could hardly breathe. And she cursed her imagination, how it behaved when beset by fear. The Indian chief would now make a signal, the Sauganash would become a bedlam of Indian braves, the air would be filled by the screams of the dying. Her time had come. She prayed anew for His Mercy and Forgiveness. Even as she yearned to pull herself back from the window, her feet remained rooted to the spot. Like one entranced, she watched.

  At some point, she realized Mrs. Eulalie was no longer standing beside her. She swung around. The room was empty. And before she could go to look for her, a frightening disturbance broke out below. Something had thrown the braves into confusion. The outer ranks were being driven backward by the ones in the middle. They were still “dancing” as before, still brandishing their clubs and tomahawks, still gyrating and jumping and whooping war cries. But in their center was a foreign element, a force of such strength that it had the effect of a whirlpool. Relentlessly, as though by the exercise of sheer will, this force was pushing the Potawatomie host back onto itself. The origin of that whirlpool, pirouetting with demented grace at its core, armed with nothing more than her voice and clenched fists, was Mrs. Eulalie.

  She had lost her hat, her thick blond hair hung loose, and she swirled around in the middle of that throng, boldly, recklessly, eyeing the braves. She was shouting. If she uttered any real word at all, it was the same one, repeated over and over. Arms akimbo, she hurled herself at the front line of retreating braves. It looked as though she had a target.

  Just as it seemed that the very gates of Hell were swinging open, Mr. Beaubien appeared like a delivering angel in the midst of those braves and managed, somehow, to extricate Mrs. Eulalie from the throng. He almost had to drag her off the brave she had attacked. Ushering her inside, he urged the Indians to continue. Mrs. Eulalie went with him meekly enough, shuddering a little, but with her head held high.

  Eliza rushed downstairs.

  … For the last week, dear F____, I have been attending her. I have no explanation for her conduct. She has not yet spoken, neither of that day nor of anything else, though her eyes are open and alert. She once told me it was suspected, when she was growing up, that she might be dumb. I fear some reversion to childhood behavior may have been prompted by this incident. Perhaps you have some thoughts to impart on this?

  I am praying for her. And I have been reading to her from the Book, to which she has raised no objection, though it seems unlikely she is listening.

  I am now certain it must be God’s will that we are leaving Chicago. Nothing good has happened since we returned. This town is not for the Indians, dear F____, it is not for Rev. Porter and myself, nor is it for Mrs. Eulalie. We must leave it, then, to the likes of Mr. W.

  Your sister-in-Christ,

  Mistress Eliza Porter

  1846–1852

  1846

  THE LONG TESTS

  THE STAGECOACH FROM Chicago arrived in Cairo at night, the final twenty miles taking over five hours due to treacherous dugways and an afternoon thunderstorm. Ellis Chesbrough managed to find the last bed at the town’s only lodging house. Though exhausted, he hardly slept. Rising as soon as it was light, he threw water at his face, pulled up the same creased breeches in which he had traveled for the last five days, slipped on his coat and hat, and hurried downstairs. He did not dare waste time having breakfast. On his feet, he swallowed down a cup of lukewarm liquid billed as coffee and chewed a piece of crackling bread (cornbread mixed, he was told, with hog fat). He apologized to the landlady but he understood the Gopher was moored at Cairo, and he needed to get to the boat before it set out for the day.

  Shrugging off the oppressive humidity, he stepped briskly across the boardwalks that lined Cairo’s main street, its parade of bedraggled frame houses fronted by a muddy road and pools of stagnant water. A pale blur of pink sun was visible behind a barrage of gray clouds. The town was waking up—carters and vendors setting up stalls in a forlorn-looking market square, a drunk tipped over on a doorstep, a washerwoman with a basin on her head, probably on her way to the river too. Already, mosquitoes were on the wing. A turgid brown effluence from a flooded drainage ditch oozed underfoot. The stench was pernicious. What a miserable settlement this is, thought Ellis, every line, angle and surface warped by damp and mold. The inhabitants trudged past with stooped shoulders and lowered eyes, as if resigned to whatever wretched fate might come their way. He observed a cripple, hobbling toward him, and wondered what had caused the man’s injuries. Ellis had seen too many accidents, and they always left him feeling uneasy. Could this one have been avoided? He handed the man a dime.

  It was a relief when the town ended and the road took a meandering course through acres of tall, healthy canebrake. He half-walked, half-ran. The soles of his boots had soon picked up a wedge of red mud. The grasses swayed, vividly green, and over the whisper of their movement came the sound of birdsong. Ellis allowed himself a smile, recognizing the dominant cries and mating calls of a warbler. There had been warblers on the farm where he grew up. That was a long time ago, before he had ever heard of surveys or railroads.

  The canebrake ended abruptly, affording him his first sight of the river. Screened in part by a thicket of beech trees, the dark surface lay silvered by a gleam of sun. He could smell it already—much more pleasant than the odor in town—a pungent mix of warm mud and rotting vegetation. A few moments later, rounding a bend, he stopped stone still and stared.

