The Ice Merchant

by Paul Boor

  25

  Alone in Her Laboratory

  By now he’d be long gone, she knew—departed from the station and rolling across the Texas coastal plain. The ice merchant. His train was scheduled for noon, and the Galveston–Santa Fe Railroad was punctual, fair weather or foul. Earlier, while she’d imprisoned herself all morning, presiding over the circular discourse of her overwrought colleagues, Nick would have been tucked comfortably into his Pullman car, fast approaching the two-mile-long railroad trestle that crossed Galveston Bay.

  He seemed such a fine gentleman, her ice merchant, so different from any other gentleman. This was a person with depth, ambition, an experience of life, and yet he was gentle and kind. She was fortunate to have made his acquaintance, to have shared such gay times and open talk. A true friendship had been forged.

  Their moments together reminded her of the first time she’d spoken a foreign tongue—the excitement of making herself understood to another, though it was seldom a man. There was never a man like Nick, was there? Most men she’d befriended since her husband’s death were from the university. Had there ever been a man with whom she could joke or speak so openly and naturally? Well, that would be quite a man.

  Still, it worried her that this tall, stately man of the world didn’t understand the extreme danger he was in. He treated it like business. She should’ve told him everything. She should have told him about the boy, the horror of it, the ghastly manner of the boy’s death. Wasn’t that what friends were for? Friends protected each other, even from their own weaknesses, their own mistakes.

  Had she forged more than a friendship with this Van Horne fellow? She blushed at the thought of that moment on the beach. It was only last night, though it seemed like ages ago. Surely their tiny indiscretion had been a spur-of-the-moment fancy, nothing more. She would put it out of mind. Still, the tenderness of his touch, the sweet way he kissed her and stood there looking so—

  “Renée! Your solution’s bubblin’ a wee bit briskly there.”

  “What? Forgive me, Uncle. How in the world did it get so—”

  “This isn’t like you, lass. Take care, or you’ll burn us up!”

  . . . Nick. Dear Nick. He’d promised to correspond, hadn’t he? They’d agreed, practically taken a blood oath. Their enthusiasm was mutual. She wouldn’t be the first to write, of course; that would be much too forward, as a woman . . . oh, damn! There it was again, that thinking she’d tried so hard to change, the silly idea that because she was born a female of the species she should act a certain way, or refrain from certain actions as improper. Complete balderdash! She must remind herself of that truth; women like her had been repeating it ever since the meeting of great minds—female minds—at Seneca Falls, decades ago. In the countryside of upstate New York, wasn’t it? Nick’s home.

  Of course she would write the good Mr. Van Horne. She’d act as any decent human being acted toward another; whether man or woman made not a speck of difference in the modern world. She’d take up her pen, she would. “Dearest Nick,” she’d begin. Her letter was already taking shape in her mind.

  Perhaps “Dearest” wasn’t right. No . . . equality was equality. The shallow men of science and medicine could hardly accept her, a mere woman, as equal, but surely this forward-thinking gentleman from the North was different. Eventually, other men would learn to be like him. Like Nick. Yes, like Nick.

  “Renée . . . Renée, dear . . . Will ye pay attention, lass? Your retort. Turn it doon, will you? What are ye about today?”

  The smell of scorched rubber filled the lab.

  “Oh, Uncle . . . sorry . . . I . . .”

  Her solution was ruined, a whole afternoon’s work. What was wrong with her thinking? There was nothing unseemly in forging a friendship with a man. With Nick, it was a natural meeting of two minds, two gentle souls, nothing more.

  Yet . . . why had she rushed to the lab this morning? Her excuse to herself was that she must call an emergency meeting of the faculty senate to discuss the lynching. But she was sure nothing new would be said. Everyone already knew all the horrible details; the entire faculty was afraid to walk downtown, and now Uncle had no one to acquire cadavers. True, she had an experiment to tend to, the cells to count and feed, but she could’ve put the experiment off or instructed Fernando to carry on until her return. That way, she might’ve seen Nick off properly on the noon train, as a newfound friend would, with an embrace or perhaps a sisterly kiss on the platform. No harm in that. Instead, she’d rushed into the meeting room as if she were afraid to see the gentleman mount the blasted train.

