American Meteor Page 6

  A chicken farmer from out by Riverton came in and stamped snow off his boots, leaving two wet puddles to dry as he walked to the counter and rang the little brass bell. Jolted, I slunk out of my roost and onto the floor behind the counter and pretended to be counting scuttles.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, getting to my feet. “What can I do for you?”

  He placed his order, scratched a raspy cheek, in a few words commented on the snow falling generally over the county, and left the store—satisfied he had done neither more nor less than he was obliged by the social contract, whose ghost is felt by all men and women, even the meanest who flout it. In a world of strangers, this rough chicken farmer was determined not to stand out from the rest. Thus are we ever to one another, and alone. Like Grant in the midst of his army, like Lincoln in his White House, like my father with his bottle, like my brother in an alleyway, surrounded by roughnecks who would break his neck for their profit or pleasure, like Ben Franklin with his pennies and his loaves of bread when he arrived in Philadelphia to start afresh, and like Spotswood, who had emptied his house and was waiting in the failing light for whatever would come next.

  I went outside to the barn to give the old man the feed order and found him asleep on a pile of sacks. I kicked him twice.

  “Wake up, you lazy bastard!”

  He opened his revolting old eyes and looked at me with unmistakable contempt, so that I had to kick him again. His eyes reminded me of ropy strands of egg white and bloody yolks. I wanted to scramble them with my fist. I don’t know why I should have felt such ill will, except that I’d overheard him tell the black kid who swept the place how I was a conceited jackass to wear my uniform and medal when I wasn’t a soldier anymore. I didn’t much care for his remark. I hate to think that I had a vindictive streak in those days, but I guess it’s true. If he were here, I’d ask his forgiveness; but he was no doubt shoveled rudely into the colored cemetery long ago.

  I gave him the chicken farmer’s order for dried corn and left him to his hard work and chilly barn. I walked back over my tracks, now nearly obliterated by the falling snow. I flung some coal into the stove and sat on the high stool, going over things in my mind. As the room grew hot, I felt a momentary pang of remorse and almost went back to the barn to invite the old man inside to get warm. But I didn’t. Instead, I worried over the girl, the poor showing I must make in her eyes, my unused potential glimpsed on a wharf in Philadelphia, and my empty days. I had forgotten all about Lowry’s dire threat.

  I closed early because of the snow, which sat on the railings and sills and leaned against the walls. The sky was white with it. Indifferent, I’d wintered in worse: in Pennsylvania with the regiment and in Brooklyn as a boy when the wind would drive snow into our room through a broken pane of glass. In winter, a tenement is a cold and inhospitable place. I walked down the middle of Fifth, fairly cleared by streetcars and wagons of the powdery snow. A block shy of Jefferson Street, Lowry bolted from a tobacconist’s doorway, where he’d been lying in ambush, having scouted my route from Bergman’s to the depot. He flung himself on me, accompanied by the shrill, unholy rebel yell, which had caused many a Yankee soldier to dampen his blue pants. I shot him down with the Colt before he could stick me with his bayonet.

  The tobacconist, whose testimony was tainted by his friendship with Lowry, which he naturally denied, told the Springfield police that Lowry had gone out to speak to me about our differences. He’d kept his distance, he hadn’t yelled, and the bayonet had stayed tucked up in his belt. He swore I’d called Lowry names no man could tolerate, and then— “entirely without provocation and in cold blood”—I’d drawn my pistol, aimed, and shot him through the forehead. There might have been a morsel of truth in what he said, but Lowry had had no cause to jump me the way he did.

  I remember the squeak of my boots on dry snow, the slap of my rubber coat, the creak of hinges on the tobacconist’s door, the snap of a tree branch, the rasp of my lungs drawing breath, and, after a curious sigh, the rattle of Lowry’s lungs just before he crumpled and fell.

  Had I been an ordinary young man, doubtless I would have been tried as a cold-blooded killer, convicted, and taken in chains to Leavenworth to break rocks for twenty or thirty years. But I had been presented with the Medal of Honor by Ulysses S. Grant himself for my valor at Five Forks and had been handpicked by the secretary of war to serve in Abraham Lincoln’s honor guard. I could not be easily swept under the judicial carpet and left to rot among the dust weevils. I was a special case. It was decided I would remain in the city jail until the Lincoln parlor car departed Springfield for Omaha, with me on it. Banished like a medieval prince, I could never again set foot in Illinois.

