Saffire (20 page)

Paying off the ranch, for me, was a substantial amount of money. Compared to one day of funding for the building of the canal, it was a fly that a horse flicks from its haunches with a swipe of the tail. Of course, if that metaphor had any truth in it, it meant I was just another annoying fly, settling for anything that smelled of manure…

Still, manure had value to a fly. To sit on the porch overlooking the valley of the Little Missouri while reading a story to Winona, to ride through gullies of a homestead that would become an inheritance to my daughter—all without the crushing worry of debt?

That could well be worth it.

I suspected the colonel could see those thoughts on my face.

“By meeting with Harding yesterday, you already established yourself as the determined cowboy seeking revenge for assault,” Goethals said. “Play the role a little longer. That's all. Pay attention as you ask your questions about the accidents and you shouldn't get hurt.”

I didn't show surprise at his knowledge of my meeting with Harding because I wasn't surprised. “I imagine you have a few suggestions on what kind of questions I should ask and where I should ask them.”

“For starters, you'll have to go to Cromwell's party tonight and ask questions about Saffire's mother. That will solidify your motivations among those who will soon hear that you are asking questions about the accidents.”

“So you suspect the hunter of the tethered goat is among them.”

“I make no assumptions. But it is a small circle of power in Panama. If the hunter is not among them, he knows them well.”

“Do you have anything to help me with this new task?”

Goethals reached under the blueprints for a large envelope filled with papers. He handed me the envelope and gave me back the Zone police badge.

“Of course I do.”

I
should have felt small and invisible.

I stood on a bank that gave me an overlook of the middle of the three Gatún locks. Neither my approach by train before the meeting with Goethals nor anything I'd read in the newspapers had prepared me for the close-up sights and sounds of construction. I tried to comprehend the audacity of the engineering marvel in front of me.

One of the reasons the French failed was that they attempted to cut a sea-level canal directly through the isthmus, without locks at any place on the forty-eight-mile route. This was doomed to failure because of the volatile Chagres River, capable of rising thirty feet in an hour during the frequent rains of the wet season.

The Americans decided to conquer this problem by damming the Chagres and allowing it to follow its natural course to the Caribbean, just west of the locks. The dam formed a lake that would allow ships to traverse a full third of the route.

It was a brilliant solution. Not only did it tame the Chagres and create a lake that gave fifteen miles of surface water along the canal route, but the dam would store the water needed for the locks as well as supply electricity to run the locks and all the lights through the Zone.

To use this route, however, the locks needed to elevate ships by eighty-five feet from the Atlantic to reach Gatún Lake. The bay at Colón allowed the Caribbean to reach inland, and a canal extended the ocean waters almost to the lake. At the end of this canal was where the locks would raise the ships to the inland route.

I faced north, to the Atlantic, and by turning my head back I got a sense of the rise of the three locks. Each one thousand feet long, they were designed with a wall down the center of the chamber to allow each lock to accommodate two massive cargo ships at a time. When complete, they would each be deep enough to swallow millions of gallons of water, fed from the artificial lake by culverts wide enough to accommodate a steam locomotive, water held by steel gates seven feet thick and as tall as an eight-story building, each gate weighing four hundred tons or more.

In this state, unfinished and empty of water, the concrete of the locks was painfully white in the sunshine. Swarms of men on layers of scaffolding poured more concrete for the locks' walls and floors.

Despite this marvel, I didn't feel small or invisible.

In my back pocket was a letter from Winona. It had been in the valise, addressed to the administration office in my name. When she concentrated on her block lettering, she had a habit of sticking the tip of her tongue out of the side of her mouth, and I glowed inside to imagine how she had sat at my writing desk in the ranch house, perhaps in the evening, using the light of an oil lamp because in Medora in December, daylight didn't last long. I could picture her care in using the thick pencil that she favored over the blotchiness of a fountain pen, and I fought the stabbing homesickness so that instead I could enjoy the sweetness of that image.

