The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  “Burning themselves out of work,” he grumbled. “Those sleepers cost a dollar apiece.”

  She squeezed in next to him in his camp bed, crowded but warm. What did love consist of, really? Legs and hands and voice. Loyalty. He was headstrong, passionate, male. Did he love her or just want to own her, or was it the same?

  He slept.

  He believed the contract was his alone. He did not see that the men and the contract and himself — and herself too, for that matter, and their unborn baby as well — were all part of one thing. He acted as if everything — the mountains, the weather, even the quick passing of seasons — belonged to him. The men in their hundreds were his men. Employees or enemies, he could see them only in relation to his own plans and determination. Perhaps it was how he saw her.

  She lay with her cheek pressed on his warm skin, and, yes, it made her feel safe. They were powerfully connected to a shared grief and his seed was inside her, but marriage was a mystery — whether theirs would sustain under the pressure of all that he wanted, whether it would keep breathing, whether it would mean anything at all.

  ~

  In the middle of the night something woke her. She didn’t know what it was at first. Her heart flurried. Then she heard men singing and recognized the tune: “John Brown’s Body.” Sitting up in bed, she tried to make out the words.

  Joe grunted and growled and sat up groggily beside her. “What the hell?”

  Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever!

  Solidarity forever! For the Union makes us strong.

  Were they headed for the compound? Were she and Joe and their unborn baby in danger?

  “Goddamn them,” he grunted.

  “Would a union be so terrible?”

  “Jesus, Iseult!” He began punching pillows behind his back.

  “Well, would it?”

  “If I let in a union — especially the IWWs — the generals would cut me out. We’d never get another contract, and there are outfits in Winnipeg and Spokane that’d be more than happy to take over this one.”

  He reached for his cigarette box on the bedside table, took one out, and struck a match on his thumbnail.

  The singing wasn’t getting any closer. It was getting farther away.

  “I worked it out. I’m going to offer a bonus. Ten-dollar bonus to every man who goes back on the line tomorrow and sticks it out till freeze-up.”

  “Ten dollars isn’t very much. May I have a cigarette, please?”

  He was irritated but offered her the box. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness.

  Flaring another match on his thumb, he lit her cigarette. “What’s the matter, Iseult, are you going Red on me?”

  Maybe he meant to sound amused, but he was angry. He needed to control everything, keep everything in his hands. If he thought people were getting away from him it made him furious.

  “They are trying to hustle me, Iseult. I won’t be hustled. We could lose everything. If I offered any more it would be like taking bread from our children’s mouths.”

  “What about their children?”

  “Any man that works hard and saves his pay will go out with a sum at freeze-up. Anyway, they’re bindlestiffs, hoboes, not family men. You see what they do with their money.”

  “Maybe they have children somewhere.”

  “Then they ought to go back to work and not listen to a bunch of crazy anarchists.” He drew on his cigarette. “Listen, Iseult, let me give you some news. Most things worth having, you have to take from someone else.”

  What had he taken from her? In bed next to her husband, four and a half months pregnant, smoking one of his cigarettes and aware of his heat between the sheets, his hip against hers, his leg against hers, the smell of his skin and his hair . . . despite all this closeness, this proximity, he might as well be a stranger. He really was a stranger.

  She thought of the inspector. Were most people walking around with such unhappiness inside? While her parents were alive, the air in their house had seemed dead. They’d never said anything, but she could always taste their disappointment in each other.

  Maybe Joe expected her to argue. When she didn’t, he said, “I can’t be responsible for anyone else’s happiness. Only for yours and our children’s.”

  She was remembering one of her sojourns with Mother Power, and a girl encountered in a precinct house in Hell’s Kitchen, a German girl who had stabbed a man. How many men had a girl like that slept with? Proximity — skin heat — didn’t necessarily mean anything. Women sold it, men bought it. Wives slept with husbands. A woman’s body next to a man’s didn’t mean they were close, didn’t mean they had ever really penetrated each other.

  He lit another cigarette and kept on talking. Offering a bonus in the middle of a contract came close to betraying his principles, he said, but the important thing was getting enough work completed before freeze-up so they’d be in a good place to start next year.

  She was barely listening. All that mattered to him was getting the work completed and on schedule. It didn’t matter who survived or who didn’t. She’d not felt such fierce loneliness since the baby’s birth and death. This man, this Joe O’Brien, her husband, had once stepped through the fog and promised life, connection, children, meaning. But really people were alone. Even in marriage — perhaps most of all in marriage — they were still alone.

  Maybe it was the pregnancy; carrying a baby made her conscious of herself and her skin and her body as a series of walls, and him standing outside, harsher and at the same time less powerful than he had once appeared. Maybe she was finally growing up. Maybe that was all.

  ~

  At Santa Barbara, Calif., Jan. 18, 1914.

  To Mr. and Mrs. Joseph O’Brien

  A son, Michael Fergus.

