The O'Briens (14 page)

He had booked a drawing-room suite on the Sunset Limited. At El Paso they would disembark, cross the Mexican border with the motorcycle, and board a train for Chihuahua City.

A smiling Negro porter showed them to their Pullman suite. They had a bedroom, bathroom, and drawing room, where meals would be served if they chose not to visit the dining car. The drawing room was full of flowers, and they sat on the sofa holding hands while the train bumped and shuttled through the endless sprawl of Los Angeles train yards. Sunlight cut and flashed at the windows.

“I want you,” he said.

He was looking out the window when he said it.

“Yes, I know.”

“What you told me, about room to breathe. You're always going to have that.”

“Yes.”

“I won't try to put you in some little-woman box,” he said. “I'm not interested in that. Happiness means freedom. The shape of the marriage, we must build it together. A house for both of us. Plenty of room.”

“And children,” she said.

“Yes, I suppose.”

The train had passed the dry purple hills of Covina and was picking up speed when Iseult stood up, unpinned her hat, and slipped off her short silk jacket. She undid a couple of buttons on her silk blouse, then looked at her husband.

Wordlessly Joe leaned over and began taking off his boots. Then he too arose and began undressing.

“I've been with women before. I should have told you before.”

“You don't have to tell me now.”

“There's not much to tell.”

“Good.”

Bright daylight hopped and bounced in the compartment. The train was so long that she could barely hear the engine as they cleared San Bernardino and began picking up even more speed on the level grade, running past orange and pecan groves. The window was a sheet of blue California sky. He shrugged out of his morning coat and removed his gold watch from his waistcoat pocket. He took off the waistcoat, slipped off his grey silk necktie, and removed his gold cufflinks, an extravagant wedding present from Grattan. Finally he pulled out his pearl collar stud, a present from Iseult, and removed his collar.

“I think of your body,” he said. “Your scent. There's nothing more powerful to me.”

Her shyness was becoming a kind of excitement as she unbuttoned the waistband of her narrow grey skirt.

“You're the flower,” he said. “Your body's the flower. That's how it seems to me.”

Intensifying alertness, curiosity unleashed. Hunger. She had on a linen slip, a chemise, black silk stockings, and buttoned shoes. He placed his hands on her hips. He was wearing only a pair of cotton drawers. Powerful chest and powerful arms. Until then she had felt as if everything were happening in a dream, but now it was coming into better focus. It was becoming clear.

People never got quite what they expected. The world was various and changeable, and maybe they were bound to disappoint each other. Maybe their marriage would be bleak and lonely, resembling her parents', but she really did not believe so. She was on fire, and Joe O'Brien was hard and solid. Everything about him addressed the future, not the past. Marriage was going to be a road, not the place where the road stopped.

He reached up under her linen slip to the tops of her stockings. His fingers brushed the skin on her thighs and she shivered with . . . what? Expectation. Savage joy. Unlike anything else. He touched her softy, gently, right
there
, and she was so startled and thrilled that she almost howled.

He was unrolling her stockings and speaking softly. “Where I come from, if the neighbours don't like a match, they come after the couple on the wedding night, banging pots, lighting fires, sometimes worse.”

“Do you suppose they're coming after us?”

“That's why I booked us aboard the Sunset
,
Iseult. Fastest train in the West. They'll never catch us.”

Iseult.
It was first time he'd used her name. His hands feeling her calves and moving higher.

The parts of her body already exposed — arms, calves — were shivery and thrilled; her skin was hungry to be touched. She felt jubilant. What kind of history awaited her? Within the next hour they'd know each other completely. They were looming together now, pleasure and pain; only death could separate them. One day she'd have to watch Joe O'Brien die, or he'd watch her.

He touched her again, exactly
there
, and she was aware of the train adding another notch of speed. He pulled off her shoes, her silk stockings, and through the soles of her feet she felt steel wheels clacking over joints. He stood up, and she lifted her arms and let him pull off the linen slip and chemise. Her breasts were free. He dropped the clothes on the floor and kissed her throat, then between her breasts, her nipples. He gently pushed her into the bedroom and onto the white soft bed and they did not leave their compartment for eight hundred miles.

