***
But his luck was to change, though his life had continued much as it always had, with aggravations, daydreams, and days lost to torpor. He came, with some sadness, into a stroke of good fortune: MacPhearson, who’d always appreciated the young man’s courteous and forthright ways—he had been a polite and quiet worker—had died of old age and left the young man his large gloomy house, the contents of his photography shop, and the considerable fortune of £800. (Margarita never really knew the source of his sudden wealth—“I had the luck to come into some money in those days,” she’d heard him say—but it happened that in 1896 her father, a young man who already had accumulated savings, suddenly found himself with a large sum of money.)
He decided to go beyond the Irish sunset and the violence and confusion of his home to America and to take his sister, Kate, with him.
— To America, 1896 —
Now Nelson and his sister, carpetbags packed, make their way onto a weatherworn ship in Cork Harbor. Holding his sister’s hand as the ship clears the port, he takes a glance back, tinged with sadness and satisfaction. On departure, his head fills with memories of the beauty of that place—the “other” Ireland—and thinking that their troubles are over, he tells her, “You’ll have your little farm.” Despite the inclement weather, he’s happy to pose his sister on the deck of the ship. She’s wearing a long coat with a fur muff and a bonnet, and as he looks through the shutter, he captures her for posterity, smiling—the crisscross of ship’s masts and the bustle of the piers, busy with commerce, beyond her. Then he poses beside her, and by means of a long, pneumatic cable, he takes another photograph. He is eighteen and a somewhat handsome young man, thin and of moderate height, a tuft of longish blond hair under his derby hat, with an earnest face, his head filled with hopeful speculations. In the pocket of his coat, he has one of those tattered, much-fingered cowboy novels, and in another his passport; and he has a money belt—he trusts no one—wrapped around his waist, containing several thousand dollars in American gold pieces, which he’d acquired from the Bank of Dublin a few days before, when they had also gone sightseeing along the river Liffey and made a short visit to Trinity College and peeked at the Book of Kells. Now, greeting their fellow passengers, many poorly off and destined for the third-class compartments down below, they embark; a sea whistle sounds and the ship makes its way on the waters.
***
Originally he had thought that he and his sister would travel across the United States from coast to coast on a splendid tour, visiting such legendary sights as the Grand Canyon and the prairies of the American West. He thought they would travel to the Pacific and see San Francisco, and that along the way he would compile photographs of such grandeur as to make him famous. But the ocean voyage had not been good for Kate’s constitution. An especially bitter wind had blown an infection into her right ear, and the offending chill had entered her bones, whistling and wheezing out of her lungs. They stayed in New York City for a few months so that she might recover, in a Hell’s Kitchen rooming house in a neighborhood where many of the Irish then lived. The city, noisy, stench-ridden, and rife with hooligan activity, and monumental with its great buildings, seemed threatening and bleak.
Nelson holed up in a small room with Kate, waiting the winter out—sitting by the window watching great banks of snow piling up on the street, and concerned; and because he was always frugal with his money, he took a job as a waiter in a beer hall.
With the coming of spring, 1896, they left that city, deciding, because of Kate’s flagging health, to find another more pleasant place. Their search ended when they found the picturesque and beautiful town of Cobbleton in Pennsylvania. That’s when Nelson, wishing to please his sister and feeling quite wealthy, rented and later decided to buy the house in which his daughters would live.
Because she had always spoken about farming and, despite her suffering, would become bright-eyed at the mention of it, he got a horse and paid visits to neighboring farms, inquiring about the difficulties of that life, as he knew nothing about the land; he’d ask if it was better to raise sheep or cows, or if horses were better. And if he wanted to be an agricultural man, which crops, native to the terrain—wheat or corn or soy or barley—to plant. He had about an acre of land at that time and considered buying more: he had the money, but also his uncertainties and doubts. Was he not a photographer?
