‘Maybe they were good at making informed guesses. They must have known you were a friend of Theodore Jones.’
‘No, Mr Edmonds. This was years ago, when I first arrived in San Francisco. This was long before I met you, or Mr Jones, or any of the people I know now.’
Collis looked at Wang-Pu and felt as if he had never seen him before. Suddenly, strangely, this amusing Chinese servant had appeared as somebody else altogether – a man whose destiny was mysteriously linked with Collis’s own.
‘We ought to talk about this some more,’ Collis said.
‘Yes,’ said Wang-Pu, as if he knew what Collis had been thinking.
Collis looked up at the frontage of 54 K, the hardware store. ‘I guess I’d better go tell Leland and Charles that I’m back. Can we meet tomorrow?’
‘Of course. Why don’t you come around to my apartments, and I will cook you a modest Chinese dinner. Eight-treasure tomatoes, lion’s head casserole, and aromatic duck.’
‘That sounds delicious.’
‘It is the traditional cooking of Peking.’
They were standing next to each other now with unusual formality, as if they were strangers who had just been introduced. In a way, they were. They had just discovered why their utterly different lives had brought them to the same place, in the same year, and why the white of the High Sierra snow was in both of their eyes.
Collis and the McCormicks had dinner that evening at the Tuckers. They drank a toast of California Pinot Noir to their partnership, and then Charles fought with a gristly joint of beef and a blunt carving knife, while Mary passed around dishes of overcooked broccoli and watery squash. Collis told them about his visit to San Francisco, and about the hardware he’d bought, although he didn’t mention l’affaire des couvertures, as Theodore Jones was later to call the burning of the Aria’s blankets, nor did he tell them about his duel with Grant Melford. He knew now how calculating he was going to have to be to get his way with the railroad, and he wanted to keep their suspicions lulled until he was ready.
After a sad pineapple pudding, Collis at last produced the purse of gold which Dan McReady had left in the safe of the International Hotel. He held it up, shook it so that it gave that lumpy rattle peculiar to gold nuggets, and then passed it across the table to Leland.
‘I still wish I knew how you made a profit out of burned blankets,’ said Charles, peeling an apple with his penknife.
Collis smiled. ‘Whatever you’ve got, there’s always somebody willing to buy it. I was lucky, that’s all.’
‘How much is in here?’ asked Leland, his eyebrows lowered with displeasure.
‘Enough to cover those shares you made over, plus a little more, which you can take as an investment in new stock.’
Leland looked at the purse balefully and wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘You know something?’ he said. ‘I still find it difficult to believe that a man of your background should wish to become involved in a hardware business. I know what you’ve said about gaining experience. I know all of that. But it doesn’t seem to ring authentic.’
Collis sipped his wine, and didn’t answer at first.
Charles said, ‘You’ve shown the enthusiasm, haven’t you, Collis? That’s all that counts.’
‘I’ve shown the colour of my money,’ said Collis, ‘and that counts even more. If you don’t like it, Leland, you know what you can do.’
‘I wasn’t doubting your integrity,’ Leland said huffily.
Collis pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Mary,’ he said, ‘I want to thank you for your dinner. Jane, it was a pleasure to spend an evening in your company. Charles, thank you.’
There was a difficult pause. Then Collis turned to Leland and gave him a mock-respectful nod of the head.
‘We’ll be friends, Leland, I don’t have any doubt of it.’
‘Friends?’ Leland said darkly. ‘We shall see.’
The following morning, a boy with gingery hair and freckles arrived with a letter for Collis. It had come on the steamboat Persephone, which his own ship had actually passed on the way up to Sacramento. The Persephone had run aground on the mud flats, and had only been refloated in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
Collis was half-way through checking the stores that had been delivered from San Francisco. He was standing outside 54 K in his shirtsleeves, a cheroot between his teeth, directing three casual labourers as they rolled kegs of nails and gunpowder into the store. There were always plenty of drifters and unlucky placers in Sacramento who were glad of a few hours’ employment. It was a fresh, chilly day, with a southwest wind blowing in from the river.
