American Meteor (11 page)

I knew a man in Santa Fe, who took offense at a horde of ants in the ground behind his house. They got on his nerves, he said; they troubled his dreams and disturbed his rest. In time, they interfered with his work and threatened his livelihood. Not that they ever came inside the house—that wasn’t it. His hatred, which swelled into a fury, was unreasoning; it had no practical point or issue. He would stomp on them as they filed in and out of the hole to their nest: a black string that he made, in his madness, into a fetish. He lay awake at night, hearing them scurry on the hard earth, plotting their extermination, rejoicing in its contemplation. But the ants were indifferent to his stratagems. Unable to destroy their race by killing them singly, he blocked the entrance, flattened the hill with a shovel, dug up the nest. But always the ants found their way out again—the tribe apparently numberless. Finally, he soaked the ground with kerosene. The fire meant to be the ants’ holocaust burned down his house. The ants endured. A pretty fable.

I shouldn’t have appeased Reynolds’s appetite. I ought to have spat in his eye, taken off my idiotic uniform, and reentered the world. Had I ever been in it? But those were hard times, and I was in the wilderness. It was no golden age after all, not for upstarts who might suddenly decide they could mouth off to their betters. The Declaration of Independence was not for people like me. Poverty had not been abolished, or cruelty outlawed, or greed shamed into nonexistence. Life on the frontier was harassed by savages, plagued by sickness, made miserable by hunger and cold. Out on my own, I could expect to live considerably fewer
than three score years and ten. Not being Thoreau, Emerson, John Brown, Frederick Douglas, Clara Barton, Lincoln, or Frederick Aiken, I behaved in keeping with my character and age. I told Reynolds what he wanted to know. I stoked his inferno and saw how his eyes sparked, then glazed over, like a priest’s vouchsafed a glimpse of Paradise.

Omaha, Nebraska Territory, October 24, 1866– December 4, 1866

Where the tailors worked, a German was pedaling the Singer. I wanted to tell Chen about my night inside the wagon in the middle of nowhere, how in the morning the gray plain sprawled to the encircling horizon, and about the photographer who’d fixed—he said “forever”—the light from a Swedish woman on a pane of glass. It never occurred to me to call Chen my friend; I hadn’t the habit or knack of friendship. There isn’t the sentimental strain in me you sometimes find in men whose childhood was grim. They see themselves like an urchin in a Dickens novel: a bleak heart sweetened by suffering. They look back fondly on their mistreated youthful selves. My childhood was brief and is best forgotten.

“Where’s Chen?” I asked the German, his head bent low over his work. In the noise of the machine—a brittle
rattat-tat
like a Gatling gun—he hadn’t heard me. I asked again, this time shouting, “Where is Chen?”

He stopped his pedaling, let the cloth rest, and raised his bleary eyes to me. He was older than Chen and looked worn, frayed, and wrinkled.

“Dead,” he replied grudgingly, annoyed by the interruption. He was paid by the piece—and what did it matter to
him that the railroad had lost a Chinaman? The coolie army had grown to thirteen thousand blue-jacketed men as the tracks leaped toward Utah, in advance of the fire-breathing dragons of the New World.

“How?” I asked. He gave me an infuriating sauerkraut smirk that made me want to brain him. “What happened to him?”

“He got a pain in his stomach, vomited, and died,” said the German brusquely, turning back to his work.

I knew I’d have to put a stick of dynamite up this stiff-backed Prussian’s ass to make him talkative. I left him to his sewing and went to find the depot quartermaster.

“He died of the ‘trembles,’” he said, with a shrug that consigned Chen to the hell reserved for heathens and infidels. You’ve heard of it, I’m sure, Jay. It comes from drinking milk from a cow that’s grazed on white snakeroot.

He was in the middle of counting shovels and had no time for “Durant’s Puppy,” as I was known—with good reason, I suppose. The Irish called me “Durant’s Nigger.” They’d have had my liver on toast ever since General Jack had ordered me to blow reveille at five o’clock on any Monday morning I happened to be in Omaha. They would wake with thick tongues and big heads after a half day’s rest, which meant, for most, a booze-up in the Irish saloon. General Jack never missed an opportunity to needle the “worthless bog trotters” for proving themselves even lower than his yellow drudges.

