John Henry Days (17 page)

The hobby grew. The traces of its development were savored and polished by Mr. Street, he talked to the artifacts when no one was around, or he thought no one was around, or he thought everyone was asleep and he had John Henry to himself. Chronicles of mechanical production. Yellowed and tattered handwritten drafts of ballads, nibbled and yellowed published versions of the ballads for drawing room amateurs, early sound recordings—one hundred twenty versions of the song and counting. Ink scratched into paper at midnight by hopeful songsmiths under lantern flicker; Yellen & Company Music printed sheet music, a tavern favorite in some localities; the recordings, expression of those written notes, piled up in their sleeves in alphabetical order, subcategorized by region. Fat 78s preserving the croaks of bluesmen who chronicled the showdown at C&O’s Big Bend Tunnel, dainty 45s from sixties English bands that garnished the fable with paisley chords and frenetic sitar of the psychedelic sound, eight-track tapes of Johnny Cash on pills singing of John Henry, C-60 bootleg cassettes of Johnny Cash on pills singing of John Henry. Recording equipment necessary for the 3 A.M. playback of said recordings.

Mr. Street made weekend pilgrimages to antiquities shows and fairs, he wrote to terse P.O. boxes in the back of obscure magazines unavailable on any newsstand. Certainly not in their neighborhood. He assembled John Henry. A playbill from the Broadway show and the original score. The very trousers and shirt Paul Robeson wore during the show’s troubled and truncated run. Did Mr. Street decline the temptation to wear the clothes from time to time? Pamela cannot find any way he could have. Hammers. Ten-pound and twenty-pound sledges in pairs. He rubbed brown oil into their handles with one of her old T-shirts, loving the wood as it was said John Henry did, to keep the wood limber, to allow it to absorb the shock of each blow. A grizzled old geezer from Charleston showed up at their apartment one Sunday night and opened a suitcase containing five of what he claimed were actual drill bits used by the Big Bend Tunnel crew, long rusted javelins with mashed plug ends. Her father bought them all, the new school clothes could wait, and hung them over the mantel, five fingers of a railroad hand.

At one point he proclaimed, over a pot of string beans entwined with bloated flats of bacon, his artifacts the largest collection of John Henry in the world. None stepped forward to dispute his claim. Some houses smelled of dogs or cats. The Street household smelled of her father’s rotting mania and the sour reek of Pamela’s and her mother’s snuffed lives. He tried to acquire one of Palmer Hayden’s famous paintings of John Henry, a piece of the Harlem Renaissance. The owners wouldn’t budge. Like he had the money. He settled for a poster and in the dining room John Henry sprawled dead on his back, surrounded by the witnesses of his feat, arms spread wide like Christ’s and his hammer in his hand, he died with his hammer in his hand. One time her father disappeared for two weeks to hunt down an old Adirondack hermit he’d heard of, to tape record from the man’s drooling lips a variant of the John Henry ballad, which had been told to him by his grandfather, supposedly a Big Bend worker who had toiled with John Henry. Her father had cleaned out the receipts from the hardware store for the trip, leaving Pamela and her mother with no money and the Street women ate tuna fish and macaroni and cheese for two weeks. The tape turned out to be unintelligible, the old hermit muttered dementia but if you listened hard enough, and her father did with all his life, you could hear the big man’s name.

The air is cool. This is the country. She hears steps down the cement walkway. Pamela sees it is the writer, the one who choked at dinner. He walks slowly and timorously, as if on a listing deck. He looks up from the ground and sees her, lifts a hand. “Still up?” he asks.

“How are you feeling?” She blows out smoke through her nostrils.

“Better,” he mumbles. He raises the soda can. “This should help,” he says. He doesn’t sound as if he believes it.

“That was pretty scary.”

His eyes dip down again. “Well, the guy saw what was going on and knew what to do.” They give their names to each other and he apologizes for his colleagues’ behavior in the van. He tells her they get a little excited sometimes.

“No problem,” she says. “I lived next to a fraternity house in college.” He smiles at this and she offers him a cigarette.

“My throat,” he says, shaking his head. He asks her what brought her down here.

“My father collected John Henry material,” she says. “It was his hobby. They want to buy it for a museum they’re planning.” She is entirely truthful.

“Must be a big collection,” the writer says.

“It is,” she answers and she lights another cigarette. One of the rooms down the line opens and the man with the eye patch pokes his head out. He yells out the man’s name and waves his arm in circles.

“Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says.

“Probably.”

Tomorrow she has an appointment to meet Mayor Cliff to hear his personal appeal. She has already decided not to give it to them.

S
oon it will be time for the night rider to take his journey. His head is full of steam. He can feel the pressure in his head build to shift pistons, he can see by the few remaining drops in the brown bottle of Quint’s Elixir that his boiler is well fed. Soon the car will begin to move.

He had the workers haul the parlor car from the yards to his home, they pulled the car down the gentle slope to the southern edge of his estate, where at night the sagging spray of weeping willows might look like speeding countryside. At midnight he lounges on the plush cushions of the parlor car, a vintage model from the Wagner Palace-Car Company, well appointed, elegant, generous in comfort for the distance traveler. Each time he enters the car he is delighted anew by the deep pile carpeting, the exquisite plush upholstery of the armchairs and couches, the lovely drag of the silk curtains and the beveled French mirrors. He watches the lantern light crackle in the chandelier and swim across black walnut paneling and marquetry fit for the first-class cabins of riverboat and steamships. No spittoons: the insalubrious brown wash that covers too many train floors these days will not be tolerated in his sanctum. He prefers the craftsmanship of Wagner to Pullman, but of course Pullman thought it out more completely, he understood the need of luxury and amenity and his current dominance in the field is undisputed. This is the fruit of competition and he will not have it any other way. Still the Wagners had a class all their own, even if he did, finally, have to hire away one of Pullman’s porters to care for his private car. The porter comes in every morning after his night rides and dusts and arranges, removing the empty bottles of laudanum, dark tincture of opium, from the waste bin and wiping clean occasional vomit from the water basin in the washroom. The parlor car ferries one passenger, and he gets the best service.

There is a splashing in the pond. His wife recently ordered the pond restocked with carp, and they are perhaps splashing in the water, sensing his anticipation, the impending departure. He pulls out his timepiece, for if he is not mistaken, his head is aswim and it is time for his parlor car to move.

All aboard! The engineer makes his magic and the parlor car begins to crawl across the grounds. On the grass the ones who remain behind wave at the locomotive—they wave their hats and kerchiefs at the departing train, great thunderous waves of steam rolling up around them. The whistle cleaves the air.

They call it the Great Connection, this route through the anger of the Allegheny mountains that opens up the tidewaters of the Atlantic to the currents of Mississippi. He thinks, these are the times of connection, of routes between people for things. He feeds the magnificent and hungry connection, the child of industry, and watches it grow. The transcontinental is complete, the oceans are joined: done. He was not there at the joining, he had other business to attend to, but he knows the details of the race for the one-hundredth meridian, the convergence at Promontory Point, where the pig-tailed Chinamen of the Union Pacific collided with the Irish paddies of the Central Pacific and the final, ceremonial gold spikes were driven home by the silver-plated sledgehammer and the nation was joined. The telegraph operator sent back one word, “Done.” And so it was. And his work is that work in miniature, connecting Virginia Central to Cincinnati, he wants Huntington by seventy-three and he will have it. His boys will have to move earth, but he will have it.

The car is fast, fast as galloping hallucination. It has found the tracks of the C&O’s western heading, or where the tracks will be when they push the heading through. The people who have never been in a train before this day tilt their bodies to the windows and take in the Virginia countryside, seeing speed itself, collecting description to share with the people at home when they have completed their journey on the iron horse. He likes variety. Tonight he sees twin girls in blue petticoats, a cotton speculator with pince-nez, mail-order brides clutching their worlds in black-watch carpetbags. (Those he conjures depend on his mood, which is in turn predicated on the density of that night’s mixture, the number of drops he has placed in the glass of water. Crescent of lemon hooked onto the rim of the glass, from his very own lemon trees. He’s not good at faces: the eyes are missing, and the lips and teeth.) He approaches a dignified gentleman who studies the land outside the window in silent measure. He likes to talk to his passengers on his night ride. And where are you traveling, sir? Going to Cincinnati to visit family. Splendid, splendid. And how are you enjoying your ride? Yes, quite pleasant. First time traveling by rail? You’ve been on the Erie. Did you enjoy it? Oh, the Susquehanna is a beautiful sight, and a remarkable piece of engineering. I’ve
heard something about that, the delays, but with recent disputes between Vanderbilt and the Erie gang, it’s no wonder there’s been a decline in service. Did you hear that they have to relay their entire track? It’s all six-foot gauge they have up there, and that’s the problem. It’s not compatible. Our entire track is standard gauge, it conforms to the American standard. It will stand the test of time. That’s very kind, sir, that’s a very nice thing to say. It is smooth, isn’t it? The right-of-way was planned meticulously by our surveyors before we laid an inch of rail. Notice that there aren’t those jarring turns that you experience on the Erie and some of the smaller lines. We planned it out.

