The Trainmasters Read online

  “Then you’ve been warned,” she said, still looking at John.

  Mrs. Lancaster’s voice then took on a serious tone. “In the name of the Lord, the people of Pennsylvania, and the directors and stockholders of the Pennsylvania…” She halted in midsentence. Instantly William Patterson moved to her side, fearing she was ill or growing faint. But she raised her hand to stop him from supporting her. “No, no, no, thank you,” she said, backing as far away from him as the limited space allowed. “I’m quite all right. Please, I’m not ill. I’m quite all right.”

  “What’s she doing?” Graham Carlysle whispered to his father.

  “Damned if I know,” John said. But it is certainly interesting, whatever it is, he thought to himself.

  Then Mrs. Lancaster did a most remarkable thing. She loosened the crimson ribbon from the magnum of champagne and pulled the bottle free.“Do please excuse me for interrupting the ceremony this way,” she said to the crowd after she had finished freeing the bottle.

  “But I’ve had a sudden flash of inspiration. And I have always made it a practice to follow my instincts.”

  There was nervous laughter in the crowd and from those on the stand, and not a few of the dignitaries’ faces registered embarrassment.

  A short, steep stairway led from the reviewing stand down to the street. Within minutes Kitty Lancaster had scrambled down it and pushed her way to the front of the locomotive. Then, lifting up her skirt, she pulled herself up onto the tiny platform at the top of the pilot, and raising die champagne high over her head like a torch, she shouted, “Such a powerful machine deserves to be christened right and properly by the direct and personal action of a human being!” She paused until the murmurs of the crowd stopped. Then she spoke again. “I hereby christen you Tiger in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the people of Pennsylvania, and the directors and stockholders of the Pennsylvania Railroad.”

  With a powerful swing of her arm, Mrs. Lancaster smashed the bottle across the nose of the engine. Instantly a great cloud of champagne burst out, and for half a second, she was surrounded by a golden nimbus of champagne mist.

  She stood radiant and smiling, basking in the waves of cheers and applause from the crowd. Then she began to look for a way to descend from her perch.

  “Here,” said a voice, “take my hand.” It was a rich, pleasant baritone with an educated British accent. When she looked to see who the voice belonged to, she realized it was the man she’d been glancing at for much of the ceremony.

  “Thank you,” she said and gave John Carlysle her hand. His hand felt firm and solid, just like his voice sounded. But it was calloused and chapped from working outdoors. And this surprised her, for the man was well dressed and well mannered. She wondered if he was a soldier or perhaps a sailor. Yet she didn’t sense anything rakish about him, nothing that suggested an adventurer.

  She was much intrigued by this man. And with his help she carefully made her way down to safety.

  “Thank you again,” she said.

  “You are most welcome, Mrs. Lancaster.”

  She wondered for a second how he knew her name, but then she realized that it had been announced before she christened the locomotive. She realized that he was still speaking to her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I missed your words.”

  He smiled. “That’s quite all right,” he said. “I was saying that you handled the champagne like a true expert.”

  “Why, thank you again,” she said, returning the smile, politely.

  “I think I should like you to christen a locomotive of mine someday. Would you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, a little flustered. “I couldn’t say.”

  “When the time comes,” he said, “perhaps you will be able to give me an answer.”

  “Are you a railroad man?” she asked, hoping he was.

  “That I am,” he said.

  Well now, she thought, that’s better than a soldier! Better than an explorer! She gave him her most radiant, official smile. Then she started to make her way back to Matthias Baldwin on the reviewing platform.

  “Wait,” he said. “Before I let you go, I’d like you to tell me something.”

  “What is that?”

  “I’d like you to tell me why you’ve been staring at me … earlier, when you were up on the reviewing stand.”

  Mrs. Lancaster didn’t answer him. Giving him a look that she hoped conveyed how impertinent she thought him, she pulled away and quickly fled back up the stairs and onto the reviewing platform.

  When she reached the top, there was a great clatter of applause and cheering from the crowd. She turned and acknowledged the crowd, and then she looked at the Englishman below and gave him a nod. Finally, she smiled.

