Chapter 4

4

DOWN THE HILL FROM WHERE THE OSWALDS LIVED, PAST THE TRAIN STATION, past the town of Empire with its machine shops and clubhouse and commissary and post office and stores, down a steep terrace of 154 steps, down, down, down into the Cordillera Mountains, into the base of a man-made canal that was presently 40 feet deep and 420 feet wide and growing by the day, thousands of men worked in the rain, shoveling mud, wrapping dynamite, laying railroad track, and swinging pickaxes at the sheared rock walls.

Every morning these men, who had come from all over the world—from places like Holland, Spain, Puerto Rico, France, Germany, Cuba, China, India, Turkey, England, Argentina, Peru, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Martinique, Antigua, Trinidad, Grenada, St. Kitts, Nevis, Bermuda, Nassau, and Barbados most of all—converged in one place: the Culebra Cut. They poured in on labor trains and scrambled down the mountainside, and when the whistle blew, they worked. From sunrise to sundown, they opened the earth. They stood in mud that came up to their knees. They breathed in coal smoke from the locomotives that ceaselessly shuttled past. Their ears pounded with the hammer of rock drills that echoed against the carved mountainsides. Their hands blistered and bled from squeezing the handles of their picks and their shovels for hours on end. Their legs ached, their shoulders burned, their backs felt as though they were breaking, about to snap in two. They were wet all the time. They could never get dry. They were covered with mud. They could never get clean. Their boots fell apart. They shivered with fever. They sang songs in the rain. They swung their arms and they shoveled again and again.

***

OMAR AQUINO, SEVENTEEN years old, stood in the Cut and wiped his arm across his brow. It was near the end of September, and rain poured off the brim of his hat. He felt a wave roll through his head from the front to the back, and he stood still, waiting for it to pass. The waves had been coming all day, making him dizzy for a second or two.

“You okay?” the man working next to him asked.

“Yes,” Omar said.

“You need rest?”

The man’s name was Berisford. Twenty years old, wearing a red handkerchief tied around his neck, he had arrived from Barbados only a few days ago.

Behind them, a locomotive pulling a chain of empty one-sided flatcars rattled on the track, then came to a stop. Steam shovels lowered their necks to scoop up the rock and clay that the men had picked loose, then rotated until their jaws hovered over the idling flatcar beds and, with a crash, dumped it all down. When the flatcars were full, the yardmaster would give the signal and the locomotive would drag the cars off, hauling the spoil away. Seamlessly and without pause, a new chain of empty flatcars would roll in, ready for more. All day long this was the rhythm. The men swung, the steam shovels scooped, the trains rolled in, the trains rolled out.

A strange sort of music, Omar sometimes thought, but one that he liked. Six months ago he had walked to the administrative offices of the canal and asked for a job. All the way there, he had practiced what he intended to say. “I want to help build your canal.” Omar had taught himself English well enough to read it in books, but he rarely spoke it aloud. The man at the administrative office had asked where he was from and when Omar said, “Panamá,” the man had looked stunned. “We don’t get many Panamanians walking in here.” Omar did not know whether he was supposed to respond to that, so he said again what he had rehearsed. “I want to help build your canal.” The man had crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, making an appraisal.

Omar was slender and not terribly strong, but he was willing, and if the man had asked why Omar wanted the job, he was prepared to say that it was because he believed the canal would be the future of Panamá, that by having such an important waterway here his country would forever be connected to the rest of the world. But the real reason Omar wanted the job—the reason he never would have said out loud to the man—was that his life so far had been small and lonely. Every day he woke up without anywhere to go or anyone to see. He wanted to give purpose to his purposeless days, wanted to be around people and stop feeling lonely so much of the time. What better way to do that than to join the biggest undertaking known to man, to which thousands of people had come, and which happened to be occurring in the very place where he lived?

In the end, however, the man had not asked. He had merely shrugged and said, “What the hell, we’ll give it a try.”

That night, when Omar told his father what he had done, his father had laughed as though Omar had told him a joke. When Omar held up the brass identification tag that had been given to him, stamped number 14721, his father turned serious and said, “It is true?” Instantly, his expression went from serious to panic-stricken. He kept staring as Omar silently tucked the tag back into his pocket. “You are one of them now?” his father asked, furrowing his brows. “No, no, no!” He paced back and forth as he repeatedly clapped his hands in fury. Through the clapping and the shouting, Omar had tried to explain. He just wanted to see what it was like, this project that no one could stop talking about. He wanted to meet other people. He wanted something meaningful to do every day. The way his father had fishing, he would have this. But his father would not listen to him. He kept clapping and squawking like a deranged parrot, saying, “No, absolutely not. No, no, no,” until finally Omar understood that nothing he said would be of any use. He stopped trying to explain and stood quietly while his father continued clapping for another half-minute. Then his father struck his hands together one last time and declared, “?Ya! ?Basta! No more!” Those were the last words his father had said to him. No more. Now nearly six months had passed, and neither Omar nor his father had spoken to each other since.

