The Spirit of Thunder

by Kurt R A Giambastiani

  “And the stench—”

  “The perfume!”

  “The crowds—”

  “The society!”

  “And the loose morals—”

  “The loose morals!”

  George laughed. “Yes, yes, you relish all those things. But me?” He motioned to the world around him. “Here it is simple. Uncomplicated. Basic. That is what I crave.”

  Vincent snorted. “This you crave? This?” He shook his head, unable to comprehend. “And surrounded by the most virtuous women in the world? It’s just as well that it is cold enough to freeze a man’s balls. No, you are a heartless man,” he said. “Heartless.”

  “And you are nothing but a base scalawag!”

  “Mais oui!

  George put an arm around the trader’s shoulder. “Come. Perhaps if we beg, we can get my virtuous young neighbor to make us some skillet bread.”

  “Ahh,” Vincent said with real appreciation. “Now, my friend, perhaps there is some hope for you after all.”

  Chapter 8

  Spring, A.D. 1888

  Washington

  District of Columbia

  The wind howled around the White House and whistled through the gaps beneath the library’s French doors. Custer stopped pacing and turned to toast his backside by the fire. Matherly sat in a deep leather chair and sipped his tea. A gust of wind pushed a puff of smoke back down the chimney and into the room. The president took a step away but stayed near enough to enjoy the warmth.

  “Read that back,” he said.

  Samuel put down his pen and picked up the piece of paper that was now covered not only with even, type-written lines, but also clumps of tiny scribbles connected by looping lines and arrows. The aide held the paper up to catch more of the light from the window.

  “‘And provided, further,’” he read. “‘That in case of the death of both father and mother, leaving an infant child, or children, under twenty-one years of age, the right and fee shall inure to the benefit of said infant child or children; and the executor, administrator, or guardian may, at any time within two years after the death of the surviving parent, and in accordance with the laws of the State or Territory in which such children for the time being have their domicile, sell said land for the benefit of said infants, but for no other purpose.’”

  Custer let the words roll around but shook his head. “I don’t see the difference one way or the other.”

  Matherly put down his teacup and leaned forward. “The way it reads now, Mr. President, is much more specific as to the way in which the land can be passed on. I believe it is crucial, especially after the many deaths of this past winter, that we provide for the perpetuation of those homestead grants in the control of widows and heirs.”

  Custer blinked at the senator. “Sakes alive but you talk like a lawyer. I don’t understand you any better than I do the bill.” He left the fire and walked toward the window.

  “Mr. President,” Matherly began again. “The difference between the two versions—”

  Custer held up a hand. “Samuel?” he said as he looked outside. “What do you think?”

  There was a pause as his aide considered his response. “The new version is less ambiguous, sir.”

  “Good. Keep it, then.”

  The daylight from outside was muted but full like pale velvet. The blizzard that had struck the whole northeastern seaboard had abated overnight. Like an invading horde bent on a farther objective, it had swept in, paralyzed the populace, and moved onward. From the library’s mullioned windows Custer looked out across the south lawn and the Ellipse. The hurricane’s winds still blew, wailing like some monstrous child and piling last night’s snow up into twenty-foot drifts. The first floor of the White House was entirely snowbound, like a thick blanket had been pulled up beneath the balcony’s chin. The immense white spire of Washington’s monument was nearly lost in the blowing snow.

  Custer sighed silently as he regarded the tall monument. To be honored like that, he thought to himself. To be so loved. To be nearly deified, like a Caesar.

  The huge obelisk pointed up to heaven. Custer’s next breath was less wistful, held more remorse.

  How in Hell can a man compete with that?

  “Sir?”

  “Hmm?” Custer turned. By the expectant looks on the faces of the two other men he realized that he had missed some of the conversation. “My apologies, gentlemen. My mind was...elsewhere. What was it you were saying?”

  Samuel cleared his throat. “The senator suggested some modifications to limit the homestead grants to lands in the territories only.”