That night, I went to see the men who’d shared Chen’s room.

“What happen Chen?” I asked in pidgin English. They stood like a quartet of Easter Island statues, poker-faced and inscrutable. I tried shouting next, as if their
incomprehension were the result of ear wax. “What happen Chen?” They must have been used to bellowing white men, for they never even flinched. Frustrated, I impersonated someone with the shakes and a bellyache. The charade must have appeared comical to the Chinamen. They jabbered among themselves critically, and then one whose ear was a scorched stump laughed. Irked, I knocked him down. He was smaller than I, and I gloated to see his surprise. I left the room, haughty as a general delivering an ultimatum to a beaten foe. I was sorry for it later—that, and much else besides.

Passing the cattle pens on the walk back to the depot, I suddenly recalled a conversation I’d had with Chen.

“Are there cows in China?” I’d asked, betraying once more my ignorance of the wider world.

He smiled tolerantly. “Yes, but we do not drink so much milk as you. I never do; it disagrees with me.”

In the morning, I went to the infirmary to talk to the company doctor.

“I want to ask you about Chen Shi,” I said.

“Who is Chen Shi?”

“The Chinese tailor who died of the trembles.”

“Go on,” he said, hooking his ankles around the legs of the stool. The black hairs on his legs poked through his checkered socks.

“Chen didn’t drink milk,” I told him. “It didn’t agree with him.”

“There’re a hundred ways to die,” he said, with a shrug that looked like helplessness. He glanced at a sickbed where a man was pledged to one of them. “He could’ve been bitten by a rattler. Or maybe someone put white
snakeroot or arsenic in his tea. He was Chinese; he was bound to have enemies.”

Like a German tailor, I thought. Or the quartermaster, also German. History will show you can’t trust a stinking sauerkraut.

The infirmary smelled like the Armory Square Hospital, where my fiction had been hatched, and I was itching to leave. There was nothing I could do for Chen. I wasn’t about to demand an inquest or to pursue the poisoner. I’m no Auguste Dupin.

“Do you know where Chen’s buried?” I asked the doctor, who had unhooked his ankles from the stool and was listening to the dying man’s chest with a stethoscope. I considered the instrument superfluous. I could hear the croup and rattle of pneumonia from across the room.

“In the ‘Chinese cemetery’ behind the train shed. Look for fresh-turned earth.”

I took Jericho, determined to play taps over Chen’s grave. I could be a vain and pompous ass in those days. There were only a few graves; most of the Chinese workers died in California and Nevada, dynamiting through the Sierras—blown to bits or buried beneath tons of American rock. A sad ending for those who’d dreamed, once, of gold ingots. Each grave had a cross for decoration. Was it ignorance or malice to have buried them like Methodists? Or did a high-minded evangelist with a shovel intend to convert the misbegotten heathen when they could no longer object? I knelt—it might’ve been the first time in history that a white man had knelt before a Chinaman, quick or dead. Not knowing any Chinese prayers, I said a Catholic grace: “We give Thee thanks, Almighty God, for all Thy benefits, and for
the poor souls of the faithful departed; through the mercy of God, may they rest in peace. Amen.” I crossed myself, and then I blew taps. I couldn’t have done better if it were Abraham Lincoln himself lying in the ground before me. I was so moved that tears started up in my eye. Seized by a fit of generosity, I took off my medal and laid it at the foot of the cross. I brushed the loose dirt from my white-capped knees and left the corpses to go about their ghastly business. I hadn’t walked fifty yards when I changed my mind and went back for my medal. Who knew? I might need it yet.

I never found a man of any race to replace Chen— excepting you. You’ve been decent and a friend. On Sunday afternoons, Chen and I would walk the length and breadth of Omaha, although, in 1866, there was nothing about it you’d call picturesque. Omaha was a machine for slaughtering, packing, and shipping cattle. For all its monotony and stink, the town had its share of amusements—drinking holes and whorehouses, naturally, but I’d have been embarrassed to be seen in either place with Chen. What I mean is, I’d have been ashamed of myself. He had more of a civilizing effect on me than all the high-and-mighty, holier-than-thou con men I’d known in my wanderings. China has an ancient civilization. It was bound to have seeped into Chen at birth and to have changed me a little during the time I was steeped in him, so to speak.

