The Last Rail

Since the morning Mara had come home to Second Street, the needle had pointed west-north-west, and it had not moved a hair.

That was a month. The walnut box sat open on the kitchen table in Fishtown, and every morning Mara looked at it before coffee, the way other people looked at the weather, and every morning the blued needle lay on its pivot pointing out through the wall, over the river and the whole width of the country, at something a long way off.

On the second Sunday Mara had spread a road atlas on the floor and laid a ruler on it, the way a surveyor would, from Fishtown along the bearing. Two hundred and eighty-six degrees, near enough. The line ran out over Pennsylvania and Ohio and Indiana, across the Mississippi and the whole of Nebraska, over the Rockies, and came down at last in the north of Utah, in a blank part of the map above the Great Salt Lake where the names thinned out to almost nothing. There was one name there in small type. Mara had looked at it for a long time, and folded the atlas up, and gone on with the shop work, and waited for the ledger to say the rest.

The world Mara had come home to looked exactly like the one Mara remembered, until you went to Washington and stood in line at the National Archives. In this world the Declaration was brown, and old, and perfectly legible. The signatures were dark. You could read every word of the founding sentence on the parchment itself, with your own eyes, from a yard away, under the gold light, the way the men who signed it had read it. Schoolchildren stood in front of it and read it aloud, haltingly, and nobody told them to hush. A memorandum from a Professor Henry of the Smithsonian, dated July 1876, was framed in the exhibition hall next door, under the heading The Man Who Saved the Ink. Mara had read it twice. It did not mention a sign painter from Second Street. It would not have occurred to Henry to.

On the first Saturday in October Mara took the ledger back to Marisa's.

The bell over the door rang the way it always rang. Marisa was at the desk in the back with her glasses on and a pencil in her hair, pricing a box of fountain pens. On the radio by her elbow a woman from the share clinic on Girard was explaining the flu shots.

"You've been sitting on something," said Marisa. "I can tell. You've got that face."

Mara put the ledger on the blotter and opened it past the stake mark at Philad.a, 10 May 1876, past Kezia Tenney's flourished hand, to the next page. Mara had turned past it in July without reading it. There had been a dozen stations in unknown hands, and Mara had been in a hurry to find a blank page.

It was not written in the book at all. It was pasted in: a telegraph form, the printed head half cut away, the paper gone the colour of tea, fixed to the page at its four corners with something that had once been flour paste. On the ruled lines, in a careful clerk's copperplate with every capital finished, it said:

Promontory, U.T., 27 April 1869.

Under that, in a column down the right-hand side, brushed in ink so black it still looked wet, were Chinese characters: a short line of them, and at the foot, set a little apart, three more.

And in the margin, in pencil, in a hand Mara would have known anywhere: Rec'd by post from San Francisco, Sept. 1877. Pasted in as Grandmother said. K.T.

Mara stood very still. In a back room on Second Street, in 1876, Kezia Tenney had opened this same book for Mara by lamplight, and past the line for 1865 there had been nothing, only Eseld's ruled pages, blank, one after another. Leave room, Eseld had said on the last morning, with her hand on Mara's arm. Kezia had left it. And a year after the Centennial, somebody in San Francisco had sent her a telegraph form eight years old, and she had known exactly where it went.

"That's her," said Marisa at once, and put her finger beside the pencil without touching it. "That's Kezia. That's the receipt hand, in pencil." She looked from the margin to the frame by the door and back. "By post. Of course by post. She'd paste a laundry list in if it came with the right address on it." She took her glasses off. "Who sends a telegram by mail?"

"Somebody who wanted it to arrive late," said Mara, and did not know yet why Mara was sure of that. Marisa looked at the date again, and then at the column of brushwork beside it, and said nothing for a while, which for Marisa was a speech. Then she said that her grandmother had kept a shoebox of letters from all over, and nobody had ever known who half of them were from.

"Whoever buys that is to have the box too," said Marisa, out of nowhere, and then laughed at herself. "I don't know why I keep saying that. Go on. Go wherever it is. Somebody has to mind the shop."

Mara flew to Salt Lake on the Tuesday, with the box in a carry-on bag and the needle pointing steadily at the cockpit door.

Then north, in a hired car, up the long straight interstate under the Wasatch, with the Great Salt Lake on the left like a sheet of tin. In Brigham City Mara stopped for gas, and read a roadside marker about the women of Utah Territory, who had voted in 1870, fifty years before most of the country. At the bottom was the familiar 1920 photograph, the four women standing behind the man with the pen. The needle did not care. It pointed west of the town, past the end of the mountains, at the empty country beyond.

The Golden Spike National Historical Park was a visitor centre, a flagpole, two short stretches of track, and an enormous sky. It was late in the season. The replica engines stood together on the rails with their fires banked, the red-and-gold Jupiter and the black 119, so close their pilots nearly kissed. A ranger was telling a family where the rails had met. Mara stood at the exact place and opened the box. The needle did not even look at it.

It pointed west. Mara followed it in the car, along the gravel road that ran on the old Central Pacific grade, and saw, running beside it on the left, a second grade, parallel, built by the other company, going nowhere: two lines of earth laid side by side through the sagebrush for mile after mile because nobody would walk the other's. A line nobody walks gets moved by whoever is strongest, Eseld had said, on Second Street, under the sign. Here the strong had built two, and walked neither.

A few miles out there was a wooden sign by the road. Ten Miles of Track Laid in One Day. The needle came round, and settled, and pointed at the ground a few yards beyond it.

Mara slept in the car with the seat back and the box on Mara's chest, under more stars than there were in Philadelphia, and woke in the grey before dawn, and got out, and stood on the old grade in the cold. The rules went through Mara's head like a checklist. The needle points at a hinge, never at north. Go where it settles. At first light, raise the sights. You arrive dressed for it, and expected. You stay until the hinge closes. What you change stays changed, and only you remember.

The light came up behind the Promontory Mountains, pale and then gold. Mara raised the two brass vanes, put an eye to the slit, found the needle's line through the window of the far sight, and held it.