  “It’s just that recent history has shown us how seriously some states take their sovereignty,” Matherly said. “Since it is our intention to encourage settlement and cultivation in the Frontier, I suggest we include such a limit explicitly in the bill. That will defuse any argument along those lines.”

  Custer smirked. “And keep your own state from being overrun by squatters.”

  Matherly stammered but had the good grace not to look affronted.

  “Go ahead,” Custer said. “Add it. Regardless your motives, I think you’re right. We’ll need all the allies we can get on this one.”

  “Yes,” Matherly said, picking up his tea again. “The debate has already started.”

  “Up on the Hill?”

  “No. But in the lobbies and dining establishments around town, which is perhaps where the more important conversations take place.”

  “What is your feeling on it?” Custer asked.

  Matherly gave a slight grimace. “Not good,” he said. “Fortunately, though, the opposition has devolved into two camps. One side opposes you completely just on basic principal.”

  “Speaker Carlisle,” Samuel muttered.

  “Just so,” the senator agreed.

  “And the other camp?” Custer asked.

  “The other, and smaller camp believes that we are creating this bill simply to fulfill a political promise; that it will ultimately fail, politically and practically; and that the best strategy is to simply go along and let it do so, taking you down with it.”

  “Duchesnes,” Custer said, naming the new senate majority leader.

  “Correct, as well,”

  “Why does the distinguished gentleman from New York think the bill will fail?”

  Matherly became uneasy. “There were...quite a few settlers who died this winter.”

  “It’s a frontier,” Custer said, walking back toward the fire. “It’s dangerous out there.”

  “But your General Herron was unable to protect them.”

  “They were squatters. He didn’t even know they were there.”

  “Well, if you can’t protect even a few squatters, how can you possibly protect half a million homesteaders—” Matherly stopped, having forgotten to whom he spoke. “...or so goes their argument, Mr. President.”

  A breathlessness tightened beneath Custer’s ribs, expanding like some yawning pit until he felt as though it would consume him. “Do you mean to tell me,” he managed to say, “that there are members of Congress who believe that I would put half a million citizens in harm’s way, just to achieve a political goal?”

  “Mr. President,” Samuel said quietly. “You know there are those who do not hold you in high regard.”

  “High regard?” Custer spat a laugh. “This isn’t a simple lack of regard. To believe this...you’d have to think me a monster.” He turned his back on the two men to hide the rage he knew he could not keep from his face. The anger that built within him was a solid thing, a tumor of terrible emotion. He walked to the French doors that led out onto the balcony, and pushed the door open against the wind and snow.

  The wind whipped his collar-length hair and he squinted as it lashed around his eyes. He made his way to the rail, pushing through the foot of snow that had accumulated on the balcony overnight. The railing was cold beneath his hands. He gripped it, feeling the iciness seep into his fingers, feeling the pain invade
his palms.

  How could they? he asked the world silently. How could they possibly?

  The pain in his hands faded as numbness took hold. The frigid wind swept away the residual warmth he had gained at the library hearth, and the cold crept in past his clothes, chilling his skin, his muscles, his bones. A shivering overtook him and with the silence of the snow-shrouded city before him, the only sound he heard was the chattering of his own teeth, and the words of damnation that filled his head.

  He turned and stormed back into the library.

  “Samuel,” he said. “Take a message.”

  Herron undid the button in the middle of his frock coat, put his hand into the inner pocket, and retrieved Custer’s telegraphed message. He shook it to unfold it and handed it to the engineer. Shafer stepped closer to the lamp and read it while Herron ground his teeth.

  The rain beat down on the roof of the small office. Two tin buckets, one near the door and one by the window behind Herron’s desk, caught the water that leaked in, each tiny splash magnified into a harsh, metallic plang.

  Shafer handed back the piece of paper.

  “Well?” Herron asked.

  “He seems rather insistent,” the colonel offered.

  “That’s hardly the way I would characterize it.”

  “How would you put it, sir?”

