El Paso

by Winston Groom

  At this, Shaughnessy roared, “Yes, my word, yes! Maybe she should at that! Here,” he said, “I will carve up the pig myself. I take pride on being the finest pig-cutter west of the Hebrides! Do you boys like pig?”

  At these reassuring words the feeling of embarrassment that had overcome the boys suddenly blew away as flakes of ash from a hearth. Arthur looked at Mick, who was grinning, studying the pig. It was one thing he had no doubt he knew how to eat.

  FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME IN ARTHUR’S LIFE, the entire world spread out around him like a gift, one he was determined not to lose. Never even to let from his sight. He was enrolled in a day school and, as the years passed, his new situation settled on him mostly in ease. Arthur received a generous allowance of a dollar a week that was raised to two dollars when he turned twelve, and not only kept up his butterfly collection but also, at his father’s suggestion, took up collecting coins and stamps as well. The elder Shaughnessy taught him how to sail on small boats in Newport, and on vacations in Maine they saw bears and moose along the roads.

  Still, Arthur hadn’t made any really close friendships with the other boys of the day school. They seemed different, and though they didn’t tease or make fun of him for where he came from, they always seemed apart and let Arthur alone. He kept in touch with Mick Martin, though, and every so often Mick would stay over for a weekend at the Shaughnessy house in Boston and sometimes even be invited down to their place at Newport. Mick was Arthur’s lone tie with his past and both his father and Beatie thought it best to let him deal with this in his own way. And so the years slipped by and Arthur grew up, a happy boy, if a little shy.

  Then came the ordeal at Groton.

  As soon as young Arthur had arrived from the orphanage into the Shaughnessy family, the Colonel began to pull strings to get him into the Groton School, just as the Colonel’s own father had pulled strings to get him into Harvard. When the time came, at age fourteen, Arthur was packed off, with the Colonel’s tales of boarding school grandeur ringing in his ears. Arthur, however, had reservations, not the least of which was that only five years earlier he had finally arrived in the most magnificent household imaginable, only to be shipped off to a place full of strangers, no matter how wealthy and sophisticated they might be.

  Colonel Shaughnessy had arranged an imposing entrance into Groton for Arthur. That morning, he timed it precisely so his private railcar would deliver his son to the rail station just as the other boys were arriving on the public trains. For a few moments the ploy seemed to work. Arthur stepped down from the gleaming railcar, with Bomba carrying his bags. A hush came over the throng of Groton boys on the platform while they gaped at this strange person arriving as if from another world, a world different and even more exalted than their own. Then from the back of the crowd someone started it.

  “Would Mr. Astor wish his bags to be taken for him?” came a loud voice.

  Everyone took up the cry.

  “Would Mr. Astor like his shoes shined?” somebody said to great laughter.

  “Could someone arrange for flowers in Mr. Astor’s private suites!”

  Bomba put on his fiercest expression and parted the derisive crowd, with Arthur tagging behind, mortified.

  “Will someone please call Mr. Astor’s personal motor coach!” a shout went up.

  It was not a good beginning for Arthur Shaughnessy at the Groton School. And in time, no matter how Arthur tried, it only got worse.

  When they learned his name, Shaughnessy, there was more mockery. They called him a harp and a bog-trotter and a fish-eater. All the Irish slurs to hurt and embarrass. When Arthur protested that his family was not Catholic, they ridiculed this, too, saying behind his back that this was no better than the Jews changing their names so as to take over the country.

  Hazing became an art form.

  They short-sheeted his bedclothes and put toads and beetles in his desk drawers in his dorm room. Someone even taped a piece of Limburger cheese to the back of his closet—it took him a week to find the source of the odor. Once he returned from class to find lace curtains put up around his window. Arthur became a loner, which of course made it worse. Boys often got the treatment from the Groton elite and were expected to be good-natured about it. But Arthur kept sullenly to himself, thinking that at the orphanage at least they all tried to get along. Then one day the dam burst.