Collis looked at both sides of the letter before he opened it. The boy stood and watched him. The envelope was cream vellum, and sealed with green wax. He couldn’t make out the crest on the wax, but it looked as if it had been impressed with a heavy signet ring. The writing was lyrical and strong, in black ink.
He ripped open the envelope with his thumb. The boy was still there, so Collis delved into the pocket of his vest, brought out two bits, and handed them over. The boy hesitated for a moment and then ran off.
The letter was addressed ‘Colusa, South Park, San Francisco,’ and it read:
Dear Mr Edmonds,
I have heard, belatedly, the details of what happened between you and my son, Grant, out at Lake Merced. I wish simply to record that while I thought your provocative behaviour was in some ways contributory to the unfortunate events that followed, I am grateful for the restraint you showed during the duel, and for the manner in which you forbore to take a life which both etiquette and law had given you the opportunity to claim.
I am hopeful that if chance should ever bring us to meet again, we can exchange our respects as gentlemen, and put to rest all of the unpleasantness that has arisen between us.
If nothing else, sir, I am obliged to you for the life of my son.
The signature was large and dignified. Laurence S. Melford. Collis read the letter again, then folded it up and tucked it into his vest pocket. He wouldn’t do anything for now. But the time would come when it might be just the lever he needed to loosen the grip that South Park’s powerful hierarchy of shipowners, freight handlers, and stagecoach presidents still maintained on Northern California’s commerce. When it came to building a railroad, they would be just as lofty an obstacle as the Sierra Nevada, and twice as harsh.
One of the casual labourers had stopped work to light his pipe. ‘You!’ Collis called. ‘Go smoke your pipe some place else, on your own time. Collect half a morning’s pay from Mr Tucker, inside, and then get going. I don’t want to see you around here again.’
The man paused in his pipe-lighting, aggrieved. He wore the red-flannel shirt and the patched britches of an old-time prospector.
‘Are you going,’ Collis said, ‘or do you want to make something of it?’
The man sucked at his pipe, then took it out of his mouth and spat. ‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘But goddam your eyes.’
Collis looked away. ‘Yes,’ he said, as if he were talking about something else altogether.
He met Theodore Jones for lunch at Thomas’s Restaurant on G Street. They sat in a straight-backed wooden booth and ordered plates of roast wild duck served very hot and very rare on wild rice, and glasses of cold steam. The place was crowded with state congressmen and local storekeepers, and waiters in long blue aprons hurried between the tables carrying trays of casseroled meat and beer.
‘Well,’ said Theodore, breaking off a piece of warm sourdough bread and buttering it, ‘what happens now?’
‘We go to Washington, I suppose,’ said Collis. ‘You seem to have it all mapped out.’
Collis cut the leg from his duck and picked it up in his fingers. ‘There’s only one thing that’s still worrying me,’ he said as he chewed, ‘and that’s the fact that we don’t have a route over the Sierra Nevada. What happens if we go to Washington and all they do is ask us to show them the route?’
‘Then
we show them the route. We draw a red line across the Sierra Nevada and say that’s it.’
‘Just any red line, anywhere?’
Theodore nodded. ‘That’s one thing you’ll learn when you get down to serious political infighting. Bluff is ninety-seven per cent of the battle. And anyway, most of the representatives are so ignorant they don’t even know the topography of their own back yards, let alone the Sierra Nevada.’
‘But we still have to find a route, don’t we?’
‘Oh, sure,’ said Theodore. ‘As soon as the winter snow starts to thaw, I want to get up into the Sierras and make some preliminary surveys.’
Collis wiped his hands. ‘Do you really think it’s there?’ he asked Theodore seriously.
‘The pass? Of course it is.’
‘I wish I had your faith.’
Theodore laughed. ‘It’s not a question of faith. It’s a question of geographical probability, combined with engineering possibility.’
‘A probability and a possibility don’t make a certainty.’
‘Listen,’ said Theodore, ‘why don’t you come with me when I try to find a trace through the mountains next year? Maybe you’ll see what I’m talking about then. You should have seen the railroad I built along the Niagara Gorge. Three experienced topographers said it wasn’t humanly possible. I didn’t worry about that. I just built it. It was only when it was finished that I realized they were probably quite right. It wasn’t humanly possible.’