Here comes the news butcher. What do you have?
Harper’s, Munsey’s,
the latest issue of
Punch.
Nothing for me, thank you, although this gentleman might require something. Not hiding any erotic literature under those magazines, I hope? I’m just joking, carry on. You’re a good boy. The Union News Company hires only the best and brightest young men for their services. Many of them stay with the railroad, sir, I’ve seen it happen. They get the railroad fever and become ticket masters and engineers and even conductors. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. (His wife has never seen him like this, his emotional rigidity playing no small role in her late neurasthenia. Examples of their eccentric and fragmenting relationship are—but not limited to— wordless dinners where the only sounds are the shuffling of servants and his dried lips sucking soup; violent conjugal relations that correlate to Sunday morning sermons about the weaknesses of the flesh; and his strict orders that he is not to be disturbed in his parlor car and her fear, so strong, that prevents her from even glancing at it. In his car he can be one of the people, garrulous and solicitous to his opium-bred specter guests. Quite a potent draft, Quint’s Elixir, available at the pharmacy until recently.) Your wife remains unconvinced? Traveling by coach and will meet you in Cincinnati, I see. Well, you’ll beat her there by days. I understand perfectly. My very own mother refuses to step foot on one of my trains, despite my protests. She thinks it’s the work of the devil. Of course you have to consider when she was born. I might have been frightened, too, by those early locomotives, with their flying soot and noisome engines. But we’re modern men, you and I, we understand the future, don’t we?

I’ve been to Atlanta many times. The lines to Atlanta are much improved and I can assure you of a comfortable ride. Do you have business there? (And he fights the temptation to mention the war. He can’t remember this ghost’s particulars, how he made him, so it is best not to raise the topic. He could tell
him that he knows why the Confederates lost the war. Simple mathematics. Between Philadelphia’s Baldwin and Paterson’s triad of Rogers, Danforth and New Jersey Iron Works, the Union could count on a new locomotive every day and miles of rail, while the Confederates had to convert the Tredegar Iron Works to produce ordnance. He visited Baldwin just last week; they know their duty. The Rebels ripped up their precious track to make armor plating for their ships and shell casings, while the Northern lines extended their mileage and kept the supply lines open and Lincoln’s war chest paid them to ferry troops and freight. Handsomely reimbursed for patriotic duty. It was simple mathematics, to him it is obvious, but he does not know his guest well enough to share his knowledge, he does not want to open a wound.) Textiles. Well, I hope that one day you will have occasion to use the C&O in your business. Our express service is nonpareil, I can assure you. Our deliveries are always on time. (He uses his line’s express service himself, to receive parcels from Quint’s Medicinal Supply. It’s his connection, one might say.) And isn’t that the most marvelous thing? We are bringing all of our isolated towns into the fabric of the nation. Much has been said about the importance of the transcontinental—yes it is quite an achievement—but I think the greater boon is to the points in-between, the smaller towns and depots we are passing as we speak. I have an English friend who used to derive much amusement from what he called our nation’s predilection for laying track through lands that had not been settled yet. He called it making a railroad line from the town of Nowhere-Special to Nowhere-in-Particular. He made sport of it. But look at us now. The people come. Like this town here, Tal-cott, the one outside the window there. Ten years ago this was wilderness. Now look at it. It is a depot, and the next day it is a community. And they need things. The grain states can send their goods to Philadelphia, and a woman in Kansas can order a new dress from New England. Did you know they refer to our line as the Great Connection? We’ve opened the Atlantic to the Midwest. Think of that. The rails are still, and always will be, the car of the people, as they say, but think of these new opportunities. The future of the railroad is to tend to the needs of the people, and not just their travel needs, mark my words. This is the spur of capital at work, my friend. But you are a man of business and I’m sure you understand. The cow towns of Sante Fe will want your fine goods, sir. And we will help bring them to them.