The Fall of Light (35 page)

“When Stephens sees his horse, he’ll know I sent you,” the doctor had said. “He owes me. You’ll ride with them, you’ll see.
Give him this.” He handed over a letter. “Say nothing to Phil, mind. But send me a letter sometimes. You know, to say how
he is.”

Tom Foley had sat the horse and nodded at the old man then. He did not say he had never written a letter in his life. The
doctor blinked his eyes and then raised a hand in sudden salute and went off inside.

General Stephens was at that time at a fort near Quincy on the Mississippi River. It was farther than Tom
Foley had ever travelled over land. He had been shown where it was on the doctor’s map but only knew it as a point directly
westward. Still, he would find it. It was not yet spring and the wind blew cold and bitter as he rode. He wore the collars
of his greatcoat up and his hat low. The land spread out before him. He galloped the horse through terrain green and rolling
and fringed with mountains. He travelled on. He did not stop, for he feared the unit of the army would be gone and the lieutenant
with them. He came out into bright, hard days and followed for a time the stagecoach road to St. Louis. Then he left this
and cut northward as was his understanding of the map. He crossed a hundred small rivers
and sometimes stopped and watered the horse and crouched down to taste the current before continuing on. He rode with a sense
of mission. He heard the hooves of his horse beat over the ground and took from that some kind of ease and satisfaction. He
was happiest in motion. Sometimes he saw a coach or wagon or a lone rider or more, but all he left likewise alone and did
not seek any company. The vastness of the land was like mesmerism upon him. It made his spirit tranquil, for the more he journeyed
on in the same relentless way, day after day, the more the griefs of his past became numbed and then slipped away. He was
a figure in the landscape, nothing more. He was a momentary speck on the huge open space he crossed, and he took from this
some portion of peace.

At last he arrived at the Mississippi River. He was south of the fort and travelled along the muddied banks where rains made
swift the flow. When he came into the fort he asked to see the general and was told by a soldier in blue uniform that this
was not possible and was asked what was his business. Tom told him he had a personal message for the general and it was to
be delivered by hand. Ten minutes later he was standing at a table in the log-built quarters of Stephens. He was a stocky
man with heavy sideburns of brown hair. He wore his hat. He looked above the pages of the letter at Tom.

“You ride?” he said.

Tom Foley said he did.

“You can shoot a rifle?”

Tom Foley lied that he could.

Three days later, he left the fort with Unit 49 of the corps of the so-called Topogs Division of the United States Army. Lieutenant
Philip J. Brown was the commanding officer of their number of eight men. Stephens himself had decided not to ride. He had
already been on various expeditions through Minnesota and North Dakota and Montana, and whether fatigued or otherwise commanded,
he this time left Brown the job of reconnoitring the lands through Nebraska and beyond the Wyoming Territory.

There were only eight of them. The general had told them that Tom Foley was scout, cook, rifleman, water diviner, and horse
doctor. They led pack mules with supplies for six months and rode out of the fort with the pale March sun at their backs.
They had all manner of maps,
accurate to a degree, some sketched by trackers, crusty pioneers, and Indian hunters. Of the eight men, seven of them knew
intimately the paper geography of the country ahead. They had studied it at length, could name gullies and canyons and mountain
passes that were eighteen hundred miles farther than they themselves had ever been. They rode that morning with the confidence
of such knowledge and were tall in their saddles. Some of the men were younger than Tom. They had been at schools in the east
and joined the army not to fight, but to be part of that other enterprise of the advancement of law and justice and civilization
westward. They were to be part of Manifest Destiny. When they had first heard heady talk of the railroad that would shrink
the continent, a railroad that when completed would make possible the circumnavigation of the globe in ninety-three days,
their heads caught fire. It was a fire that was easily fed, for it burned on the stuff of young men’s dreams, of voyaging
into the unknown and leaving there a mark inviolable and absolute. They saw the railroad in their sleep. They saw the iron
tracks running on and on across untrammelled terrain of prairie and desert and were drawn to the dream of tracing a line on
that vast emptiness. In rooms in cool evenings by fireside they fingered ways across the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada,
deserts west of Missouri.

And now there they were. They rode out those fine spring mornings with the air soft and the world like a thing newborn. The
broad sky was before them. They rode in single file without discourse and assumed the manner of such men who knew that the
way was to be long and tongues would tire before horses. They rode from the Mississippi westward and crossed the Missouri
River above St. Joseph and were as yet on lands already well surveyed for rails. They crossed then into Nebraska and soon
their progress slowed as the engineers stopped and studied and charted the land. They opened maps and knelt on them in winds
swift and capricious. They marked coordinates and spoke among themselves and did not say more than two words to Tom Foley
but to ask him to fetch something or ride out and see what danger lay beyond the next canyon. He did so without pause. It
was bigger country than he had ever dreamed, and when riding alone across the prairies and open spaces, he felt himself vanished
from the world of men and achieved a kind of serenity there. Still, his rifle was at his
side. He had seen those Indians that were at the fort and wore buckskin and blue coats and he had thought them peaceable and
proud. But he had not as yet encountered what the engineers referred to as hostiles.

Brown, he found to be energetic and earnest. He was blue-eyed, had a peak of thinning blond hair and a way of addressing the
others that made his statements seem urgent. When he spoke at the fireside about the railroad, his eyes glittered. He gestured
with his hand and waved it like a wing. He told them to think how it would be if they were the ones to find the true route.
He told them then that the way they would chart the rails would endure for all time afterward.

