Saffire

by Sigmund Brouwer

  I generally tried to avoid philosophical thoughts because my tendency to get carried away could make me look like a mule’s hind end. But standing on the edge of the greatest construction project that humans had conceived, I had little hesitation in ruminating on why I didn’t feel so small.

  Love trumps concrete.

  Despite the urgency of the letter that sent me to Panama, and despite the authority of the person who sent the letter, I refused to leave Medora before Christmas. The trip was going to take me away from Winona for about a month and a half, and no force on earth was going to prevent me from watching the joy in her eyes as she unwrapped the stuffed bear I’d purchased on a trip to Bismarck in early fall, before roundup. Roosevelt’s bear, it was called. Or Teddy’s bear. All because the president, on a hunting trip in Mississippi, had refused to shoot a bear hounded to exhaustion. I knew full well how much Roosevelt hated the diminutive Teddy, but the name had stuck and the craze had started. Everybody wanted Teddy bears with button eyes.

  On Christmas Day, I’d fully realized the irony of seeing Winona whoop with joy over Teddy’s bear, but when I had purchased it months earlier, I’d had no idea of the request that would arrive to send me to Panama.

  Against almost any scale, a man could look around and feel tiny. Against mountains or sky or ocean. Against the mighty buildings in New York. Or the unending concrete and scaffolds and loads of dirt that the trains carried here at the building of the canal.

  Yet all it took was love to sustain the soul, and with the letter in my pocket, which I intended to reread again and again, I knew that it was the reverse. Mountains and oceans and sky and concrete would all eventually disappear and could never endure in comparison to the invisible, eternal fabric that was love.

  I couldn’t help but grin, thinking of the tenderness that my young daughter showed to a stuffed bear and the imaginary wound on its paw. I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by love that Winona’s worry had been for my loneliness, not hers.

  Sure, the canal would be a monstrous triumph of man over nature. The audacity to connect one ocean to another would be a combination of the world’s largest man-made lake, the world’s largest locks, the world’s largest canal. But well within a lifetime, the decades would pass, and as they did, few would give thought to the wonder of it. Yet in a lifetime, none would ever forget a first love or a sustaining love.

  Two more days. I told myself. Two more careful days.

  I began to climb down the bank toward the buzz of construction below me.

  Railway tracks ran parallel to the locks, where flatbed cars carried buckets of fresh concrete from the mixing plant. Overhead, steel cables ran from the railway tracks to sets of massive towers on the opposite side of the locks, carrying those buckets to be dumped into the empty forms for the walls, fifty-feet wide at the bottom, tapering to eight-foot-wide tops.

  As I moved from worker to worker to get directions to the foreman, I kept a nervous eye on the buckets passing overhead. Six tons of wet concrete in each bucket, enough to bury a small herd of cattle, hung from what looked like threads of steel.

  I finally reached the foreman near the base of some scaffolding that clawed those eight stories upward to the top of the forms filled by those buckets of concrete.

  The foreman was a block of a man. Closing in on fifty, he had pale skin and short hair that had probably once been red, judging by the man’s thick freckled forearms, which extended from the rolled-up sleeves of a sweat-soaked denim shirt.

  “Geoffrey Denham?” I asked at the man’s suspicious glance.

  “I only speak to construction men,” he snapped. Irish accent. “And plainly, you aren’t. So whatever you want, the answer is no.”

  He turned back to his inspection of some welds on the scaffolding.

  “I’ll pass that along to Colonel Goethals.”

  Denham straightened and gave me attention again. “That’s a name you’ll not be wanting to throw out lightly. And anyone can do it. So when you bring papers to show authorization, I’ll give you my time. Until then, I have some locks to complete.”

  Once again, Denham turned to inspect the welds.

  From the large envelope that Goethals had given me, I pulled out the sheets and flipped through the pages. Humidity made them soggy—there was no satisfying crisp sound to give my actions authority. I found what I needed a few pages down: a letter with the ICC letterhead, signed by Goethals.

  I walked around to get a view of the welds myself, then held the letter below Denham’s eyes.

  After a few seconds, the man raised his head again. Drops of sweat were beading above the man’s eyebrows. His glare remained in place.

  I took the letter and slid it and the other papers back into the envelope.

  “Get this over with then.”

  I wiped my brow. “I’d prefer a place with shade.”

  “We’ll not be talking long enough to make the walk worthwhile. Any idea of the logistics involved here? When it’s all said and done, we’ll have gone through five million bags of cement. Goethals came up with the idea of forcing the men to shake out every sack after it was emptied. All that came out was dust, but with all the bags we go through, it’s saved fifty thousand dollars a year.”

  Impressive. That amount of money could pay the combined yearly wage for a score of gold-dollar engineers.

  “We’re hauling in sand from twenty miles away,” Denham said. “We have three rock quarries going twenty-four hours a day for the gravel. And Goethals wants this done in two years. So we’ll stand in the sun, and I’ll answer what you have with yes or no until you get the hint and leave me to my work.”