  — Santa Barbara Press

  Spokesman-Review, Spokane

  The Province, Vancouver

  Winnipeg Free Press

  Toronto Mail and Empire

  Montreal Star

  { August 1914 }

  On Sundays when the weather was fine, they would take their baby and a picnic basket and a camera and go off in a handcar, zinging along rails freshly spiked to sleepers embedded in mile after mile of just-finished grade. Iseult loved Sunday picnics in the meadows among wildflowers, alongside streams. Sometimes she tried to photograph the flowers but more often she photographed Joe and the baby. After nursing, she and the baby napped in the sunshine while Joe fished for brown trout and kept an eye out for grizzly bears.

  The IWWs had not returned to the Selkirk Mountains. Most of the railway had been completed, no new lines were planned, and plenty of men were out of work, tramping up and down the fifteen-hundred-mile line between Winnipeg and Vancouver.

  Near the end of that third season, news came over the telegraph that war had been declared in Europe. The Britishers immediately began to celebrate, and dozens of “Austrians” — mostly Ruthenians, Poles, and Italians from lands claimed by the Austrian emperor — were roughed up and their tents and lean-tos violently demolished. Chinese station men were also attacked, even though the Chinese emperor wasn’t involved in the war. Some of the Austrians and Chinese fought off the attacks and others fled their remote stations, tramped back to Head-of-Steel, and set up camp as closely as they could to the frame house where Iseult and Joe were living with their baby. The house had been shipped in on a flatcar and assembled in three days, and as far as Iseult could tell it was the only frame house for a hundred miles in any direction.

  The next morning hundreds of nervous station men were camped outside in tents and impromptu lean-tos, all wanting their pay, all wanting to quit the mountains before the Britishers attacked them again. Joe went out and told them they were safer in the bush than in Vancouver or Edmonton, at least until the war fever had cooled a little. Any man who wanted to leave could see the timer and pick up his pay, he told them, though he could not guarantee their safety once they quit the contract.

  That day the Britishers were
preoccupied with drinking and amassing fuel for a bonfire. They ignored the Austrians and Chinese, and by afternoon most of the foreigners had gone back to their remote stations. At dusk a torchlight procession came through the camp, led by a girl from the Dovecote riding a mule and waving a Union Jack, with hundreds of Britishers marching behind her. Iseult watched from the nursery window, her son in her arms. She did not understand this war fever. Her grandfather, wounded in the neck at Cold Harbor, had always spoken bitterly of his Civil War soldiering.

  She could hear Joe and his American gangers and engineers in the kitchen downstairs. There was feeling in the camp against the States for not joining the war, and the Americans were wary. Some were carrying pistols, though Joe had assured them the excitement would blow over when the whisky was gone.

  Iseult sat down in a rocking chair and began nursing Mike. He was a big, healthy boy with a good appetite, and he settled contentedly into her arms. She felt his body relax and she relished his warmth. They both enjoyed nursing, the circle surrounding them, protected and complete.

  After he fell asleep on the breast she swiftly changed him and put him in his bassinet. She didn’t feel like going downstairs. With the men so rowdy in the kitchen, she might not be able to hear the baby. Covering Mike with a blanket, she pulled the chair over to the window and sat down.

  The men had lit their bonfire out on the grade, and she could see figures cavorting around the flames. Two days before, no one at Head-of-Steel had given a moment’s thought to the European situation. Now some were dancing around a big red fire while others — the foreigners — huddled out in their stations, afraid of being attacked.

  Joe had received a telegraph message that dozens of fires were being lit tonight along the grade, all the way back to Winnipeg: a chain of fire to celebrate the British Empire’s coming into war. Maybe, thought Iseult, they expected soldiering to be more interesting than building railway grade. Perhaps they were excited at the prospect of crossing the ocean.

  She and Joe had been planning to sail from Quebec to Liverpool on the twentieth of October, with their baby. She’d been looking forward to their first trip to Europe together. He had business in London and they’d intended to see her relations in France, then visit Italy.

  The previous winter, a week or so before Mike was due, Joe had driven from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles in their new Ford touring car to see her mother’s old friend Mr. Spaulding about a real estate investment. Joe had been due back the next morning — it was a single day’s trip — but he hadn’t shown up. In the middle of the afternoon she received a telephone call from the assistant manager of the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, who told her a Mr. J. O’Brien of Santa Barbara was under the care of the hotel nurse, and could they expect a family member to come and take him home as soon as was convenient?

  Her first thought was that he’d come down with malaria. There had been malaria at some of the remote stations along the line.

  “I don’t like to say, madam; I’m no doctor. But there was an empty whisky bottle in his room when the maids went in.”

  She had telephoned Grattan in Venice Beach, and he rode the electric cars out to Pasadena, collected Joe, brought him back to Venice, and drove him up to Santa Barbara the next morning. At Butterfly Beach Joe stepped out of the automobile looking spruce, shaved, and healthy. He insisted that he could easily have driven himself home, but Grattan had wanted to try out the new automobile.

  “He just about burned the brakes on the Conejo grade. You ought to know you can’t treat a machine that way, Grattan.”

  “You weren’t sounding so snappy this morning, brother.” Grattan turned to Iseult. “I made him take a plunge in the ocean first thing this morning. He was howling, but I think it did him good. Woke him up, anyway.”

  “I had a minor headache,” Joe insisted. “That was all.”

  As soon as Grattan left for the train station she made Joe tell her what had happened.

