Death in the Age of Steam (21 page)

“I remember,” said Oscar. “The butler saw us in conversation at the woodpile that afternoon and gave me notice. No room
for gossips. Who tends her horse now I don't like to think.”

“That's disgraceful!” Harris rejoined with feeling. “Let me help you find another position.” He owed the coachman that much, though Oscar's present demeanour would scarcely recommend him to anyone looking for a smooth drive.

“Don't blame yourself, sir. The things that are meant for us gravitate to us.”

“How is that?” The diction suggested a third party speaking through the coachman.

“We cannot escape our good. You gave me hope of finding the Mistress—and I have.”

“You have found Mrs. Crane?” Harris fought to keep a modicum of calm in his voice. “Where?”

“‘A light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.' Ralph Waldo Emerson. That's the writer I was trying to remember. I re-read his essay. I'm a simple man, but I do read. Some nights I don't sleep for reading.”

“You look as if you would benefit from some rest.” Harris tried to guide him away from the railing, but the man would not move. “Tell me about Mrs. Crane,” Harris added.

“The Over-soul.”

“The which? Step this way, please.”

Oscar stayed put. “The Mistress, I tell you. We see the world piece by piece, but the whole is the soul. I marked what you said about her feeling for plants and growing things, and then I read there's a kind of botanical park up here, apart from the tawdry glitter. A Garden of Eden!” He flung his free arm out towards the land between the Canadian and American Falls. His fingers moved to gather up the rocks and trees and unseen wildflowers as he would a set of reins. “That's why I borrowed from my brother and came up here, Mr. Harris. I thought I should find her in that sylvan paradise.”

“Let us go there then,” said Harris. “Let's go now.” He had of course already searched Goat Island and interviewed both naturalists and custodians.

“No, sir. I was wrong. Man is a stream whose source is
hidden. As soon as I saw those mighty cataracts, I knew I had misread the Revelation.”

“Oscar—is that a photograph?”

His eye darting to a party of passing strollers, Oscar clasped the sepia-toned pasteboard tighter and dropped his voice to a frenzied whisper. “The landscapes, the figures are fugitive as
mist
. That's how Mr. Emerson puts it. As
mist
. The soul advances not in a straight line but by meta—like a butterfly. I heard her voice in the waters, Mr. Harris. She is done with earthly gardens.”

“She is alive, Oscar. We just have to look harder.”

“No, listen.”

“We have to keep on looking.”

“Listen to the waters. She's calling me over to the other side.”

“Wait.”

“One blood flows through us.”

“Wait a day at least. See how you're shaking. You're not yourself.”

“I'm blasted with light. Read Mr. Emerson—the soul is giving herself to me. Did you not know the Mistress was born
this very day
under the sign of the Lion? A sign of fire! And I—I am a Crab.”

“A which?”

“Yes, yes, a Crab, native of the water sign Cancer. She had to pass through fire, but I must pass by water.”

“She wants you to live, Oscar.” Harris heard a desperate passion in his own voice now. As he went on fumbling for any key to slacken the strain on the coachman's wits, he felt the taut wires of his own purpose vibrate in sympathy. “I know her character,” he pleaded. “Live for her.”

“Mr. Harris knows better than poor Oscar Eberhart?” Oscar shook his long head pityingly. “The soul gives herself to the simple man as to the scholar. We are
all
dreamers of spirits.”

“Wait, man, and see which of us is right.”

“No need. The power to see is not separated from the will to do. Look, I took this from the Master's bedroom.” For the first time he showed Harris the
carte-de-visite
his right hand had been clutching to his chest. “See how the Deity shines through her.”

Harris tried to hold Theresa's trembling portrait steady so he
could look.

“Master may be in Chicago, Nelson in Port Hope, Mr. Emerson in Massachusetts, but
she
brought
me
here.”

“Port Hope?” cried Harris. “When and where did you hear that?”

“See her lips move,” commanded Oscar, entranced.

“Tell me about Nelson.”

“‘O, Oscar,' she's saying, ‘come Over.'”