Collis smiled in amusement.
‘You must come, anyway,’ Theodore said. ‘If you’ve never been up into the Sierras, you’ve got yourself a treat in store. The air’s marvellous. Good for the respiratory system, and even better for the bowels.’
‘All right,’ said Collis, ‘I’ll come. Maybe we ought to take Wang-Pu with us, too.’
‘Oh, sure. Then he could go back and tell all his would-be Chinese labourers what they’d be letting themselves in for.’
The waiter brought them two fresh glasses of steam. Collis raised his. ‘Here’s to Washington, then.’
Theodore nodded. ‘To Washington. And to the day we can travel there by railroad.’
Collis spent a quiet winter in Sacramento. The days passed like slices of light falling through the spokes of a carriage wheel. Each morning he would be up at six, dressed in his clean collar and his grey coat, and walking down to the store. Each day would be spent in selling fuses and screws and gunpowder, in organising the stock, in compiling inventories and arranging for deliveries.
He lunched at the Merchants’ Association Club, often sitting alone at a corner table. A week before Christmas, he moved out of the Tuckers’ house and rented the second-storey rooms of a house on J Street, within sight of Sutter’s Fort. Some evenings he spent alone, reading and smoking and drinking whisky; but two or three times a week he went to the Auburn Saloon on H Street or the Duffy House on I, where he played faro until two or three in the morning.
There was a passable whorehouse on the corner of Eighth and L Streets, Mrs Pangborn’s, a four-storey frame building painted ochre-red, with green blinds that were always drawn. Collis went there once or twice a month, following along the musty corridors the firm buttocks of some girl dressed in nothing but a silk-panelled corset, and then lying in bed afterwards breathing in the smell of musk and sweat and listening to the distant repetitive banging of the house pianist’s heel on the worn-out rugs downstairs.
He spent Christmas with Theodore and Annie Jones. It was a gentle, emotional day, and he found he was beginning to understand and love them both. Theodore carved the goose, and after their dinner they exchanged gifts. Collis had bought Theodore a bound monograph on the rolling of permanent way at Mount Savage, in Maryland, and a bottle of rose-scented toilet water for Annie. In return, the Joneses gave him a travelling-case with razor and scissors and hairbrushes, all engraved ‘CE’. They stood in front of the fire and sang Christmas carols, unselfconsciously and with joy.
As 1858 began, Collis also began to deepen his friendship with Wang-Pu. They rarely dined out together, since a merchant of Collis’s standing was considered eccentric and even anti-social if he ate with a Chinese, and both Collis and Wang-Pu decided that the interests of the Sierra Pacific railroad would be better served if Collis kept up his local respectability. But they spent many evenings in the calm simplicity of Wang-Pu’s apartment, where Collis learned to sit on the floor crosslegged and eat with chopsticks, and where he learned the subtle pleasures of wind-dried ducks, kai-choy, and pig’s-trotter jelly.
Wang-Pu talked about the summers in North China, and of outdoor feasts with his family, when they would eat so many river crabs that they would be sitting ankle-deep in empty shells. He talked of Buddhism, and of Chinese funerals and marriages. He tried to explain the visions in his mind.
These evenings always left Collis feeling peaceful and whole, and although he was still determined to press ahead with his railroad, as hard and as fast as he could, he began to see himself more clearly, and his ambition took on a shape that was as unmistakable as the distant peaks of the Sierra Nevada.
Wang-Pu said one evening, as they sat drinking rice wine, ‘It is a rare thing, to have a dream for which one would happily give one’s life. We are fortunate men.’
‘You’d give your life for a railroad?’ Collis said.
Wang-Pu nodded. ‘Yes, and I believe you would, too.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Collis. ‘I think I’d rather stay alive, and go by boat.’
Wang-Pu put down his porcelain cup. ‘Maybe. But what is a little death compared to a great fame?’
