Bill stood up, retrieved his coat from the bed, and abruptly walked from the room. No words had been exchanged. Lucinda had instinctively waited for him to speak before speaking herself, and when he’d sighed once, exhaling softly over his folded hand, she thought he would tell her his own news. He had brought no bags into the room, and there was no indication that he had anything other than the dirt-streaked clothes on his back. His boots were thickly coated with old mud and he left bits of it on the floor, like a trail.
Within a quarter hour he returned and beckoned for her to come from the room. After pinning up her still-damp hair and collecting her shawl, she followed him down to the lobby and out onto the street, where a small carriage, brought from the livery, stood. He climbed into the driving seat and took up the reins and waited for her to climb in after. She hesitated briefly, allowing herself to think only that he was taking her to the place where the gold had been stored.
He chucked at the reins and they followed the sea road south, the Gulf to their left, the sun blinding them through a wilting sky to their right. Lucinda had brought no hat or bonnet and placed her hand as a shield over her forehead and cheek, keeping her face turned expectantly towards Bill, waiting for him to break his silence.
After traveling a few miles, he finally spoke to her. “Do you know what a boondoggle is, Lucy?” He turned his head to look at her, and Lucy blinked and nodded hesitantly.
“Yes,” he said, nodding along with her. “A waste of time and money. Middle Bayou was a complete and utter boondoggle.” He drew out the last word, his lips and tongue hard against the consonants. “Bedford Grant fabricated the story of pirate’s treasure to puff up the value of land that he wanted to unload.”
Shocked, she remained motionless, but the hair on her arms rose as with a chill.
“I have lost a man and substantial resources, leaving me with what I’m wearing on my back, and my horse.” He’d taken off his spectacles so that she could see closer into his eyes. “I’ve also lost a significant asset in the person of May Grant. Or rather, I should say, you have lost May for me. You are lowered in my esteem, Lucy, for not following my instructions.” His tone was reasonable: a father reviewing the fractious behavior of a child. But for the first time in her relationship with Bill, she felt afraid, and she fought the temptation to look away, to scan the road for any fellow travelers.
He removed from his pocket a cigar and expertly lit it against the wind. “Have you got any money left?” he asked, and she shook her head. “What about your gun?”
Before she left the hotel room, some formless, self-preserving thought had niggled at her to take the small purse in which she kept the Remington. But she had brushed it aside in her eagerness and expectation, and, when he cut his eyes to her, she met his gaze and again shook her head. Now she did look to the beach for some person to offer assistance, but he clamped one hand over her arm, as though reading her thoughts, and for the first time, it entered her mind that he might kill her.
He dropped the reins to his lap, letting the horse go at his own pace, the hoofbeats sounding a paper-like rattle on the shell-filled road, and lit another match. Handing it to her, he instructed her to keep the flame alive with her cupped hands. Within a moment the wind had blown it out, and he lit and handed her another, instructing her to try it again. The flame stayed visible for only an instant and then went out, leaving a spiral of smoke.
“You see, Lucy,” he said, “no matter how hard we try, the outcome is always the same.”
After that he was quiet. She dropped her hand from her face and stared dully at the banks of clouds obscuring the sun, turning the white road a liverish pink.
When she was a child, confined inside the walls of the asylum, she dreaded most of all this time of day: the disappearing of the sun and the casting of long shadows. It was a time of claustrophobic despair. Of constrained ice-water baths when she was uncommunicative and cod-liver purges when she lagged in sufficient animal energies; a time of enforced eating, supervised sleeping, and communal, vigilant prayer for her return to normalcy.
In her third year of confinement she discovered the comforting axioms of geometry, the science wherein the properties of magnitude are considered: a line having length, but not breadth; a surface having length and breadth, but not thickness, and so on. Fixed, constant, and immutable. She would recite them aloud as a way of distancing her mind from her body, which would otherwise be rebellious during her fits and enraged during her treatments.