“No—”

Suddenly Harris's left hand, which all this time had been on the coachman's right sleeve, was clutching air. Harris lunged. He threw Oscar back from the railing down onto the deck of the bridge. As he moved to pin him there, thick arms encircled his own chest from behind and a voice of nightmare was growling in his ear.

“Steady there, my fine thug.”

“Let go. He's going to jump.”

In no longer than it took to say the words, Oscar had found his feet and stepped over the railing. He fell at attention, feet together, hands at his sides. Harris and his captor saw the spray blossom as the coachman's body entered the river 250 feet below.

“We have to get a boat out,” said Harris. “He may be alive.”

“He was alive enough before you got to him. I saw everything.”

Fully expecting to be freed, Harris instead found other strollers laying hands upon him. Around him sputtered male and female voices.

“This one pushed the other.”

“Hold him.”

“An accident, you could see.”

“But if they had not been fighting—”

The whistle of an eastbound train ran over the conclusion. So crowded had the narrow walkway become that there was now a real danger of someone's going over the edge by accident, or else onto the tracks.

“It was a suicide,” said Harris.

Daddy Sightseer agreed, but—as he had only just come up from the toll collection point—he was given little credit.

“The poor beggar that fell,” put in someone else, “he had
been knocked on the head.”

“Just so. He was reeling and—”

“Not a bit of it. I saw everything.”

“He was tripped.”

“In any case,” said the growling man who had first caught Harris, “I'm making a citizen's arrest.” It sounded as if part of his tongue were missing.

“Take him into custody.”

“Not that way. It happened on the Canadian side.”

“Not a bit of it. This is the United States of America.”

“Stand back there while they take him off.”

“No, this way.”

Harris was being pulled in both directions now. Space opened around him. Between the red silk or white muslin bonnets of the women and the men's felt or straw wide-awakes, he noted that the black face of the oncoming locomotive was no more than twenty yards away. If it were observing the bridge limit of five miles per hour, he calculated, he had a chance.

He drove a boot into the stomach of the growling citizen. His bare head butted that of another tormentor. By diving under the bowed legs of a third and between the suspension wires, he managed to clamber across the tracks inches ahead of the advancing iron beak of the cowcatcher. The G.W.R. drew a curtain between him and his pursuers.

He ran west. Seeing the curtain was only four cars long, he allowed himself no more than a glance into the gorge as he made for the Canadian end of the bridge. No sign of Oscar. Some bodies never were recovered, allegedly revolving forever in the Whirlpool three miles below the Falls.

At the toll booth, the young collector was rummaging through the portmanteau Harris had dropped. Twenty-five cents was owing. Squaring the debt with some small coins the pickpockets had left him, Harris instantly reclaimed his possessions. He still had a customs inspector to face.

In vain, Harris insisted he had not been out of the country. Regulations required an interrogation regarding contraband, and
what—incidentally—was the blood on Harris's forehead? Just above the hairline, Harris's fingers discovered a warm wetness. He wondered if there would be blood and hair on the belt buckle of the man he had butted. If he submitted to questioning until the mob from the bridge caught up, he could find himself facing assault charges as well as having to explain Oscar's fall. The loss of hours, if nothing worse, would be unendurable.

West of the toll and customs posts, the tracks forked out into extensive freight yards with two hundred feet of open ground before the first cars or sheds that could provide any cover.

The inspector was wearing slippers. He did not appear to be armed.

Harris fled. He abandoned the luggage he had just redeemed, an eight-inch hunting knife with it. He had had to leave his hat where it had fallen during his tussle with Oscar.

The breeze rushed through Harris's hair. It seemed to him he was running full tilt.

Theresa's vivid and characteristic portrait, which Harris had actually had within his grasp, the coachman had managed to take with him into the gorge. All that he had left Harris was a name, possibly no less a hallucination than the photograph's moving lips. Port Hope.

Harris's legs were pumping faster and faster. With just fifty feet to go, he put on even more speed.

A gun went off. Metal clanged against the iron track just ahead of where his right boot was coming down. He didn't ask himself whether the ball had shattered or whether he felt the flying fragments of it enter his flesh. He had reached the corner of a woodpile. The last thing he saw as he rounded it was the growling man with a smoking derringer in his hand.