  It was the end of the first term, and so far Arthur had made good marks in all of his studies. But when he was called on and stood to read a class paper on the history of the Ostrogoths, he discovered his hands were black after he reached into his satchel. Someone had poured ink into it, ruining the work. Arthur turned red; his breath caught in his throat. He thought he was going to choke. Tears welled in his eyes as his classmates smirked at one another and the instructor stood waiting impatiently. Finally Arthur burst out, “I hate all of you! You’re wicked bastards! You’re . . . you’re . . .”

  People began laughing. The instructor marched to Arthur and snatched his wrist and led him from the room to the dean’s office for punishment. Arthur could hear the scathing laughter from the classroom all the way down the stairs and out of the building. Back in his room, he stared out of the window until it was dark and even afterward. He envied the birds he saw wheeling in the air and wished he could be like them. When he got back to Boston for the holidays two days later, Arthur informed his father that he would not be returning to Groton.

  “You cannot quit, Arthur! It’s the worst thing you can do. All boys get hazed at boarding school.” They were sitting in the study, the Colonel behind his desk, distressed, Arthur in his chair.

  Arthur merely looked at him. The Colonel knew that when Arthur made up his mind it was hard to change it, and tried a different tack.

  “Look, son, why don’t you think about it over the holidays? Just think about going back for the last term. It might be bad, but then, next year, you’ll be an upperclassman. It will let up, I promise you.”

  Arthur said nothing. He could not begin to explain the indignities he felt had been heaped on him at Groton. He had told his father only that the other boys were rude to him, but could not bear to go into details.

  “All right, Arthur,” the Colonel said at last. “Just promise me you will think about it—is that fair? It’s your decision to make.” Even though the Colonel knew Arthur well enough to believe that the situation was bad, he did not like this business of quitting. It could be habit-forming.

  Arthur nodded, appreciating this concession by his father. He’d always felt he was treading on thin ice in the Shaughnessy home. To make matters worse, Alexa made him feel like a leper at every opportunity. She declined to introduce him to friends she brought over to the house and, recently, when the Colonel had asked Arthur if he might want to get a dog, she loudly complained that fur made her sneeze.

  Beatie and the Colonel, however, were warm, obliging, and kind: the Colonel told him that what he did mattered; Beatie complimented him on his curiosity, and told him that he had a destiny to fulfill, though she had not ventured what it was.

  Still, Arthur felt a little knot of anxiety deep down inside him. He’d developed a hunger for a place of his own in the world, and ever since the first day at the Shaughnessys’ there was that little lurking fear that it could all be taken away just as fast as it had come. Even though there wasn’t a whit of evidence that such a thing might happen, Arthur seemed incapable of severing relations with the harshness of his past, a past weighted with his childhood loneliness.

  Next afternoon he went to the Laura Bostwick Home to see Mick Martin. Mick had quit school and at the age of sixteen looked almost like a grown man, tall and muscular, with a handsome rugged face set off by a chiseled nose and a short mustache. Now he ran a lathe in a shoe factory and on the side he had a rather murky job that he didn’t much talk about. But from what Arthur guessed, it had to do with one of the gangs that controlled the gambling, shakedowns, and prostitution in Southie.

  They took a walk a
round the old neighborhood. Mick told Arthur he was going to move out of the orphanage pretty soon and find a place of his own. Soon as he got up enough money. He told him he had a girlfriend, too, who worked in the shoe factory. After a while, Arthur told him his own story.

  “And so these punks are really laying it to you?” Mick said.

  Arthur nodded.

  “And you ain’t going back.”

  Arthur shook his head.

  “Well, just suppose,” Mick said, “that I go up there with you when the classes start again. I don’t think any of those little snots are going to fool with you after I give them a talking-to.”

  Arthur shook his head again. “It’s not worth it, Mick, but thank you,” he said. Arthur just couldn’t see it, not after what they’d done. How they’d treated him. He felt sick to his stomach every time he thought about it.

  “So let me ask you this,” Mick said. They were stopped at the curb to let a trolley rumble past. “Who’s the one who’s the ringleader? The one who gives you the most trouble?”