She recited to herself, as they drove along a parallel path to the sea, the rule of the magnitude of angles, which depended on the inclination the lines that formed it had to each other, and not on the length of those lines. There had been magnitude between the path of her life and Bill’s, even if the length of that path would be short.
When he stopped the carriage, she calculated that they were close to six miles from town. He handed her down and walked with her away from the road and onto the beach. He let go of her and stood pondering the ocean and the sky, both equally dark now.
She stared at his features for as long as she could, until he told her to turn around.
“Watch the stars,” he directed, pointing upwards.
She identified the constellation of Perseus and the variable star of Medusa’s head. It made her think of the glass negatives of the soldiers in the Wallers’ greenhouse and of the white spaces where their eyes would have been.
Then Bill said, “Lucy, look at me.”
Chapter 20
The train from Houston to Galveston was to leave at four o’clock. Nate and Dr. Tom arrived shortly after noon, in time to store in the post office’s safe room all of their weapons, with the exception of a firearm each, Nate’s Winchester and the Whitworth rifle. From the post office, Nate cabled Austin to inform the state police captain there that they would be “off the map” for a week or so but that he would give a full report once they had returned to Houston.
The postman also handed Nate a letter from his wife. The last one he had received from her was during the time of Dr. Tom’s convalescence from pneumonia. Nate placed the letter carefully in the pocket of his coat, planning to read it on the train, and followed Dr. Tom to the local apothecary. As he sat on the stoop, though, he decided he couldn’t wait any longer and opened the envelope raggedly with one thumb, then pulled out the thin sheet of paper.
Dear Nathaniel,
All is well now, but Mattie was laid low for three days with a griping belly. She is recovered and is back to chasing the chickens. The livestock is hearty, the cow giving eight pounds of butter a week. The weather is mild but with heavy rains.
I must tell you I’ve had troubling dreams these past few nights. Because of this, I would ask that you take especial care in making any river crossings or in being close to rough water. You have respected my glimmerings in the past. Please do so now, even if these dark thoughts come from excessive rains and from too much time spent within four walls.
I abide in the belief of your essential goodness, and know with certainty that you will always make the right and dutiful choice.
Yours always, Beth
He worried at his lip with a thumb and forefinger over the last but put the letter quickly away when he felt Dr. Tom’s shadow fall over him. His partner’s face was droop-lidded and relaxed; the man had wasted no time in dosing himself with the newly acquired laudanum.
The most difficulty they had was loading the big bay onto the cattle car. Deerling’s horse, already brutish from the noise and commotion, balked and almost pulled the stock loader’s arm from its socket. Nate tried patience and bribery in equal measures, but after ten minutes of the horse’s rearing and plunging, they had moved only the front half of the horse into the narrow entrance of the darkened car. The lead rope was passed over a pulley, but the stallion continued heaving backwards, threatening to yank it from the mounting.
Nate finally moved to the top of the ramp, stood to the bay’s left, and rubbed his hide gently, tal
king to him in a soothing way. He motioned for Dr. Tom to do likewise on the right side and told him to grab hold of the handrail fixed to the side of the opening. Nate reached across the meaty part of the horse’s rump with his right arm and gestured for Dr. Tom to lock forearms with his left and hold fast. Nate counted to three and with their combined momentum forward, they shoved the skittering animal into the stock car.
Dr. Tom clapped the dust from his hands, saying, “You never cease to surprise me, Nate. That’s another one I’ve not seen.”
They took their seats in the passenger car with Nate facing in the direction the train was moving.
Dr. Tom smiled and asked, “This your first time on a train?”
Nate nodded and, taking in Dr. Tom’s relaxed manner, leaned back onto the bench. Promptly on the hour the train’s whistle screamed, and the car bumped violently forward. To Nate’s embarrassment, he yelped, slapping the seats with the palms of his hands to right himself, which brought smiles from some of the other passengers.
