El Paso: A Novel (5 page)

“And so these punks are really laying it to you?” Mick said.

Arthur nodded.

“And you ain’t going back.”

Arthur shook his head.

“Well, just suppose,” Mick said, “that I go up there with you when the classes start again. I don’t think any of those little snots are going to fool with you after I give them a talking-to.”

Arthur shook his head again. “It’s not worth it, Mick, but thank you,” he said. Arthur just couldn’t see it, not after what they’d done. How they’d treated him. He felt sick to his stomach every time he thought about it.

“So let me ask you this,” Mick said. They were stopped at the curb to let a trolley rumble past. “Who’s the one who’s the ringleader? The one who gives you the most trouble?”

“They all do,” Arthur said dejectedly. “I’d rather be back in Southie than to go back there.”

“C’mon, there’s got to be a ringleader. There’s always a ringleader.”

“I don’t know,” Arthur said. “I guess if it’s anybody, it would be Hawkins. He’s from Ipswich.”

“And you don’t want me to go and say hello to Master Hawkins?” Mick asked.

“No, Mick, like I said, it’s too late, at least for me.”

Mick looked at his friend. He felt terrible for him. With all Arthur had now, all the things he himself could only dream of, and now this unhappiness.

“Well, bucko,” Mick said, draping a thick arm over Arthur’s shoulder, “you do whatever you think best. That’s the thing—the only thing. And now I’m going to take you to a place and buy you a beer.”

When school resumed two weeks later, without Arthur’s knowledge or consent, Mick Martin boarded a train to Groton. It did not take him long to find Hawkins after he’d asked around. Mick caught Hawkins just outside his residence hall and yanked him behind a tall long hedge, where he administered a fearful beating to the boy, making sure Hawkins fully understood the reason. Hawkins told the headmaster; a search was launched for Hawkins’s assailant, and the Boston police came to the Shaughnessy home and questioned Arthur, which was the first time he learned what Mick had done, but he told them nothing. He didn’t really lie; besides, all he had were his own suspicions. Still, Arthur did not return to Groton that year or any year, enrolling instead at day school in Boston. His father never let him forget it.

NOW, AT HIS DESK AT THE RAIL YARDS
in Chicago, Arthur sat with a pencil and a pad, trying to compose a response to his father’s wire that would convey the mounting crisis at NE&P. Since his father was now aboard
Ajax
where there was no phone, the telegram would have to be worded cautiously, since the worst thing that could happen was some loose-lipped telegraph operator letting it get out that for the second time in its history under the Shaughnessys, the New England & Pacific Railroad Company might not be able to meet its payroll.

The first time this had happened, three years earlier, Arthur’s father wriggled off the hook by selling a considerable piece of company property in western Connecticut. He’d realized so much money from the sale that the company was not only flush, but the elder Shaughnessy was able to order the construction of the
Ajax
, which Arthur felt was a wild extravagance.

But his father was always extravagant: the big house in Newport, the enormous ranch in Mexico, the place in Maine, the lavish parties, the safaris and trips to Europe. All that might have been fine while the company was making money. And indeed it had made a great deal of money for a while; so much so that John Shaughnessy was able to fulfill at least his
second
-most ardent wish, which was to be included in that rarefied class of barons such as Gould, Harriman, Hearst, Rockefeller, Stanford, Huntington, Guggenheim, and even J. P. Morgan himself. Although John Shaughnessy was on the outside tier of that august bunch, he was nevertheless a member of the club, which he would not have been had he merely been content to own a codfish fleet and not a railroad company.

The
first
most ardent wish of the elder Shaughnessy, however, would never be realized, and Arthur knew it.

This was that the Old Man would be included in the circle of the Boston Brahmins—Sedgwicks, Lowells, Cabots, Adamses, Lodges, Saltonstalls, and so on—all those elite Yankees with blue blood dating back to the
Mayflower
who would never accept a second-generation Irishman into their class, no matter how much money he had, or that he had adopted the Protestant religion, or even the fact that he had gone to Harvard.

Oh, they were polite enough, all right, when they had to be, at places like the Harvard Club. But to their own clubs and dining tables Arthur’s father was not invited, no matter how large his yacht or grand his parties, which, Arthur understood, was why the Old Man indulged in all this ostentation in the first place. So the elder Shaughnessy had to content himself with the companionship and admiration of the New York, Pittsburgh, and Chicago lords of commerce, whom proper Bostonians considered vulgar. But when the Old Man looked at his social circle, while he wasn’t ashamed of it, he was deeply frustrated—perhaps hurt wasn’t the word—that no matter what he accomplished, this avenue to the old-line society of Boston would be forever shut off to him.

Arthur’s father had actually won the railroad company in a dice game. At that point it was little more than a broken-down two-bit enterprise organized in 1862 to transport munitions and men across northern New England so they could connect up with a major line headed down South where the fighting was. After the war, the New England Northern, the old name of the company, had turned into a milk train, transporting milk from the dairies of western New England to Boston and fish from Boston back across the region. About that same time, however, New England farmland was playing out and the farmers were migrating by the thousands to the Midwest. As a result, less and less milk got to be transported and there was a much-diminished demand for Boston fish. The owner at that time was a man named George Mudd from Hartford It was from Mudd’s son, who had become filthy rich from his mother’s inheritance, that John Shaughnessy acquired the railroad in the dice game several years after he graduated from college in 1882.