Omar set his pickax in the mud and leaned on the handle. He took a deep breath. Along with the waves in his head, he kept having chills.

Berisford asked him again if he needed to rest. Before Omar could answer, Clement, who was alongside them, said, “No such thing as rest. Not here anyway. Only men resting is them that dead.”

Clement, who was from Jamaica, had always been surly, but something about Berisford made him quarrelsome, too.

Ignoring him, Berisford looked at Omar and said, “You need my kerchief? Wipe your face?”

“I am okay,” Omar said, forcing a smile. He had his own handkerchief in the back pocket of his trousers, but he appreciated Berisford’s concern. In his few days on the job, Berisford had been friendlier to Omar than anyone else.

Omar took one more deep breath and wrapped his hands around his pick. As he swung, he watched their foreman, Miller, walk down the line through the mud in his tall rubber boots. All day long he paced and shouted at them in American English as he puffed on Havana cigars.

“One million cubic yards this month, boys,” Miller yelled over the grind of the shovels and the patter of rain. “That is the goal!”

Next to Omar, Berisford widened his eyes. “One million, he say?”

Clement said, “Too much for you, eh?”

“No.”

Clement tsked. “This work not for the weak.”

Berisford gave a mighty swing. Then he straightened up, looked directly at Clement, and said, “How come them let you do it, then?”

Prince, a Trinidadian who worked with them, too, laughed. Clement just glowered before he swung again.

Unsteadily, Omar raised his pick over his head and cast it back. He felt the weight of the iron head tug down over his shoulder. It was heavier today, or else he lacked the strength he had other days.

He wished his father would speak to him again. There was no one else in the house, after all, for Omar to speak to. His mother had died when he was only a few months old. Of an illness, his father had told him once when he asked—an illness that could not be cured. Omar had never known her, although at times he told himself that he had. He had swum between her bones, after all. He had known her from the inside out. It was true he did not remember her, though. Instead, all his memories of childhood involved his father: his father sanding the wood from a tree, his father sprinkling the rooster feed out back, his father trimming Omar’s hair over the basin, his father licking his fingers after a meal—and his father fishing, of course. That was the principal thing. Fishing was so much a part of his father that without it, Omar hardly knew who his father would be.

Every day at dawn his father walked out of their house at the edge of the bay and untied his boat and paddled out and cast nets into the sea. When his father was gone, to keep himself busy and because he wanted to help, Omar swept the floors and hung the wash and cut the weeds and cleaned the tools. He picked limes from the trees and squeezed them till they were pulpy and dry.

He would have liked to go to school, but the nearest primary school was too far away, and even if one had been closer his father did not see the use. “Schools do not teach fishing,” his father said. Every once in a while when Omar was young, his father made a point to show him how to wrap a handline, how to sharpen a hook, how to sliver bait. These were the lessons worth learning. And they were all preparation for the day his father finally took Omar out on the boat.

Omar had risen early that morning, eager for something new, something different to do with his time—and he had thought he was ready. But from the moment he stepped into the boat, Omar had found himself stricken with fear, an unnameable fear that only grew stronger the farther they went. Having grown up by the bay, he knew how to swim, but he was strangely petrified of the water, it seemed. Eventually his hands were shaking so much that he had trouble getting them to do what he wanted. There was the way he tangled the net, the way he was suddenly incapable of tying a knot, the way his stomach turned each time the boat swayed. The fear had a hold on him until he and his father returned to the shore. And the way his father looked at him then—with pity—was something that Omar would not forget. He knew he had failed. His father had never taken him fishing again.

When Omar was not doing chores, he spent much of his time wandering outside by himself. He talked to the frogs that squatted beneath the spiny aloe plants or to the butterflies that flitted among the tall grass alongside the dirt road. The frogs stayed in one place when he spoke, so Omar crouched down next to them but did not pick them up. The butterflies, however, were fitful, so Omar caught them and cupped them between his palms, feeling their fluttering wings while he whispered his secrets or sorrows before letting them go.

Once in a while, Omar climbed down to the shore and listened to the scrabble of the crabs and the shush of the waves. He stood on the sand and stared into the distance, trying to catch a glimpse his father somewhere on the water, straining to see any flash of the boat in the sun. Sometimes he thought he saw something, but it was always too far away for him to be sure.