  “He’s good and God-damned mad is how I’d put it. He’s furious. I’m surprised he didn’t order my ass onto the next eastbound train so he could bust my balls in person, is how I’d put it, Colonel.” He folded the message, put it back in his coat pocket, and continued in a calmer tone. “But he did not say those things, and so here I am. And here, also, are you. You’ve read the president’s request. As far as the bridge is concerned, will you be able to accommodate him?”

  Shafer shrugged. “Sir, the late winter has slowed our schedule and the blizzard that hit back east, well, sir, it’s delayed some critical shipments.”

  “Is that a ‘no’?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. We just need more time.”

  Herron pressed his lips into a thin line and sighed. “Very well,” he said. “That’s what I needed to know. Thank you, Colonel. You are relieved.”

  Shafer saluted and turned to go. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, hand on the doorknob. “Did you say dismissed?”

  Herron sat down at his desk and pulled out a sheet of paper and a pen. “Hmm? Dismissed? No. I said you are relieved.”

  “Relieved. Sir...but...the bridge...”

  “The bridge,” Herron said as he wrote, “will continue on without you. It will be completed without you.” He dipped his pen again and wrote some more. The nib met the paper with the sound of rat scratchings. “You, Colonel Shafer, are hereby reassigned. McCormack will take over your duties.”

  “McCormack? Sir, McCormack is a dullard and a ditch-digger. You can’t turn a project of this magnitude over to him.”

  “I can, and I will. In fact”—He put his signature at the bottom of the page.—”I just have. And if you, Colonel, don’t rein in the attitude, you’re going to find yourself reassigned to duties far beneath your abilities. As it is, I know they’ll be far beneath your opinion of yourself.”

  Herron could see his point finally strike home. Shafer slowly pulled himself up to attention. He faced Herron like a condemned man before a firing squad. Herron put aside the first paper addressed to McCormack, took out another sheet, and began a new set of orders. The colonel stood silently before him, awaiting the words that would spell out his future. Herron wrote. He glanced up and saw Shafer leaning in, trying to make out the upside-down letters in the dim lamplight. Herron finished the orders, re-dipped his pen, and moved to sign them.

  “What’ll it be, Shafer? Levees in Mississippi? Or working here to fulfill the request of your Commander-in-Chief?” The tip of the pen hovered over the blankness at the bottom of the page. The colonel’s face was rigid: jaw tight, nostrils flared, brows beetled low, his eyes hidden by the reflection of lamplight in his spectacles.

  “Last chance,” Herron said. No response. He shrugged and looked down to sign.

  “No. Wait...”

  The general looked up again.

  “I’ll stay.”

  “I don’t need you to do me any favors—”

  “I mean,” Shafer interrupted. “I mean, I’d like to stay. Sir.”

  “You’ll finish the bridge?” Herron asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In six weeks’ time?”

  “Sir, six weeks? McCormack couldn’t do it that fast.”

  “Shafer, if I let you stay, it’s because you can do something that McCormack cannot.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you do it in six weeks?”

  Shafer struggled with it, then gave in. “Yes, sir. In six weeks. Trains will be rolling across that bridge by the time the president arrives.”

  Herron studied his colonel. Shafer had not lost the passion of his youth nor the idealism. Yet, despite his experiences, neither had the younger man acquired a sense of proportion. For an engineer, Herron found him impossibly impractical.

  “Shafer, you are a zealot, and a zealot is the most dangerous kind of man there is.” He leaned his elbows on the desktop and looked up at the colonel’s lamplit eyes. “You’ve placed your faith in something beyond this world. You believe in ideals but not in reality. You believe in perfection but not in fallibility. Something tells me that if I send you down into Mississippi, you won’t learn anything. You’ll just bitch and moan and make yourself into a martyr for your own cause.” He picked up the two sets of orders. “No,” he said, ripping them in half. “I think you’ll learn more here in this next month than you would if I sent you to the bayous for a year.”

  A smile curved Shafer’s lips but he remained at attention. Herron stood and pointed at him, the torn orders crumpled in his fist.

