Terrain Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  The trains carved into land that wasn’t theirs, and swallowed the men who laid their iron roads—the tracks like threads to draw white men closer together—monsters belching smoke across a land they meant to conquer.

  So Faye made herself scarce the day the men from Union Pacific visited Western Fleet Courier, to ask Elijah about the land.

  Elijah wasn’t a man who thought much where he didn’t have to; maybe it was just as well, since many who’d thought harder were cruel, and Elijah’s place was where she and Frank had made their home.

  So far.

  The railroad men spoke with Elijah a long time. They cast looks around the yard where Fa Liang and Joseph were working on a dog, weighting the front pair of its legs so it wouldn’t flip backward the first time you scaled a rock face. Fa Liang muttered something to the dog, and Joseph laughed, and the tall railroad man watched.

  They watched Maria tending vegetables, rake in hand, shirtsleeves rolled to her elbows.

  Faye kept in the barn. And Frank was somewhere those men would never find him. (Better not to trust anyone with the government. That much they’d learned the hard way.)

  But Elijah was white, and kindhearted, and had made friends when he lived in River Pass—Harper at the general store still set things aside for him. Elijah had no reason to fear two men who smiled and seemed polite; once or twice, he laughed.

  Bad sign, Faye thought.

  They shook hands with him and left at last, and Faye was able to tear herself away from the hole in the boards and pretend nothing was wrong.

  People came with messages for delivery every week: homesteaders, wagon trains, the Pony Express. If she was shaken every time a stranger showed, she’d spend her life in this barn.

  When Elijah came into the barn, he smiled, but there was a second’s pause before he said, “Hello, Faye.”

  She didn’t mind the pause; worse to be called a wrong name.

  It was easy to mistake Frank and Faye. The twins looked like their mother, the high brow and strong jaw, and they had the matching, flinty expressions of a lot of the Shoshone children who were sent to the white school. It made Frank look like a warrior, and Faye look troubled.

  She stood beside Dog 2, one hand on its right foreleg. It was foolish to seek comfort in machines—look at the railroad—but still, she felt calmer with it close by.

  She should have had a wrench, if she was pretending to work, but she’d been shaking.

  Elijah meant well. Elijah was an easygoing man, most days. He tried to keep peace, he tried to be fair.

  Faye just didn’t think she and Elijah had the same idea of fair.

  She couldn’t even ask—the words stuck when she saw him—and she held her breath and looked at the open door behind him, the sliver of deep blue sky.

  She’d been waiting for a sign to run. An open door was as good as anything.

  Then Elijah said, “Lord, these trains have made men greedy.”

  The land can be beautiful, depending where you’re coming from.

  The sun sets in bands of red and gold, and one of turquoise just ahead of the night; sunrise is cool in summer and sharp in winter, like ice cracking; and the horizon’s so unbroken that weather isn’t a surprise—you see clouds well ahead of the rain.

  The soil is shallow and it fights, but there are wildflowers and tall grass until snowdrifts cover them. Snowdrifts, with rock to rest against, climb taller than a house, thin dry powder. The snow can turn any moment, with the wind, and swallow a man whole. You don’t go out alone in winter if you want to make it home.

  There is, sometimes, water. It’s always flowing away from you.

  There are always hills on the horizon, even though you’re already so high up you never catch your breath. You can look out and out and out across the basin, and see specks on the horizon, twenty miles away, where a city’s fighting to take hold.

  Sometimes a city lasts. Sometimes you look out one night and not one lamp is lit, and you know the land passed judgment on it.

  When you look at the night sky, it makes you dizzy.

  Part of this is wonder. Part is knowing how far away from other lives you are, in this wide unbroken dark.

  If you’ve made your way west from the forests, and given up town life for the frontier, this land seems like punishment.

  It’s beautiful, if you’re coming home.

  Elijah Pike owned the fifty acres of Western Fleet Courier.

  He’d come to River Pass from Boston, after he’d tired of being someone else’s clerk and decided it was time to make something of himself in the West. He’d been an indifferent farmer—too uncertain of the soil—but River Pass needed even indifferent vegetables, and he’d found enough success on his own that when Fa Liang presented himself, Elijah had the land, and money for an extra barn, and parts for the dogs.

  He was proud of the business; he was proud that they sometimes boarded a scrawny boy from the Pony Express while they handed off a message going where no horse could reach.

  Elijah had painted the wooden sign himself: “Any Message, All Terrain.” It hung below the wrought-iron sign for Western Fleet, nailed to the arch marking his property line.

  It was just as well he owned the land; he was the only one of them who could.

  A dog has six legs. Each one is thin, and tall as a man, and arched as a bow, and in their center they cradle the large, gleaming cylinder of the dog’s body. The back half conceals a steam engine, with a dipping spoon of a rider’s seat carved out ahead of it, with levers for steering and power, and just enough casing left in front to stop a man from hurtling off his seat every time the dog stops short.

