American Meteor (13 page)

I took a few pictures for Durant, who was my patron, of sorts. I wasn’t much good yet as a photographer, and he could get all he needed from the famous cameramen in attendance. Still, I thought I’d better show him something for the railroad’s money: a little legerdemain of light and shadow. The camera and darkroom setup were expensive, and “What the Lord giveth, He taketh away.” If you’re not sufficiently appreciative. I didn’t want Durant to take back my camera. Photography had enthralled me since the day Kari and I got our portrait made at the hundredth meridian. I had what you might call an instinct for it. Edward Jackson said later that I had the makings of a first-class photographer. So I made several exposures of the two locomotives, cowcatchers kissing; of the dignitaries, chests puffed out; and of the Irish, squatting by the rails. They’d as much right to the honor as I did to my medal. Only one of the pictures turned out passably well: It showed the Union Pacific’s locomotive engineer reaching toward the Central Pacific’s man, holding a bottle of champagne. (You’ve probably seen Russell’s version.)

In spite of the rough crowd packed into the picture, beneath the engineers’ outstretched hands—one clutching a bottle, the other about to receive it—the photograph made me think of God in a tangle of angels, touching Adam’s finger with His, although both of those gents were staunch
teetotalers and probably Methodists. I’d seen an engraving of Michelangelo’s famous fresco hanging in Stanton’s office. It looked as out of place as a nosebleed on a wedding dress. Unless Stanton pictured himself the Lord of Hosts, adjuring shirkers with His galvanic finger. Or maybe we were meant to see Abe Lincoln in that graven image, about to give “old Mars” a vivifying jolt. War and electricity do seem to be connected by a mystic chord. Whitman wrote in
Leaves
: “I sing the Body electric,/ The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them . . .”

Durant had bought me the photographic equipment in answer to my proposition. I doubt he did it to further my education or to show his appreciation for my years of servility. No, he was not that sort of man. He did nothing in his life without a mental calculation determining the advantage to himself. Durant bought me my camera because it pleased him to think of himself doing it. I knew in advance just what terms of endearment I would use to express my gratitude. Four years in service as a steward taught me the protocols by which men meet men as something other than equals. But first, I’d have to pass an unholy night with him.

The Black Hills, Wyoming Territory, August 1868

One summer’s evening at a railhead in the Black Hills, Durant fell into a genial mood indicative of a profound satisfaction with the world and his privileged place in it—encouraged by whiskey and the contemplation of “his empire,” sprawling in every direction beyond what the human eye could take in. He’d just returned from viewing a seven-hundred-foot wooden-truss bridge thrown across Dale Creek Gorge by his Chinese and Irish workers.
Momentarily well disposed toward them, he spoke kindly to me, to whom he rarely spoke at all except to instruct me in my duties, about his past days as a surgeon in Albany, as a wheat broker, and a railroad man.

“You were acquainted with President Lincoln, I believe,” he said, gazing wistfully through the carriage window at the gathering dusk.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Seeing the bridge this afternoon reminded me of another, built across the Mississippi in ’56.”

Pretending to be interested, I threw the bar rag, with which I’d been polishing the liquor glasses, over my shoulder and looked in his vicinity. He didn’t like me to stare. Maybe the eye patch disturbed him, although he’d been a surgeon and the thought of the empty orbit underneath wouldn’t have made him squeamish. To be fixed by an underling’s gaze, like a pin through an insect specimen, must have annoyed him. What insect most resembled Durant? The cicada-killing wasp. And me? One that crawled about in muck and seemed to be at home in it. The idea of beauty lay far off for me. The gulf between that “rough sketch” of a man in a white suit and the person who would winter in the Wasatch with the Ute is as wide as the Pacific Ocean, which I would glimpse, once, like Moses did the Promised Land. No, I could not have said then what beauty meant. Nor could I have explained what it meant to be human. Six years after that summer night in 1868, I would have my picture taken, sitting, like a desert sheikh, on the hump of a Custer-dispatched buffalo where it lay in terrifying silence on the grass. I was a coward even then.

