Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

Less than a week later Tom was able to walk. The first thing he did was go outside of the house and around to the back, where he managed one-handed to swing an ax and split the many logs that were assembled there. When the doctor returned he looked at the timber and thought to admonish the patient but simply thanked him instead.

“I will be gone tomorrow,” Tom said.

“Gone where?” Brown said.

“On.”

“I see. Plans?”

“No.”

The doctor said no more then. He waited until the evening had drawn in and the street darkened and he and Tom Foley sat one last time on the porch seats where the doctor liked to smoke in the chill winter air.

“How you going to repay me?” Brown said. He was looking away over the small fence that separated them from the street.

“You didn’t want me to.”

“Not money, I said.” The doctor kept his eyes far away. He seemed to be engaged in some study of the air in the middle distance.

Tom Foley looked at him. “What?”

“Well, let’s see here,” Brown said. “I saved your life, that’s for sure, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, there has to be some payment, otherwise every fool in the street’ll be shooting down some other fella, saying Doc Brown will patch him up no charge. You see my point? Where would that leave me? No, there has to be something,” he said, and drew on his cigarette and waited. A moon was rising through clouds and suddenly the snowed street turned a dirty yellow.

“What?” Tom Foley asked him again.

“I have a lifelong interest in this country,” the doctor said then. “Had it since I was a small boy and my mama told me she had come here on a ship from Scotland and that this country had been her saviour. That’s what she called it. Her saviour. And I often got to thinking about that. How can a country be your saviour? And I didn’t know then about all she had suffered and her sea voyage and all that. I didn’t know her father had been hunted down and hanged and that she had seen him swinging from a tree. She told me that only when she was lying in a bed dying and raving with fever.”

The doctor paused and pushed his lower lip out and back a little, then he took his right hand and rubbed at his chin stubble and waited a time.

“So, she had a good life after that beginning. That’s what struck me. That’s what it is about this country. You can begin here. It can be your saviour. Long as you don’t get shot down in the street,” he added, and made a small smile in the corners of his lips.

“There’s a man going to make this country better,” Brown said. His voice was soft but firm. “He’s going to find a way to bring the railroad all the way to California.” He paused again and let the smoke drift on the cold and seem a measure of the vastness of that distance in geography.

“I want you to go with him, Tom,” he said at last.

The night was still. The chairs creaked on the old porch.

“I want you to keep an eye on him. He’s been shot two times already.” The doctor rocked in his chair and the clouds came and passed across the face of the moon.

“Who is he?” Tom Foley asked then.

The doctor did not turn to him, his features obscured in the poverty of clouded moonlight.

“He’s my son,” he said.

Tom Foley left the doctor’s house two days later and rode westward on a chestnut gelding that once belonged to a man that had been gut shot in the street and cut and patched and sewn by Brown. That man was General Isaac Stephens, under whose command a unit of the Corps of Topographical Engineers of the U.S. Army was engaged in surveying the land west of the Mississippi River for a rail route that would join the two sides of the continent. In that unit was one Lieutenant Philip J. Brown, engineer, draughtsman, and map reader.

“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.