Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 30

Rain  soaked Louis and Jones as they  left the Devonia and hurried through  Manhattan’s gritty streets in search of a hotel. After all the dire warnings on board about murderers lurking on every corner, they were relieved to ?nd a friendly Irish family running a cheap boardinghouse not far from the docks. In the morning, when Louis went to collect waiting mail, he found a telegram from Monterey. It was from Fanny’s sister, who was staying with her there at an inn. The message was simple and direct: Fanny sick with brain fever. Frantic, Louis grabbed his bag from the hotel, raced to the ferry terminal, and bought a ticket to Jersey City, where he would begin his train journey west.

Later the next day, relieved to be ensconced in his train seat with heads nodding around him, he pensively watched the lights of Philadelphia come and go before he fell into his own slumber. When he woke, the train was at a complete standstill in a hilly green stretch of country that looked not unlike England. An accident on the tracks up ahead had brought everything  to a  halt,  and for an  entire day,  Louis sat in  the train  cars with  the other frustrated passengers, unmoving and without food. It wasn’t until the next night when the train pulled into Pittsburgh that he went to a café at the station. He’d not eaten for some thirty hours.

The emigrant train might have been merely uncomfortable if he had been in reasonable health.  But  the  privations  of  the  ocean  voyage  had  come  home  to  settle  upon  his profoundly reduced self. He was ill with fever, chills, and aches, but the worst of it was the itching. Louis expected he could forgive an itching man nearly anything.
He grinned darkly when he remembered he had packed a small bottle of laudanum. It wasn’t enough to last the whole ten-day trip, but for now it was a miracle. Louis cursed the pharmacist he’d sought out in New York who had looked at his bitten arms and issued him useless pills for his liver, of all things. In San Francisco, he would ?nd whatever oil was prescribed for the itch—if, in fact, this hell was caused by mites. Periodically, the other possibility sent shivers of terror through him: The itch might be syphilis. People with the disease often got a rash that looked a lot like the one he had. If this be the pox, I know where I  earned  it—in  the  Old  Town.  Louis  drank  down  a  dose  of  the  laudanum  and,  ?ghting despair, took out his pen and notebook.

Dear Colvin, he wrote as he waited for his misery to subside, I never knew it was so easy to

commit suicide. Certainly, Henley and Bob believed he was doing just that when he set out on his journey. Sobered by their concern, he had written a quick will before boarding the Devonia. Now, in the grip of depression and pain, he thought, Where would I be buried if I died on this train tonight? Without hesitation, he wrote, Under the wide and starry sky. Below the line, he began composing an epitaph for his gravestone. Robert Louis Stevenson, born 1850 of a family of engineers. Died …

He stayed awake as a poem came to him.

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

When  he  woke,  his  ?ngers  were  covered  in  ink,  and  the  conductor  was  shouting “Chicago!” As the train jolted to a stop, he tried to stand but fell backward into his seat. After a while, a newsboy came by and gave him a hand getting up. On legs intoxicated by the drug, Louis made his way into the train station, where he found a plate of ham and eggs.  Waiting  to  board  the  next  train,  he  lay  down  on  marble  stairs  with  his  arms outstretched and watched himself as if from the outside with a removed sort of curiosity, to see what would become of him.

Another train appeared, this one running as far as Council Blu?s and the Paci?c Transfer Station, where he would board his final train to California. Somehow he got himself on it.
At a hotel in Council Blu?s that night, he spent part of his dwindling money on a decent room, where he ate, drank, and fell asleep picturing Fanny sitting under the arbor at the Chevillon. In the morning, feeling revived, he joined a hundred other emigrants outside the station waiting to board. Here was the great melting pot of America everyone talked about, right on this platform. What an assortment of humanity! Irish, German, and Swedish types —but these people were not fresh o? of steamer ships, he discovered after a couple of short conversations. They had been  in  America  for a  while. They were from the eastern  and middle states, failed farmers and factory men headed west with nothing to lose.

The train had two dozen cars, three of which were for passengers, the rest for baggage and cattle. As people moved forward in line, they were dispatched by the ticket taker to speci?c cars. It became evident to Louis that a sorting process was under way, and soon enough he found himself in the middle car of the three for passengers. His fellows on that car, it turned out, were all men traveling alone, with the exception of a small boy, perhaps eight, who had whooping cough. Women and children, along with a few men traveling with their families, boarded in the car behind his. The third passenger car, just ahead, was filling with Chinese.

Louis surveyed his new accommodations. Rows of wood benches on either side of the aisle allowed two sitters, but just barely. At the front, a stove occupied one corner, and at the back was a toilet closet. As the train moved out of the station, a white-haired conductor appeared  at  the  front  of  car. “Gentlemen!”  he  shouted.  Then,  lowering  his  voice, “Gentlemen. I will explain this once.” The crowd silenced itself. “These here wood benches you’re sittin’ on? You can make ‘em face each other. Even better, you can make ‘em ?atten out and join into a bed.” The conductor held up a ?at piece of wood. “Now, this here is the board that will connect ‘em.” He chased two men from their seats and demonstrated how the benches collapsed. “Let me explain how we do things on this train. You need to ?nd a chum to share your bed with. Between the two of ya’s, you buy one board. Okay. Then each man buys his own cushions.” The conductor put down the board and held up three square straw-stu?ed, gingham-covered cushions. “Each man puts these on top, you got yourself a bed. One board and three cushions costs two-?fty.” As the information sank into the heads of the emigrants, the men began to look around warily for a suitable bedmate with whom to split the cost of a board.

