The Kingdom of Ohio (2 page)

In my imagination, it begins with a day in the heart of winter. I can picture it effortlessly: the gray sky and the leafless trees, the solemn profile of a young woman standing near a riverbank. A whisper of cold on my cheek as I look up to see the first flakes of snow beginning to fall—

But that's not right. That scene comes much later—or, looking at it another way, much earlier. Really, the only place I can honestly begin is in the middle of things, with New York City, in the year 1900. With the construction of the first subway tunnels through the dark bedrock beneath the metropolis, and with a young man so distant from where I sit now that he seems an unrecognizable stranger: a mechanic, an adventurer, and perhaps also a criminal, named Peter Force.

THE SUBWAY WORKER

IN THE YEAR 1900, NEW YORK IS A CITY OF MACHINES. IT IS THE biggest Italian city in the world, the biggest Jewish city, the biggest Polish city, and most of all the greatest city of the New World. There is nothing else like it on earth: the accretion of humanity, the burgeoning accumulation of metal and stone and concrete, and sheer, constant motion.

It is a metropolis that is home to both the wealthiest and the poorest people in America, a city full of hope, and hope destroyed. It is a place of furious ambition and simple fury. It is impossible: this is what newcomers think as they walk through its streets.

When Peter Force arrives in New York, stumbling off the train from Chicago with his meager possessions clutched in a burlap sack, he spends his first few days wandering along the boulevards like a drunk, gaping upward at the buildings, terrified and amazed. At the suggestion of a stranger, he rents a room in one of the nameless flophouses at the lower end of Manhattan, where Grand Street intersects the Bowery among piles of refuse. His hotel is a teetering three-story clapboard structure whose rickety walls tremble whenever a door slams. Peter's room is a stall the size of a closet, with a rough hemp net to sleep on suspended near one wall.

During those first nights in New York, though, sleep eludes him. Kept awake by the continual sound of the city outside, he stares at the flickering shadows on the ceiling and listens to the snores of other men in the darkness. Bedbugs itch beneath him, burrowing in the yellowed woolen blankets. Wrestling with insomnia, he thinks of the landscape he left a week ago—the echoing stillness of the western mountains—struggling to connect this recollection with the foreign place where he finds himself now.

Peter remembers clambering up a sheer rock face of granite, pulling himself over a final ledge to collapse exhausted at the top of a cliff. He remembers lying on an outcropping above a twisting, nameless river, staring up at the mindless blue of the frontier sky and the ascending spiral of a hawk. Nights spent sitting across a campfire from his father, the crack and hiss of sap in the logs, sparks rising through dark evergreen branches. These random images returning to him. But none of these things have any place in the present, he reminds himself, listening to the rattle of wagons and omnibuses on the street outside. The rumble of turbines under the earth, burning coal into a fine, black dust that settles over everything.

He imagines the city as a collision of all the forces of human nature, a zoo of poverty and wealth. One-room flats house extended tribes of dishwashers and laundresses and the unemployed, who meet and clash each day in the streets in a Babel of signs and curses and discussion. Electricity and steam push through the earth in layers of pipes and tunnels. In Times Square, moving pictures and tinctographs loom behind garish full-color billboards, the Talking Dog and magic-lantern arcades and restaurants and trinket mongers crowded together in between.

On his fourth day in Manhattan, as the few dollars he arrived with dwindle to a handful of small coins, Peter makes his way to a recruiter's office where legions of workers are being hired to help build the first subway lines under the city.

 

 

This is the setting, the place and time, where I need to begin. The only question is how to get there. How to find a bridge across the span of so many years. And it's hoping to discover such a path that I keep scrutinizing the history books, searching among all those dust-dry words for some hint of the living past.

In 1900 no comprehensive public transportation system existed in New York City. Instead (the historians tell me), most passengers traveled on privately operated horse-drawn omnibuses, which inched along the crowded, ill-paved streets. The few aboveground trains that ran through the city were perpetually overcrowded, their noise intolerable, and the footings of the elevated tracks were a further obstacle to traffic.

Finally, in 1899, after years of debate (and, as the textbooks point out, against the opposition of politicians whose power was bound up in revenues from the omnibus lines), a transit proposal was passed, authorizing the Rapid Transit Commission to build the first segment of the New York subway. A number of powerful financiers almost immediately gained control of these subway contracts, among them August Belmont, Jr., John D. Rockefeller, and John Pierpont Morgan.

On October 27, 1904, the subway would finally open to the public, seventy thousand people riding the new underground railroad on its opening day. This account, which I found in the
New York Tribune
, seems typical, describing how

In the years following its opening, the subway would deeply shape the daily and emotional life of New York, becoming a metaphor for the city's character. In his epic poem
The Bridge
, for example, Hart Crane would describe a subway ride from Times Square to Brooklyn as a journey through hell, writing:

But at the beginning, before all these things, came the seemingly impossible task of shifting aside tons of bedrock to make this miracle possible. Employment on the subway crews was backbreaking, heartbreaking, an almost unimaginable labor. Nearly unnoted in the history books, beneath the rock of Manhattan, twelve thousand nameless men were hired to perform the work of Hercules for twenty cents an hour, ten hours a day.

I read this and close my eyes, trying to re-create the scene (as if somehow I could return to watch it happening, a time traveler perched in a time machine). I imagine the young man who calls himself Peter Force joining the group of ragged applicants outside the office of the New York Drilling Company. The gray autumn sky, the swaybacked brick buildings. The sudden disorientation and loneliness that comes over him: a brief sensation of watching himself, like a distant stranger, fumbling to fit his gestures into the imagined shape of this new life.

I picture young Peter Force, waiting in line, trying to convince himself that this is how a new life might begin.