Still, he speculated. Traveling from town to town daydreaming, he considered other professions. What if he worked for the railroad, which had a yard in the town, the ground rumbling at night under the weight of many-car trains loaded with ore and coal; or became a barber, set up on the main street with a shop, sociable lather-faced customers, and a red-striped pole? When he dallied outside the workhouses, watching in their cool recesses carpenters at their benches, the smell of wood and industry lingering around them as they constructed cabinets and troughs, he considered that, too—and then dismissed it all, with a vague and unproven artistic pride. Wool mills, dentistry?
No.
Their days were happy, spent tranquilly, brother and sister looking forward to the vague but promising future.
One morning in the spring he got his equipment out from a copper-hinged trunk—his camera, bottles of potassium and silver-nitrate developing solutions, tripod and light-swallowing gelatin plates—and called his sister into the yard for a portrait. Although the cough that had started at sea had not left her and she hadn’t been feeling well of late, she got herself ready for the shot, putting on a ladylike felt-buttoned dress, the buttons rising on an embroidered collar to just below her chin. She sat on a chair in the yard, cheeks rouged, her widow’s peak high, and her brother, Nelson, disappearing under a black cloth, holding on to a pneumatic bulb, asked her to be still.
The sad thing was that, during the coming winter, on one of the harsher days of December, she would remain still, forever—history, as it happened to his own mother, repeating.
— Cuba, 1898 —
In early spring of 1898, Nelson planted a garden of flowers which he hoped would grow eternally, filled with star grass, nodding azaleas, morning glories, gaywings, geraniums, forget-me-nots, and daisies. He would walk about the yard, following the looping frittilaries and monarch butterflies as they made their rounds like otherworldly angels. He would sit on the porch stunned as swallows circled the barn, and would watch, almost studiously, as the sun’s light moved from one side of the yard to the other. He put up bird feeders and stuffed them with seed, delighted when the robins and cardinals filled their bellies and flew happily away to their kingdoms in the upper branches of trees. Sometimes he would remain on the porch, sitting in a cedar rocking chair, with only the occasional wagon passing by on the road, sitting alone until the morning star, Venus, would rise, and he would note with a grand appreciation the spiral motion of the constellations. On such a night he happened to notice some black-widow spiders hanging off the eave of his porch, and, laughing, discovered the stars of the constellation Arachnid glinting through those webs. Later, when they’d moved across the horizon, he thought that all things went forward, why couldn’t he?
In April of that year, he packed up his equipment and, mounted on a horse, rode to the town of Quarryville some ten miles west and made some interesting photographs of the excavations there—lunar-looking gray man-made cliffs, workers with steam-powered pile drivers, and a train of rivet-weld transport railroad cars lugging their loads slowly away; he made photographs of barges serenely meandering up the Susquehanna River, clouds like bells breaking up on the horizon. He had moments when he felt like getting on a barge and riding it until he arrived at the end of the world. Still, he had wanted to work. An advertisement that he put in the local newspaper, the Cobbleton Chronicle, yielded him a few jobs: he recorded for posterity the weddings of several couples, took a group shot of the Cobbleton City Council, those very serious fellows, which would years later be one of those old, frayed photographs in the Council’s gloomy halls. And he had photographed ne
wborn babies—his favorite subjects—hair soft and willowy, eyes filled with dollops of the sea, or chestnut gems open wide and anxious for life.
