When We Were Strangers (26 page)

A hand pressed my arm. “You will find good friends in San Francisco, my dear,” Jacob whispered. “And other work to do.
Your
work.”

“But no friends like these.”

“That is true, none like these. And we will have no one like our Irma, but I carry you here always.” He touched his heart, patting the somber black coat that Freyda said he wore on holidays and feast days. “And for
tonight
, we celebrate together.” We finished the wine and mousse and sang songs from our old countries until the church bells rang midnight.

“I don’t come to the station, Irma,” Hélène announced suddenly. “I have had enough sadness in good-byes, but you do
well
in San Francisco,
mon amie
, you promise? And write to us. Now go home, it’s late and I must think how to tell the ladies they have lost their Irma.”

“Yes, we have to go,” Molly announced, pulling me to the door. “The train leaves early. But don’t worry, this time leaving will be different.”

The next morning
was
different. I had my fine carpetbag, not an immigrant bundle. Vittorio hired a cart to take our baggage to the Central Depot, and a noisy clump of well-wishers crowded around us: Jacob, Freyda and Sarah, Molly’s friends, some of my English students, Vittorio and Claudia, Simone and Lune. There were kisses and hugs, packages of sweets tucked into our baskets and addresses pushed into our hands.

“
Zay gesunt
, go in good health, my dear,” Jacob said, coming close to whisper, “and remember, there
are
good men in the world.” Then he handed me off to Sarah and Freyda, who warned me against strangers.

Molly called a porter to stow a trunk of linens, which she heard fetched high prices in San Francisco. We each had a clump of tickets: passage with the Chicago and North Western line to the Pacific Transfer station in Council Bluffs, Iowa, then tickets on the Union Pacific to Omaha, and finally the Pacific line to San Francisco. We had our dusters and two dresses for the trip, underclothes, books, soap, food for the first day, my sewing box and a neat package from Vittorio with medicines for travelers’ ills: sick headaches, nausea, sore throats, coal coughs, and all manner of digestive problems.

The shrieking train whistle and bustling conductor hurried us onto the train. Below our window, handkerchiefs fluttered like doves. “Good-bye, good-bye, au revoir, zay gesunt, arrivederci!” My last view of the Chicago Depot was hazy with tears.

“Six days,” said Molly, busily sorting our bags. “I’ll learn bookkeeping and you’ll study medicine. Not like those bumpkins who stare out the window or play cards all the time.” I did study my book of child and infant maladies. But the window drew me relentlessly.

“You’ll wear out that nose,” Molly warned, “pressed to the glass like that.”

But I couldn’t stop, and even paid boys at the stations to wash the coal dust from my window. We roared across prairies at forty miles an hour through green-gold seas of grass. Children tumbled from sod houses to wave us by. Years ago, a traveler said, there were buffalo herds as large as lakes here, horizon to horizon, moving like thunder. Flocks of passenger pigeons once passed for hours. No matter, the golden light was enough now; hawks rose into a cobalt sky and crimson tipped the shocks of trees. I saw Indians in fringed leather with rain-straight black hair. Storm clouds bloomed over wheat fields, mounded high as mountains. Lightning laced the sky. No one had ever told me that America was so grand. If Carlo and my father were here, these sights would amaze even them.

Inside the train, hours crawled by in weary sameness. A foul “convenience” bucket at the end of each car was barely shielded by a curtain. Ceaseless card games sometimes crumbled into fights and once a wooden bench was ripped out of the floor. When we finished the food we had brought, there was only the station cafés’ unvarying fare: thin, tough gray beefsteaks, weak beer, rubbery boiled eggs and potatoes fried in rancid oil. We wolfed these meals in minutes lest the train pull out without us. Twice we had to leave before the food we paid for had arrived.

“They’ll sell it again to some poor fool,” said a burly Irishman. “Don’t you know? The stationmasters make deals with the engineer and sell the same meal three times over, then feed it to the dogs.” Two days west of Chicago, chicken stew appeared on the menu. “Hah,” he scoffed. “That’s ‘furry chicken.’ The greenhorns always fall for it.”

“Meaning?” Molly demanded.

