The Law of Dreams (22 page)

Peering ahead, Fergus saw two figures approaching along the road. Jumping
down, he stood alongside Arthur.

Breathing the cold, loamy air of England, tinted with smoke.

“Shea, have a look,” Arthur said. “Here are a couple of
poor Cathleens.”

A pair of girls, both wearing cloaks. One limping slightly.

“Good day to you,” Shea called.

One girl stopped and the other bumped into her. Both were barefoot. Their
faces looked dull with exhaustion.

Fergus said a greeting in Irish, and they started to cry.

“Ask if they've had the fever,” Shea said.

He asked in Irish. Both girls nodded.

“Ask how old they are.” Walking up to them, Shea stood looking
them over head-to-toe. “Tell them to open their mouths.”

The two girls stood dumb as cattle. Straw in their hair.

“Go on!” Shea told Fergus impatiently. “Do as I
say.”

Their names, they told him, were Brigid and Caitlín. They were
thirteen and fifteen, and from a townland he didn't understand the name of but
near, they said, Tullamor.

They stood with mouths open like birds while Shea squeezed their cheeks
and peered at their teeth and their tongues. The two coachmen and the whores watched in
silence as Shea felt beneath the coarse workhouse gowns and squeezed their breasts then
lifted up their skirts and studied the triangles of hair, white bellies, and thighs
streaked in filth.

The bigger girl was shivering. The horses shook their iron hooves and
dropped shit on the road.

“What a pair of haggard little creatures,” Arthur said.

Shea stepped back, still studying them. “Cheap meat, but I can feed
'em up, I suppose. Need a bath more than anything. Tell them they shall come along
with us, Fergus.”

When he didn't respond she glanced at him. “They'll have
a warm bed, rations, and pocket money. Shall you leave 'em here, then?
They're dead in a week.”

In Irish he said to the girls “She will give you a roof. Come with
us now.”

THE CHAMPAGNE
was all finished. Cold and tired, the
whores wanted to go home. The outing had lost its glamour.

The pauper girls were seated in Shea's coach, and Betsy was tucking
a blanket around them. Girls were still climbing in when Fergus heard a puffing, like
the warm breath of an animal.

On the edge of the sky, he saw an explosion of white smoke.

“Train!” Betsy called.

Snorting, hissing, clanking, the train rose from a cutting he hadn't
noticed, speeding along the rim of the horizon, like a line drawn under everything he
hadn't known before.

The whores stood waving their handkerchiefs and bonnets, pitching
champagne bottles, screaming.

“Come lay with me you iron monster!”

“Give me a shilling for my breath!”

“Kiss my squeak hole, you old smoky beast!”

Shea sat with a rug around her shoulders, ignoring the train, and the two
paupers huddled together, terrified at the commotion the whores made.

A train was an idea, he saw that right away.

Before he knew what he was doing, he had leapt down and climbed the wall
and was racing across the wet meadow grass, whooping.

Passion of motion and distance.

Power of smoke, transformation.

Possibilities. Change.

He reached the line just as the train blew past, hard as Hell and flagrant
with speed, light bursting from carriage windows. A gorgeous disturbance, breaking up
his sense of the world.

Then she was through, leaving the air buffeted, disturbed by the violence
of the passage. He bent to touch the rail, feeling the heat.

The whores were calling, waving their bonnets and handkerchiefs. He stood
on the track bed staring after the train as it took a bend, ramming across the open
country, like a promise of everything you could leave behind.

HE TOLD
Iron Mike he was going on the tramp, looking for
railway work, and the porter directed him to an old-clothes stall in the Vauxhall where
he swapped his button jacket, nankeen waistcoat, strapped trousers, ruffle shirts, and
slippers for greased hobnail boots, woolen stockings, moleskin trousers, two linen
shirts — one green, one blue — a tweed coat, a good stiff beaver hat only
slightly dented with a hatband to tuck a pipe into, and two red handkerchiefs.

