ALAN WILKINSON

The golden spike

It’s almost a hundred and twenty years now since my ancestors, working on the Central Pacific Railroad, met up with the Irish gangs of the Union Pacific out there in northern Utah. Everybody turned out to witness the historic event and they commemorated the occasion by driving a golden spike into the last tie, and so linked the east coast with the west.

Ever since I first heard about the ceremony I’ve wondered about that spike. I mean, did they really take a fourteen-pound hammer to a piece of solid gold? Did they drive it right the way in and - just leave it there, unprotected, out in the middle of the desert?

I’ve been thinking about it all a great deal lately. Sitting here at my desk back in New York, with page after page of notes about the UP and the CP from a whole pile of books I took out of the university library, I just have to glance up and there it is on my wall, the whole scene captured in a photograph. It’s an old copy, in a wood frame, behind apiece of glass that’s flawed and opaque with dirt. There are the two locos, head to head, and the crowd, frozen in attitudes of expectation. There’s one guy with a shovel, another with a hammer slung over his shoulder. The foreground is all sagebrush, pretty much what you would expect out there, I suppose.

It’s what happens afterwards that bothers me. I mean, the two locos for one thing. Which one backs up? Is it the Union or the Central that yields ground? And what do the crowd do? Do they just melt into the landscape? And where are all the Chinese? I don’t see any Chinese there. But what I want to know most of all is, what became of the spike? I start wondering about that and before I know it I’m going over all that stuff between Michael and me again.

I had a letter from him today. He says maybe if we got together at Thanksgiving we could talk things over. Of course, he just assumes I’ll fly out to his place. He says he needs me. And then finally he gets around to the thing I’ve been waiting for all along - about the spike. He’s discovered what I’ve done, he says.

They can’t have just left it there, can they? I can’t see them doing that. Can you just imagine the crowd dispersing, slowly, reluctantly, all of them pretending to leave, but nobody wanting to be the first to go? Everybody’s eyes fixed on twelve ounces of solid gold embedded in a slab of wood. Personally, I would have left and then hidden behind a rock or something to watch what happened, biding my time.

Michael doesn’t live in Utah, by the way, although we did meet there.

The golden spike 35

We met at a conference at BYU where I was working the summer as a cocktail waitress and he was the bashful postgrad preparing to give his first paper. It was all about his Irish ancestors working on the railroad, and how they built this one and that one, back and forth across the country, before finally settling in northern New Mexico. Immigrants are Michael’s subject. He’s writing a book about them. I forget exactly how it was we got to be talking, but when he found out my great-great-grandfather had come over to build the railroad he started asking me all sorts of questions about my family. I guess I was a little flattered, being younger than him and still in my sophomore year. It was his idea that I start on this little project I’m doing now.

I have spent a long time puzzling over this business with the spike. I’ve tried to cover all the angles. Just hanging around waiting for everybody to go back to Ogden or wherever wouldn’t have been enough. A person would need the right tools. Those spikes are - what, six inches long, and about an inch fat? You couldn’t dig one out with just a pocket-knife. I’ve gone through the whole scene, over and over in my head. The best idea I had was lighting a fire under the tie and burning the wood, but always a train would come along and one of the crew would spot it. They were very fire-conscious in those days with the locos burning wood, and sparks flying out of the smokestacks. They had to be: they set fire to a lot of forests one time or another. It says in this book I‘ve been reading that they even had guys who were paid to guard over the bridges and check them for live coals after a train passed.

Michael‘s is a real, old-fashioned American success story. All his folk were railroad men, right down to his father. He worked on the track-bed gang of the Santa Fe. Used to walk the line looking for defects, all alone in the desert - winter and summer. His big aim in life was to put his son through college. I never met him: he died soon after the company laid him off.

I’ve had several letters from Michael since I arrived back in New York, but I daresay they’ll ease up when his vacation’s over. Not that he‘s quit working - he’s far too dedicated for that - but at least he hasn’t had to teach through the summer. I’m surprised he’s kept writing. I thought I’d made it plain enough that it was over between us. But there are his letters piling up on my desk along with the notes I’ve been making, and the copies of old photographs - coolies in the mountains patiently waiting for the blasting crews to do their stuff. Mostly he asks me questions about my ancestors, and have I unearthed anything interesting. It’s strange to think of me here on the Atlantic coast under this pale sky reading about the Rocky Mountain passes, and him out in Chama where the sky is such a deep blue

36 Critical Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 4

in the morning before the clouds puff up over the San Juans . . . him out there researching Irish nawies from Boston and New York.

I found one book that really went to town on the ceremony. It had a whole chapter about it. That’s really outside the scope of my project, I guess - I should be up in the mountains following the dynamite gangs - but this thing fascinates me. It seems there was more than one spike: the gold one from California, a silver one from Nevada, and one from Arizona made of iron, gold and silver combined. There was a quote from the diary of a photographer about the privilege of striking the first blow being given to ‘some lady, but she proved to be a poor “Spiker” and missed it‘. That made me think of our softball coach back in High School. He always said if the ball had the face of someone you realled hated on it you’d sure as hell connect first time.

Michael’s book is going very well, he says. He’s forging ahead. I knew he would, especially with me out the way. He reminds me of his country- men, dashing across the plains, ten miles a day, while their counterparts were carving a path inch by inch through snow-covered granite. He wants to know how my work is progressing; and he reminds me to send him a copy when it’s finished. He says he mlght find some of my material useful.