John Shaughnessy didn’t much care for fish, or his father, either, for that matter, and so instead of going into the great codfish fleet business as was expected of him, he threw himself full-time into his own railroad enterprise. When he took over, there were ten decrepit locomotives, the aged rolling stock, mostly left over from the Civil War era, and the company was in debt. With loans from his father and several friends, Shaughnessy began rebuilding the New England Northern and expanding it at the same time.

The great rail moguls of the day—Vanderbilts, Harrimans, and Huntingtons—had created their wealth by bringing the railroads to the towns and cities. But now that they had done this, there was no room for competition. So Shaughnessy had the expansive notion that if he could not bring his railroad to the cities, he would bring the cities to his railroad. He quickly grasped that the land and lumber of New England was running out after two hundred years of colonization, and as the farmers began to be forced westward into new territories, he built his track in that same direction. By the 1890s, after his father died, the younger John Shaughnessy had sold the codfish company, invested its proceeds in the railroad, and had pushed the New England Northern out past Chicago, intending to take it all the way to the West Coast. Thus he renamed it the New England & Pacific.

As he laid track across Iowa toward the Dakotas, a fortuitous thing began to happen. Another vast wave of immigrants arrived on American shores, these from Northern Europe: Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Latvians, and some Germans, too. Shaughnessy, quick to see an opportunity in this, had his people place ads in foreign-language newspapers in New York, Boston, and even in Europe, telling of the great fertile prairies waiting to be homesteaded in America.

The NE&P offered transportation across the country free of charge to any family that would settle on the plains. Not only that, he threw in a free cow, bags of seed, and a handbook on cultivating the land. There were accommodations in the boxcars, along with the families’ belongings, the cows, and the seed. By the time Shaughnessy’s tracks had reached the Dakotas, there were homesteads and towns all along their wake and the big money soon began rolling in, just as he had expected: the crops and stock the immigrants produced came east and the implements and items they needed as they prospered went west—all on the NE&P. The gamble had paid off.

ARTHUR HAD STOPPED TRYING TO WORD
his telegram and simply sat tapping his desk with the pencil. He looked at the picture of his wife Xenia and thought about phoning Boston, just to talk to her. She’d seemed unusually distant in their last conversations and he couldn’t understand why, except he might be spending too much time in Chicago. But more pressing things were now in the air.

His father’s cavalier attitude about the company’s predicament upset him. Even though his father was known in certain circles as a “man of action,” Arthur had observed over time that he could sometimes be paralyzed when confronted with large difficulties—such as the time a few years back when he seemed to come apart after a racehorse stable he owned in upstate New York went bankrupt.

Everybody could see it coming, bad buys in horseflesh and the manager secretly pocketing stud fees for himself, but the Old Man wouldn’t act. Wouldn’t sell horses or fire the manager. Just said, “One good season at Saratoga and we’re back in business.” Change seemed beyond him, the older he got. At the time, Arthur thought it would have been smarter if the Old Man had invested in a glue factory or a rendering plant, for all the horses were worth. More and more, the elder Shaughnessy seemed to devote himself to social hobnobbing, lavish entertaining, and improvident travel instead of applying himself to the company. Yet when the big decisions were made, he insisted on being the one to make them.

Except now, this: SEE IF YOU CAN HANDLE IT, the telegram had read. How? Arthur thought. They had a payroll of $388,000 to meet by week’s end, plus a $428,000 loan payoff to the National Bank of Boston. Cash on hand was less than $900,000. The Old Man had been in Boston—why for chrissakes wouldn’t he go to the president of the bank and get an extension? Arthur knew the answer. The Old Man was embarrassed that it should be known around town—especially in the circles that shunned him—that the great rail mogul Shaughnessy was actually short of cash. So what does he do instead? He goes to Ireland!

Recently Arthur had been doing much reflecting on what had gone wrong with the NE&P, rolling it around in his head like a man rolling a ball bearing on a table. Things certainly had been rosy until the past several years, and then events that were far beyond anyone’s control overtook them. For one, Washington politicians had begun to object to the giving away of millions of acres of public land to railroad companies for their rights-of-way. All sorts of outrages found their way into newspaper headlines—railroads owing millions to the government, then demanding insulting extensions of the loans while the owners cavorted around in private Pullmans or disported themselves with the kings and queens of Europe. The entire nation was suddenly up in arms over such abuses of the public trust.

Arthur’s father had been the recipient of nearly a thousand miles of free track land until, as the route reached westward through southern South Dakota, he was, quite literally, stopped in his tracks.

The weather in those climes was not being cooperative, either. The first years were good, all considered—including the usual blizzards and droughts—and the sturdy Scandinavians stuck it out, being used to the cold, if not the heat. Then, during the first decade of the new century, the droughts became more frequent and the winters more severe, killing sheep, cows, and pigs.

Worse, tremendous winds blew up out of the Midwest, bringing clouds of choking dust to the Great Plains. Plagues of grasshoppers appeared, devouring every growing thing and in many cases halting the trains because their wheels could not make traction over the hordes of squashed grasshoppers. Soon, a few people began leaving; giving up, turning back. At first it was a trickle, but recently there were more uprooted settlers returning eastward on the company’s trains than meat and produce, and many of the little towns the NE&P had spawned, nurtured, and depended upon began to wither and die.