He tended to spice his remarks with epigrams. One I remember was “Stars that outshine the rest are the first to disappear.” I don’t know if it was Confucius’s saying or Chen’s own. Product of a self-effacing race, he disapproved of my inclination to show off, which he attributed to shallowness and insecurity. I was hardly more than a boy! He
thought it a dangerous folly to wear a snow-white uniform in a wilderness peopled by the Irish and the Indians. Chen’s gift was to fit himself to circumstances. I’d advocate it, if his life hadn’t been cut short.

With nothing to do anymore in my idle hours, I undertook my education. I wish I could tell you that I had Chen’s example in mind. But the truth is, I became an avid reader by chance. I was searching the depot warehouse for a case of scotch that Durant had ordered from New York, when I found a crate of books intended, by some eastern philanthropic society, for Omaha’s circulating library. A library, circulating or otherwise, had not yet been thought of for a town consisting mostly of illiterate Irishmen, foreigners, and cowboys herding steers into cattle pens by waving their Boss of the Plains hats and making their own version of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp.” I gave a coolie two bits to haul the crate to the tool car hitched behind Durant’s traveling boardroom, where I had my quarters; and in the long evenings when I wasn’t licking boots and kissing backsides, I read. In the three and a half years remaining to me as Durant’s Puppy, I read
The Scarlet Letter, Silas Marner, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Pride and Prejudice, Gulliver’s Travels, The Marble Faun, Moby-Dick, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, The Red Rover, David Copperfield, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Woman in White, Adam Bede, The Age of Fable, Bleak House
, illustrated by Phiz,
The Origin of Species
, which could have found its way into the crate only by chance or spitefulness, and
The Diary of a Superfluous Man
, whose title spoke to the situation of a boy no more central to the great events in which he found himself than a gnat in the halls of Congress. I had fallen in
my own estimation since leaving the army, but I’d be sitting in the catbird seat once again.

With no formal education and little experience in reading (beyond Durant’s private papers, which I would pull from his briefcase and peruse), I could never have wormed my way through all those books if it hadn’t been for Patrick Landy. He’d been sent by an eastern newspaper to write an article deploring the Johnson administration’s neglect of the Lincoln parlor car: a “national disgrace” and “the final quietus to the man who saved the Union.” I met Landy the month following Chen’s murder (for so I swear it to have been), when he visited the Union Pacific shed. One of my duties was to scare off trespassers and vandals. Personally, I did not think my face or manner could scare a boy on his way to a Baptist picnic. But the car had been “egged” once already by die-hard secessionists, and Durant insisted I keep watch. This was his price for letting me stay in a corner of the tool car—dirty with pigeon droppings and grease. When I suggested he furnish me with a firearm, he replied fleeringly that my bugle would be enough to intimidate any mischief makers and, if I were overrun, to signal for help. So I met Landy for the first time with Jericho at the ready.

“I’m not partial to bugle music,” he said disarmingly when I had answered his knock on the old parlor car’s back door.

“What do you want?” I asked with as convincing a show of grit as I could muster. I couldn’t have been more surprised by the burly man’s abrupt appearance if he’d been a grampus heaved up on my doorstep by the night tide.

By now you know I was never brave—not as a boy, not as a man. I’m not saying I ran from trouble (at least not always), but I would feel something inside my nerves and gut give
way at trouble’s approach, making my gorge rise, as well as the little hairs on my neck. Antagonism did not come naturally to me, unless the other party to the conflict happened to be a smaller man. Landy must’ve seen my apprehension in the way I shuffled and fidgeted with Jericho, but he had tact enough not to belittle me.

“I’m a reporter for the
Chicago Daily Tribune
,” he said in a peaceable voice belied by his robust presence. “Mind if I take a look around?”

I didn’t see any reason to bar entrance to a gentleman of the press or to blow Jericho for reinforcements, so I opened the door wide and let him come in. Reading by the light of a single candle set on the table, I hadn’t noticed when the shadows engulfed the narrow car. I lit the wall sconces, and their reflected light bloomed suddenly, gilding each windowpane. Mr. Lincoln’s funeral coach still retained its opulence; the varnished wood of the coffered panels and carved furniture gleamed, the crystal shone, and the tapestried chairs and sofas caught glints of light in their shiny threads.