  While I waited for the Union Pacific to take the car away (is this what Spotswood had meant by “waiting”?), I wondered if my celebrity—the case had been a spectacle for some, a scandal for others—impressed the girl. She might be willing to share my exile. She might not be bothered by the parlor car’s morbid associations. Originally, it had been built as a sort of democratic triumphal car for the president to confer with his generals in the field and to see for himself the results of their campaigns. Fit for a pasha, it was too splendid for modest Old Abe, who in his lifetime had refused to use it. He could hardly do so in death, the commemoration of which would have embarrassed him by its extravagance. When he traveled to Gettysburg to deliver his address, he rode in a train such as anyone would take on a mundane journey to a commonplace destination. Death, however—its kingdom or realm—required a stylish conveyance. Mr. Lincoln’s funeral car was comfortable and smart. It had the makings of a bridal bower of bliss. The girl ought to jump at the chance to marry me. Such were the idiocies that passed through my feverish brain.

  The girl faithfully visited me in my cell, once: to give me a newly baked apple pie and a letter, written in an awkwardly childish hand, informing me of her decision—before I’d so much as asked for one—to have nothing further to do with me because of the “shame and disgrace.” For the rest of her life, she wrote, she would regret the kiss she’d bestowed on me in a moment of pity. Galled, I swore to forget her and looked forward to putting ten or twenty years between us. The months spent in Springfield had been a disaster for me. Maybe if I’d dwelled on poor Lincoln’s cold dwindling inside his tomb, I wouldn’t have been such a damned fool. Remorse always comes late in the day.

  Bored, lonely, and sorry for myself, I took Whitman’s book from my haversack. I stared at its green cover, scuffed and stained by time. Even a few months will leave its traces, provided they are packed with life. While I perused his catalog of humankind, my cell grew crowded with every type of man and woman, clamoring and jostling or nonchalant and imperturbable. I relished their stink and noise. In his Song of Myself (so unlike my braying), Whitman seemed like Christ. I’d have said “Buddha,” had I not been ignorant of any belief except my own. My faith in God and in his creatures may have been weak—a rope frayed to its breaking point by the strain of a small, mean, knock-about life—but I’d heard stories of a gentle Jesus from my mother. In my cell, I remembered how Whitman had leaned over my hospital cot to console me for my wound. I’d have given him my blessing, gladly, had he sauntered through the prison door, hooked his arm around my neck, and called me “comrade.” Of the poems (if that’s what they are) I read in jail, I recall this:

  I am possess’d!

  Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering,

  See myself in prison shaped like another man . . .

  I waited five weeks for the train that would take the parlor car and me to Omaha. Maybe in Nebraska, I thought. Maybe on the other side of the Mississippi, I’ll find my own song. If there’s one to be found.

  Omaha, Nebraska Territory, January 15, 1866– October 19, 1866

  We should count ourselves lucky that Lincoln’s funeral car got sold to a railroad instead of a traveling freak show. Can you picture it, Jay: the “World’s Tallest Man” tucked up in Abe’s extra-long bed while pinheads
gawk at themselves in the ornate mirrors? Our century didn’t value sentiment unless it was gold-leafed inside a Valentine. Remember the calendars put out by the packinghouses, illustrated with lambs frisking in meadows found only in Paradise? A thing or a person, who was accounted a thing by business, had to have cash value; otherwise, it was trash. The future— I’d have visions of it, though I couldn’t levitate like Daniel Dunglas Home—reeks of sentimentality, which papers over everything, no matter how dire. Maybe the nineteenth century was more honest because it made less a pretense of compassion. Entrepreneurs, financiers, industrialists, and company directors wrung money from the world, as you or I would juice an orange before tossing away the skin.