  “But if you fail, Colonel, I swear by God Almighty that you will spend an eternity engineering nothing more than latrines. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  “Dismissed.”

  He returned Shafer’s salute and waited until the colonel left. Then he sat, leaned back, and put his feet up on the desk. The crumpled orders were still in his hand.

  Were you bluffing? he asked himself. Would you really have put that mediocre dunderhead in charge of this thing?

  He reached into his pocket and unfolded the message he’d received only an hour before. The operator’s bold letters only added emphasis to Custer’s words—an emphasis that the words did not require.

  YOUR FAILURE...NO EXCUSES...YOUR DUTY...

  Strong words—made more terse by the medium—pounced upon him from the page. He folded it up and took it as if to tear it up as well, but stopped himself. Instead, he put it back in his coat pocket and, patting it to feel it there, buttoned his coat again.

  A zealot, he reminded himself, learns most through humility.

  In the days that followed, Herron watched as Shafer shook the crews from their hibernation. The work that had slowed and eventually stopped with the onset and persistence of winter now began anew, revitalized by the colonel’s passion. Shafer did not renew his objections to the use of substandard iron. Nor, to his credit, did he complain of anything: not the weather, the hours, the conditions, or even the food.

  When the rain slowed the progress of the welding teams, he simply made them work double shifts. When the mud became too deep for the drays to work at dockside, he conscripted a dozen of the crop-haired Indians that lived upstream. They came in with their turtle-like hardbacks and Herron watched in amazement as the near-naked savages stood knee-deep in muck—the rain and thunder pounding down upon their heads—and with no more than a touch or a short whistle they maneuvered the ox-sized beasts into precise formations.

  The construction began to pick up pace. The trestled sections had been completed for some time, as had much of the arch. The trestles stretched from concrete footings on each riverb
ank out to huge pylons that stood a quarter of the way out from either side of the Missouri. Crisscrossed iron beams made the x’s and v’s that formed the long sides and top, and their decks—completed before the rains of autumn—had been laid with railroad tracks and were now used to cart out supplies and men for the main effort now underway.

  And it was that main effort that had frustrated Herron—and fascinated him—during the long, dark months of the winter.

  Between the two tall stone-and-concrete pylons and across a full half of the river’s breadth was an intricate and disorderly collection of barges, pilings, piers, cranes, and scaffolding; a tortuous skeleton of metal, wood, stone, ropes, and cable.

  The barges at the base of each pylon set pilings into the soft river mud, and on those pilings piers were built. The piers supported scaffolds built of timbers and logs, clumsy constructions that rose up higher than the pylons and slowly reached out toward the opposite side. Atop each pylon was a crane of wood, metal, and thick, twisted cable. The buttressing support of the barges and piers worked in tandem with the lifting power of the cranes to extend the scaffolding outward. The scaffold became thinner and narrower as it neared the center, and it was on this fragile array that the first pieces of iron were laid.

  Through the past months of cold and ice, Herron had looked out his window to see the awkward, ungainly structure stand idle and unworked as sleet fell and the occasional snow blanketed the spars and boatdecks. Now, with the warming rains and Shafer’s new-found resolve, the uncompleted arch was like a thing come alive.

  Every morning, his fire-blackened enamelware cup filled with steaming coffee, Herron stepped outside what the men mordantly called The Devil’s Den: the small, leaky-roofed building that held the administrative and command offices, including Herron’s own. With his coffee cooling in the harsh air of the prairie morning, he looked out at the tremendous structure that leaned out over the water, silhouetted by the awakening sky.

  Lamps glowed in the nascent dawn, hanging like a hundred yellow eyes along the back of a myth. The blowtorch stars heated rivets to a volcanic glow, and the rivets shed bright meteors as they were pounded into place, joining metal to metal, beam to beam, section to section. The cranes atop the pylons wove webs of cable and rope like colossal spiders hunting for the men who worked at their feet.