  She would wait before writing, not because it was the proper thing to do, but because this feeling in her was so alarming. Yes, she’d best wait for a letter from Nick, to judge its tone, its intent. She’d have plenty of time to ruminate over her response, the salutation, her deeper thoughts . . . Nick’s Pullman car had just left the island; it was mere hours since he’d the crossed the bridge over Galveston Bay to begin his voyage.

  It would be four long days before he’d arrive at his mountain home in the great state of New York, and that damned ice business of his.

  II

  The North Country

  26

  Layover

  “Layover! Ladies and gentlemen. Layover!” called the conductor who made his way between the cars as the train slowed, near to stopping. “Chicago it is, folks. Chicago. Boiler’s in need of repair. With luck, we’ll be departin’ the station at daybreak.”

  Nicolas peered out at the black night and the ghostly shadows of telegraph poles creeping by. Chicago—gateway to the West, stockyard to the nation—the city of blood and meat, from porterhouse to headcheese, from chop to wurst.

  In spite of his booking a private cabin with the most comfortable of Pullman’s sleeping berths, Nicolas had climbed into his bunk only once in the last two nights. On the first day out, he tried his damnedest to put the island of Galveston out of mind. He’d forced himself to pull his ledger from his trunk and wrestle with the columns of figures, but waves of memory and trepidation washed over him. He shut the ledger. He stared out the window, never turned down the sheets. Instead, he took up paper and scribbled at the writing table till dawn, though he produced nothing more than a halting string of a hundred words. He was no good at it. Not words, not for this thing, this feeling he was fighting.

  Besides, it was futile, was it not? Renée hadn’t come to see him off at the station, though he’d asked, practically begged to be bid farewell. Her absence at the platform must hold some meaning, mustn’t it? He should count himself blessed to be out of that strange, disturbing city and off that damp, salty island…But he didn’t feel blessed…

  With morning light on the second day after departing Galveston, Nicolas wasn’t sure of anything. He had scribbled, scrawled, and searched for words until a sheaf of false starts stared back at him from the small table. No, he was no good at it. He’d hardly gotten past the salutation—“Dearest Renée” . . . “To my dear friend . . .” Then, in a fit that lasted till noon, he filled four pages with his finest hand and fell, dazed, into his bunk.

  . . . dining with you . . . our walk on the beach . . . forgive me but . . . tossed on a sea of emotions . . . our friendship . . . what hope can I hold . . .?

  As they chugged into the Chicago railroad yards, Nicolas reached for the mound of foolscap and chucked it out the window into the cold night air. Foolishness. He’d written foolishness. A letter to Renée could wait for eternity; it would never be finished.

  The train wheezed to a halt, was rumbling and hissing when there was a knock at the door and Adam stood in the corridor. “Come on, boss. Let’s get us a steak,” he said, licking his chops. “I’m starved and the stockyards are walking distance.”

  Van Horne felt a hollowness at his center, an emptiness food could hardly fill. But the evening was young and his foreman needed sustenance.

  A few blocks from the railway platform Nicolas and Adam crossed Thirty-Ninth Street and e
ntered the stockyards and meatpacking district. The going became slick with a steady, icy drizzle that mixed the clay of the street and the blood from the abattoirs into a grisly muck. Stinking stockyard workers, their eyes bleary from twelve-hour shifts on the killing floor, pushed their way to and fro. The lowing cattle, the squeal of hogs, and the smell of raw animal fear filled the air. It was the sort of scene that kept ladies in their berths and gave pause to even the hungriest man contemplating a steak dinner.

  Eight blocks into the district, they entered the neighborhood known as “back of the yards” and came on a row of public houses. Stockmen and slaughterhouse crews congregated on a particular street corner signaled the busiest and best establishment. The pair of New Yorkers pushed through the swinging doors into a poorly heated, drafty saloon consisting of a single cavernous room. The tables were packed with boisterous men. The doors to the kitchen—one in and one out—were so distant as to be a goodly hike for the dozen or so waiters hauling trays of grilled meats and sausages to the tables. Adam stepped to the bar and ordered beers from a tapman of great girth who spoke with a German accent. Two mugs skidded toward them from the taps and sloshed to a halt.