  Outstanding among cutthroats were the railroad barons. Their ruthless disregard of the disenfranchised and of the land they savaged increased with every mile of track. Perhaps the granite difficulties of the enterprise hardened their hearts. The Union Pacific didn’t buy the car that had borne the dead president to his rest in order to commemorate his life, but to conduct its affairs in luxury. Not a shrine or even a museum, the Lincoln car was just a piece of rolling stock, more sumptuous than the rest. In the winter of 1866, not a word of this jeremiad against the money-mongers would have crossed my mind. What did engross me was my new uniform.

  Dr. Thomas Durant—he insisted on the Dr.—was vice president of the Union Pacific when I arrived in Omaha. Stock manipulator, smuggler of contraband Confederate cotton, war profiteer, and among the first to take advantage of the new limited liability incorporation laws allowing him to slip out of his financial obligations as smoothly as a duck from water—Durant earned the admiration of America’s biggest crooks. In one boondoggle, he ordered that track be laid in devious oxbows, instead of straight lines, to squeeze wartime profits from the beleaguered federal government, which paid for new railroad construction by the mile. After two and a half years of weaseling, the Union Pacific had advanced only forty miles west of Omaha. Curious, how one lie can get a man jailed for being a fraud, while another can get him rich—or a Medal of Honor. In the panic of 1873, Durant would lose everything he’d managed to steal in his lifetime and spend the balance sunk in a swamp of litigation. But in the winter of ’66, he was a king of the mountain, rolling rocks down on anybody wanting to dethrone him.

  When the Lincoln car arrived at the South Tenth Street Depot, Durant sent for me. I washed my face, slicked down my hair, blackened my boots, and walked across the rail yard to his office. Smiling through his beard, he rose from behind a big walnut desk, as if he meant to hornswoggle me into putting money into one of his concerns. I thought he must have confused me with some other army sergeant; I was still wearing my uniform, which had been, admittedly, growing shabby. But no, he knew me as soon as I stepped through the door.

  “Stephen Moran,” he said, extending a fleshy hand like a prince of the church so that I wondered if I ought to kiss his signet ring. Instead, I stiffened to attention, as was my habit in the presence of lordly beings like generals, aldermen, and cops. Even ruffians appreciate the oil of servility’s usefulness in situations where wriggling and weaseling are called for. “Sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

  I sat in an overstuffed chair. He opened a humidor and offered me a Honduran cigar.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, accepting the cigar and sniffing its length appreciatively. It smelled deliciously of cedar and vanilla. I was about to bite off its end, when he handed me a little silver scissors made for the beheading of expensive stogies.

  “You’ll need to learn how to behave among gentlemen,” he said, leaning back in his swivel chair and eyeing the sooted ceiling.

  I flushed with egotistical satisfaction and wished the girl could see me hobnobbing with a railroad millionaire, until I remembered I’d sworn to put her out of my mind forever. Durant’s chair squawked as he broke off his contemplation of the ceiling, planted his elbows on the desk, and looked me in the eye. (That particular expression was tailor-made for a man with only one of them.)

  “Stephen, you’ve got friends in high places,” he said shrewdly.

  The most elevated person I could—at a stretch—claim as a friend was a Tammany Hall alderman locked up for graft. I thought the wisest course was to say nothing and let Durant tip his hand.

  “I received a telegram from my good friend President Johnson.” He paused a moment to calculate the effect of his name-dropping. I put on an awestruck face, which gratified him. He was one of those men who needed the adulation even of a no-account like me. I saw no harm in it and amplified my awe with a whistle, such as one gives to signify an envious astonishment. Andrew Johnson’s origins may have been humble (his mother had been a laundress), but he was no Lincoln. His meteoric rise was the result of an assassin’s bullet to the far greater man. Like Durant, Johnson would become famous for his crookedness. But the history of the age had yet to be written, and a boy might well be impressed by a sharpster in a fancy cravat. “President Johnson asked me to take you under my wing as a special favor to General Grant. I believe you’re acquainted with the general?”

  “I am, sir. He gave me this.”

  I pointed to my medal as proudly as if I’d earned it.

  “So I’ve been led to understand.”

  He nodded and, leaning across the desk, fingered the decoration’s engraving. A morbidly curious man might have done likewise to a goiter.