  It looks ungainly. The casing jangles, and the legs seem hardly sturdy enough to hold it, and when someone takes a seat it looks like the contraption’s eating him alive.

  But legs that seem ungainly in the yard are smooth on open territory, and dogs don’t get skittish about heights or loose ground, and when scaling a rock face, six legs are sometimes better than four.

  There’s a throttle for the engine, and three metal rings on each side of the chair, where the rider slides his fingers to operate the legs. Left alone, the dog walks straight ahead; when the rider starts his puppetry, it treads water, dances, climbs mountains.

  It takes a strong boy to wield one—not muscled, but wiry, a boy who can keep his balance and his head if the ground slips out from under him.

  Faye won’t train them if they look like they force their own way. On the trail, a rider has to understand enough to sidewind Dog 3 in heavy winds, enough to hear what’s breaking in old Dog 1 before it breaks.

  Sometimes she and Fa Liang placed bets about what would need fixing up when some boy came back.

  “The boy,” Frank said, “if he breaks Dog 2.”

  Faye shouldered him, but Fa Liang said, “No bet.”

  The dogs never tire, and need one quarter the water a horse does. The boys carry some, but the inside of the engine shell collects condensation at night, which siphons into a skin.

  That was Faye’s idea; their mother taught her, a long time ago.

&nb
sp; They’re five strange beasts—they terrify horses—but they do as promised. The Express advises riders to use them if the road gets impassable for animals.

  Even folk in River Pass have a little pride that for those who need a message sent where no messenger goes, you can point them right to Western Fleet.

  Fa Liang started the business.

  He left the Central Pacific line and came to River Pass in search of work. River Pass wouldn’t have him.

  He’d never said if it had come to blows; it didn’t always have to.

  But Susannah Pell from the clerk’s office followed him out of the general store and told him about Elijah, living on land of his own, well outside the city limits.

  Elijah welcomed him. He was working alone, then, and the place was falling to ruin.

  The barn had a pile of equipment Elijah had run so poorly that no one would take it off his hands.

  The first dog Fa Liang built was small, and slipshod—the engine casing was one sheet of tin, and the seat little more than a metal spoon nailed on in front of it. The engine sputtered on steep inclines, and it limped. But when the livestock count was off one day, Fa Liang rode out in it, and came back with a calf he’d maneuvered out of a split in the rock.

  “Damn,” said Elijah, grinning.

  Fa Liang peeled himself off the seat—that first build wasn’t kind to the rider, his back was scorched for a week—and asked, “There a courier in town?”

  They met Joseph when they came into River Pass looking for a blacksmith.

  Fa Liang handed him two uneven legs from the dog.

  “I need something to make this one longer,” he said. “And some weight, for the bottom.”

  Joseph frowned, turned it over and over, smoothed his hands over the joints.

  Then a smile stole over his face, and he said, “What the devil are you building?”

  When Elijah came back from the general store with his wagon of dry goods, Fa Liang and Joseph were waiting.

  Joseph had come from Missouri a freedman, after dismissal from the Union Infantry; he’d been working to earn money to go with the Mormon wagons headed west.

  “If it weren’t for the dogs,” he told Faye once, “I’d have kept going until I hit the ocean.”

  The dogs wouldn’t have kept him long, but Maria came soon after, and she could keep hold of almost anything.

  What Maria hadn’t held was her farm—Texas ranchers ran her off as soon as her husband was in the ground.

  But she was determined to find another homestead, so she’d joined a traveling preacher, and in River Pass, when he demanded to see the husband she’d claimed to have in a town she’d picked off a map, Maria saw Elijah coming out of the clerk’s office, and took a chance.

  Sometimes, in January when it seemed winter would never break, Frank asked for the story. Maria made Elijah act it out, laughing; she claimed he’d been marvelous.

  Faye didn’t buy it. Elijah was an honest man. Playacting didn’t suit him.

  “He must have been bad, though,” Faye said once, when they were alone.

  Maria grinned. “Horrible. Not even Padre was fooled.”

  “But you came back with him.”

  She shrugged. “A man who can’t lie is sometimes a good sign.”

  Faye went to wash before the supper bell rang at the big house.

  They came from their own cabins—Joseph, Fa Liang, and Frank and Faye from farthest out.

  Maria had moved into the big house two winters back, when the ground betrayed her and her cabin floor split.

  The garden turned into a cornucopia when she laid hands on it.

  (“It’s like he tried to kill them,” Maria muttered to Faye once, wrist deep in dirt. She was planting squash far enough apart that they wouldn’t choke.)

  When they came inside, Maria glanced up and nodded. “Frank. Faye.”

  Frank glanced at Faye with the ghost of a smile. He had his shell necklace on, looped down his chest like a breastplate, and it was the only reason why Maria had been able tell one from the other. It was the same, the days Faye wore her skirt because her trousers were drying.

  Still, Faye took any smile she could get from Frank.