At last February came, and it was time for Collis and Theodore to pack. Charles in particular was irritated that Collis was going to go away for so long, but the store was in good order, and Collis promised that he wouldn’t stay away for longer than three months, at least if he could help it. He borrowed a sea chest from Wang-Pu, and made sure that he packed his best evening coat and his white collars. Washington, after all, was a highly social place. On a fresh Wednesday morning, Wang-Pu drove Collis in the company’s wagon down to the Sacramento River, where he met up with Theodore, and together they boarded the paddle-steamer Occidental and set sail.
The California took them to Panama City. The sky was overcast, and the weather after Sacramento was sultry and almost unbearable. There was a day before the train left for Aspinwall, and Collis went up to the Hospital of the Sacred Heart. In the dark hallway, under the crucifix, he asked a young Flemish nun for Sister Agnes. The hall smelled, as before, of soap and boiling vegetables. The nun shook her head and said, ‘Je regretted …’
He stood in the hospital cemetery with his hat in his hand while Theodore Jones waited with his arms folded, looking down at the grey curve of Panama harbour. The stone bore only her name, and didn’t mention how young she was, or that her father had run a patisserie in Lokeren, or that she had once given courage in the hospital to a young American who had come through Panama with a woman, not his wife, who was suffering from yellow fever. It didn’t mention that one month later, she had gone down with yellow fever herself, and had died in great pain.
Theodore came over after a few minutes and stood beside him. ‘It’s very said,’ he said sympathetically.
Collis swallowed and nodded. ‘She was so damned young. And pretty, too.’
‘There’s no point in getting yourself upset. She knew what the risks were, after all.’
‘I’m still upset. My whole life seems to be spent standing over graves.’
‘Everybody’s life is.’
Collis lowered his eyes. ‘I guess that’s something about the West I haven’t gotten used to yet.’
‘You will, I’m afraid,’ said Theodore, laying his hand on Collis’s shoulder. ‘Just count yourself lucky that you haven’t gotten used to it the hard way. Two friends of mine died of cholera last year only one month after they got to San Francisco. It’s the foul water, mainly, and the lack of good doctors. Someone worked out tha
t one out of five people die within six weeks of arriving in California, and that three out of the remaining four get sick within three months.’
They left the hospital grounds, let out of the gate by an old bent Negro in a straw hat. They walked down by the seafront for a while, and then, after a muddy sunset, with the sea slopping against the harbour wall like tepid soup, they went back to the Grand Hotel for dinner, spiced meat and beans, which they washed down with bourbon, to keep away the fever and the dysentery.
That night, in his huge four-poster bed in the Grand Hotel, with the February wind blowing in from the Pacific through the open shutters, Collis sat up in his sweaty sheets and lit the oil-lamp. The wallpaper in his room was peeling and mildewed, and the hotel’s plumbing shuddered like a man dying of disease. He poured himself a glass of whisky and stood looking at himself in the blotchy mirror. He looked older than he could ever remember. An old young man, with the tiredness of other people’s deaths already on him.
They steamed into the Potomac late in the afternoon on the last Thursday of February. Collis and Theodore leaned on the starboard rail of the steamship Charleston, looking out over the wide herring-boned waters where the Eastern Branch flowed into the main stream, and beyond to the irregular skyline of Washington itself, with its bare trees and stately brick buildings. In the distance was the square pillared shape of the Capitol, still unfinished, and with its dome yet unbuilt. And there were the wide, muddy avenues, crowded with carriages and horse-drawn buses, and the criss-cross streets. Smoke from hundreds of household fires rose into the frosty air, and drifted away to the east. Over at the navy yards, a three-masted frigate was just putting to sea, drawn out on to the silvery river by three small steam tugs.
The Charleston was to tie up at Georgetown, where her owners’ offices were. She paddled slowly upstream, rousing loose flocks of bufflehead ducks, and as she passed Mount Vernon, the captain tolled the ship’s bell, and the gentlemen passengers all removed their hats as a tribute to George Washington. Soon, past the islands in midstream, the curve of Georgetown harbour came into view, thicketed with two- and three-masted schooners. High on a hill to the west, shadowed by the sinking February sun, were the buildings of Georgetown University, but the town itself was not much more than a waterfront lined with offices and wooden warehouses, and a hilly clutter of trees and private houses.
Railroad Page 48