At El Paso she watched the red motorcycle being unloaded from the baggage car. She climbed into the sidecar and they drove across the Rio Grande bridge to the depot at Juarez, where the machine was put aboard a train for Chihuahua City.

Rebels attacked before the train had even left the station, firing pistols and galloping horses up and down the platform. Joe pulled her down to the floor and lay on top of her, and it was there, on the dirty floor of a Mexican day coach with his weight holding her down, that she had the first inkling that she was pregnant.

Mexican dust, cracking glass, voices screaming in Spanish. Bullets slugging into varnished wood. A man's body holding her down. Slight nausea, exhilaration, and a sense of her life coming open, sudden and entire.

The Contract

{ November
1912
}

W
innipeg was frustrating.
Joe hated wasting time in the city, arguing points that should have been obvious, when he needed to be in the mountains, driving work forward. The season was rushing to a close. At most there were only two or three weeks left before mountain weather shut him down for the year.

After two days of meetings and ridiculous, penny-pinching arguments, the generals grudgingly approved every single one of the variances his engineers wanted. Joe hurried back to his hotel, sent off a couple of quick telegrams, ate a hasty, greasy supper in the restaurant, and headed for the train station, carrying his grip.

The station was crowded with footloose men, harvest hands clutching carpet bags and beat-up satchels, blanket rolls slung over their shoulders. All of them heading somewhere, getting clear of Winnipeg before winter locked in. He felt blessed to not be one of them, to have a wife, and a baby on the way, and an important piece of work to get through.

His responsibilities grounded him. Before his marriage he had sometimes been overwhelmed by sadness while hurrying through important train stations. Struck by a drowning sorrow that made it impossible to keep going, to reach the platform, to board the train. He could only stagger to the waiting room and collapse on one of the benches. It was as if his spirit — the soul of himself — had evaporated, leaving him empty and stranded. Sometimes he'd recover in time to board the train. Other times he missed his connection entirely.

But marriage to Iseult had given him direction and purpose. A bright, challenging woman made it clear: life was worth living. No more stranding in great depots. No more feelings numbed in the midst of rushing, purposeful crowds.

Around dawn, as his train was approaching Edmonton, he raised the shade in his berth, saw the snow, and knew there would be more of it in the mountains. At the Edmonton telegraph office he was told that the wires west of Tête Jaune Cache had been down for twenty-four hours. Towards noon he boarded a supply train. At Tête Jaune the track was blocked with snow, the telegraph lines were still down, and he had to spend the night in the guest house at the big Canadian Northern construction camp, nearly sick with impatience to get back to Iseult.

The next morning he left a fifty-cent tip for the Chinese steward who served him breakfast, then caught a ride on a
4
-
8
-
4
locomotive headed west with a snow blade attached. The storm had passed through and the sun was shining. Standing up in the cab with the engine driver and fireman, sipping strong, sweet tea, he felt refreshed. At such times when he was heading home, or where he thought of as home, the substance of his life felt as dense and real as a chunk of coal.

If the good weather held there might be a couple more weeks before freeze-up, when the camp would shut down and the men would scatter and he'd take Iseult to California to have the baby. He would probably need to make a business trip back east sometime during the winter, and probably to Winnipeg as well, but their child was going to be born into the sunlight and salt air of the coast.

West of Yellowhead Pass a series of avalanches had slumped over the right-of-way, but the engineman was able to power up and drive through. Three hours out of Tête Jaune the locomotive slunk, hissing, up to a pair of timber stops at Head-of-Steel.

Jumping down, he made his way along a snowy, icy rut to the shed that served as the contract's central office. It had been put up in a hurry, the way such buildings always were, using logs harvested on the site, and it would be abandoned at the end of the season. Next year's Head-of-Steel camp would be twenty miles west, along the North Thompson River, on a site his crews had already surveyed and logged clear.

A pair of Quebec heaters were hissing and groaning in the main room when he came in. Stoves had always smelled of power to him — hot iron somehow the scent of leadership, chiefdom, magnanimity — but their heat never spread very far, and most of the clerks and purchasers had on scarves and mufflers, and some were wearing overcoats or mackinaws, with derby hats or knit caps pulled down over their ears. Many of his clerks were young Englishmen, though not much younger than he was. He enjoyed their odd, yawpy accents, and there was always one or two with an appetite for administration, for studying and interpreting the flow of numbers through a contract.

