June 1847

 

 

Isabel’s father claimed she was born on the day the train came to Allenton, a city that had never known the smell of a coal engine, or the squeal of wheels across metal tracks, or the weight of tracks against dusty pasture grass. When the train appeared on the horizon, Allenton pressed inward, like all invaded places. But it was too late. The black arrow broke one field from another, parting neighbors and enemies in a blinding instant of noise and velocity. Isabel slid out, purple, choking, on a snow of sheets. The doctor beat breath into her body. Smoke rose, a banner trailing back to the hills.

Later, Daniel Lindsey would tell Isabel that her first wail sounded like the whistle of the locomotive as it arrived—a high song, heraldic and longing. This was not a lie, but the kind of exaggeration a father makes to explain significance to his daughter. He did not say that her mother’s labor was difficult, and that the house grew cold around him with the soreness of Faustina’s screams. He tried not to listen to them, straining instead for the rhythmic commotion of the first train, which bore the Lindsey name, to arrive down in the lumberyards.

He stayed until the doctor emerged, wiping his hands, to say that Daniel had a baby daughter, and invited him to see. He kissed the wet petal of Isabel’s body lying on Faustina’s breast, and held his wife, who wore the white, relieved expression of someone whom pain has just abandoned. And only when Faustina’s eyelids fluttered toward sleep after her first nursing did Daniel creep from his house to get a look at the train he helped to bring, and to feel what it was, for once, to be a destination.

The small, taut Irishmen who laid the rails were drinking from flasks that had worn white crescents in their hip pockets.

“Just look at it, Mr. Lindsey. The Allenton has arrived!” a man called, shifting his weight from one leg to another.

Isabel’s father nodded and appraised the dark skin of the engine. He was entranced by its intricate pieces, the red cowcatcher and silver whistle, and the brass star that joined the two rear wheels of the engine with an L inscribed in its center.

“You going to drive it now?”

Daniel shook his head, touching the star with his good right hand. The left, crushed by a childhood accident, hid in the folds of his coat.

“You going to take it straight on to Montreal? Or back to Boston? We’ll put down the track for you, won’t we, fellas?”

“I’m not planning on it until it’s full of lumber,” another voice said from the opposite side of the engine. Daniel stepped back and peered around the massive metal flank.

The owner of the voice was his elder brother, George, who wore a well-cut wool suit but was oddly hatless, his gray hair guarding his head like a helmet. Immersed in his examination of the engine, George Lindsey did not notice Daniel immediately.

“Full of lumber,” he repeated to himself, as if pleased by the impending commerce. In contrast to Daniel’s scholarly, elegant pallor and narrow limbs, George’s body was as robust as a marker oak on the edge of pasture, and he moved with a vital confidence, stepping back smartly from the train and finally catching sight of his brother.

“Daniel,” he cried out. “Boy or girl?”

“Girl,” said Daniel. “Isabel Prinz.”

“A girl,” George proclaimed for the crowd. He was the one who had convinced Daniel that they should bring the railroad to their little Vermont city; he had thrown himself into the project with such enthusiasm that he knew the names of all the workers and their wives and children, many of whom were still in Ireland. “A Lindsey girl.”

The flasks were lifted again, and a few cheers shouted, which Daniel hardly heard. A warm spring gust stole the last smoke curling from the smokestack.

“And Faustina?” George’s voice tightened like a rope.

“Tired, but fine.” In Daniel’s mind flashed the blood-spattered sheets in Mary’s arms as she descended the stairs, her face pinched in silent prayer. The Irish servant girl began washing them immediately. He could still hear the splashed well water soaking the sheets, poured from a pitcher on the sink to cleanse the doctor’s red-crusted knuckles.

Before leaving, Dr. Cochran had advised Isabel’s father that they should have no more children. Because of her fragile health, Faustina had already miscarried three babies, and the very fact that Isabel was born was a miracle they should not attempt to repeat, the doctor said. George, on the other hand, already had twin daughters and a young son, Laurence, who rode around town next to his father in princely fur robes, and who bore a miniature whip he cracked at the air in time with the coachman.

“Glad to hear it. Shall I send Pattie by to visit tonight?” George inquired. A white gull settled on one of the metal rails girding the boiler and began to preen.

“Not tonight. Faustina needs some rest.”

The women were not friends. Pattie was the busy socialite, the rigorous churchgoer. Faustina preferred to stay home and dip her head over a book Daniel had brought her from Boston, with her feet nestled catlike beneath her.

George disappeared around the other side of the engine again, and Daniel stared with a certain propriety at the train. Although he had always been a water man, understanding the intricacies of reservoir and canal building better than anyone else in the city, Daniel rocked back on his heels in awe before the black musculature of the engine.

Allenton was no longer an island, but a peninsula, the crested hills around it finally blasted to make valleys. He crouched down to examine the wheels and saw George doing the same, his likeness, his opposite, brother and enemy. Their eyes met for the first time that day, each peering uncertainly into the shade, testing the other’s gaze. George mouthed something and then looked away, and to the end of his life, Daniel did not know if it was lower or love her that his brother said, or why he answered yes.