“In the fifties, I was involved in the construction of the
Rock Island Railroad,” said Durant. “I hired Lincoln to defend a new bridge against a suit brought by riverboat operators claiming it was a hazard to navigation. They demanded that the bridge, the first to carry track across the Mississippi, be taken down, after the steamer
Effie Afton
ran into it. Abe was a long-shanked, raw-boned, wiseacre Springfield attorney then. Like me, he believed in America’s western expansion across the Mississippi and on to the Pacific and in railroads as the thing to accomplish it. Riverboat companies, which had been fattening on the north-south trade, didn’t see it that way. Lincoln won the case—
Hurd vs. Rock Island Bridge Company
—by arguing it brilliantly. Many people had a low opinion of Lincoln’s brains; some still do. But if they’d seen him in the courtroom that day, they’d have had their minds changed. Honest Abe was shrewd and ruthless when he had to be. He’d fight tooth and nail if you cornered him. I admired the man and the lawyer. You know, Stephen, there were two reasons I hired you: first, because of General Grant’s push; second, because you played a part in Lincoln’s send-off.”

He smiled benevolently. He might have patted me on the shoulder had there not been a polished mahogany bar between us. Encouraged, I seized the opportunity to ask him a favor. One succeeds in business, as in war, by taking advantage of an enemy’s weak moment. And if robber barons were in the habit of getting what they wanted, Durant might respect a young man for going brazenly after what
he
wanted.

“I have a proposition for you, Dr. Durant.” I thought he might overlook an upstart’s ambition if I couched my
request in terms as familiar to an entrepreneur as a Hail Mary is to a Catholic.

“A proposition. Is that right?”

I detected amusement in his tone, and, emboldened, I continued: “I’d like you—that is, the railroad—to set me up as a photographer. I can use a corner of the tool car, next to my bunk, for a darkroom. Any photographs I make will be Union Pacific property.”

“Do you know how to make a photograph?”

His two eyes bore into my one good one like a pair of hot gimlets. If any power on earth could have grown me a new eyeball, it would have been Durant’s stare. I felt my insides clench, like a case of the gripe, and my poor bunghole pucker. For once, I kept my gaze fixed and unwavering on his, so as not to appear shifty. Now was not the time for servility. I wished I had on my own clothes—my Union blues, for preference, if I hadn’t given them away—instead of a weaseling steward’s uniform. Chen was right: It did make me look like a bottle of milk.

“Have you ever taken one?” Durant asked.

“No, sir.” Honesty, my instincts told me, was the best card to play. “But I watched that newspaper fellow up on the hundredth meridian, and there didn’t seem much to it. I’m sure I can teach myself how and then take you some swell pictures of railheads, tracks, and scenery on the way to Ogden.”

He grew silent, letting his attention drift to the carriage windows, which the pitch-dark night outside had turned into mirrors. In one of them, I saw on his face the stricken look of a man who all of a sudden finds himself in a place he doesn’t recollect and can’t explain how he got there. I let him
be awhile. The rambunctious Wyoming wind whipped and buffeted the car as though it meant to topple it. I felt lonely. A man who comes to the end of the world, with night and nothingness at his back, would feel like this. It came to me with a jolt how isolated we two were in our candlelit car, with only the huddles of miners’ camps, sod huts, and miserable Indian villages between us and the civilized world on the far side of the Mississippi. If I were to climb one of the limestone hills that shone faintly up near the rising moon, I wondered if I would see—faraway to the east—a lightening of the sky in token of broad pavements thronged by men and women and cobbled streets noisy with traffic in the gaslit cities of Chicago, St. Louis, and New York.

I’d spent my life in crowds—in Brooklyn and Manhattan, Washington City and Omaha, and on fields where blue- and gray-coated dead men were in the majority. But there was solace even in that, poor as it was, for the dead can be company when you have no other.