Harris wasn't hit. So ascertaining, he didn't tarry behind the cordwood. He had not seen if the derringer had more than one barrel, and farther shooting weapons might be out against him. He made next for a string of boxcars. In their lee, he kept running west.

Yardsmen gaped. Still, he was better off in sight than in range. His feet would in any case betray his location to a kneeling observer, but hopefully make poor targets.

The nick in his scalp was throbbing now. He was unhurt otherwise, but his left ankle was beginning to tire. He could not run much longer. There was, moreover, no departing train for him to slip aboard and no hiding in the yards with so many railwaymen about.

Open fields adjoined the freight yards to the north. As soon as he felt no eyes upon him, Harris veered that way. The first field he crossed on his belly, moving only when a gust of wind stirred the long grasses enough to disguise his movement.

In the intervals, he strained his ears for pursuing footsteps. No shots had followed the first. His principal antagonist, though armed, struck him as neither fleet nor stealthy. The pounding in Harris's chest began to subside. He heard nothing but the cicadas around him and from the direction of the river the aggrieved squawks of seagulls.

He thought of Oscar. There would not in any case have been time to scramble down the side of the gorge, find a boat, negotiate the rapids, and fish him out before the Whirlpool claimed him. Still, Harris regretted not being able to look for the body. The lightning suddenness of the man's exit—for all
the warning signs—had left a sense of incompletion. He had been there, speaking, then not.

Harris felt a kinship to Oscar because of the dramatic effect Theresa had had upon the coachman. Lightning could have struck Harris as well. Perhaps it had. With neither position nor family backing, nor even a change of clothes, he was busily grinding earth into the knees of a pair of pale striped trousers and into the elbows of a bespoke morning coat. The bank cashier of three weeks ago would scarcely have differentiated this madness from that of the mystic Crab.

A row of trees marked the field's northern limit. Harris crawled to one of the thicker trunks and stood behind it. Looking back towards the yards and station, he detected no sign of interest in his existence.

He decided, all the same, on one more precaution. Rather than wait around for a train, he would try to catch a lake steamer from the mouth of the river. He had heard there was a daily departure around noon. With no watch, he could not tell what chance he had of covering the dozen or so miles before then. It might already be as late as eleven. Time to start running again.

Ahead the river elbowed left into the Whirlpool. The timbers of a boat or wharf vomited to its white surface, revolved, and re-submerged. Harris barely glanced down as he pounded past through fields and orchards.

From the next farm, a road led north. In the yard stood a team of Clydesdales hitched to a waggon-load of fruit. While the sight of a spirited saddle horse would have pleased him better, Harris nonetheless decided to ask for a ride. He paused first to brush himself down and to draw a banknote from his moneybelt. Licking his handkerchief, he sponged from his face as much blood as he could locate. He was prepared to blame robbers for the rest.

The incurious farmer spared him the embarrassment of telling this fairy tale. He was quite willing besides to transport Harris as far as the port of Niagara, but on no consideration would he be hurried. His peaches were not to be bruised or bounced from their pine crates.

By the time they had crept down the steep escarpment at Queenston, Harris doubted his father could have had much more trouble getting up it in 1812. Might greater headway not be made by water? From this point the river ran strong and straight without rapids. The breeze was southerly and stiffening. There was, moreover, not a horse to be hired in the village. Nor a dinghy either—but Harris dipped again into his reserve of paper money and bought one at a piratical price. Hoisting her triangular sail without delay, he steered her into the swiftest part of the current.

He glanced left at traffic on the riverbank road. As broad almost as long, the little boat was likelier to have brought her owner pike and sturgeon than racing trophies. She was nevertheless overtaking one farm waggon after another. Her red sail canvas, though ripped, was not rotten, and she didn't leak much. By holding both sheet and tiller in one hand, and with the other plying a wooden flour scoop provided as a bail, Harris was pretty well able to keep up. The dinghy had been beached, after all. He expected as her planks swelled with moisture the seals between them would tighten.