“Take the Woodside ferry across the river,” Iron Mike advised.
“Catch the line for Chester. Don't buy no ticket, but ride the trucks;
you'll see plenty of fellows jumping. From Chester you can follow Mr.
Telford's road out along the coast of Wales. You'll soon see railway works,
the Chester-and-Holyhead. Contracts are let in ten-mile sections, and they will have
navvy camps all the way to Anglesey. Mr. Murdoch has one of the contracts, I hear, and
you could do worse. I've worked for him in Scotland and in France and he always
paid his men in coin of the realm, no scrip, as some of them will try.”

SHEA WAS
annoyed when he told her he was going.
“My God, Fergus, do you really believe you can help yourself by leaving? My girls
live as soft as house cats. I'm offering you the life, and you're going to
break yourself on the navvy line?”

He nodded.

“Can you tell me why? Have you been so ill treated?”

He shook his head.

“Was it that no one chose you last week? Listen, boy, we shall dress
you up a little nicer next time. You already look so much healthier. You have to
remember
there is a lot of Irish boys harking the streets these
days and they're terrible cheap, and many with black fever — Irish boys seem
a little out of fashion, at least among my class of gentlemen. But we'll get you a
velvet suit and a softer name — William, Albert, Edward, something squishy like
that. We'll tell 'em you're Scotch. Don't worry, you'll do
fine.”

“But I was glad I wasn't chosen.”

She shrugged. “You were scared, so. That's natural
—”

“I can't do that, Shea, what the wags want. Don't wish
to be open that way.”

She shook her head slowly. “Boy, they'll get into you one way
or another, don't you know?”

“Still, I'm going to leave.”

She crossed the room and he thought she was going to slap him and he
prepared to take the blow, thinking he deserved it from her, but instead she placed cool
hands on his cheeks and kissed his forehead.

“They'll crack you like mice,” she said.

EARLY IN
the morning Mary fed him breakfast in the
kitchen of the Dragon. The whores stood around in nightdresses and flannel wraps,
sipping milky tea and admiring his hard new clothes.

Mary fed him toast, honey, tea, and an orange, and gave him a parcel for
the road, tied up in a handkerchief.

“You'll be sorry,” said Arthur. “Only when you get
down there, tell them you're the friend of Arthur McBride, best hammer there ever
was on the Manchester lines.”

“I'll tell them so, Arthur.”

“And don't think ill of your old house.”

“I won't.”

“Which took you in when you was a scarecrow, don't forget. And
look at you now.”

“I won't forget anything.”

“You watch out for them navvy kills, man. You're small enough;
they'll put you on the horses. Watch your legs. The horse tip is the wildest spot
on any contract — they are always murdering boys.”

He kissed Arthur, and then went around the kitchen kissing them all, his
chest tight with emotion, sorrowful now that he was actually leaving. Never before had
he left where anyone had wanted him to stay. Such parting was sweet, in a way.

“You're a miserable, ungrateful cur for leaving, after all
we've done for you.” Shea kissed him, then held open the door.

Grave, excited, confused, he walked out into the smoke before he could
change his mind.

THERE WAS
power in going forward, but it was vulnerable,
it could be broken. The ferry flapping across the gray Mersey was packed with cattle. He
studied the tramps leaning along the rail and smoking their pipes — tough men in
greased hobnail boots, carrying their belongings in handkerchief bundles.

After the ferry arrived at Woodside landing stage, he followed the tramps
up past the slaughter yards to the railway station, where dozens of men sprawled on the
platform, puffing pipes, dozing like bulls in the sun.

After the train slid in, shrieking, he watched well-dressed passengers
disembarking and boarding carriages. Gentlemen removed their shiny silk hats, too tall
to wear inside. The engine leaked steam and an odor of iron and burned coal. He watched
the tramps sauntering down the track, pitching their packs and bundles up into open
wagons attached at the rear of the train, and climbing over the sides.

A whistle whooped like a bird, and a boy raced along the platform,
slamming carriage doors shut. The train shook itself, and Fergus heard the iron
couplings banging, one after another, as it began to move.

You throw yourself on the world like turf on a fire.