In the evenings when his father returned to the house from a day spent at sea, one of them cooked the fish he had caught, and together they ate at the same table, and if his father was not too exhausted, they talked. The conversation tended toward ordinary things—his father’s physical pains, how many fish he had caught, whether or not Omar had brought in the wash. Occasionally his father would grumble about someone he had encountered in the market, someone who had done something in a way his father believed it should not be done. “What is this world coming to?” his father would ask, and Omar would say, “I don’t know, Papi.”

Now, though, when they were both in the house at night, they avoided each other. His father still brought home fish and cooked it for dinner, but he left Omar’s food on the table and took his outside where he sat on a barrel and ate with the hens and roosters behind the house. Omar sat at the table by himself, and when he finished eating he silently walked to his bedroom and lay down on his palm-stuffed mattress and stared at the ceiling, achingly listening to the sounds of his father shuffling through the house, until he fell asleep.

By the time Omar woke in the morning, his father was gone again, out on the sea.

***

“FASTER NOW!” MILLER yelled from the berm.

Down the line, someone in the gang—Miller could not tell who—started to sing. It might have been a different song from the one they’d been singing before or it might have been the same. Miller did not know, nor did he care. He was willing to tolerate the singing if it made the men work faster. There had been a change of command not long ago, and the new fellow in charge of everything here was an Army man, so there could be no mucking around.

Miller threw down the stub of his cigar and drew another from the pocket of his overalls, cupping his hand as he lit it. The rain had worked its way down into his boots, and his toes were slick when he wiggled them. He took a few quick puffs of the cigar before yelling again.

“There’s a week to go before the end of this month. Now is the time to push, you hear? The boys at Culebra are closing in, but we can best them if we try.”

Each week Miller made it a point to look at The Canal Record , where the excavation totals for various segments of the line were printed for all to see. No single division had yet managed one million cubic yards in a month, but it was a goal within reach, and Miller wanted to be the one responsible for reaching it. He imagined the sorts of accolades and recognition that would come his way if he did. It was possible The Canal Record would write a profile of him, even run his photograph alongside it.

“They say,” he went on, “that this will be the deepest cut to the earth ever made by man. Consider that, now! You’ll be part of history, see?”

Maybe that would inspire them to work faster, Miller thought. It was history in the making, wasn’t it? The president himself had said as much. It was the destiny of the United States to build the canal. The dream that had begun four hundred years earlier was theirs to fulfill. And if they could do it, they would be a major power—indeed the major power—on the world’s stage. With this one single waterway, the United States would be able to control the shipping routes, and thus the trade, and thus damn near everything across the whole of the globe.

Miller looked again at the men under his watch—island men by and large. He’d heard many a reason why they had been recruited here. They were accustomed to the climate, they spoke English, they could better withstand disease. In the end, he didn’t care so long as they got the work done.

Miller promenaded along the berm and watched the men swing their picks as they sang. Their job was to feed the steam shovels that rumbled behind them, hungry for dirt. Only Americans were allowed to handle the shovels, and each had an engineer high up in its cab as well as a craneman balanced out on the arm. Either was a job Miller might have liked to try himself—they carried a certain prestige—but as it was, he was stuck down here on the ground.

Before coming to Panama, Miller had been a railroad man. His father had died when Miller was thirteen, leaving his mother and him in a pinch as far as money was concerned. It was his mother who raised him, a broomstick of a woman who made the meanest sweet potato pie known across three counties. Miller was a handful, and he was the first to acknowledge that she had done her best, but after a certain point, there was nothing more she could do. Miller was fighting at school, roughing up anyone who looked at him sideways. After school, he kept fighting in the streets. He was foam-mouthed angry, and for the longest, stupidest time he didn’t know why. Perfectly obvious, of course. The absence of his father was a force, a ripping gale of wind that nearly tore him in two. When he dropped out of school, his mother pleaded with him to go back, but schooling, Miller had come to believe, was not made for a boy like him. From what he had seen, it was just a means of getting people to behave in agreed-upon ways while fooling them into thinking it was for their own good. Miller was certain his life had other things in store.

He fell in with the railway when he was all of sixteen. He was aimless, and the railroad gave him a direction to follow, somewhere to go. It took him first to Charleston, where, in the employ of the newly formed East Shore Terminal Company, he helped build a waterfront spur. Two years later, he helped open an artery so that trains carrying cotton could get where they needed to go. He saw firsthand how important that artery was. Without the artery, there could be no running blood. Movement was key. Transportation was all. Those were lessons that Miller would never forget.

In 1893, sensing it was time to move on, Miller ventured westward, sucking freedom into his lungs. As his chest expanded, so did the country. The railroads offered hazardous work. He’d seen men killed trying to couple together cars with a link and pin, men sandwiched and crushed, skulls and bones broken like twigs. But if you had luck on your side, then the pay was worth the risk.