Exchanging quick greetings with a dozen men, he headed for his private office. He liked having a scrap of Persian or Turkish carpet on the floor of his room even though the walls were just logs chinked with a mortar of clay, lime, and straw. Whenever he bought an expensive rug at auction or from a dealer, he usually acquired a few old remnants at the same time, which he would use in his office. The purple, scarlet, and gold intricacy of an antique Tabriz or a silk Isfahan, no matter how threadbare, had a meaning he couldn't quite put his finger on. The patterns were gorgeous and bewitching. When he was tired, he sometimes sat contemplating an intricate scrap of carpet on his floor, obtaining a kind of satisfaction available nowhere else. He hadn't tried explaining it, even to Iseult. A good piece of carpet gave him spirit somehow, and he didn't give a damn if his men trod their muddy boots on it; they could not obliterate its magic.

Otherwise his room's furnishings were plain: a rolltop desk, a chair, and a green metal file cabinet. Snowshoes hanging on the wall. Back in August Iseult had sometimes left a handful of wildflowers in a glass of water on his desk, and he'd appreciated the femininity, the generosity of the gesture, and the peppery scent of the little alpine flowers.

Survey maps covered every inch of wall space, with the route marked in with a blue grease pencil. An army cot, South African War surplus, was set up on one side of the room, with a Hudson's Bay blanket neatly folded. He had started taking naps in the afternoon because he hardly ever slept through the night. At two or three in the morning he would rise without waking Iseult, throw on his clothes, and make his way through camp to the main office. After lighting a lamp and starting a fire in one of the stoves, he would start working through the stacks of documents always on his desk.

Like any big operation, a railway construction contract had a tendency towards turmoil and inefficiency, but with good organization, painstaking administration, and rigorous accounting even the most complicated undertaking could be successfully managed and controlled. Any man who despised paperwork — who thought it beneath him — was abdicating power over his own affairs, leaving his fate in the hands of those who had grasped and mastered the arts of administration.

He quickly riffled through the stack of letters, reports, and telegrams that had accumulated in the four days he had been away. There was nothing that couldn't wait until he'd seen Iseult. He ought to have brought her some sort of present, but it had slipped his mind, and there had never been any time for shopping anyway.

He was getting ready to leave his room when his chief clerk, a Belfast Irishman, appeared in the doorway. “I must have a word, sir.”

“Sure, what is it?”

“Sad news, sir.”

Joe looked up. “What the hell are you talking about?”

~

That year Head-of-Steel was in a valley in the Selkirks, beside a green river flowing off a glacier. Another railway contractor had gone bankrupt over the winter, the news reaching Joe on their wedding trip as they came out of the Mexican mountains. He'd immediately booked a first-class cabin on a steamer from Vera Cruz to New Orleans. From New Orleans they'd gone by train to Chicago and on to Montreal, where Joe had met with the Canadian Northern Construction Company's chief engineer and undertaken a new subcontract for another eighty miles of grade through the British Columbia mountains, in addition to his original thirty-five-mile piece.

Subcontractors had to buy every tool, spike, and length of timber from the general contractors, paying cash at prices the general contractors set; Joe explained to Iseult that the generals skimmed most of their profits that way. The generals were in fact the same promoters who had persuaded the Dominion government to back bonds they had sold in London and New York to finance their railway.

Joe had calculated it would take three years to complete their whole piece, figuring eight good months each year, April to freeze-up. Penalties were written into the contracts, and if he didn't finish on time they stood a good chance of losing everything. “Either we make our fortune on this job, Iseult, or it'll bust us.”

She had offered to sell the house at Venice Beach so he could have that money, along with the balance of her inheritance to use as working capital, but he'd refused. “I want you keeping all that's yours. I aim to give you more of everything, not subtract from what you have. I'll shake it out of the bankers, you'll see. Those fellows know we're a going concern, and they'll want a piece of us.”

He had met with bankers in Montreal and New York, and she had been startled, and a little frightened, by the enormous sums of money they were prepared to loan him. He hadn't seemed at all surprised. “They've certainly given us enough rope to hang ourselves.” He smiled when he said it; it was clear he had no intention of “busting,” and she realized that nothing was going to stop him from carrying through what he intended.