  Two

  Along with more than seven hundred other Irish immigrant laborers, Egan O’Rahilly worked in the depths of the earth, digging the long summit tunnel for the Pennsylvania Railroad at the crest of the Alleghenies near the village of Gallitzin. Thousands of other Irishmen toiled on other sections of the line. Indeed every tie was laid over a dram of Irish blood spilled in its making.

  Contracts for the tunnel had been signed in 1851, though its completion was expected in 1853, when at a length of 3,570 feet, it would be one of the longest railway tunnels in the country. It was, more significantly, one of the most difficult holes to dig, and one of the most dangerous.

  Late on a Saturday afternoon, along with twenty mates, Egan awaited his turn to be lifted out of the tunnel. He would be hauled to the earth’s surface in a metal cage attached to a steam-powered winch at the top of the four-hundred-foot shaft.

  With a screech of metal grinding on metal, the cage returned to the tunnel floor for another load. The next gang of men climbed in; they were crowded closer together than sheep in a slaughtering pen. The cage was only ten feet square.

  With a great, tumultuous heave, the cage jerked and began to rise. Egan’s gang was next in line. He hated being down in the tunnel where the air was dank and close, and the oily stench of mud and toiling men—many of whom had not washed in weeks—was strong. The tunnel floor was a running stream. Except for the lanterns at the actual working sites and at the bottom of the shaft, the tunnel was pitch black.

  In addition to the two headings at the eastern and western ends of the tunnel, two more shafts had been sunk, making six tunnel headings in all. Egan worked out of the easternmost of these shafts. Although a third shaft had recently been attempted, the surrounding ground was too unstable, so the shaft had been abandoned.

  That was a typical problem at the Gallitzin Tunnel. Most of the ground penetrated was wet and muddy, requiring extensive shoring and foundation work. Egan’s job, therefore, was doubly perilous.

  Yet such danger did not affect the workers’ pay. Since the men who labored on the tunnel were Irish, they were all paid Irish wages, $1.15 a day. Out of this sum the men were expected to purchase their own room and board and tools.

  That didn’t leave much for themselves or their families, but it was better than nothing. And nothing was what was available elsewhere.

  Egan O’Rahilly was a young man of twenty-two with a family to support. His wife, Deirdre, and their young daughter, Peg, lived in a cellar room in Philadelphia. He adored Deirdre and Peg limitlessly, and he missed them more than he missed working in the light. He thus sent home the greater portion of his weekly pay.

  Other men were not as generous; they spent most of their wages on drink or on the few hard, ancient, and ugly camp whores who had set themselves up nearby. Egan did not blame the other men for taking what comfort they could get in the groggery next to the camp, or from the whores. Their jobs were physically exhausting and mentally debilitating.

  Although Egan joined his mates in the groggery after work, it was for the companionship, not the oblivion alcohol offered.

  Egan was of medium height, slim but tough, wiry, and lithe. His hair was curly and sandy. And his splendid tenor voice was his most v
aluable contribution to the groggery at the end of the day. He liked to sing, and the other men liked to listen to him.

  Five years earlier Egan, his younger sisters, Teresa, Maria, and Anna, and his parents had taken the American packet Queen of the West from Liverpool to New York. The passage had cost five pounds apiece for space in steerage, and it took seven stormy, tortured weeks, during which time Anna, Maria, and the two elder O’Rahillys died of ships’ fever, a form of typhus. After landing in New York, the two surviving O’Rahillys went to Philadelphia, but there they separated. Egan, who had met Deirdre on board the Queen of the West, married her.

  Teresa, who was beautiful and smart, had looked for work in domestic service. And, because she was beautiful and smart, she quickly found a position. And just as quickly she lost it. She found another almost immediately. Then she lost that one too. After several more jobs and several more dismissals, no one would hire her. The women who employed young “Bridgets”—as the Irish girls were called because so many of the girls had that name—did not like her. She was contrary and self-willed; she was not properly humble and meek. Her beauty and intelligence too often played against her: Many of the husbands of her employers made it abundantly clear that they would welcome her sexual favors.