  Moored alongside the riverbank was what could only be the Gopher, the most outlandish-looking paddle steamer he had ever seen. It was as though two oversize canoes had been strapped to the opposite sides of a giant deck. Over their twin prows towered a scaffold. Attached to the scaffold was a boom. From the end of the boom, like the swollen claw of some mythical underwater creature, a huge grapple swung to and fro. Though Ellis had never seen a snagboat before, he grasped at once the point of its design. The deck would be solid iron, a battering ram against underwater thickets; the grapple would be for seizing individual trunks. Some might have found the craft an incongruous presence in such a remote place, but such a thought did not cross Ellis’s mind. He was curious about how it worked.

  Figures were moving about on the deck. Ropes were being hauled in. There were three ominous blows on a whistle. As Ellis set off at a sprint, a man in uniform stepped out of the cabin at the rear. Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Long’s erect bearing was unmistakable. “Wait,” shouted Ellis. “Please wait for me, sir.”

  * * *

  He had been fifteen years old when he first met Mr. Long. It was 1828, his father’s latest business venture had failed and, to support his mother, Ellis wanted to find work that paid more than he earned as a clerk at a mercantile house. That was not easy for a boy with no education or training. He had left school at the age of nine, when his father stopped farming to start his first trading enterprise, and since then he had worked his way up from warehouse laborer to clerk. It
was dull work with no future. So he could not believe his good fortune when he was hired as a chainman by the Corps of Topographical Engineers for a survey of what would become the first railroad in America—the Baltimore and Ohio. It was Mr. Long himself who offered him the post.

  Ellis applied himself to the job with enthusiasm and diligence. He had always liked figures—he had a natural ability with them—and he was obsessed with keeping accurate records of everything he did. Each evening, no matter how late they worked, he would crouch in the firelight and record the day’s activities with drawings and figures, accompanied by a diary entry of lessons learned. Perhaps his behavior was driven, he would reflect in later life, by a determination not to be like his slapdash father. “Don’t make the same mistakes,” his mother would tell him, in her lilting, singsong voice that owed its music, she said proudly, to the hills of her native Wales. One of her favorite sayings was the one his father never heeded: “A man without prudence, Ellis, is a ship without an anchor.” She repeated it so often, and with such melancholy, that it haunted his nighttime dreams.

  Very early on, Ellis concluded that his boss was the cleverest and most capable man he had ever met. Mr. Long had studied at Dartmouth College, taught at West Point and enjoyed countless other adventures. He was an explorer, an inventor, a man of diverse talents. He was also strict, stern and humorless. Ellis did not mind. Deciding to learn everything he could, he accompanied Mr. Long on his preliminary sorties across the ground to be surveyed, observing him closely as he took compass readings, made calculations and noted things down.

  Ellis’s task was to lay his chain between the two ranging rods that determined the direction of the railroad line. To keep the chain straight was no easy task in uneven terrain, and every single one of the hundred links had to be fully extended for an accurate sixty-six-foot reading. The number of completed and partially completed chain lengths then had to be counted off and reported to Mr. Long.

  After the first week of work, Ellis came up with an innovation. Cutting ten strips of the brightest cloth he could find, he tied one to every tenth link in the chain. When counting incomplete lengths, it meant he could count the links more quickly and reduce the likelihood of error. Mr. Long was impressed. He taught Ellis how to use his prized Rittenhouse compass.

  When the Baltimore and Ohio contract ended, Mr. Long took Ellis with him to Pennsylvania to work on the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Ellis had a new title: Assistant Engineer. He was seventeen years old.

  * * *

  Ellis was panting as he mounted the gangway. Lieutenant Colonel Long greeted him with an awkward formality, as was his way, before introducing him to the captain of the ship. “Mr. Chesbrough has come all the way from Boston,” he explained. “He and I have some business to attend to. But in the meantime I think he will be glad to remove his coat, and set to with the men. Am I right, Mr. Chesbrough?”

  “You are indeed, sir.”

  Ellis asked the captain whether he might be assigned to the team working with the grapple. Over the next few hours, he threw himself into the task as they hauled snags out of the water with the windlass to cries of “heave-to.” The labor was hard, the heat intense, the mosquitoes persistent, and the crew worked for the most part in a sullen silence, punctuated by oaths. At first, they regarded Ellis with suspicion. But as the morning progressed and they saw him pulling his weight, they became more communicative. He asked many questions about the grapple and how best to manipulate it, and by the time they stopped for the lunch break he was being quizzed about growing up in Baltimore and work on the railroads.

  With the sun almost overhead, the Gopher was moored partly in the shade of some overhanging branches. Mr. Long had remained on deck all morning, barking orders about when and how to dispose of the debris collected. On a couple of occasions, Ellis heard him lose his temper. Now, he was examining the captain’s logbook. Mr. Long disagreed with the claim that they had removed sixty-three obstacles to navigation and that each one was correctly noted down under a heading chosen from: “Snags, Logs, Stumps, Roots, Impending Trees, Thickets, Planters.”