There were bunkhouses at Head-of-Steel, but most of the four thousand men he employed lived in small, remote camps called stations, strung out for a hundred miles along the projected route. Supply dumps and repair shops were at Head-of Steel, along with horse pens and feed barns. Joe's clerks, timekeepers, telegraph operators, and purchasing agents worked in the log building that served as the main office. Iseult and Joe lived in a white canvas-walled tent set in a private compound with its own cook shed, outhouse, and kitchen garden. They were at some remove from the bunkhouses, sheds, and equipment shops clustered at the railhead.

His men had built her a small hut she used for a darkroom. Iseult had been taking photographs of the men and horses at work — shyly and hesitantly at first, but as the men became accustomed to her, she became accustomed to herself with the camera and started carrying it all the time. They had given her rolls of oilcloth but it was impossible to strain out every chink of light from her darkroom. When Joe worked late, she stayed up too; night was best for developing. She got used to moving and touching in the dark and trusting her hands.

Most of her prints weren't nearly as interesting as the world around her, but every now and then an image swam up out of the developing medium and surprised her, and that was enough to keep her going. Making photographs, she felt a kind of magic in her hands, something she'd never experienced holding a pencil or a paintbrush.

The plank floor of their tent was covered with Persian rugs Joe had bought at auction in Montreal. He'd ordered their camp beds from Abercrombie and Fitch. Their bed linen was a wedding present from Mr. Spaulding; the Hudson's Bay blankets were from Grattan and Elise, and Joe's Montreal bankers had sent a pair of prime buffalo robes, very heavy and almost suffocatingly warm. His two sisters, cloistered in their convent in Ottawa, had sent a holy picture, an image of the Sacred Heart. Early in the summer Joe had raced the two thousand miles to Ottawa to try to see them before they took final vows. He wanted to persuade them to leave their cloistered convent.

“I should never have put them in there, Iseult. They're asking them to take vows and give up the world — how can you give up what you've never had?”

The Mother Superior agreed to speak to Joe through an iron grille, and she told him that his sisters refused to see him. He threatened to return to the convent with a policeman, but he knew no police would dare bust into the Visitations. He was staying at the Chateau Laurier; that night he received a telegram from Head-of-Steel saying that men had been killed in a tunnel blast gone awry, and the next morning he caught a train back to the mountains.

All summer Iseult and Joe had been dining off her mother's china and using her father's table silver and candelabra. Oil lamps at night gave their white tent a cozy glow, and a little woodstove kept them warm. Mail came from Tête Jaune and Edmonton on the weekly supply train, and Iseult usually got a letter from Elise, who had delivered her baby in June, a red-haired girl named Virginia.

I'll spare you gruesome details Iseult but when you go into labor don't think something's wrong just because it hurts so much because it does.

There was always plenty of mud at Head-of-Steel. Wolves scavenged the camp's perimeter. Iseult had seen grizzly bears stalking across avalanche slopes like irritable men, and herds of elk feeding on young aspen, stripping the bark with their tongues. The mountains were no idyll and the risks were momentous, but Iseult, pregnant, shared her husband's sense of great endeavour. And intimacy with a man like Joe was exhilarating and strange. His legs were powerful. He had rough hands but could be shockingly tender. When the tunnel collapsed in late May and those men were killed on the job, lovemaking gave each of them sustenance through the horribly black mood of that week.

She had slept in her husband's camp bed every night until her body got too big and she had to sleep in her own. She had nursed injured men and held the hands of men who were dying. She had dug, planted, and passionately defended the kitchen garden, and though most of her beans and onions had been lost to rampaging elk, she was still harvesting beets and potatoes even with frost in the ground. Joe's men had built a chicken house, and she kept eleven hens, all of them good layers. Early in the season she had paid the camp tailor, an elderly Chinese, Mr. Bee, to make her two pairs of trousers out of honey-coloured canvas duck, she'd knitted her own thick woollen socks, and she had ordered a pair of caulk boots from Eaton's catalogue in a boy's size that fit her perfectly. She greased the leather herself with a compound of bear grease and ashes, first warming the leather by the fire, then rubbing in the grease with her hands.