  “They all do,” Arthur said dejectedly. “I’d rather be back in Southie than to go back there.”

  “C’mon, there’s got to be a ringleader. There’s always a ringleader.”

  “I don’t know,” Arthur said. “I guess if it’s anybody, it would be Hawkins. He’s from Ipswich.”

  “And you don’t want me to go and say hello to Master Hawkins?” Mick asked.

  “No, Mick, like I said, it’s too late, at least for me.”

  Mick looked at his friend. He felt terrible for him. With all Arthur had now, all the things he himself could only dream of, and now this unhappiness.

  “Well, bucko,” Mick said, draping a thick arm over Arthur’s shoulder, “you do whatever you think best. That’s the thing—the only thing. And now I’m going to take you to a place and buy you a beer.”

  When school resumed two weeks later, without Arthur’s knowledge or consent, Mick Martin boarded a train to Groton. It did not take him long to find Hawkins after he’d asked around. Mick caught Hawkins just outside his residence hall and yanked him behind a tall long hedge, where he administered a fearful beating to the boy, making sure Hawkins fully understood the reason. Hawkins told the headmaster; a search was launched for Hawkins’s assailant, and the Boston police came to the Shaughnessy home and questioned Arthur, which was the first time he learned what Mick had done, but he told them nothing. He didn’t really lie; besides, all he had were his own suspicions. Still, Arthur did not return to Groton that year or any year, enrolling instead at day school in Boston. His father never let him forget it.

  NOW, AT HIS DESK AT THE RAIL YARDS in Chicago, Arthur sat with a pencil and a pad, trying to compose a response to his father’s wire that would convey the mounting crisis at NE&P. Since his father was now aboard Ajax where there was no phone, the telegram would have to be worded cautiously, since the worst thing that could happen was some loose-lipped telegraph operator letting it get out that for the second time in its history under the Shaughnessys, the New England & Pacific Railroad Company might not be able to meet its payroll.

  The first time this had happened, three years earlier, Arthur’s father wriggled off the hook by selling a considerable piece of company property in western Connecticut. He’d realized so much money from the sale that the company was not only flush, but the elder Shaughnessy was able to order the construction of the Ajax, which Arthur felt was a wild extravagance.

  But his father was always extravagant: the big house in Newport, the enormous ranch in Mexico, the place in Maine, the lavish parties, the safaris and trips to Europe. All that might have been fine while the company was making money. And indeed it had made a great deal of money for a while; so much so that John Shaughnessy was able to fulfill at least his second-most ardent wish, which was to be included in that rarefied class of barons such as Gould, Harriman, Hearst, Rockefeller, Stanford, Huntington, Guggenheim, and even J. P. Morgan himself. Although John Shaughnessy was on the outside tier of that august bunch, he was nevertheless a member of the club, which he would not have been had he merely been content to own a codfish fleet and not a railroad company.

  The first most ardent wish of the elder Shaughnessy, however, would never be realized, and Arthur knew it.

  This was that the Old Man would be included in the circle of the Boston Brahmins—Sedgwicks, Lowells, Cabots, Adamses, Lodges, Saltonstalls, and so on—all those elite Yankees with blue blood dating back to the Mayflower who would never accept a second-generation Irishman into their class, no matter how much money he had, or that he had adopted the Protestant religion, or even the fact that he had gone to Harvard.

  Oh, they were polite enough, all right, when they had to be, at places like the Harvard Club. But to their own clubs and dining tables Arthur’s father was not invited, no matter how large his yacht or grand his parties, which, Arthur understood, was why the Old Man indulged in all this ostentation in the first place. So the elder Shaughnessy had to content himself with the companionship and admiration of the New York, Pittsburgh, and Chicago lords of commerce, whom proper Bostonians considered vulgar. But when the Old Man looked at his social circle, while he wasn’t ashamed of it, he was deeply frustrated—perhaps hurt wasn’t the word—that no matter what he accomplished, this avenue to the old-line society of Boston would be forever shut off to him.