“No need for shyness now, boys.” The conductor laughed. “I’ll do the matchmakin’, if you ain’t got a partner.” He proceeded to pair up travelers as he walked along the aisle. When he got to Louis’s bench, he solicited a nearby gentleman in a suit who appeared alarmed that  he  might  be  paired  with  the  ragged-looking  Scot.  “I  talked  to  this  fella  up  here already,” the man protested, standing and scurrying over to the side of a boyish traveler. “Feel like I know him. I believe me and him will be bunkmates, what do you say, young fella?”

The conductor moved on in his mating game. “Any o?ers?” he asked, looking around for another prospect. Louis felt himself blush and, in that moment, understood the plight of

every woman who faced an arranged marriage.

“I don’t mind,” said a strapping young Pennsylvania Dutch youth, stoically stepping up like a volunteer for a chancy military maneuver.

That night, as the train  chugged through  the dark hills of  Iowa, the men  in  the car swigged from bottles and listened to the lonely tunes of a cornet player. The booze and the music loosened them, and they shared where they were headed. In short time, everyone in the car had a new train name. Louis’s bunkmate was  “Pennsylvania”; the young fellow going west to cure his asthma was called “Dubuque” for his hometown; Louis was dubbed “Shakespeare.”

The  heat  inside  the  train  was  blistering,  so  he  wore  only  trousers  and  a  shirt  left unbuttoned and open. Every morning he went out onto the platform at the back of the train car with a tin dish of water to and the cloth and bar of soap he had bought at the same time as his bedding. It was a risky operation to bathe on the back platform of a moving train, with one arm looped through the wood railing for stability. Louis quickly apprehended  who  was  bathing  and  who  was  not:  There  appeared  to  be  a  direct relationship between how much ?esh one exposed and how much one smelled. Louis found the stench  of the men  in  his car profound, but when  he came into proximity with  the women and children, he felt near to fainting. The least o?ensive were the Chinese, who were more thorough in their daily toilets and actually washed their feet, an idea that had not occurred to any of the men on his car, including him.

And yet it was the Chinese who were reviled in one vicious “joke” after another by the white emigrants. It was common for men to make gagging sounds in proximity to a Chinese passenger. Not long before it had been the Irish who were hated, yet here was a race even more  despised  in  the  land  of  opportunity.  Never  mind  that  the  Chinese  had  invented gunpowder and printing and a thousand ideas that the Western world was glad to imitate. It  puzzled Louis,  and he  jotted down: Their forefathers  watched the  stars  before  mine  had begun to keep pigs.

Perched up  top  of a  train  car, where he could escape the closeness of the passenger section, Louis felt the terrible itching  ease some. He looked out at the ?at, near-naked Nebraska  plains and pondered his notions about the United States. Like a  lot of young Europeans, he had for some while viewed America as a promised land. Any place declaring from the outset that it was dedicated to the proposition of all men being created equal had

a foot up. Places like Edinburgh seemed staid and passé compared to, say, Chicago, where a man could capitalize upon his native talents in grand fashion, regardless of who his father was. In the scheme of things, it was hard not to feel some jealousy that America was on the ascent, and Europe was wallowing in decline, thanks to its own bad behavior.
Judging from the people he’d encountered so far, the American personality was gru? and suspicious  until  it  became  suddenly,  inexplicably  kind.  Just  this  morning,  he  had experienced the dichotomy. Louis had positioned himself at the back of his car to catch fresh air through the door. Because the latch was broken, he held open the door with his foot. When a newsboy passed, he kicked Louis’s leg hard, causing him to cringe in pain. But when the boy figured out just how sick Louis was, his cruelty vanished.
“Have  a  pear,” he  said when  he  passed later,  and handed Louis  the  fruit.  “You can borrow one of these, if you want,” he added, giving him a newspaper. “Just keep it nice so’s I can sell it.”

Dubuque, who had observed the encounter, moved a wad of tobacco out of the way of his tongue.  “Most folks here got leather hides, Shakespeare. But inside? You’re gonna ?nd a sack o’ feathers.”

It was true. Americans as a people were decent types at heart. But their generosity did not extend to the Chinese. Nor to the Indians, who came in for particular ridicule. At a station  near  Omaha,  a  small  family  approached the  idling  train  to  sell  trinkets  to  the passengers. The tiny woman was wearing a dirty print dress and a man’s bowler hat. The man looked strange and displaced, standing there in red suspenders and a dandy’s striped waistcoat with a watch fob dangling from the buttonhole. The children were merely dirty, wearing  rags  of  indecipherable  origin.  How  could  American  citizens  witness  such humiliation  and  not  rise  up  in  outrage?  Louis  was  seething  with  that  question  when Pennsylvania  joined a  group  of  other male passengers outside the train  car and began dancing behind the Indian family while whooping wildly, much to the delight of the men inside.

Louis might have downed the whole bottle of laudanum at that moment were he not out of the stu?. How could the human heart hold within its chambers at the same moment such grand  measures  of  nobility  and  baseness?  He  wrote  in  his  notebook: Indians  at  Omaha station: I am ashamed for this thing we call civilization.

“What just came over you?” he fumed when Pennsylvania made his jolly return. “Did you

leave your decency in your pocket when you got o? the train?” Shamed, the boy turned his head away from his seat partner.

Louis stared out the window after that, watching the plains turn into the stark black hills of Nebraska. When the train slowly pulled into a station in Wyoming, he saw an eastbound train reloading its passengers. Weary-looking people hurried to return to their cars on the other side of the platform, but not before shouting into the windows of Louis’s westbound train, “Go back! Turn around and go back!”