  Shortly afterward, Ellis joined Mr. Long in the captain’s vacated cabin. The space was small and functional: it housed the wheel, overhead cupboards and two benches. They removed their hats and sat down opposite each other. “Ten snagboats are under my command,” Mr. Long explained. “The others are on the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Arkansas. I have created the same recording system for them all, but its success depends on accurate records.”

  “I understand, sir,” said Ellis.

  Mr. Long eyed him. “I know you do not make mistakes, Mr. Chesbrough. And you have initiative, unlike these snagboat captains.” Wiping the sweat off his brow, face and neck with a handkerchief, Mr. Long took out his lunch.

  Ellis removed from his bag the package the landlady had pressed on him as he was leaving that morning. He found biscuits, three slices of ham and some crackling bread. They ate for a while in silence.

  Ellis was relieved he had caught up with Mr. Long. To have come all that way and missed him would have been disastrous. But, now that he was here, he was increasingly doubtful what good it would do. The two of them had always kept up a regular correspondence, but it was over ten years since their last encounter. Mr. Long must now be in his sixties. His hair had receded and turned gray, the skin about his face had slackened, removing something else in the process—it seemed—of a more qualitative nature. It was difficult to define the precise nature of the change. But it was in his eyes, in the way he barked commands, in the way he snapped at the captain. Mr. Long looked distracted, irritable and worn down. He was in decline—a very different man to the inspiring genius who had been mentor to a youthful Ellis Chesbrough.

  Coffee was brought to them in battered tin mugs. “In a moment, you shall tell me your business here, Mr. Chesbrough. But first I want you to understand why you find me in circumstances such as these.” He gestured disparagingly, in a way that seemed to take in everything, the ship, the river, the sky. “Six years ago, I agreed to investigate how we could clear the Red River Raft. I assume you have heard of it?” When Ellis confessed he had not, Mr. Long explained that the Red River Raft was an ancient, treacherous, natural logjam, comprised of trees with entangled roots and branches that stretched all the way from Georgia to Louisiana. “The Raft is the greatest obstruction to the waterways of America. It goes on for hundreds of miles. Hence my interest in the project.” This was a new kind of challenge, he explained, and surely a grand one. It might not equate to surveying for a canal or railroad where none believed one could ever be built; it might not equate to the invention of patented locomotive wheels; it might not equate to a revolutionary treatise on grades, curvatures and gravity. Mr. Long’s voice had changed and his eyes began to brighten. “But imagine,” he said, “if we could eradicate this Raft. Eradicate it forever.” He stopped, and for a moment his eyes continued to shine as though he were imagining that happy day when the Red River flowed smooth and uninterrupted, free of obstacles, its waters plied day and night by great steamers.

  Ellis was relieved to hear him speaking like this. This was more like the old Mr. Long, the one who had taught him how to look at the world anew, to think about angles and gauges, about “rack and pinion” engines, about how to move canal boats up inclined planes.

  Mr. Long’s exuberance, though, did not last. He dropped his hands. “It never happened like that,” he said. “And now, six years later, instead of putting all our resources into clearing the Red River Raft, as I urged Congress, my ten snagboats are dispersed across the country, picking away at minor obstacles. Fiddling, in my view, while Rome burns. It makes me furious.” Last year, though they had traveled over 2,250 miles of river and removed 56,062 obstructions, that was as nothing compared to how much more dangerous the Red River Raft had become in the meantime. “And we lost six crewmen,” he added, his eyes coming back to Ellis, “with a further four crippled for life.”

  Ellis recal
led the cripple he had seen earlier that morning and wondered if his injury had been sustained in circumstances such as these.

  “It’s dangerous work,” continued Mr. Long. “That is why a good engineer must go beyond his calculations and set the rules by which the work is done. I have established new Shipping Articles to be adhered to by every captain and crew under my command,” he said. “But as we have seen this morning, the best rules cannot prevent incompetence.” He paused, tapped the tips of his fingers together. “Never forget, Ellis, that the death of the few will always be justified by the improvements we make for the many.”

  Ellis nodded, though he was not sure he wholeheartedly agreed. What if you knew one of the men who lost a limb, one of the men who died? Would that always be a sacrifice worth making? Was it always justified?

  “Of the many things you taught me, sir,” said Ellis, “the notion that we should attempt nothing unless it be for the public good has always inspired me. I think of it as the ‘Long test.’”

  Mr. Long almost smiled. “Are you not forgetting another Long test?”

  Ellis hesitated. He had learned many lessons from Mr. Long, but none of them struck him in the same way, as a test to which each job he undertook should adhere.

  “Why have you come to see me, Mr. Chesbrough, rather than write?”