  I understood men like this one. I respected them for the bluntness. It gave me no pleasure to pull the papers out of the envelope again and find the letter from Goethals.

  “Shove it,” the man said. “I read it through the first time. I’ll tell it to Goethals myself if I need to. Every minute counts, and if he wants the canal done in time, he shouldn’t be wasting my time.”

  The diplomatic response would be to act as if Denham meant that I should shove the letter back into the envelope. So I did so before speaking. “I’ve been sent to ask some follow-up questions about the cable that snapped.”

  “And you would be?”

  “The person sent to ask those questions.”

  “How much expertise is it you have with engineering?”

  “How much does a person need to understand gravity?” I was not going to be intimidated.

  “I’d like to give your gob a good smack,” Denham answered. “But I doubt it would shut you up. What questions have you?”

  “Much the same as the first time around. Send me down the line, and have someone else answer for you.”

  Denham gave a big grin, maybe deciding that I was trying to help him by leaving him alone. In truth, I decided the more people I questioned, the higher the likelihood of drawing attention, and the sooner I drew attention, the sooner I could get back on a steamer for the Dakotas. I was sweating under my cowboy hat, but the hat—not the sweat—did make me noticeable.

  “Then talk to my head negro.” Denham pointed at a crew at the base of the opposite wall. “Jimmy. He’s the one that nearly got killed.”

  Denham put two fingers in his mouth and gave a whistle that turned the heads of the half-dozen black men across the concrete floor. Denham pointed at me and gave a thumbs-up. “You’ll be set now. Mind you don’t take too much of Jimmy’s time.”

  As I moved across the base of the lock, I tried to imagine it filled with water, with a two-hundred-ton ship floating those eight stories above my head.

  Incomprehensible. Some men had dreamed this, and others were making it happen.

  As I neared the workers, the tallest one separated himself. He, like the other workers, had stripped to the waist, and sweat sluiced off his gleaming skin. He could have been carved from black granite.

  “A few questions,” I said. “On behalf of Colonel Goethals.”
>
  “Then I’ll have a few answers.” Jimmy’s broad southern accent didn’t have the harshness of the hills of Tennessee, but was more flattened. Atlanta, I guessed. “Take your time. I don’t mind stepping away.”

  The man had a breezy confidence that came with youth, muscles, and a sense of belonging to the world’s greatest construction project.

  “Four weeks back, give or take,” I said, “one of the steel cables snapped.”

  The big grin dimmed. “In my sleep, I still see it falling. One end tore a man in half.”

  I squinted.

  “Six tons a bucket.” Jimmy gestured with his chin to the strands of cables above. “It only looks like slack in the line because of how the weight pulls them downward. Any idea of the tension on those cables? It was a sound like I’d never heard before, cutting through the air as that tension released. Loose end whipped right through his belly. I didn’t find that out till later though. The bottom of the bucket hit this concrete floor like thunder. Splattered twenty steps in all directions. Took forty men with wheelbarrows to haul it away while it was still wet.”

  I offered a handshake, and Jimmy took it, his brows drawn.

  “That’s all I needed,” I said. “Would be a waste of your time to ask about the cable. One of the men on the towers would know more, I’d guess.”

  “You’ll only hear what we heard down here. Cable was cut, not frayed.”

  “Who could have cut the cable?”

  “Any one of twenty men.”

  Not a helpful comment. “A foreman up there, could he tell me?”

  “Gerald Dawson is the man you’d want. But he’s in a cage in Cristóbal.”

  “Cage.”

  “Isolation cage. He took sick, and he’s stuck there until he’s cleared by doctors.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to ask.

  Jimmy leaned in. “The last week or so, rumors have started. That the Germans found a way to do it.”

  “Germans?” I did my best to sound surprised.

  “Think about it. Whoever controls this canal controls the oceans. And whoever controls the oceans controls the world. You do know the kaiser is building his navy twice the size it used to be, right?”

  It wasn’t until late morning that I reached Empire, essentially retracing a good deal of the journey I had taken earlier in the morning. This time, however, I was not asleep, and I watched the countryside pass by.

  After leaving the elevated tracks, where eventually the dammed Chagres would form a lake, the cut went through areas of cleared-out jungle, where hut villages were set up in scattered clumps.

  Out of the river valley were the barren hills, where occasionally giant mechanical cranes betrayed the activities just beyond the crests. And then, from those heights with each mile away from Gatún and each mile closer to Corozal, a sweeping panoramic view of the Pacific.

  I took the trip to Empire because that’s where I would find Harry Franck, Zone policeman 88, as he had so named the book that he was writing. I didn’t expect it to be a wasted trip, since at the train station in Gatún, I had called the police station in Corozal and learned that Harry would be enumerating in Empire and would not be difficult to find.

  Not once did I use a telephone without remembering the day, time of day, and the spot where I had first spoken to someone over the wires. I hadn’t yet reached ten years of age when the telephone was invented. In the Dakotas, there was no point for even a wealthy person to own one because who was there to call if there was only one telephone in a thousand square miles?