My life didn’t end among granite peaks, on a solitary length of track, but I would never again sense so vast an emptiness. It belonged to the Lakota—that emptiness— granted them in perpetuity. They were welcome to it. Only an Indian would live in desolation, without so much as a telegraph wire to bear witness to enlightenment and progress. That changed after Custer’s Black Hills Expedition. Having once been deemed worthless and therefore fitting for savages, the Black Hills would become the Gum Sham the Chinese had dreamed of finding. Only they had no more right to it than the Indians cast out from what had been given them “for as long as grass grows and rivers run.” What did an Indian want with a precious metal, when he’d
be just as happy with a tin can—or a bottle, preferably full of rum? Such was the general opinion and, to be truthful, mine. It would take time and experience before I could rise above the common view, tarred and mired with it as I’d been since my tenement days. With us, hatred was a staple we’d gnaw on, like a dog a bone. It might have lacked nourishment, but it kept the teeth sharp. Of all the people I knew in childhood, only my mother managed to make room in her generous heart for whoever or whatever needed comforting.

“If you can stake me,” I said, rounding to my proposition, “I’ll undertake to be the Union Pacific’s photographer.”

The candles had guttered to nothing. The car was awash with night. The pine, spruce, aspen, and birch trees clinging to the steep hills might have lengthened their aboriginal shadows down the face of the butte, across the high country, and into the opulent carriage where Death’s own shadow had lain for twelve nights—so very black it was. Durant hadn’t stirred the whole time my mind milled what grist the night and its terrors brought. Scared, I determined to break the silence, though it cost me my camera.

“Dr. Durant,” I said in a whisper of a voice.

He didn’t answer. I felt an oppression of the chest as disquiet gave way to dismay.

“Dr. Durant, are you all right?” I said, louder this time, though not so very loud, in case my voice should break into a shout that could shiver the china cups: an uncanny sound to stop the heart of a young man of nineteen, surrounded by darkness, who felt at that instant like the last person left on earth.

I picked up the knife I used to shuck oysters. Little good it would do me against fiends or the ghosts of murdered
Indians. Then I heard Durant—I couldn’t see him in the dark. He caught his breath, snuffled like a wasp in a jam pot, and began to snore: a soft and even rasp that made the bedeviled carriage ordinary again. The terror that had nearly finished me vanished. I let him sleep and gave up all hope of prying a camera out of a millionaire. Like all of his kind, he held that the audacity of having staked all entitled him to take all, without a downward pitying glance at those who lost or lacked the sand to try.

I tried to imagine Durant’s dreams. Did he see visions of railroads, gilt-edged securities (guilt-edged is more like it),
nymphs du prairie
in shimmies and fancy drawers, slinking about a Denver bordello? Or was he once more in Lee, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1830, when his childish ambition extended no further than a fish hook at the end of a line? How little we know of life! Once before, I’d felt the earth swinging to no purpose through a space hostile to humankind. That time also involved a man waiting, motionless, in the dark of this same silent coach. Afraid to wake him—Durant’s temper could be sharp when he was abruptly roused—I closed my eye and fell into the chasm of sleep.

Omaha, Nebraska, October–December 1868

I was sweeping out the private car when a black boy knocked at the door. He took off his hat, handed me a folded piece of paper, and ran off without a word. Lincoln and war had freed the slaves, but the habits of abjection were too ingrained to be broken in a generation. They waited, excitable as Fleischmann’s yeast, to rise and show themselves. A scowl or an angry word could make a Negro doff his cap to a white
woman or step aside to let a white man pass. Black folk might have been disenthralled, but their fear remained— with good reason. For no sooner had the war ended than six disgruntled rebs cut eye holes in their missuses’ sheets. Rope became a thing with which to hang a man, and crosses, such as the lynched Jesus had sanctified, a torch to burn in a black sharecropper’s yard. Traffickers in human sweetness—the poets, preachers, and printers of Valentine’s Day cards— declare love to be our kind’s supreme emotion. Young as I was, I suspected enmity held sway.

The note asked if I would come to the Jackson Brothers’ photographic studio at three o’clock that afternoon, “if convenient.”

You can call William Henry Jackson’s arrival in Omaha “triumphal” insofar as a cowboy whooping and waving his dusty Stetson to goad a herd of exasperated cattle into the stockyard, at the end of a thousand-mile trail through hostile territory, has completed a journey as harrowing and as worthy of commemoration as Ulysses’ or Hannibal’s. Heroic moments like Jackson’s belong to the mythology of the West—the Old West now, in 1901.