Dr. Tom nodded and pointed for Nate to look out at the surrounding terrain, which had begun to slip past the window at an alarming rate. Once the train had gained momentum, the lurching stopped, and within minutes Nate began to feel heavy-limbed. He hadn’t been subsumed by such a lull since he’d been a child rocked in a chair.
“There’s no feeling like it,” Dr. Tom said and took a newspaper, abandoned by an earlier passenger, into his lap.
Nate read the letter from his wife again and pulled a stub of pencil from his pocket to write his response on the back. He finally had something he could convey to his wife that hadn’t to do with men dying, but the rocking of the train sprawled his writing and caused the pencil lead to break through the paper.
He pocketed the envelope, stretched his legs carefully around Dr. Tom’s, and finally stood up in the aisle, knuckling his fist into his bad hip, trying to release the cramp that had threatened to take hold while he was sitting down in the unfamiliar position: knees together and pointing forward. After a short while, though, he felt conspicuous. His standing caused all the other passengers to look at him expectantly, as though he were about to make a pronouncement. He realized that with his coat off, his badge was visible. A man sitting opposite glanced at it briefly and then gave him a hostile gaze.
Nate eased himself back onto the seat and looked at Dr. Tom. He held the newspaper aloft, but he was staring out of the window, his lips moving.
“What’d you say?” Nate asked.
Dr. Tom looked at him, crumpling the newspaper onto his lap. “Charles Dickens is gone. He died this summer past.”
It took Nate a minute to recall who Dickens was, and then he remembered their night outside Fort Davis, when Deerling was still alive, and Dr. Tom reading some bit of story, barely legible on the scrap of paper he always kept in his pack. He thought of Deerling sitting by Dr. Tom’s bedside, reading from that same paper: I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers…
“Well, now we won’t ever…” Dr. Tom’s voice trailed off beneath the train’s noises. With some difficulty, he reached and pulled a rag from his back pocket and passed it over his face, pressing his thumbs into the depressions under his brow. He drew a short breath, hiding his mouth behind one hand.
To Nate, Dr. Tom’s reflection in the glass made him appear even more gaunt and sickly. In the hours since leaving Middle Bayou, his partner’s body had seemed to diminish, as though the timbre of his thoughts were draining his vigor even more than the laudanum had.
Once, as a child, Nate had spied a frog on a riverbank, poised motionless on a rock. He’d crept up on it, getting close enough to reach out a finger and touch the slick sheen of its head, but still it sat. The frog soon seemed to grow lax in its outer parts and began sinking in on itself. Nate watched horrified as the entire frog, within a quarter hour’s time, deflated into a shriveled, glistening mass. When the frog was as hollow as a skin sock, a large beetle crawled out from under it, scurried into the water, and swam away. The image had stayed with him for a long time, haunting him at night, but finally it had slipped away as other, more necessary and compelling, thoughts crowded into his mind. The remembrance of that event unsettled him, and he wished it had not resurfaced.
Dr. Tom had told Nate that Middle Bayou had turned his thoughts dark. The place seemed to be a conjoining of miracles and draining terrors, almost biblical in scope, where crippled men walked, harlots posed as teachers, and giants with claws and teeth pulled grown men into rivers. And if nothing else, it offered a hardened kernel of damnable proof that foolish men like Bedford Grant could wreak as much havoc as malicious ones.
The train began to slow as it approached Harrisburg to take on more passengers, and at the town limits, a man with a long, filthy coat and beard and looking as though he’d been wandering for years faced the tracks and held up a sign. It read Rouse Yourselves to the Anger of God.
Lost in his thoughts, Nate was startled by Dr. Tom calling his name. When the train stopped, the ranger bolted up, grabbed the Whitworth, and, gesturing for Nate to follow, walked purposefully off the train. He moved briskly towards the front of the railcars and stepped up the ladder, disappearing into the engine cab.