“Meaning, watch the prairies.” That afternoon we saw herds of sharp-nosed, puppy-fat little beasties pushing up through earthy knobs to sit on their haunches as we passed. “Prairie dogs,” the traveler explained haughtily. “There’s your ‘chicken stew.’ ”

Molly stared him down. “Could be your people would have been glad for any kind of stew when potatoes failed in Ireland. Am I right, lad?” She smiled in her wide-mouthed way and thrust out a hand. “No harm meant. My friends call me Molly, if you want to know.”

The man looked her up and down and smiled. “Mine call me Tom and you’re right, Molly. It was grass they were eating back home in the Great Hunger and songs they lived on when there was nothing else.”

“Well, then,” I suggested, “shall we try the chicken stew?” We ate it at the next station. The meat was fresh, at least. Molly and Tom, splicing their stories together, determined that their fathers could have sailed on the same ship out of Ireland.

The first days passed despite the stifling afternoons, shivering sleepless nights and the growing stench in our carriage. A young woman’s labor started early and the porter helped me cordon off a birthing space. I made a little nest of clean cloths and rags that Molly collected from the passengers and coached the mother’s breathing as Sofia had taught me. The babe was born just west of Omaha, a rosy black-haired baby girl the giddy parents named Mary Irma. The father lined a soapbox with a buffalo blanket he bought at the next station and Tom sang lullabies to her in Gaelic—“God’s own mother tongue,” he insisted.

Finally, the mountains! They rose from the plains in Colorado, rank on rank of peaks, enough to hold a thousand Opis with high meadows to feed a world of sheep. I never tired of watching sunlight splash the rock faces or clouds skim over hanging lakes. Our tracks cut through forests and topped bridges that seemed flimsy as spider webs. We entered the Wasatch Mountains under a crescent moon hung over a jagged range cut into the blue-black sky. A silver waterfall poured over a dark cliff that seemed to melt into the night, as if water tumbled from the moon. I shook Molly awake.

“Look! Did you ever see anything so beautiful?”

“A beautiful dream I
was
having,” she groaned, “about
not
being on trains. If these mountains are so wonderful, sew them, why don’t you?” I tried that, moving to a car near the back of the train where those who could not sleep passed the night reading or playing cards by kerosene lamps.

I was stitching a varicolored mountain range on a length of linen as a storm roared in from the north. A lid of thick clouds closed over the train. Driving rain poured down, turning icy. Lightning blazed across the valley and porters whispered anxiously to each other. They had cause, said one traveler, for we had entered the “killer miles,” deadly for the men who had laid these tracks and for those who ran trains over them.

We stopped in a mining town, where a brakeman was sent up to fix the coupling on a coal car. Perhaps the engineer didn’t hear his cry or see his lamp swinging in the driving rain. Perhaps the brakes didn’t hold. In any case, the train jerked forward and released, crushing the brakeman and then flinging him down the icy embankment.

They carried him howling into the caboose. I raced back, following his cries. They had laid him on a narrow cot that was quickly soaked with blood. Torn pants revealed a mass of gushing blood. “God damn engineers. We’re cheaper than dirt to them,” spat one of the men. “It’s me—Hank,” he said to the injured man. “We’re here with you, Bill. We’re not going nowhere.”

“Let me see him,” I said. Bill’s right leg was crushed and left arm twisted out at the elbow. The side of his face was a pulp of pebbles and ice. I looked in his eyes as Sofia had taught me. The pupils were dilated and his pulse weak. Bruises covered the chest, but I dared not touch him, for perhaps an organ had been pierced. The day before, at a station diner, I’d heard passengers ask advice of a kind-faced man called Dr. Windham, who traveled first class. I asked the porter to fetch him.

“I’m sure he’s sleeping, miss. He might be angry.”

“Ask anyway.”

I carefully cut away Bill’s pants leg, but didn’t touch the white bone or shredded flesh. I could clean his face at least. “Do you have any bandages? Sheets?” I asked the men.

“Sheets? They don’t give us none,” Hank spat again.

“Rags then, as clean as you can.”

Bill opened his eyes. “My leg. What happened?” His voice rose. “Somebody! Why can’t I feel it?”