  At the table, Faye pressed against Frank and Elijah on either side; wedged at the end was a boy from the Express whose name she had forgotten, bunking with them while Tom Cantor from River Pass delivered his message.

  They talked about nothing, for a while, for the sake of the Express boy. They all fought, sometimes—about the dogs, about the town, about elbow room at table—but never in front of strangers. Some things you couldn’t afford to do.

  Joseph sat next to Maria, as always, and she pretended not to give him the biggest slice of cornbread, and he pretended not to look at her even when she wasn’t speaking.

  They talked with Elijah about Tom and Dog 3, due back any day, and Faye watched Elijah’s face for signs he’d been a fool about the Union Pacific.

  He didn’t seem a fool, but you got used to worrying.

  When the cornbread and preserves were polished off and the boy from the Express had taken a hint and vanished, Elijah sat back and said, “We had a visitor.”

  They set down their forks and knives too fast, ready for the bad news they’d known was coming.

  Elijah laid out the visit from Michael Grant, and the plans for the Union Pacific construction, and the offer he’d gotten for his land.

  It was the biggest number they’d ever heard.

  It was the sort of money that evaporated loyalty; it was such a number that they all sat, stunned silent.

  Faye watched him. For a bad liar, his face gave so little away.

  “What do you mean to do?”

  Elijah shook his head. “Wanted to hear from everyone.”

  “It might not come,” said Maria. “If they’re promising that kind of money across Wyoming they’ll run out.”

  But it wasn’t true, Faye thought. The railroad was swallowing the land. The train was inevitable.

  A lot of things were inevitable that none of them ever talked about.

  (They held together like they did because to break would mean being swept back.)

  “It will come,” said Frank, his face grim.

  “Trains will be bad for business,” said Joseph.

  “It can’t crawl up mountains,” Faye said. “Dogs can.”

  Elijah said, “They told me they can bring goods from California in three days, right through the mountains.”

  Fa Liang flinched.

  Maria whistled under her breath.

  “All the land?” Faye asked.

  “They want to build through the north side,” Elijah said, “so the station will be part of River Pass.”

  Faye’s stomach sank.

  Towns battled for the railroad, because the miles between the train and the city would fill with hotels and saloons and traders. If River Pass had gotten word of this, not Elijah nor anyone else would be keeping the railroad out.

  When she looked at Frank, he was watching her, his face a mirror of her dread.

  “Have they spoken to the town?” Fa Liang asked, in the tone of a man who knew what was coming.

  “They’re seeing the mayor tomorrow,” said Elijah. “It’s River Pass, or Green River. Our land decides.”

  Joseph crossed his arms. “And what would we do?”

  Elijah shrugged. “We could travel northwest, start again. There are places that still need messages taken.”

  “You have a sweet feeling about how people will take us,” Faye said.

  “If we had that money, people might,” said Fa Liang.

  “I could have more money than Croesus,” Joseph said. “People won’t ever forget what I am.”

  (Maria looked up at him, a second too long.)

  “Then they’re small people,” Elijah said.

  “There are more small people than the other kind,” said Faye.

  Elijah looked at her, but didn’t argue. He was good-hearted, but he ha
d eyes, and he knew how they were all received sometimes, even in River Pass.

  Elijah’s hair was going gray, and when he smiled at Faye, the corner of his mouth disappeared into the deep lines carved by the sun.

  “Then we won’t sell,” he said.

  Joseph sucked in a breath.

  Frank unclenched his fist from around his necklace; his fingers brushed Faye’s.

  Maria’s face was drawn. “What will you tell the town?”

  “That Union Pacific should look at Carson’s place, and talk to him instead.”

  He didn’t look worried enough. He looked like he was doing business, and not handling a monster whose iron teeth chewed right through men. He looked like a man who had never been in fear for his life.

  They sat for a little while in silence.

  Fa Liang left first—in a hurry, like he planned to clear out while he could.

  Faye couldn’t blame him. It was all she could do not to race the mile to the cabin, pack, and strike out north before dawn could find them.

  Frank must have known how she felt; his laced hands were pressed to his stomach.

  Joseph left, after passing close by Maria, and looking down at her with some silent conversation that closed out the rest of them. After he was gone, Maria laid her apron across the back of her chair and went upstairs, brushing her skirt like she could brush the railroad away.

  Faye and Frank stood in tandem.

  At the threshold, Elijah held out a hand without quite touching her elbow.

  (He’d never touched her, not once in three years. He was the sort who didn’t presume.)

  “It will all come out right,” Elijah said.

  He was wrong, but still, she wanted to believe him.

  She hoped the railroad men felt the same, when he tried to talk them out of it.

  In the cool dark outside, Frank said, “We’ll never see a fair day again, will we.”

  “No,” she said.

  The dark swallowed the echoes that should have been there; the words pressed in like the nights they’d spent in ditches with one blanket, whispering into the dirt to make sure the other was still breathing.

  (The Mormon school had taught them plenty by accident; they knew each other’s voices above a hundred strangers, through a hundred feet of earth.)