Confused, Nate walked as quickly as his seizing hip would allow, and as he came abreast of the engine, he looked up and saw Dr. Tom in animated conversation with the engineer and the fireman. He turned to Nate and motioned him up the ladder. Offering him a hand, Dr. Tom said, “Nate, I am rousing myself to the anger of God.”
The cab was cramped with the four men, and the noise was so deafening from the escaping steam, the bell clanging, and the whistle signals that Nate couldn’t hear the names of the railroad workers, but he nodded at them and shook hands with the fireman, who was as black with cinder and smoke as the firebox itself.
Dr. Tom shouted into his ear, “I worked for a time on the rails. In Pennsylvania. After I left medical school.”
He pointed to the fireman. “That’s what I did. Stoked wood and carried coal.”
Nate expected they’d soon climb down from the engine and return to the passenger car, but Dr. Tom braced himself against a railing. “Hold on, Nate!” he yelled. “This is somethin’ to write your wife about.”
The train began its thundering pitch forward and a sensation like falling through the floor of a well passed from the soles of Nate’s feet and up his legs. The noise was terrible, making his teeth clash together, and he watched with awe through the forward portal as the train gained speed, pulling the tracks towards and beneath the engine as though they were not being traversed so much as consumed.
The engineer gestured ahead. “Less than forty miles to Virginia Point. Then the bridge to Galveston.”
Nate shook his head, amazed, and a kind of harrowing joy overtook him to the point of giddiness. For several hours he watched the passing of fields and houses and even people who had come to stand by the tracks, gawking or waving up at them. Some boys ran alongside for a brief while until their legs gave out and they tumbled all at once into the grass. One fool on a horse chased them and looked to try and cross the tracks ahead of the engine but pulled up at the last minute, the terrified horse lathered and slinging its head.
The engineer shouted to Nate, “We catch one on horseback every few months. Makes a god-awful mess.”
Nate watched the engineer expertly twisting valves and wheels and checking gauges for pressure and water levels, and he wished he knew enough to even ask questions as to the function and purpose of the moving pieces. He caught Dr. Tom watching him, and the ranger smiled as though understanding Nate’s thoughts.
“I was never happier than when I was riding like this.” He leaned closer to Nate, his arms crossed contentedly. “Bituminous coal. That’s what we hauled. Soft, powdery stuff. Gets into everything. Especially the lungs.” He hooked a thumb at his ribs. “I think that’s what’s given me the cancer.”
Nate jerked his head around and saw his partner was telling him the tru
th. Dr. Tom placed a hand on Nate’s arm.
“Take this as a gift from me. You’ll never forget this. Always carry this moment, ’cause you may never in your life again feel this free.”
Nate’s sensation of falling returned as the engine made the slight rise onto the wooden crossing and the elevated tracks over the Gulf, the pale green colors of the shallows bottomed with sand quickly turning to the dense murk of deeper water. Before them stretched Galveston Bay, and the bridge that ran for miles across it to the island. The whistle was sounded in three long blasts, but the wind that tore in buffeting currents through the cab carried the sound away along with the steam.
The sun was low behind them, lighting the tight, triangular waves obliquely, and a shadow train flowed apace with them over the surface of the water. Giant gulls, their beaks open as though astonished at the train’s progress, veered low around the stack vent and followed them across the length of the bridge.
It was another few miles into Galveston along sandy flats and through to the middle of the town, which to Nate’s eyes was the finest he’d seen, surpassing even Austin in newness and the scale of its buildings. But a tension had started to grow in his gut that was more than the deep vibratory sensation of riding the engine. All he could think about was how dark the streets and alleyways were becoming as the train passed along them on its way to the rails’ end.
The terminus was an immensely long passenger station fronted by a square, red-brick freight building, and by the time Nate had stepped down from the engine, the sun had set and all of Dr. Tom’s loose-limbed camaraderie had evaporated. They unloaded the horses without mishap but for the stock loader who had a bandaged shoulder beneath a torn shirt and who came down the ramp swearing. He glared at Nate, saying, “That bastard horse of your’n bit me!”