“There was an accident, Bill,” said a gentle voice behind me. “I’m Dr. Windham. Let me take a look at you. Give this man some whiskey,” he told Hank. “If you’ve got any.”

“Don’t have sheets, but we sure got whiskey. Hold on a minute, Bill.”

Bill watched avidly as Hank found a bottle, filled a cup and lifted his head to drink. In this lull, Dr. Windham set down a tooled leather case and stepped toward the cot, keeping his fine kid boots clear of the widening pool of blood.

“Doc, don’t cut my leg off.”

“There now, son, nobody’s cutting. You rest easy, I’ll give you something for the pain.” The doctor opened a vial of morphine and prepared a needle, speaking slowly as he injected. “Breathe in and out for me now, Bill. Good, very good.”

“Don’t leave me,” Bill muttered.

“We’re here,” Hank repeated. “We’re all here.”

“You won’t amputate, sir?” I ventured, when Bill’s eyes closed and his head fell heavily to one side. “Because if there’s an infection and gangrene—”

“You’re a doctor, young lady, or a nurse?”

“No, but I worked in a clinic back in Chicago.”

“Miss—?”

“Vitale.”

He pulled me clear of the men closing around Bill’s cot. “Miss Vitale, the best London hospital couldn’t save that man and for sure we can’t save him on a moving train with the tools in this bag. I was a surgeon for the Union army at Antietam, Gettysburg and Chickamauga. After four hundred seventy-three amputations you come to know who’ll survive and who won’t. There is doubtless cranial bleeding. You saw the abdominal bruising?”

“Yes sir. I was afraid of—”

“Internal injuries? Certainly. They will be massive.” He slipped between the men around Bill’s cot, put his stethoscope to the heaving chest and came back to me. “Water in the lungs already, possibly pre-existing pneumonia. Many of these men have it, working in all weathers, breathing that coal dust. The heart’s badly weakened. He won’t last the night.”

As Bill’s shivers deepened to convulsions, the men tucked their blankets and jackets around him until only his head was visible under the mound.

“Weight on the chest—” I began, but Dr. Windham raised his hand.

“Let them be,” he whispered. “This is all the funeral he’ll have.”

“Fine brakeman,” said one of the men.

“Flyin’ Bill.”

“That blizzard in seventy-two, crossing the Divide, you saved us all.”

“God be with ye, Bill.”

The men brought us stools and we sat by the bed as the men made their quiet ministrations. Dr. Windham described his battlefield surgeries and I told him about Sofia’s clinic and my hopes to study at the dispensary. When Bill moaned, Hank brought a flask and lifted his sweat-soaked head to help him drink. I tucked my stitched mountains in his whitening hand.

Bill died near dawn. When the cloth dropped to the floor, Hank asked me for it. “Mountains and trains kill us like that,” he said, snapping his fingers, “but us brothers on the Pacific line, where else we gonna go?” They wrapped Bill in the rain slicker that shrouded so many railroad men. Nobody knew his family. “The crew at the next station will bury him along the tracks,” Hank explained. “Close enough to hear our whistle blow.”

When he walked me back to Molly, the card games paused. “Hard, was it?” Molly asked. I nodded. A porter brought me breakfast from the first-class dining room with Dr. Windham’s compliments, but I couldn’t eat and gave the tray to Molly.

“It’s strange. You can see patients all day,” Sofia once said. “The sick, the wounded, children you know will die. You think you’re strong, that you can do your best with each case and then go on to the next. Then one case comes along, no different from the next and you don’t know why, but it’s just so hard.” This time, Sofia would have been wrong. There
was
something different about Bill. In the flickering dark, his bristled hair, deep eyes and long nose had slowly become Carlo’s. Careless, cocky and quick to anger as he was, who would have covered Carlo with blankets when his luck ran out or passed a flask to ease his dying?

“Hard as all that?” Molly asked. “A lot of blood?”

“He reminded me of my brother.”

“Ah,” she said and set the dinner tray aside.

Later that morning Dr. Windham sent back a letter of recommendation for the Pacific Dispensary. Molly folded it carefully in my book while I stared out the window into the rainy dark above the Rocky Mountains.