  Nicolas set a foot on the brass rail; took a long, bitter swig; and studied the row of haggard faces at the bar for a sense of what this booming city was all about. Most appeared to be older, grey-haired workingmen in bloodstained blue shirts and woolens who sucked at their beer as if it were their last. A few younger men stared glassy eyed into nowhere. Nicolas found it impossible to tell which were about to start a shift on the killing floor or cutting tables and which had just gotten off work.

  “We must count ourselves lucky,” Nicolas said to his trusty foreman. “Harvesting ice is cold, hard labor, but at least it’s clean. It’s healthy.”

  “I’m beginning to think this business of yours might not prove so healthy.” Adam leaned closer. “There’s folks all over this nation who’d see us swing like that poor devil in the alley.”

  Nicolas gave a resigned nod, settled his elbows on the bar, and continued appraising the crowd.

  He found that a surprising number of stockyard workers in this establishment appeared to be mere boys. One group near the bar looked eleven or twelve years old at most—dirty, ill kept, with musty hair and angry faces. Nicolas was reminded of the two dead bodies from Buffalo.

  A couple of these ruffians leered at the older men as only youths intent on doing wrong might do. As Nicolas watched, a scuffle broke out between two of the boys, and the German tapman circled from behind the bar to eject the two combatants.

  “They sure work ’em young in these stockyards,” Nicolas said with disdain. “Are there no schools here? Have these boys no parents?”

  “They’re prob’ly orphans,” Adam said. “The orphanages are filled to bursting these days. Poorhouses, too. Makes for plenty of able-bodied young ones, and a slaughterhouse don’t care if they’re only boys.”

  The shenanigans of these youngsters saddened Nicolas. His mind had been consumed by Galveston—the murderous events in Sailortown, the good professor and his lovely niece Renée, the scientists’ work . . . the unsettling preoccupations of Renée’s mother. Nicolas had given hardly a thought to his mountain home, the upcoming ice harvest on Upper Spy Lake, or his own son. Galveston occupied his mind so, Nicolas couldn’t remember eating a thing since Trudeau’s on Restaurant Row. Now, in the smoky barroom, the smell of frying meat piqued his appetite. He followed Adam’s lead and called for the house’s finest porterhouse with all the fixings.

  Adam went on about the boys. “I’ve seen ’em in the North Country, too,” he said. “Gangs of youngsters peddled as cheap labor. Some boss man takes their first month’s pay and probably half their pay after that. In cities like Chicago I’ll bet they cram a dozen of ’em into a flat with no water, no nothin’.”

  “These industrialists.”

  “And they call that progress.”

  Cuts of seared beef two inches thick arrived, piled high with sweet-smelling onions and fried potatoes. At arm’s length from Nicolas a dull-eyed, balding worker, his face grey and drawn, sat hunched over his empty whiskey glass. The man glanced with something like disgust at the fine plate of food set before Nicolas, like he’d seen too much meat, had too many years on the killing floor. He had the look of a man whose whole purpose in life was a single, small, nightmarish task, performed countless times in the service of the company. Perhaps it was the fatal slash to the jugular, or hoisting the warm, twitching carcass into the air, or—most gruesome—the disembowelment.

  On the bar in front of the man sat a single gold eagle, likely half his entire day’s pay. He tapped the coin with a finger and called down the bar for another drink just as a second ruckus broke out among the ruffians. When the older man swung around to face the commotion, one of the boys broke from the pack, circled around, and slid between the old man and Nicolas. He shot the ice merchant a scowl, then whisked the old man’s coin off the bar.

  “No you don’t!” Nicolas wrapped the youth’s wrist in a steely grip. The boy’s eyes swiveled around, snakelike. Nicolas twisted; Adam stepped up and cocked the boy’s other arm behind him. Nicolas stared into the boy’s hateful face. The boy sneered back.

  “Hold on,” Nicolas muttered. “I know you. I’ve seen you before.”

  “Leave me be!” the boy cried, wiggling, rising on his toes, and arching back toward Adam with the pain.

