Chapter 32

32

1913

SIX YEARS LATER, THE SPINE OF THE MOUNTAINS WAS SEVERED AT LAST. AT THE base of the Culebra Cut, steam shovel 222 and steam shovel 230, digging toward each other from opposite directions, met in the depths. The path had been cleared.

In September, John Oswald stood on the lock wall and watched as a tugboat festooned with flags approached from Colón. He was surrounded by thousands of onlookers, all of whom had come to witness the first vessel ever to pass through any set of the locks. Despite the reports in the papers, no one around him that day was talking about the growing possibility of war in Europe. They were focused solely on the canal. A photographer hung from a cableway over the middle of the channel, waiting for the little boat to chug through. There was not a cloud in the sky. As he stood, John considered the report he had left behind on his desk. Malaria had declined in the zone, but he had not managed to eradicate it. “Not yet,” Marian would have said. The belief that he might is why he stayed. Maybe it was still possible. Every scientist was only one essential discovery away, after all. John watched as water (as well as a number of frogs) bubbled up through holes in the floor of the first lock chamber. It took a long time to fill. But when the water level in the chamber was the same as the water level of the sea, the steel lock gates—massive double doors that had been manufactured in Pittsburgh, John had heard—slowly cranked open. The tugboat inched through. Once the boat was in the chamber, those same gates closed behind it, penning it in. More water was added, raising the boat up to the level of the subsequent chamber. Again, the gates at the fore opened, the boat slid through, the gates at the rear closed, water surged in, the boat rose. The procedure was repeated once more—a perfect staircase of water—until, in the third chamber, the water level matched the level of the new lake. When the final gates opened and released the small boat, the crowd broke out in cheers. John did not. It was a tremendous achievement. Miraculous to see it operate exactly as the engineers intended it should, but even on the sunniest days, John existed in a cloud of gloom, and the most he could summon was a smile, which no one saw.

As the tugboat navigated the locks, Lucille fed a piece of fabric through her sewing machine, an oak-topped treadle model with a cast-iron foot pedal that she had purchased in part using the money Ada had earned in Panama. Whereas it used to take her a week to sew a single dress, the machine allowed her to finish a garment, sometimes even two, in a day, and those garments, still in her signature bold fabrications, were so impeccably stitched, so cleanly finished, that people were keen to buy them. Millicent sat next to her at the hearth, sewing buttons by hand, as Lucille had taught her. Lucille glanced up to take stock of Millicent’s progress. Ada had no interest in sewing, a fact that Lucille had come to accept. Ada was and always would be an own-way child. Millicent, though, had a knack, and had become a wonderful seamstress in her own right. With the buttons that day she was using a decorative stitch that not even Lucille would have thought to add.

That same afternoon, Ada stepped off Dr. Leonard Jenkins’s buggy where it had come to a stop on Sweetham Road. She dusted off her dress and followed Dr. Jenkins into the house of a woman who had called him about her awful stomach pains. She watched as he gently pressed the woman’s abdomen through her blouse. After so many years as his apprentice, Ada knew just what he was feeling for. When the woman yelped, Ada said, “The appendix?”

Dr. Jenkins smiled at her. “Precisely.”

“Is it inflammation or an obstruction?” Ada asked.

“Good question. How can we tell?”

“Whether a fever is present.”

“And is it?”

Ada stepped forward and put her hand to the woman’s forehead. “Yes.”

Later at supper, Ada would tell her mother and sister how she had successfully diagnosed the woman. At no point that evening would anyone mention the milestone in Panama, because although reports of it ran in The Barbados Advocate , none of them had read about it.

At the end of his shift, Clement took the train to Gatún, where the tugboat, looking like a toy upon the vast water, was gliding out through the final lock chamber. When the cheer rose up from the crowd, Clement lightly pumped his fist and cheered with them. He felt a complicated pride. It was thrilling to see with his own eyes that the canal truly worked. He felt the urge to tell the spectators around him that he had been part of making it happen, but he did not. When the cheering died down, Clement stepped away from the crowd. He wondered what would become of him now that the project was nearing its end. He had risen to the rank of lead switchman, but, hampered by various injuries and expenses he had not foreseen, he had never made the kind of fortune he’d hoped for, and he was embarrassed to go back to Jamaica, where everyone could see that. As the day darkened, Clement walked back to the train, jingling the coins in his pocket. He did have enough to treat himself to a celebratory meal at Café Antoinette, at least. It was a modest establishment but a lively one, always packed with people from Jamaica and Antigua and Barbados, people like him who had come to Panama and stayed. The woman who owned it made the best callaloo in town.

In the soft light of dusk, Francisco paddled home from the market, where Joaquín had paid him for twenty-two good fish and had lamented the day. “So they have done it?” Joaquín had said. “The first boat went through?” He had refused to say the name of the tugboat, though both Francisco and Joaquín knew very well what it was called: Gatún.

Six months after the initial protest, the entire town of Gatún had been moved to the opposite bank of the river. Now, Joaquín was consumed by a rumor that the town was going to be moved once again, this time to an area completely outside the zone. “Do you know,” he had asked Francisco that day, “how Valentina says they want to use that land after everyone is expelled? For cattle grazing. Cattle, my friend! Apparently they like the cows more than they like us.” Francisco, as usual, had patiently listened, then bid his friend farewell.

The warm air blanketed Francisco as he rowed. At some point he caught a whiff of violets, which came to him every now and again. “Hello, Esme,” he said. As Francisco pulled through the water, he told her everything that had happened since the last time they had talked. His knees had started popping when he got out of bed in the morning. Yesterday, his right shoulder had been sore. Omar was well, and there was a girl from Santa Ana that lately he had mentioned quite a bit. “So that could be something,” he said. Francisco chattered for as long as he smelled the violets because he knew that Esme was with him. She had returned to him that day in the Cut and had not left him since.

On the floor of the boat, along with Francisco’s reel and net, were two white fish that he would cook for dinner that night. With the money Omar had earned from working in the canal, he had bought himself books, a mountain of books that he studied all day and all night, having enrolled in a program that was training him to become a schoolteacher one day. Every night the two of them ate together while Omar told Francisco the things he had learned—that the earth was 2.2 billion years old, that butterflies used their feet to taste, that the earliest poems were carved into clay—all the things he hoped to pass along to his students and in the meantime passed along to Francisco. They talked and debated and disagreed and laughed. It was always Francisco’s favorite part of the day, with the world at his back, to paddle across the bay toward the shore and go home.