Returning from a job one late afternoon, he dallied at the saloon, in no rush to go back home, for when he entered the house he would often sit in the kitchen and read and reread the obituary notice that he had clipped some months before from the paper: “Katherine Anne O’Brien, a recent immigrant from Ireland, and sister of Nelson O’Brien, succumbed on the afternoon of December 12, 1897, to pneumonia, after a prolonged bout with that illness.” It would make him think about his letters to Ireland, one posted to his parish priest, the second to his father and his uncle. Perhaps because so little had been said about his sister, the notice consisting of a few lines, he had written those letters with the hand of a madly contrite brother, placing much of the blame on himself, but ever careful to note that she was happy to the end. (So many sleepless nights then, when he would cover her with blankets and his own coat, pile wood into the fireplace and the wood-burning stove; he would dread leaving her alone, hurrying off, his hands frozen to the reins, to fetch the doctor, who wore a black frock and had muttonchops and preacher’s eyes, examining her each time and leaving them with yet another bottle of expurgative syrup, whose alcohol base seemed to relieve her suffering. Now and then a farmer’s wife would come along, a Mrs. Kelley or a Mrs. Neustadt, with a pot of soup, which he would feed her spoon by spoon; and yet she still shivered.) Only the priest responded, enclosing a sympathetic note and a pamphlet of prayers, good for the reduction of purgatorial suffering. And so, thinking that there had been a mix-up in the mail, he had written his father and his uncle twice again. Hearing nothing, he had come to the conclusion that he had no family in Ireland. (What had he done to them, he must have wondered on his nights alone. Taken his father’s beatings, helped his uncle along as he wobbled on intoxicated legs?)
These thoughts sometimes troubled him, and he would go to the saloon and have a few shots of whiskey, and for the sake of manly intercourse smoke a Havana cigar, biting off the tip and expelling it into a murky spittoon. The whiskey and the pianola would induce in him a relaxed state of mind, and as was his habit, he would start to make plans for travel—perhaps out to the American West, or down to Mexico or South America, where a man of heavyhearted temperament might lose himself in adventure. But there was something else going on, an opportunity, it might be said, staring him in the face. As he sat drinking one afternoon, in no rush to go home, a crowd had gathered on the street outside the saloon. They were waving flags and handkerchiefs, and a pom-pom band appeared, marching in place; across the way, on the balcony of the hotel, was strung a banner reading “War with Spain!” and above it stood a handsome army officer in a creaseless uniform, making a speech.
Stepping out of the saloon’s door into the sunlight, hand over hat brim, eyes squinting, he listened intently to an impassioned call to patriotism, the speech titled “Reasons for an Intervention in Cuba!” The officer read with great oratorical calm and resonance: “Greed and Sedition in the Courts of Spain,” “Commander Roosevelt and His Wise Words to the Spanish,” “American Interests Must Be Protected from the Spanish Pirateers”—ending by asking, “The Poor Cubans—Will They Survive Without Us?”
Back in the saloon and thinking about the word “Cuba” and the war, it occurred to him that he knew nothing about the country, except that Cuban cigars—the word “Havanas” common in tobacco shops—were said to get their flavorful aromas from young girls rolling the cover leaf on their thighs. And yet, as he thought about it, he realized that he had come across the word again and again while surveying advertisements for steamers on their way to South America, the cities of Havana and Santiago being ports of call. He knew little else. For all the recent ballyhoo in the local paper, with its muckraking articles on the impending war (excerpted from newspapers like the New York Herald and the World), he had hardly paid attention to the situation. For the most part, since the time of his sister’s death, he had been moving through the world oblivious to its occurrences: and while all this business with the war had interested him, he did not at first give it much serious thought, until a few days later, when he resolved to go.
— Another Journey —
There had been parades in New York, and nearlynchings of opponents to intervention in Cuba, and church bells had rung and beautiful women in great plumed hats and velvet dresses and stiff corsets had packed the platforms of Union Station, flinging bouquets of flowers at the troops and civilians boarding the trains to Tampa. And there had been that camp, overcrowded, filthy, disorganized, and jammed with loons and mercenaries and professionals who had passed the weeks before the invasion drilling, gambling, playing baseball, and engaging in bare-knuckle boxing matches in its muddy fields. Despite his grief, he could not help feeling overjoyed, because here he was at last among the wild cowboys!