  In 1885, shortly after my fifteenth birthday, I had fled the ranch to join Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. That took me to Chicago for the first time. Such extravagance and noise, the crowded streets. The same day in Chicago, skinny and hungry for life and cocky as only a young cowboy can be, I was humbled first by the laughter around me in a hotel when I openly marveled at a voice coming out of the telephone. Before the setting of the sun, I was humbled again as I beheld the Home Insurance Building, ten stories tall, still as marvelous to me in my memory as the world’s tallest building, built just over twenty years later in New York at a staggering fifty stories, the Metropolitan Life Tower.

  I was living in the prime of human advancement—born before skyscrapers and telephone, now an adult in the United States where, according to the trumpeting of a daily paper in Bismarck, some three million telephones were connected by manual switchboards, and skyscrapers were so common—with the exception of the tallest in the world—as to not be worth discussion. There had been Kitty Hawk only six years earlier, and the Model T. We could fly, we could drive, we could send our voices across wire, and we could build monuments to the heavens. And in this time of wonder, nothing was more wondrous than what was unfolding around me—the connecting of the oceans, proof that there was not much left for humans to achieve. I thought about future generations that would look back and see the pinnacle of human achievement behind them. I felt sorry for them. Who, after all, enjoys knowing the best is behind them?

  Yet I knew I was a different person from who I had been in those first years of the Wild West show, wide-eyed at all those wonders. Because I wasn’t interested in wonders anymore.

  I just wanted to get home.

  American canal construction had begun with a few hundred workers in 1903, men who were adventurers and unafraid of pioneer life in a faraway jungle. Eventually, some had been joined by families, though the women and children lived in appalling conditions. Then someone realized that men work best if they have happy families for moral support, and canal budget money poured into bringing civilization to the canal. As a result, most of the train-stop towns along the isthmus railway had been constructed in the previous few years.

  Empire was not one of these modern towns. Shacks and inhabited boxes crowded the backyards, all the way to the jungle edges, where heaps of junked locomotives and dredges, most from the French era, had been slated for eventual removal.

  The main street was not whitewashed or sanitized but had the vibrancy of Panama City. On Railroad Avenue, I passed restaurants run by the Chinese, outdoor laundry facilities operated by the Jamaicans, and sidewalk stands for shoemaking and barbering.

  Navigation was simple. I’d pass a shoeshine stand and ask for Harry Franck. Each time I’d receive a smile and directions with an extended arm and pointed finger. Harry, it seemed, was not a stranger in this town and had few enemies.

  Eventually I stood in front of a three-story boardinghouse with peeled paint and a few broken windows—obviously outside of inspections and maintenance by the ICC.

  I stepped inside to be assailed by a medley of smells, from cooking food to exotic spices to human sweat. I heard laughter up the stairs. Harry’s laughter.

  I followed the sound to find him sitting in a small room with beds alongside the wall and a wooden barrel marked ICC in the center. That must have served as the dining table.

  “Who dat handsome mon be?” the large-bosomed woman sitting on a cane-backed chair asked as I knocked and entered. She had a washtub in front of her. “And what on eart’ be happening with the strange hat?”

  I removed it.

  Harry nodded. He was holding a clipboard.

  “Want me out of here?” I asked.

  “Are you supposed to be learning to enumerate?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Well then, go ahead and enumerate.”

  “How about I observe? As a way to learn.”

  “I’m the type that teaches someone to swim by throwing them in a pool.” Harry gave me a grin.

  “Dat’s all right, strange hat mon,” the woman said. “You ask what you want.”

  I cleared my throat. I’d rather be roping a wild horse than this.

  “Well, how many live in this room?”

  She laughed, a wonderful rolling sound. “What you see?”

  “Okay then. Harry, mark down one.”

  He said to her, “What’s your man’s name?”

>   “Rasmus Iggleston.”

  “Two then,” I said to Harry.

  He said to her, “What’s his metal-check number?”

  “Mister Harry, ah don’t know.”

  “Let’s see your commissary book then.”

  Another rolling laugh. “We finish that already before last week.”

  “He Jamaican?” Harry asked. “Your man?”

  “No. Him a Mont-rat.”

  Harry spoke out of the side of his mouth to me. “From Montserrat. Island in the British West Indies.”

  He turned back to her. “What color is he?”

  Rolling laughter. “What you ask dem questions for? Him just a pitch darker than me.”

  “How old?” Harry asked.

  “Why would I care about that?”

  “Older than you?”

  “Him be a ripe man. Yes, my love, him a prime man.”

  “Older then,” Harry said to me. “Holt, guess her age.”

  Not a chance. I asked her instead.

  “Lost my age paper. I is plenty old enough.”

  “Is Rasmus Iggleston married?” Harry asked.

  Her face turned grave. “Yes, indeed. I sure enough be his wife.”

  “Can he read?” Harry asked.

  “He can scratch out some words, yes, he can.”

  “And what kind of work does he do?”

  For the first time in the conversation, she became haughty, giving me a sense of how status was measured in her world. “Him employed by the ICC.”

  “A laborer?”