  “You’re the one they called Rainbow,” Nicolas said. “I know from your eyes.”

  The hooligan’s eyes were of two distinctly different colors, one dark brown, the other a translucent, fleshy grey.

  “You were that boy on the lake at the first harvest.”

  The youth’s freakish eyes darted about, searching for an accomplice. He could barely be a teenager. Frail with malnourishment, his growth into manhood stunted, the boy weakened quickly in the grip of the two Northerners.

  “Please don’t, mister,” he whined.

  “You were on the ice,” Nicolas said. “It was only a day or two, then you disappeared. Quit.”

  The barkeep appeared at their side, spouting a handful of German oaths. With startling dexterity for his girth, he grabbed the youth by the collar and tugged, ripping the boy’s shirt as he pulled him away from the bar.

  “Did you see that?” Nicolas said. “On his shoulder. Was that . . . ?”

  The barkeep hustled Rainbow out the barroom door.

  “I swear, Adam, I saw that strange—”

  The barkeep was back, wiping his hands on his apron. “So sorry, gents,” he said with a shake of his big round head. “No good, these young ones they bring here.” He scanned the crowd for more trouble, but the pack of ill-kept boys had quickly dispersed into the large room. “Mein Gott . . .so many, and new ones all the time. They have no home, ja, so they come to steal and fight. Every minute my eyes open I must keep. Let me stand you two a drink.”

  Nicolas and Adam returned to their steaks. “You recognized that hooligan, too, didn’t you, Adam?”

  “I remember him well, though I hate to admit it. Rainbow. He was one of ’em in them crews, the young ones working the sawmill. He snuck away from the mill and come to me when I was recruiting for the first ice harvest in December. I’m afraid I hired him.”

  “Where’d he come from?”

  “Never said, but a grown man said he was the boy’s uncle come to me wanting the boy’s pay. I gave him nothing. Told the fellow we weren’t working the ice more than a day or two when the scalawag ran off.”

  “I thought I saw a mark on the boy’s shoulder. Something like this . . .”

  Nicolas dipped his finger in his suds, pushed his beer aside, and drew on the bar.

  Ж

  “I never seen nothing like that, boss.”

  “Well, I trust you won’t hire the likes of him again.”

  On their return to the railroad station, Nicolas and Adam passed a row of brightly lit shops, among them an apothecary wit
h a modern, finely outfitted display window. Seeing this, Nicolas suggested that Adam go ahead to the train. “I’ll make a quick stop,” he said, thinking of the depleted morphine mix given him by Thomas Chubb.

  With a nod, Adam continued to the station. Nicolas entered the apothecary’s shop, where he studied the exhibit of shining new hypodermic syringes at the counter. These were the latest thing, all the rage with their sparkling glass cylinders, ground-glass pistons, and finely tooled steel casements.

  “Nowadays, they’re drawing these needles as thin as wire,” the apothecary commented as he laid out the various hypodermics on the counter. “They vanish beneath the skin with ease and leave the barest trace.”

  “The works I was given is certainly much coarser. Badly worn, too, I’m afraid.”

  “Now, this one, sir, is from the manufacture of Codman and Shurtleff of Beacon Street, a Boston maker. It’s a most excellent instrument.”

  “The tooling seems quite precise.”

  “The ground glass and tempered metals guarantee perfect accuracy, sir.” Nicolas worked the plunger slowly. “It’ll last a lifetime.”

  “I dare say it will.” Nicolas slid the works into its leather case. “I’ll take it, and two vials of a mix, mostly morphine.”

  “Will Magendie’s solution do?”

  “I suppose that’d be fine.”

  “I’ll prepare it with a dash of chloral hydrate, though I rather recommend the scopolamine,” the apothecary said as he headed to his laboratorium at the back of the shop. “A mere tenth of a grain is most relaxing, yet without aftereffects.”

  When the apothecary returned, he bundled the kit and the bottle of mix, and pushed the brown paper package across the counter to Nicolas.

  “Do beware that finer needle, sir,” he said with a smile. “Just beneath the surface of the skin, small veins are remarkably plentiful. Should one wander into one, a certain unpleasantness may result. Some tingling, fatigue—nothing more, you understand.”