Nelson O’Brien had gotten himself a berth on one of the press boats, having signed on as a freelance photographer with the New York offices of Le Figaro, which, among other European newspapers, tended to buy photographs from a pool; they hired Nelson, and dozens of others, to record the grand and glorious proceedings of the war, as well as to make photographs of the “local color,” anxious for their readers to benefit from the recent invention of the half-tone process. With his camera equipment in a black hinged trunk and a provisions pack on his shoulders, he, a boy of twenty, had joined a cynical and worldly contingent of the press, who liked to drink, and in their company aboard a chartered steamship he sailed with the flotilla south along the mountainous and verdant southern coast of Cuba.
There he had witnessed the bombardment of the beaches of Daiquiri and Siboney, the landing of 14,000 shouting, gun-firing, whistle-blowing troops, the dash of stallions and cattle, romping behind herders through the surf, the swagger of commanders, sabers and pistols raised, shouting out orders. The cavalry had charged into the brush and forests, the infantry hacking through the dense foliage with their bayonets. They encountered swamps and ponds of stagnant water, torrents of black flies and pestiferous mosquitoes. There wasn’t enough quinine, or enough good canned meat, or cattle to slaughter, or pure water to drink. As the troops marched to commandeer the main roads to the city of Santiago, the Spanish capital of the island at the time, the roads were muddy from rain. Antiquated wagons, their axles snapped in two, turned over on the road. Troops opened up cans of beef from New York and found festering insect larvae. Men crouched down low in ditches beside the road, pouring their guts out under them; men staggered like drunks in their blue army jackets, a yellow pallor on their skins. And they had seen the plantations burned to the ground, spires of smoke everywhere. Troops raided towns for food, clashing with the regulars of the ragged Cuban army, demanding food and supplies. Those Cubans, the troops of the great Calixto García, exhausted from three years of war against the Spaniards, had no food; they had been living off boiled grass and snake flesh, and they told the Americans to go to hell. Many of them were there already.
Then they had arrived at a hill overlooking the river of Las Guásimas, and while Nelson set up his tripod and camera, one of the journalists, a cowboy-like fellow, Harrington, had climbed up some rocks and was taking “moving pictures” of the battle with an odd-looking device, a box-shaped camera with a crank in its side that he called a vitascope. Spotting something in the distance, he handed Nelson a pair of binoculars and shouted, “Just look at that!”
At first Nelson did not know what he was looking for, but then he saw what appeared to be a hot-air balloon with an ornate gondola, serenely drifting above the melee below—the muddy river jammed with troops in waist-high water, caught in the cross fire of smokeless Spanish Mausers and being picked off, their own guns firing blindly into the brush and barricades around them, their smoke dense as a winter fog. When the balloon got close enough, he focused on its commander, in a woolly trimmed admiral’s cap, a certain Major Derby, peering out over the brush and forest around the river thro
ugh a nautical telescope. It was inevitable that some Spaniard sharpshooter would have a little fun when it came within range, and just like that, the great vehicle, something out of a state fair, its canvas husk punctured, began to float slowly down toward the river, where it toppled on its side, the balloon crumpling under itself like a great wilted flower. Around it, a furious cloud of butterflies rose up out of the bushes, like angels floating upward in spirals toward God, happily oblivious as the rush of panicking, confused men continued, men in Civil War caps and cowboy hats and in tan-and-blue uniforms, screaming when hit in the kneecap, or in the shoulder, or in the neck, and crying “Mother” where they fell—clouds of black-and-white smoke rising everywhere from rifles, some men lying down in the mud, weapons cast aside, in a chaos of noise, men vomiting, some saying prayers.
Roosevelt would bring up the rear with his Rough Riders, a cavalry brigade, and then, by sheer force of numbers, a kind of mad courage prevailing, the troops forded the river, and, charging ahead across the grassy meadows before the Spanish battlements, would shortly overrun the barbed-wire defenses of Kettle Hill.
— On His Way to Santiago —
Nelson and Harrington rode by horse and carriage to a camp on one of the routes to Santiago. Funeral pyres were burning on the sides of the road and in fields, lofting a bad smell into the air. It had started to rain.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 12