  I couldn’t imagine how Grant had learned of my expulsion from Illinois unless he’d read about it in the papers. But why he should have concerned himself with me remains an enduring mystery. The belief I’d entertained once or twice before—that I might have a destiny, that I was intended for a place at the table among the grown-ups—once more took hold. Durant had something else in mind, however; I wasn’t to sit at the table, but to wait on it.

  “I’m offering you the job of steward aboard the Lincoln parlor car, although we won’t be referring to it as such. I’m having it renovated as a private carriage. Your job will be to make certain our directors and guests are comfortable. When the car is idle, you’ll spruce it up. I’ll find you other things to do, as well. There’s no end of work to be done at a rail yard. You will enjoy learning about the railroad business, Stephen. It’s fascinating, I assure you. Do you accept?”

  I accepted, pretending to be pleased. What else could I have done? Omaha in January is a bitterly cold place to be stranded without money. The moon must be like this, I had thought, walking to Durant’s shed over snow peppered with cinders: its cold dust and bitter loneliness.

  “Fine! Of course, you can’t wear your old uniform. Besides, as I understand it, you’re no longer in the army. After you leave here, present yourself at the quartermaster’s depot and have them run you up a smart white serge jacket and trousers. You can wear your medal; it’ll show what caliber of man the Union Pacific employs.”

  I nearly blushed to have heard myself called a man. I was small, skinny, and looked young for my years. My eye patch and the skeptical cast to my surviving orb did nothing to confute the impression of a general youthfulness.

  His eyes wandered off to a memorandum on his desk as he suddenly lost interest in me. I stood and saluted him; I could not have saluted the general himself more correctly, though I’d taken a dislike to Dr. Thomas Durant—not for his moral failings, which I knew nothing about. I might have liked him better had I known he was a thief. What I couldn’t abide was insincerity (except my own). Durant’s benevolence covered his like the veneer on a piano. You’d never know how false he was until you played him. He might have fooled an ordinary boy of seventeen, but not me. I had sucked on the tit of disillusionment and teethed on the bitter root of cynicism. I was on my way to the misanthropy that would sour me. You know that I grew into something better, but I still had one more man to kill before I stumbled on goodness. Not such as brimstone sniffers praise, but what is sometimes found in men (and in women, too) on the frontiers of experience and hard living.

  I went to the depot a
nd got myself outfitted as a steward so that I could get through the winter without starving or freezing to death. I remained one until I was twenty-two. Durant never again spoke to me as if I were a special case, and when he referred to my Medal of Honor at all, it was scornfully, as though he’d looked into my heart and seen there just another fraud.

  I’d never known any Chinese, though I’d seen them in the Devil’s Arcade, mincing down the sidewalk, their pigtails swinging. They worked as cigar rollers and cobblers, mostly. I never gave them much thought, except to yell a wisecrack their way when I was feeling mean. There weren’t many in Omaha at the time, but plenty were breaking their backs for the Central Pacific. They led a sorry life no white man would have tolerated. They’d fled civil war and the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, where they hadn’t stood a Chinaman’s chance, to search for Gum Sham in California: the fabulous Mountain of Gold. Finding hunger and cruelty, tens of thousands of Chinese went to work building the transcontinental railroad, which was progressing like a wool scarf knitted and purled by a blind old woman with rheumatism. The “Celestials”—the insult chink hadn’t yet been coined—were given the worst jobs like, wagon-loading, ballasting, or dynamiting the far West’s flinty terrain: a “ruinous space,” a Boston paper called it. Their industry earned them a lower wage than the Irish; their death, a place for their bones in a wagon car destined for Sacramento. Jack Casement, the Union Pacific’s man in charge of construction, admired the “cone hats” because they weren’t fractious, fussy, scared of “firecrackers,” or liable to strike for better wages. Besides, their ancestors had built “the world’s biggest piece of masonry.”

  Yellow men can go bad the same as white men. How could it be otherwise, given the universal temptation to bite the outlawed apple? But a story is a kind of sieve, and I’ve let the Chinese workers sift out extra fine; the Irish, I’ve made the chaff. It isn’t fair, but being a Mick myself, I feel entitled to the prejudice. Life is truly rendered in subtle tones—to speak like a photographer—but its drama is made more powerful by the stark contrast of chiaroscuro. Every storyteller knows as much.