 

 

 

 

THE RECRUITER looks him up and down. For a moment the recruiter's eyes linger at the fading bruises on Peter's face. He looks away.

“You got no experience.” The recruiter has already decided—he is a thin, red-faced man with an angry rash up the backs of his legs. The office where he sits is cold, the chill wind whimpering through chinks in the window framing.

Peter shakes his head. “I've been in mines before. Some might get nervous, down there. Not me.”

The recruiter scribbles on a piece of paper. “Take this. Give it to the secretary.”

“Thank you.”

“Don't thank me.” He waves Peter away as the next man enters the office, a lumbering giant with his hat in his hands. Peter glances at the paper but can't decipher the scrawl. Outside the office, he hands the slip to a secretary who perches on a tall stool behind a pulpit-desk. The secretary accepts the paper and barely glances at it before tossing it on the floor. He opens a ledger and writes something.

“Name?”

“Peter Force.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Crew B, Canal Street tunnel. Tomorrow morning at eight. Your foreman is Josiah Flocombe.” He looks up.

Peter nods mutely.

“You're paid Fridays. Next.”

Dizzy with the suddenness of his employment, Peter nods again and descends the stairs to the street.

And the following morning, his breath steaming in the chill November air, he walks to the subway-works. Outside the rough wooden fence surrounding the excavation site he stops for a moment, hands in his pockets, hesitating.

Around him the streets are filled with a silver mist that fragments the city into a series of disconnected details: the tangle of wrought-iron fire escapes, indistinct shapes of hurrying pedestrians, sidewalk vendors beginning to open their stalls, a knot of beggar children encamped in an alleyway around a smoldering trash-can fire, the sound of horses' hooves, shouts, and the rumble of carriage wheels . . .

Inside the construction site, a line of workers are clambering out of the tunnel excavation. A reddish light is shining from somewhere underground and, silhouetted in this glow, wreathed with swirling clouds of stone-dust, each figure seems to be on fire. At least, this is the unsettling thought that comes to Peter as he watches—a vision that stays with him for a long moment, despite his efforts to blink it away.

More and more often, in recent months, he has been troubled by images like this: men plunging from cliffs, bodies torn apart beneath the impact of bullets, limbs slashed by invisible knives. But these are just meaningless daydreams, Peter tells himself. He has never put much faith in intuition or visionary stuff, has always been more comfortable with cautious reasoning and careful judgment.

And gradually, as he shakes his head, the normal world returns. Inside the construction site the workers rack their tools in wooden trestles before breaking off into little groups. They pull wrapped packages of bread and cheese from their pockets for the morning meal, smoking cigarettes twisted together with scraps of newspaper.

Peter takes a deep breath. He knows what he's doing here, he reminds himself, and has more experience with this work than most men. Still his heart is pounding with the painful self-consciousness of being watched as an outsider as he steps through the gate.

He finds the foreman—a stocky man with weary pouches beneath his eyes and thinning orange hair—sitting on a mound of rubble, a flask pressed to his lips and his head thrown back, fer vently as if in prayer.

“Are you Josiah Flocombe?” Peter asks.

The other man lowers his flask and wipes his mouth on his sleeve, regarding Peter with one bloodshot eye. Beneath this silent scrutiny, Peter looks away. Somewhere underground, pushing up through the soles of his feet, he can feel the throb and crack of drills eating into rock.

Finally, at a loss, he decides to repeat the question. “Are you—”

“I am,” the foreman interrupts. “I am that Josiah Flocombe. And who are you?”

“Peter Force,” Peter says.

“And what do you want, Peter Force?” Flocombe demands.

Growing up on the western frontier, a territory populated largely by crackpots, wanderers, and persons too eccentric for regular society, Peter is no stranger to odd characters, but something about the foreman—a certain gleam in his eyes, behind their pinkish glaze—still unnerves him. He tries to choose his next words carefully.

“That recruiter said—”

“Don't talk to me about the poxy, shit-for-brains recruiter!” Flocombe sits up straighter, his stare redoubling in reddish intensity.

“I only meant—”

“Listen to me, Peter Force.” The foreman's voice drops to a whisper, forcing Peter to lean into the alcoholic haze of Flocombe's breath. “There's something rotten in this project. It begins at your recruiter's office, and goes up from there. So—”

With a groaning effort Flocombe pushes himself to his feet and stands, wavering unsteadily. Peter takes a hasty step backward, out of the foreman's reach. “So best we understand each other now. Are you with those men? Or with me?”

Peter takes another step away from Flocombe, struck by the unpleasant thought he might be working for a madman—a category that seems to encompass half the population of New York with its mobs of mumbling beggars, every street corner marked by a preacher shouting at the moon.

“Well?”

Peter's lifelong sense of caution answers for him: “I'm here to work.”

This seems to satisfy Flocombe. He nods, the intensity of his stare evaporating into exhaustion. He runs a hand through his hair. “Well, then. You ever dug before?”

“No.” Peter shakes his head. “Done some blasting, though. Silver mines.”

Flocombe spits on the ground. “Not much blasting here. We use pneumatic hammers, picks, shovels. Handwork, you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You will.” The foreman's face is now unreadable. “Follow me.”

Peter follows Flocombe across the construction site to where a makeshift shanty, built from discarded boards and packing crates, has been erected against the side of a building. A fire is burning inside, a tin pipe through the roof belching smoke. He trails the foreman through a low doorway into a space that feels more familiar than any other that he has seen in New York—two bedraggled men sitting on split barrels by the small coal fire, piles of gunnysacks, rows of tools, soot-darkened wood: a scene interchangeable with countless others from his frontier days. While Flocombe rummages through the equipment stacked in one corner, Peter tries to wrestle down the sense of vertigo this recognition brings. That life is over, he reminds himself, done with and in the past.