  So when work in service became impossible, Teresa chose what she saw as the only course left to her. What she had to offer was her beauty, her wit, her intelligence, and her lively personality. She found men willing to pay for her companionship, not just for a night, but for weeks or months at a time.

  This meant, of course, that Teresa often took these men to bed. Yet Teresa did not consider herself a whore. She believed she had become a kind of courtesan. And so Teresa O’Rahilly became Teresa Derbyville because the English name, she felt, bestowed on her more class, and she was much sought after by the younger gentlemen of Philadelphia.

  While Teresa deluded herself about her chosen profession, her brother did not. Egan interpreted his sister’s behavior with utter severity, and he cut her off completely. He despised Teresa; he hoped he would never see her again. Yet he failed to see that he suffered from the very same pride that led Teresa to her current position in life. Pride was an O’Rahilly family trait.

  The O’Rahillys had left Ireland during the worst horrors of the potato famine. They had never been farmers, nor did their livelihood depend on fanning. The O’Rahillys were traveling thespians, part of a troupe of players who put on skits and dramas from town to town and village to village. They also sang, juggled, or performed acrobatic routines— anything to entertain and earn a few pence or a few potatoes if there was nothing else.

  There had never been much for them as they wandered through the counties of Ireland, for the farmers and townspeople had very little left over from their meager crops and earnings; but the Irish did adore a good time, and so there had always been something.

  Until the blight struck in 1845.

  After that there was scarcely a penny available for the O’Rahillys and their band of players. What they had, they got as a result of the presence in their band of Malachy Patrick Rafferty, a Jesuit priest who was using the troupe as a disguise for the priestly activities that the British occupiers forbade. He also taught the children of the troupe letters and numbers, lessons that Egan and Teresa learned especially well. Even as the horrors of the famine grew worse, Rafferty always seemed to know how to scrounge a bit of food; he always knew somebody who could spare a little for him and his friends. But after the crop of 1846 failed worse than the crop of ‘45, even Rafferty’s resources were expended. He advised the players to emigrate.

  Egan would never forget the scenes he witnessed in Cork and Galway and Kerry and Tipperary. The streets crowded with gaunt, hopeless wanderers; the mobs of starved, barely clothed women around the poorhouses, clamoring for soup tickets; the ghastly, scarcely living skeletons huddled on filthy straw in the corner of some hovel; the frozen corpses, half gnawed by rats. The men were indistinguishable from the women, for all evidence of their sex seemed to have shrunk and withered away. The children were like mummies with bloated bellies and terrified eyes.

  But the landlords didn’t starve. By God, they kept eating well. And they continued to take profits back to England from the devastated land.

  Egan O’Rahilly hated the English with all the passion and fervor that he loved Deirdre and Peg.

  The cage was down again.

  “All right you bog-eatin’ bastards,” yelled Tom Henneberry, the boss of Egan’s gang, “your turn.”

  Henneberry had a thorn in his brain about Egan: Egan was smart, educated, and sensitive. That annoyed Henneberry, who was none of those things. He enjoyed tormenting every man in his gang, but he enjoyed tormenting Egan most of all. He never passed up a chance to deride Egan.

  This afternoon, as the cage ground to a stop, Egan was daydreaming. He often did so to save his sanity.

  “You! O’Rahilly! Move your tender sweet ass,” Henneberry hollered at Egan. If they’d been close enough, Henneberry would have aimed a boot at Egan’s rear, as he had done a dozen times before. But Henneberry was on the other side of the group.

  “Sure, sure, hand-fucker,” Egan yelled back. Returning Henneberry’s insults also saved his sanity. “You ignorant son of a turd.” And with greatly exaggerated lethargy, he boarded the cage, which with a sickening lurch moved toward the patch of light hundreds of feet above.

  Henneberry fumed a moment before he answered.

