Peter Davies - The Fortunes

“Cape Horn,” Crocker said, pointing to a buttress of rock. “They said we couldn’t lay track there, sheer as it was. But your boys did it.” He slapped Ling’s back as if he’d carved the way himself, making him clutch the filigree railing.

The train gave a lurch and Ling felt himself stagger into Crocker’s girth, and then the big man righted him. “Luncheon, I think,” Crocker declared, as if reminded by the pressure on his stomach, and Ling followed him back inside, grateful to be of service.

He busied himself in the cramped galley among the victuals packed by Cook that morning — half a dozen baskets of cold meats, bread, cheese, one composed entirely of apples, shiny as shoes, and a bucket filled with bobbing, jostling beer bottles.

When he went back in to set the table, Crocker was nowhere to be seen. Taking the air, Ling guessed, but when he peered out he saw his employer on the rear platform, sighting along a rifle, hunting, Ling supposed, his body tensing for the report. Yet by the time he returned with food Crocker hadn’t fired a shot, and the big man was at the table, tucking a napkin into his shirt collar, the rifle stowed.

Ling himself ate standing up in the galley, and when he went in to clear Crocker was asleep again, hands laced over his stomach, mouth ajar.

Outside, the narrow walls of Bloomer Cut closed in — the engine’s hammering echoing back off the stone — then receded, and the train seemed to climb into the air. Ahead the hillsides, speckled with snow, looked piebald. Steam from the locomotive— The Governor Stanford, Ling had noted with a sanctimonious thrill as they’d boarded — whipped past the windows, and it was as if they were entering the very clouds. The track snaked along a precipice, and when he looked down there was only air between him and the distant bristling treetops, the silver wink of a river far below. It made him giddy, but if he stared ahead the sensation was of flying, or rather of riding a bird, one of those — were they eagles? — lazily circling the updrafts before him. So this was the famous Cape Horn. Men had been lowered in woven baskets to blast out this ledge, so the papers said, the wind spinning them like tops, then swatting them against the rockface. It was one of the most celebrated achievements of the Chinese on the line, and Ling had expected to feel pride, had imagined fatuously bursting into applause, but instead he felt his heart filling with fear. How many times had he built this very scene playing with the Crocker boys, getting down on the floor of the nursery with them to lay the track for their tin train up inclines of primers and three-volume novels, all under Crocker’s indulgent eye, only for the boys to stage gleeful, clattering wrecks? Ling pressed himself back into the plush upholstery now and stared at Crocker, counting his breaths until the track curved like a slow brushstroke into a tunnel, and he sat in darkness for so long he felt the damp chill penetrating his bones. When they did finally emerge it was to the searing brightness of snow all around.

Even the sun seemed to shiver here through the spruce branches, throwing lacy shadows on the snow, as if the mountains were draped with the same antimacassars adorning the furniture at the Crocker home.

The dappled sunlight grew stronger as they rose above the feathery treetops, onto the Secrettown trestle, the panting engine drowned out by the percussive clatter of the wooden bridge. Ling had overheard Crocker telling his Associates at a recent meeting that the rickety trestle, all eleven hundred feet of it, would eventually be buried beneath tons of earth — a precaution against fire — to make a permanent embankment. As if it were a secret itself, Ling thought, the spidery lattice of stilts and crossbeams too frightening for passengers to behold, though he recalled Ng telling him the place was originally named, satirically, for a gold strike that local miners tried unsuccessfully to hush up.

For a moment there was nothing but blue on either side, and then the rails met earth again in the form of a sharp ridge curving off to the left. Below and beside the track Ling made out small cairns of rock dotted among the trees, and as the land rose like a slow wave to enclose the train again he saw them come closer until they stood within a few yards of the track. Mile markers? But they were too irregularly spaced. Something to do with the construction? Spare ballast for the grading? And then the isolated ones gave way to a little cluster, laid out together side by side in a clearing, and he realized they were graves.

Crocker had told him that around a dozen men had been buried in an avalanche near Alta the previous winter and their bodies only found in the spring, still upright, still gripping their tools, frozen as if by Wu Kong’s magic. Crocker had reported it as a marvel—“cigarettes still in their dang mouths”—and yet Ling had noticed that he couldn’t recall the exact number of Chinese—“ten or fifteen, supposedly”—and this from a man who could tell you the price of a shovel in 1854 (fifty dollars — admittedly a memorably fabulous sum). Where had Ling been during such disasters? he asked himself. In Sacramento watching the trains pull into the depot with a load of snow for the local boys to have powdery snowball fights.

The dead, he’d heard, were buried with a bottle alongside them, a scrap of paper or cloth with their name and home village inside it. Some of these graves contained the remains of men blown to bits in the blasting, “and not all of them found,” as the papers related. Ling shuddered at the thought of their not being buried whole. Someone from their clan or district association, whichever of the Six Companies they paid into, would eventually come to claim their bones and send them home, perhaps on the same ships that had brought them.

Once, as he’d filled buckets at the laundry, a drowned body had floated past him along the slough, a man’s, judging by the queue that trailed it like a water snake, though the flesh was so pale and puffed that Ling had taken it at first to be a clump of laundry. It had drifted silently into the early-morning mist before he could think to snag it, but he’d seen the face later that day in his own tub just beneath the soap scum, a wound like a dark stain on the brow, and thrust it back down with his paddle, thumping and splashing to cover his sobs.

Before that, on the voyage out, Ling had found his own bunkmate — a fellow so seasick that Ling had thanked the flower boat for his own sea legs — cold and stiff one dawn. Not wanting to fail the man’s spirit and blight his own enterprise before it began, he’d gone to the captain and pleaded with him not to bury the body at sea.

“What d’you suggest? That we pickle it? Salt-cure ’im?”

And so the body had been sewn into a sack, weighted with a length of rusty chain, and tipped over the side into water the color of long-worn jade. Ling had watched it go, his queue hanging down toward the spray like a fishing line. And moments later the sailor’s cry of Floating gold! went up, the ambergris spied bobbing beneath a mob of gulls, their wings flecking the sky like breakers. A wondrous occurrence, Ling would realize later, which at the time seemed no stranger than burying a man in water. That night he had had a berth to himself, but he slept poorly, tossing and turning as he dreamt of the dead man’s bones gnawed by fish, swirling and bouncing across the sandy ocean floor. He imagined the spirit out there in the waves, slapping the wooden hull, trying to get in, trying to tell Ling it was his turn to lie down.

Outside, the earth rose up once more on either side of the tracks, another deep cut, sharp as an arrowhead, and the train was plunged into gloom again.