December 29, 1908

Pappy, each morning Unk Hunk lets me scratch off another day on the calendar. Then I count how many days. So far, we are up to three days. Unk Hunk says that I should figure on January 31, so that means me and Teddy only have 33 more sleeps until you get home. Teddy hurt his paw, but Unk Hunk helped me put a bandage on it, and I kissed it better like you also kiss my hurts better. It is snowing hard. Unk Hunk wants me to tell you that the cattle are doing fine. Unk Hunk is helping me with my spelling, but all these words are the ones I want to write to you. I am so glad you waited until after Christmas to go because I would have cried all the time thinking how lonely you might be without me. In two more days, I get to write you another letter. I love you and I miss you.

I generally tried to avoid philosophical thoughts because my tendency to get carried away could make me look like a mule's hind end. But standing on the edge of the greatest construction project that humans had conceived, I had little hesitation in ruminating on why I didn't feel so small.

Love trumps concrete.

Despite the urgency of the letter that sent me to Panama, and despite the authority of the person who sent the letter, I refused to leave Medora before Christmas. The trip was going to take me away from Winona for about a month and a half, and no force on earth was going to prevent me from watching the joy in her eyes as she unwrapped the stuffed bear I'd purchased on a trip to Bismarck in early fall, before roundup. Roosevelt's bear, it was called. Or Teddy's bear. All because the president, on a hunting trip in Mississippi, had refused to shoot a bear hounded to exhaustion. I knew full well how much Roosevelt hated the diminutive Teddy, but the name had stuck and the craze had started. Everybody wanted Teddy bears with button eyes.

On Christmas Day, I'd fully realized the irony of seeing Winona whoop with joy over Teddy's bear, but when I had purchased it months earlier, I'd had no idea of the request that would arrive to send me to Panama.

Against almost any scale, a man could look around and feel tiny. Against mountains or sky or ocean. Against the mighty buildings in New York. Or the unending concrete and scaffolds and loads of dirt that the trains carried here at the building of the canal.

Yet all it took was love to sustain the soul, and with the letter in my pocket, which I intended to reread again and again, I knew that it was the reverse. Mountains and oceans and sky and concrete would all eventually disappear and could never endure in comparison to the invisible, eternal fabric that was love.

I couldn't help but grin, thinking of the tenderness that my young daughter showed to a stuffed bear and the imaginary wound on its paw. I couldn't help but be overwhelmed by love that Winona's worry had been for my loneliness, not hers.

Sure, the canal would be a monstrous triumph of man over nature. The audacity to connect one ocean to another would be a combination of the world's largest man-made lake, the world's largest locks, the world's largest canal. But well within a lifetime, the decades would pass, and as they did, few would give thought to the wonder of it. Yet in a lifetime, none would ever forget a first love or a sustaining love.

Two more days. I told myself. Two more careful days.

I began to climb down the bank toward the buzz of construction below me.

Railway tracks ran parallel to the locks, where flatbed cars carried buckets of fresh concrete from the mixing plant. Overhead, steel cables ran from the railway tracks to sets of massive towers on the opposite side of the locks, carrying those buckets to be dumped into the empty forms for the walls, fifty-feet wide at the bottom, tapering to eight-foot-wide tops.

As I moved from worker to worker to get directions to the foreman, I kept a nervous eye on the buckets passing overhead. Six tons of wet concrete in each bucket, enough to bury a small herd of cattle, hung from what looked like threads of steel.

I finally reached the foreman near the base of some scaffolding that clawed those eight stories upward to the top of the forms filled by those buckets of concrete.

The foreman was a block of a man. Closing in on fifty, he had pale skin and short hair that had probably once been red, judging by the man's thick freckled forearms, which extended from the rolled-up sleeves of a sweat-soaked denim shirt.

“Geoffrey Denham?” I asked at the man's suspicious glance.

“I only speak to construction men,” he snapped. Irish accent. “And plainly, you aren't. So whatever you want, the answer is no.”

He turned back to his inspection of some welds on the scaffolding.

“I'll pass that along to Colonel Goethals.”

Denham straightened and gave me attention again. “That's a name you'll not be wanting to throw out lightly. And anyone can do it. So when you bring papers to show authorization, I'll give you my time. Until then, I have some locks to complete.”

Once again, Denham turned to inspect the welds.

From the large envelope that Goethals had given me, I pulled out the sheets and flipped through the pages. Humidity made them soggy—there was no satisfying crisp sound to give my actions authority. I found what I needed a few pages down: a letter with the ICC letterhead, signed by Goethals.