If they did just leave the golden spike, and the silver one, and that mixed- up thing from Mizona, if they did leave them there and the trains kept running, I guess after a period of time they’d work loose. And then the trackmen would have to tap them back in. Gold I can imagine, but silver? It’s way too soft. I h o w they do work loose: Michael showed me one time when we took a walk from his place down to the little depot in Chama. The railroad there - the Cumbres and Toltec - folded years ago, but they’ve kept it open as a tourist attraction. There’s a steam loco hauls a whole string of coaches up into the mountains along the Colorado border. I never rode it myself - it cost way too much - but lying in bed with Michael, early mornings up in the attic room of that creaky old gabled house of his, we could hear the whistle sounding off as they got up steam. I often walked down around eleven to watch it leave. I enjoyed the silence after it had departed.

I doubt that Promontory has ever seen quite so much activity since that great day, 10 May 1869, although I believe they do have a little celebration every year on the anniversary. Maybe if I go there some time I’ll find out what really happened after it was all over. The photograph gives no clue, and there’s nothing in the books about it. I guess they all piled into the trains and rode back to town, wherever that was.

The time we walked the tracks together was about the last good day we had. Things started to fall apart pretty fast from there on. Michael was so

The golden spike 37

preoccupied with his studies he only really spoke to me to tell me what to do around the place. It got to where I was just cooking and cleaning, and in between times proof-reading his manuscript for him. Even as we walked he was telling me about the kind of timber they used for the ties and what it all cost and how the shippers made a fortune. We walked on the ties, because the rocks were too uneven. For him that was quite an adjustment: he’s six feet tall and takes a long stride. My short legs accommodated themselves very well to the spacing.

‘See here?’ I remember the way he kicked at a loose spike with his boot. Most of the guys up there wear boots, same as a lot of them carry knives. ‘See here?’ he said, and he bent down to show me how he could wiggle it with his fingers. I had been trying to get him to talk about the future, about what would happen when the summer was over and I had to go back east to school. But he was intent on a more immediate and soluble difficulty. He took out his knife. ‘Yeah, see how the tie’s all rotten around it?’ He dug away at the wet black fibres, like the dark tobacco my grandpa used to take from his pouch and roll in the palm of his hand before filling his pipe. The spike came out clean and easy. Michael passed it over to me. ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an original at home.’ Then he told me that when his grand- father was a young boy back in the twenties he knew an old Chinaman who claimed to have been at Promontory the day the two crews met up, and he gave him for a keepsake one of the original spikes that he‘d saved all his life. ‘It’s what we hang our winter coats on; in the front porch there,’ Michael said. Then he went on, ’Yeah, we’ll keep in touch. I’ll write you. I’ll be bugging you about your project.’

Think of it this way. You’ve just built a railroad from coast to coast. The UP and the CP. You decide to splice them with a golden spike. You aren’t about to leave it out in the wilderness forever, are you? Of course you aren’t. What you do is, you drill a hole in the last tie, let the company president‘s wife tap the spike home with a special ceremonial hammer, and then you pass it across to your main man who sees that it gets mounted on a piece of mahogany in the boardroom. Then when the ceremony’s over some coolie steps up and bangs in a proper one. You’ve got to be practical about these things.

Michael used to study all day after we’d got up and I’d made breakfast. Then I’d go shop for our groceries. That last day I called in at the hardware store, right across from the depot. The loco was getting up steam and the passengers were starting to arrive. When I’d got what I needed I hurried back to the house. I slipped round to the front and let myself into the porch. I could hear Michael typing upstairs. I quickly threw the coats on to the floor. By placing a block of wood below the spike I was able to get good

38 Critical Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 4

leverage with my wrecking bar. It took some doing, but it finally came, throwing me back against the front door with a bang. For a moment I was worried I mlght have disturbed Michael, but his typing continued steadily. I put the spike in my pocket and replaced it with the rusty one Michael had pulled out for me. I gave it a couple of taps with my block of wood and put the coats back. So long as nobody disturbed it I figured it would hold.

Michael once asked me if any of my family back then had married outside their race. He was thlnlung of the Irish, I guess. I remember laughing at him and asking did he hope to find a neat little romance on the tracks. I even made a dumb joke about the ’Union Pacific’ but he wasn’t listening. That’s his trouble: he never hears what people are saying to him.

I had my bags packed and ready. I wrote him a quick note to say goodbye, got into my car and drove the three blocks down to the depot. The train was about to leave. There was a whole crowd of people on board and the smoke and the steam kept blotting out the sunlight. The whistle was blowing and the bell clanging. They even had the light blazing at the front. It all looked . . . I don’t know, cinematic, corny as hell. I broke down and wept then and never stopped until the train had gone and the handful of sightseers had dispersed. I was about to set off when I realised I’d forgotten the paint, so I called in at the hardware store again and bought a little can. Then I headed east as fast as my old Pinto would go.

I shouldn’t think I’ll hear from Michael again. The new semester is starting and he’ll be staying down in Albuquerque Mondays through Fridays. I doubt I shall send him his copy, either. I can’t see how I can tell him anything he didn’t already know about the Cantonese workers. Anyway, I’ve just about satisfied my curiosity now. I’ve finished writing and it’s all neatly typed up. It’s only about twenty pages long, but that’s pretty good for an undergraduate paper. I followed my coolies over the mountains, down into the Great Basin where they met the Irish, then turned about and headed back to the coast, some of them to laundries, restaurants and fishing-boats, some of them back across the Pacific ocean. Maybe that’s why they don’t figure in the picture.

So now I have quite a pile of cuttings and notes, and Michael’s letters, and my finished project. It‘s all here on my desk, neatly stacked, right under the framed photograph. And on top, holding it all down, there’s my freshly- painted golden spike.