Picking up his bundle, he started walking along the platform, conscious of
the iron wheels rumbling and creaking, the scent of grease, and death so close. Glancing
over his shoulder he could see the string of open wagons approaching, each one packed
with men peering out over the wooden sides.

He let the first open wagon go by. Walking faster, he flipped his bundle
into the second, and saw one of the men aboard catch it. Grasping the iron ladder, he
felt the hard power of the train, and suddenly he was running to keep up. His feet left
the ground, and he hauled himself up the first two rungs then froze,
disoriented by the complex motion, the ground spinning, the wagon trembling like an
animal.

A couple of tramps reached over, grabbed him, and roughly dragged him in
over the side. He fell onto the floor but jumped up immediately, and a man gave him his
bundle. They stood packed shoulder-to-shoulder. The wagon rocked and shook.

Looking over the sides, he saw houses tumbling by, gardens, piles of
bricks, ash heaps. A pen of sheep, a fellow waving a hat, a girl dashing liquid from a
window. He gripped the flexing sides and stared at the world rushing past like an animal
escaping, as though the train had torn a trap open.

NORTH WALES, JANUARY
–
MARCH
1847

HE TRAMPED THE COAST
road for four days, out of Chester,
singing to himself, light-headed, face burned by bright wind off the sea. Most of the
time he was alone. He avoided Scotchmen and English tramps. He knew the Irish by the
bent shapes of their hats, and sometimes joined a pack of men for a few hours, learning
what he could from their talk.

Thousands of navvies and horses were constructing the railway along the
coast of North Wales. The work had been let out in sections, in dozens of separate
contracts. Each river was being spanned with iron bridgework. The country was being
smoothed out mile after mile in the railway's quest for perfect grade. Cuttings
were slashed straight through the Welsh hills, and tons of excavation dumped, spread,
and compacted across every soft place, every dip, every bit of marsh.

“A railway loves the level grade,” an old tramp told him one
afternoon.

They were smoking their pipes and watching a thousand navvies at work in a
cutting, hacking with picks and spades. Fergus had wanted to know why they
couldn't lay the railway over the slight rise instead of cutting straight through
it.

“On a slope, iron wheels don't have any purchase on iron rails
— they spin,” the old tramp said. “Which is why we make cuttings and
fill embankments — to make good grade. The world ain't level, but the
navvies make her so.”

In some places, the line was almost finished, and he heard the crack of
hammers and watched men driving spikes, fixing the iron rails on timber sleepers.

Driving spikes was work looked down upon by the
tramps, who said the track-layer gangs were composed of poor Welsh shepherds paid meager
wages, drawn down off their black mountains by the promise of hot food.

Making grade
— cutting open the hills, laying a streak of
perfect level across the old, soft world — was the work the tramps respected.

“No skill or risk in pounding iron,” the old tramp said
scornfully. “Nothing glory. There's no battle in it. Making grade is our
work — a navvy likes to fight the ground.”

He understood this. Making grade was a powerful act.

In Ireland the ground had betrayed them all, poisoned their food.

Grade was theirs, human. Grade was like a thought made hard and real. It
might last a thousand years.

Grade showed the navvies as strong as the world.

MOSTLY THE
weather was clear and hard, but flurries of
snow swept in from the sea, rattling the road, scratching his cheeks.

He encountered packs of navvies on the tramp, moving in both directions
along the coast road. Contractors were always trying to lure the tramps into hiring on
— they were fed at the contractors' beer shops, and slept on clean straw in
their sheds. All along the Chester & Holyhead, contracts were shorthanded. Men quit
casually, shifting from one contractor's camp to another, staying clear of the
Welsh villages, where they were not welcome.

Offered wages at Aber cutting, he kept walking.

At Conwy, the contractor wanted rivet boys on the bridge that plunged like
a sword across the neck of the river. Offered two shillings sixpence daily wages, he was
stunned, and tempted, but still did not feel like stopping.

Days tramping the coast were short and cold. The sea on one side, like a
green glass eye. It was easy enough living inside your head, absorbing the sky, and
thinking only of the weather, the next feed.