  Arthur’s father had actually won the railroad company in a dice game. At that point it was little more than a broken-down two-bit enterprise organized in 1862 to transport munitions and men across northern New England so they could connect up with a major line headed down South where the fighting was. After the war, the New England Northern, the old name of the company, had turned into a milk train, transporting milk from the dairies of western New England to Boston and fish from Boston back across the region. About that same time, however, New England farmland was playing out and the farmers were migrating by the thousands to the Midwest. As a result, less and less milk got to be transported and there was a much-diminished demand for Boston fish. The owner at that time was a man named George Mudd from Hartford It was from Mudd’s son, who had become filthy rich from his mother’s inheritance, that John Shaughnessy acquired the railroad in the dice game several years after he graduated from college in 1882.

  John Shaughnessy didn’t much care for fish, or his father, either, for that matter, and so instead of going into the great codfish fleet business as was expected of him, he threw himself full-time into his own railroad enterprise. When he took over, there were ten decrepit locomotives, the aged rolling stock, mostly left over from the Civil War era, and the company was in debt. With loans from his father and several friends, Shaughnessy began rebuilding the New England Northern and expanding it at the same time.

  The great rail moguls of the day—Vanderbilts, Harrimans, and Huntingtons—had created their wealth by bringing the railroads to the towns and cities. But now that they had done this, there was no room for competition. So Shaughnessy had the expansive notion that if he could not bring his railroad to the cities, he would bring the cities to his railroad. He quickly grasped that the land and lumber of New England was running out after two hundred years of colonization, and as the farmers began to be forced westward into new territories, he built his track in that same direction. By the 1890s, after his father died, the younger John Shaughnessy had sold the codfish company, invested its proceeds in the railroad, and had pushed the New England Northern out past Chicago, intending to take it all the way to the West Coast. Thus he renamed it the New England & Pacific.

  As he laid track across Iowa toward the Dakotas, a fortuitous thing began to happen. Another vast wave of immigrants arrived on American shores, these from Northern Europe: Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Latvians, and some Germans, too. Shaughnessy, quick to see an opportunity in this, had his people place ads in foreign-language newspapers in New York, Boston, and even in Europe, telling of the great fertile prairies waiting to be homesteaded in America.


  The NE&P offered transportation across the country free of charge to any family that would settle on the plains. Not only that, he threw in a free cow, bags of seed, and a handbook on cultivating the land. There were accommodations in the boxcars, along with the families’ belongings, the cows, and the seed. By the time Shaughnessy’s tracks had reached the Dakotas, there were homesteads and towns all along their wake and the big money soon began rolling in, just as he had expected: the crops and stock the immigrants produced came east and the implements and items they needed as they prospered went west—all on the NE&P. The gamble had paid off.

  ARTHUR HAD STOPPED TRYING TO WORD his telegram and simply sat tapping his desk with the pencil. He looked at the picture of his wife Xenia and thought about phoning Boston, just to talk to her. She’d seemed unusually distant in their last conversations and he couldn’t understand why, except he might be spending too much time in Chicago. But more pressing things were now in the air.

  His father’s cavalier attitude about the company’s predicament upset him. Even though his father was known in certain circles as a “man of action,” Arthur had observed over time that he could sometimes be paralyzed when confronted with large difficulties—such as the time a few years back when he seemed to come apart after a racehorse stable he owned in upstate New York went bankrupt.

  Everybody could see it coming, bad buys in horseflesh and the manager secretly pocketing stud fees for himself, but the Old Man wouldn’t act. Wouldn’t sell horses or fire the manager. Just said, “One good season at Saratoga and we’re back in business.” Change seemed beyond him, the older he got. At the time, Arthur thought it would have been smarter if the Old Man had invested in a glue factory or a rendering plant, for all the horses were worth. More and more, the elder Shaughnessy seemed to devote himself to social hobnobbing, lavish entertaining, and improvident travel instead of applying himself to the company. Yet when the big decisions were made, he insisted on being the one to make them.