Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

And now there they were. They rode out those fine spring mornings with the air soft and the world like a thing newborn. The broad sky was before them. They rode in single file without discourse and assumed the manner of such men who knew that the way was to be long and tongues would tire before horses. They rode from the Mississippi westward and crossed the Missouri River above St. Joseph and were as yet on lands already well surveyed for rails. They crossed then into Nebraska and soon their progress slowed as the engineers stopped and studied and charted the land. They opened maps and knelt on them in winds swift and capricious. They marked coordinates and spoke among themselves and did not say more than two words to Tom Foley but to ask him to fetch something or ride out and see what danger lay beyond the next canyon. He did so without pause. It was bigger country than he had ever dreamed, and when riding alone across the prairies and open spaces, he felt himself vanished from the world of men and achieved a kind of serenity there. Still, his rifle was at his side. He had seen those Indians that were at the fort and wore buckskin and blue coats and he had thought them peaceable and proud. But he had not as yet encountered what the engineers referred to as hostiles.

Brown, he found to be energetic and earnest. He was blue-eyed, had a peak of thinning blond hair and a way of addressing the others that made his statements seem urgent. When he spoke at the fireside about the railroad, his eyes glittered. He gestured with his hand and waved it like a wing. He told them to think how it would be if they were the ones to find the true route. He told them then that the way they would chart the rails would endure for all time afterward.

“It will be like this,” he said, and reached and marked with the blade of his knife a straight line in the sand. “That. Done. See? Marked out on the ground. Once. And never changed.” He looked across the fire and they looked at the line in the sand. For some time the men retained their gaze there and mutely considered it, and as the firesmoke wavered to and fro it was as if they could then imagine the great iron engine moving along ever closer until it was beating down through the very darkness behind them. It was as if the future itself were but an instant in their rear. As if, while the men each day moved on, behind them sprang up stations and telegraph offices and saloons and smithies and all manner of lean-to clapboard premises to fulfill the needs of man and become the cities of tomorrow.

Then Brown scuffed at the line with his heel and made it vanish. But his eyes glittered yet. The night passed.

They rode on. They crossed lands that had once been covered by glaciers and later by beasts unnumbered whose names were unknown and which lands were later still part of Indian country from which all white men were excluded. And all that vast and empty landscape seemed to Tom Foley to echo still with a chimerical afterpresence. They passed over a plain where a great herd of bison moved before them like a brown tide. As the animals ran, their dust hung in the breezeless air and was a cloud low and sad and slow fading. None of the men had ever seen such a herd and they stood upright in their saddles and pushed back their hats. Then one of them who was young and whose name was Cartwright let out a cry and spurred his horse and galloped in pursuit. He pulled a rifle as he rode and the others sat and watched as he tore into the dust and let off a shot at the blue sky. The bison charged. Their noise travelled over the plain and was the noise of hoof and bellow and fear. Still Cartwright raced on. The rifle he raised to his shoulder, but the motion of the horse and his own lack of expertise at such caused the weapon to waver right to left like the upturned rod of some demented diviner. He fired. The report of the bullet was a sharp and hard crack. The shot would have missed all but the widest target, but as the herd thundered on, a beast lay fallen in the dust. Cartwright rode past it. He fired again at the air and then again before he reined the horse and turned about a small circle in the passing cloud. The bison passed on. Slowly as the dust settled there resumed the air of tranquillity over the plain, but it was like a thing fractured and repaired and ever fragile now. The troop rode on to where the animal lay and Cartwright next to it, still astride his horse.

“This is the U.S. Army, Cartwright, do you hear me?” Brown asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“This is not some band of renegades, or wild men or hunters.”

“No, sir.”

“We have orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

Brown studied the distance. “If I want you to shoot an animal, I will say so.”

“Yes, sir.”

A pair of birds, dark shapes high in the blue, glided toward them.

“Very well,” Brown said, “You shot it, you skin and carve it. We’ll be at camp down there.”

He squeezed his thighs and they moved off then and left the soldier there, and Tom Foley stayed with him to help. Later, when his and Cartwright’s arms were stained to the elbow with blood and they looked like perpetrators of some foul savagery, they sat exhausted on the plain. The sun beat down. Scavenger birds cut arcs in the blue. After a time the soldier thanked the other for his help.

“Do you know writing?” Tom asked him.

“What kind of writing?”

“Letters. I’m long out of practice.”

“I suppose I do.”

That night Cartwright wrote a short letter for Tom Foley. Because Tom did not want the soldier to know his business, he asked him the words in jumbled order and later copied these in his own hand. When it was done his letter read:

Dear Doctor, He is out in country big and grand. He is right well. He is finding a route. I am watching out for him.

Yours, Tom Foley.

They journeyed on. They did not see the Indians that saw them. They camped by the many lakes in the sand hills there and ate grouse and quail and waterfowl. Summer thunderstorms crashed over them. Coyotes and foxes and badgers ran across the evening light. The men passed up over the grasslands and sheltered betimes in forests of oak and hickory and cottonwood where the shade was welcome but harboured thin clouds of insects that ate at their faces. These trees would be felled, Brown told them.

“These are our sleepers,” he said.

They traversed the North Platte River into Wyoming Territory and came to Fort Laramie and refreshed supplies. Tom left his letter there and after four days they travelled on again. They rode north to the pale red horizon of mountains. They came to desolate lands where alkali dust was deep to the knee and the water had to be rationed to drops and the horses and mules lifted up their lips to suck in vain for moisture in the air. The men’s faces burned and tanned like leather hides. They followed the routes of fur traders and gold seekers and those who had sought to make homes in the far land of Oregon. The days stayed dry. A high wind blew without cease and made move the sagebrush and buffalo grass. Whitened skulls and brittle rib cages of beasts long slain lay in disassembled poses like things struck and shattered by time. Sunlight dazzled there. The small troop passed along the boundaries of forests of pine and spruce and fir and sometimes saw moose step quickly away. They rode all the time with the knowledge of the great barrier that lay before them, for in the high-ceiling rooms where men had dreamed the railroad the Rocky Mountains always lay like God’s defiance in the way. To bring the rails through the mountains would be a kind of ultimate proclamation, a statement sent heavenward of all that man could attempt and master.

This is all the engineer soldiers knew. They rode with their gaze fixed on the peaks ahead. Slowly then they ascended through narrow passes and dry gullies. They wound their way upward beneath the blue sky and found themselves in the stillness and silence there that seemed of another world. The sun burned its relentless fire. The men dismounted and led their animals and were a thin, ragged line of blue coats and might have been the last remnants of a tribe vanquished and forgotten and wandering there until they thinly fell and the sun blanched their bones. The harsh majesty of that place assailed them. They progressed almost not at all yet all day moved about trying to find routes that were not impossible. Sometimes they tethered the horses and then Tom and Cartwright and Brown made their way up through the mountains on foot, scrabbling over the warm rocks, to find viewpoints for surveillance.