  “O’Rahilly, you stupid fuck,” he yelled from across the cage, “you take those words back or I’ll have you working the jack in the pilot next shift.” Working the pilot—the small tunnel that was dug in advance of the main tunnel— was the most dangerous job in tunnel building. The most perilous part of the work in the pilot was the job of transferring the load on the tunnel roof from temporary to permanent shoring. And working the big jacks was the most dangerous part of that job. Henneberry’s crew was scheduled to work in the pilot on their next shift.

  “You’ll do that anyway,” Egan said, “rat face.”

  Henneberry kept muttering, but Egan paid him no more heed.

  Some day, Egan knew, he and Henneberry would fight it out. And one of them might not come out alive. Although Henneberry was as beefy and heavy-muscled as he was mean, and Egan was slight and slender, Egan knew that he had a better than even chance when the inevitable moment arrived. He was quick and clever and decisive. Others had tried to take him on, but after every fight, they had been the ones to leave with scars.

  After Egan and Teresa had arrived in Philadelphia, he thought he would be able to support what was left of his family, including Deirdre, and soon after that a child, with a clerical job. But he soon found that was impossible. He was more than well qualified, and there were plenty of such jobs to be had, but not one of them was open to a man from Ireland. He grew to know intimately and painfully the refrain that so many of his countrymen were to hear again and again and again: No Irish need apply.

  He of course would have done anything to join a theatrical company, but there was no position in even the Irish troupes that entertained around Philadelphia for a young immigrant with no parents or friends to back him.

  So Egan did what thousands of others did: He hired himself out to a contractor for the railroad.

  The cage disgorged Egan’s gang at the top of the shaft, and after a few additional snarls from Henneberry Egan slogged through the spring mud into the huts that were home to the workers on the eastern shaft. He made his way back to the tiny slat-board shack where he and eleven others slept.

  There he gathered a change of clothes, walked over to the creek that was the source of water for the camp, bathed and shaved, and then pulled off his work shirt and pants and slipped into clean clothes.

  Supper was beans, pork, and cabbage. Egan sat and ate quietly with three others from his gang: Ferdy O’Dowd, a boy of sixteen, Owen and Cornelius Blake, twins about Egan’s age, and Patrick Geraghty, a grandfather at thirty-seven
. Geraghty was a practical joker when he wasn’t exhausted from a week of labor. Tonight he was as quiet as Egan. Not until later, with a few shots of rum inside him, would he become boisterous and outrageously funny.

  Except for Egan, all the men in the gang were from Cork. In fact each gang was composed of men from the same Irish county. All of the men were proud of their old homes and passionate about their native hills and valleys, villages and dialects. Their old country loyalty made them uncomfortable with mates from unfamiliar places. So a man from Galway or Tipperary would not have fared well among the men who worked with Egan O’Rahilly. Indeed Egan had been accepted by the Cork men because his family’s profession and travels made the O’Rahillys acceptable everywhere in Ireland.

  And he in turn liked them all, with the exception of Henneberry. He especially liked the three men he ate with; and he worked alongside them with all the energy and strength he had to give.

  After they’d eaten, the men climbed a long muddy path up a steep hill. The path was the main street of the rough town that was Gallitzin, and there were a few buildings along either side of it, including the railroad’s administration building, a blacksmith’s, a stable, a general store, a machine shop, and the camp groggery. Only the administration building, a two-story, barrackslike, wood-frame structure where the company engineers and supervisors lived and maintained their offices, was faintly impressive.

  The men climbing up the path were on their way to the groggery, which was a drafty shed made out of the same green pine slats the workers’ huts had been built with. It was larger, though, and warmer, since there were over a hundred men and a few women inside. At the start of an evening, the women would be available for dancing. Later on, they would be working on their backs in some hut or other.

  Egan O’Rahilly owned the fiddle that had been his father’s, and he played it passably well. On Saturdays he often brought it up to the gathering and provided the evening’s musical entertainment. Everybody danced. Since there were not enough women to go around, the men danced with one another—jigs and reels and rounds and hornpipes.