  He said that Mr. Spaulding had taken him to dinner at the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles, to celebrate their real estate deal. “I guess I was more tired than I thought. Been working the numbers pretty hard, you know. And I’ve been . . . anxious . . . about this fellow.” He touched her pregnant belly. “Took a drop more than I ought to have, I suppose. It took me by surprise, I’ll tell you.”

  “More than a drop,” she said.

  But as soon as he’d admitted his anxiety about the pregnancy, she was ready to forgive him. And five days later Mike was born at Cottage Hospital: a happy, healthy, eight-pound boy.

  Tonight at Head-of-Steel, as she watched the Britishers’ bonfire funnelling drafts of embers into the cold sky, she tried to imagine what might be happening in France. She could remember watching soldiers in red trousers parading past her uncle’s house in Lille. Were her French cousins in uniform? Were they marching now? Were men shooting at each other?

  She had left a stew simmering on the stove, and the sweet aroma of carrots and beef broth, thickened with white barley and flavoured with onions, was drifting upstairs. She could hear Joe’s gangers laughing and talking. Pretty soon they’d have a poker game going.

  She had stolen two of Joe’s cigarettes, and now she lit one because she was hungry.

  The bonfire was as big as a house. Watching the figures whooping around the flames, she recognized the girl who’d been riding at the head of the parade. She was standing off by herself some distance from the fire and waving a torch back and forth, back and forth, like a child with a Fourth of July sparkler or a little girl with a magic wand, pretending to be a princess.

  Joe had never once mentioned the Dovecote. It was Mr. Bee who told her there were women living in tents one mile down the line who would pay twenty-five cents for one bunch of carrots.

  “Women? Who are they?”

  The old Chinese man looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. “Bad women. Very bad.”

  She had wanted to go and see for herself, but the grade was too rough for Mike’s beautiful English pram, a present from the Pasadena Theosophical Society, and he was too much for her to carry all that way. And there were always gangs at work on the grade, tamping gravel, spiking rails to sleepers. The men were polite but she felt self-conscious near them.

  It would have been much easier if there had been other women in the main camp — wives, mothers with children. But there weren’t. When she asked Joe if there really were women living in tents one mile down the line, he admitted there were.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “How was I to ask if I didn’t know?”

  “Are you going to pay a social call?”

  “Are they prostitutes?”

  “I suppose they are. They came up from Edmonton last month, and there’s not much I can do about it.”

  The following Saturday night she had noticed that the main camp was almost deserted. Most of the men were at the Dovecote, which had its own supply of liquor. On Sunday morning, as she and Joe pumped their handcar along the temporary rails, she saw men sprawled in the ditches, sleeping it off.

  Joe said he couldn’t tell them how to spend their money as long as they stayed healthy enough to work. “If they start catching disease, I’ll go down there myself, burn down every last tent, and chase the ladies back to Edmonton.”

  The bonfire’s lights and shadows flickered on the wall of the nursery. Iseult felt a little flutter in her stomach. When she had told Joe she thought she was pregnant again, he had been delighted. They could still travel to Europe as planned, though perhaps not for as long. She would have the new baby in California in the spring.

  Now war, if it lasted, made Europe unlikely.

  She distrusted the night’s excitement, those bonfires burning for war along a thousand miles of railway grade. They frightened her more than the IWWs and the bomb threats had. She glanced at the crib, where Mike was making gentle, chirring sighs, then gave her pregnant belly an affectionate rub.

  J
oe had said this might be their last season in the mountains: the Canadian railway boom was just about finished. There were no more big contracts on the horizon. With Mr. Spaulding and some Pasadena theosophists for partners, he had bought land south of Los Angeles, in Orange County. He planned to build houses and put Grattan in charge of selling them. He was also thinking of establishing a London office, or at least a representative, so he’d be able to bid on construction contracts coming up in the Caribbean, Africa, and India.

  The savoury scent of that stew. Why hadn’t he brought her up a bowl? Like everyone else he was distracted by the war excitement. He was worried his men would start quitting in droves and heading off for Edmonton to enlist.

  It had spooked her, seeing the American gangers with pistols lumped in their coat pockets. They were wary of the Britishers. Or perhaps carrying a pistol was an unconscious gesture of solidarity with the men outside, an acknowledgement that the war changed everything for everyone, even the neutral Yanks. The stakes had been raised. They were living in history now, and history was more satisfying than a railway camp.

  Joe was a gentle husband but there was an element in him as hard as a drill bit. Earlier in the month he had buried two men up the line without even mentioning it to her. Two Italians who had borrowed a rifle and shot an elk. The day had been hot, they hadn’t butchered fast enough, and the spoiled meat had killed them. She’d learned about it from Mr. Bee a few days afterwards.

  Any death upset her, even more so since Mike’s birth. She had not been able to bring herself to visit the bone-house all summer. It was sixty miles back along the grade, but that wasn’t the real reason. Now that they had a baby, she didn’t want to lay any shadow across the little boy’s life — that was what she told herself. Once or twice Joe had mentioned going back to the avalanche slope, but maybe he felt the same way, because he certainly had not pressed the matter.