“It will be like this,” he said, and reached and marked with the blade of his knife a straight line in the sand. “That. Done.
See? Marked out on the ground. Once. And never changed.” He looked across the fire and they looked at the line in the sand.
For some time the men retained their gaze there and mutely considered it, and as the firesmoke wavered to and fro it was as
if they could then imagine the great iron engine moving along ever closer until it was beating down through the very darkness
behind them. It was as if the future itself were but an instant in their rear. As if, while the men each day moved on, behind
them sprang up stations and telegraph offices and saloons and smithies and all manner of lean-to clapboard premises to fulfill
the needs of man and become the cities of tomorrow.

Then Brown scuffed at the line with his heel and made it vanish. But his eyes glittered yet. The night passed.

They rode on. They crossed lands that had once been covered by glaciers and later by beasts unnumbered whose names were unknown
and which lands were later still part of Indian country from which all white men were excluded. And all that vast and empty
landscape seemed to Tom Foley to echo still with a chimerical afterpresence. They passed over a plain where a great herd of
bison moved before them like a brown tide. As the animals ran, their dust hung in the breezeless air and was a cloud low and
sad and slow fading. None of the men had ever seen such a herd and they stood upright in their saddles and pushed back their
hats. Then one of them who was young and whose name was Cartwright let out a cry and spurred his horse and galloped in pursuit.
He pulled a rifle as he rode and the others sat
and watched as he tore into the dust and let off a shot at the blue sky. The bison charged. Their noise travelled over the
plain and was the noise of hoof and bellow and fear. Still Cartwright raced on. The rifle he raised to his shoulder, but the
motion of the horse and his own lack of expertise at such caused the weapon to waver right to left like the upturned rod of
some demented diviner. He fired. The report of the bullet was a sharp and hard crack. The shot would have missed all but the
widest target, but as the herd thundered on, a beast lay fallen in the dust. Cartwright rode past it. He fired again at the
air and then again before he reined the horse and turned about a small circle in the passing cloud. The bison passed on. Slowly
as the dust settled there resumed the air of tranquillity over the plain, but it was like a thing fractured and repaired and
ever fragile now. The troop rode on to where the animal lay and Cartwright next to it, still astride his horse.

“This is the U.S. Army, Cartwright, do you hear me?” Brown asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“This is not some band of renegades, or wild men or hunters.”

“No, sir.”

“We have orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

Brown studied the distance. “If I want you to shoot an animal, I will say so.”

“Yes, sir.”

A pair of birds, dark shapes high in the blue, glided toward them.

“Very well,” Brown said, “You shot it, you skin and carve it. We’ll be at camp down there.”

He squeezed his thighs and they moved off then and left the soldier there, and Tom Foley stayed with him to help. Later, when
his and Cartwright’s arms were stained to the elbow with blood and they looked like perpetrators of some foul savagery, they
sat exhausted on the plain. The sun beat down. Scavenger birds cut arcs in the blue. After a time the soldier thanked the
other for his help.

“Do you know writing?” Tom asked him.

“What kind of writing?”

“Letters. I’m long out of practice.”

“I suppose I do.”

That night Cartwright wrote a short letter for Tom Foley. Because Tom did not want the soldier to know his business, he asked
him the words in jumbled order and later copied these in his own hand. When it was done his letter read:

Dear Doctor, He is out in country big and grand. He is right well. He is finding a route. I am watching out for him.

Yours, Tom Foley.

They journeyed on. They did not see the Indians that saw them. They camped by the many lakes in the sand hills there and ate
grouse and quail and waterfowl. Summer thunderstorms crashed over them. Coyotes and foxes and badgers ran across the evening
light. The men passed up over the grasslands and sheltered betimes in forests of oak and hickory and cottonwood where the
shade was welcome but harboured thin clouds of insects that ate at their faces. These trees would be felled, Brown told them.

“These are our sleepers,” he said.

They traversed the North Platte River into Wyoming Territory and came to Fort Laramie and refreshed supplies. Tom left his
letter there and after four days they travelled on again. They rode north to the pale red horizon of mountains. They came
to desolate lands where alkali dust was deep to the knee and the water had to be rationed to drops and the horses and mules
lifted up their lips to suck in vain for moisture in the air. The men’s faces burned and tanned like leather hides. They followed
the routes of fur traders and gold seekers and those who had sought to make homes in the far land of Oregon. The days stayed
dry. A high wind blew without cease and made move the sagebrush and buffalo grass. Whitened skulls and brittle rib cages of
beasts long slain lay in disassembled poses like things struck and shattered by time. Sunlight dazzled there. The small troop
passed along the boundaries of forests of pine and spruce and fir and sometimes saw moose step quickly away. They rode all
the time with the knowledge of the great barrier that lay before them, for in the high-ceiling rooms where men had dreamed
the railroad the Rocky Mountains always lay like God’s defiance in the way. To bring the rails through the mountains would
be a kind of ultimate proclamation, a statement sent heavenward of all that man could attempt and master.

This is all the engineer soldiers knew. They rode with their gaze
fixed on the peaks ahead. Slowly then they ascended through narrow passes and dry gullies. They wound their way upward beneath
the blue sky and found themselves in the stillness and silence there that seemed of another world. The sun burned its relentless
fire. The men dismounted and led their animals and were a thin, ragged line of blue coats and might have been the last remnants
of a tribe vanquished and forgotten and wandering there until they thinly fell and the sun blanched their bones. The harsh
majesty of that place assailed them. They progressed almost not at all yet all day moved about trying to find routes that
were not impossible. Sometimes they tethered the horses and then Tom and Cartwright and Brown made their way up through the
mountains on foot, scrabbling over the warm rocks, to find viewpoints for surveillance.