The railroad took Miller out through the Corn Belt with its acres of long prairie grass. Most of the folks there were farmers, working the land, making good use of it, which was the same thing he felt he was doing when he laid railroad track. What was the land for if not to support the men who walked upon it?

Those were the days when the great wheel of innovation was turning with speed. Telephones could suddenly carry a person’s voice across space. Electricity somehow bolted through wires and lit up people’s homes. And horseless carriages were coming, from what Miller heard. American ingenuity was on the advance.

Miller landed in South Dakota, where he spent a few years among the Black Hills and slept at night beneath a basin of stars. Other railroad men came and went. There was Riley from Georgia, who cooked black-eyed peas most nights over an open flame; Lee from Kansas, who carried a Winchester rifle engraved with his initials; a man who introduced himself as Bill Jones, though everyone knew this was just a name cowboys went by when they did not want to give their own. Most of the men were bachelors, either by their own design or by God’s, and after a long day of work there were always a few, including him, who would tromp into the nearest town to find a saloon and spend their earnings on a much-needed drink. Miller pushed farther westward, but railroad opportunities were dwindling by then, the bulk of the track in the United States already having been laid. By the time he reached California, he had the feeling he had come to the end of the world.

That’s when Panama beckoned. All the men Miller knew were talking about it. The U.S. government was hiring railroad men by the hundreds, having them lay the track that was essential for moving dirt and machinery through the growing canal. To be associated with the enterprise was to be granted a certain cachet. Plus, the money was good and the housing was free.

Miller started off doing railroad work, but when the majority of that work was done, he took a job as a foreman instead. The pay was fair, but he had thought there would be more to it than keeping men in line all day long, sunrise to sundown. That was what it amounted to, though, his great contribution to the great Panama Canal. What’s more, it was hotter than Hades and wetter than the world during Noah’s big flood. Hell’s Gorge, the men called it, and between the black smoke and the heat and the slime and the rocks and the constant deafening clamor, the name was certainly apt. No one had warned him about all of that. Instead, what he’d heard about the canal was all the trumped-up huzzah: The greatest feat of engineering the world has ever seen! The future of civilization! The salvation of the tropics! He had bought into it all, and now it was what he was trying to sell.

***

HIGH ABOVE WHERE Miller stood and where the men toiled, a group of tourists were walking along the ridge overlooking the Cut. The women, in cream-colored dresses, held parasols over their heads to protect themselves from the rain.

“You see them?” Berisford asked Omar.

“Yes,” Omar said as he tried to shake off yet another chill. They were coming more frequently now.

“Don’t seem they seeing us, though,” Berisford said, gazing up.

A man named Joseph, who Omar knew had been a preacher in Jamaica before joining their gang, said, “We part of the scenery, like so much else.”

From the berm, Miller took note of the one man on the line who was standing still, looking up, and he turned to see what had captured the man’s attention. At the top of the ridge, he saw some pretty American ladies walking in the rain. Well, he should have known. Miller took a minute to admire them, too, before walking down the berm. His boots squelched in the mud and reminded him of that unpleasant slickness between his toes. When he had planted himself right in front of the man, Miller pinched the cigar out of his mouth and said, “You see something you like?”

Berisford, still squinting up at the tourists, was so startled that he nearly dropped his pick.

“Pretty, ain’t they?” Miller went on.

Omar swung his pick while he watched out of the corner of his eye. Clement and Joseph and every other man on the line kept swinging without pause, back and down, back and down, keeping the rhythm. Prince whistled along.

“You hear me talking to you?” Miller said.

“Yes, sir,” Berisford said.

“Well, I asked you a question.”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Don’t know what? Whether they’re pretty or not? Wasn’t that you who was just looking up there?”

“I can’t recall, sir.”

“Can’t recall?” Miller shook his head. “Listen here. Their pretty ain’t made for you, boy. Keep your eyes off them and down here on your work.”

“Yes, sir.”

Omar was still watching, and he saw Clement turn his head just enough to catch a glimpse, too. In the rain, with his pick on his shoulder and his sopping-wet hat on his head and his red handkerchief tied around his neck, Berisford stood.

“Well, get to it, then. There’s one million cubic yards of dirt to be dug this month—if you recall.” Miller grinned.

Slowly, without looking at Miller or anyone else, Berisford raised his pick off his shoulder and swung.

***

MIDMORNING, AS HE did every day, the Quinine Man tramped through the Cut. Omar had never been happier to see him approach. He hoped a cupful of quinine would help stop the feverish chills he had been feeling.

“Quinine!” the man called.

Berisford groaned. “Lordie! Again?”

Prince stopped whistling and said, “He come every day.”

“But I don’t like what he bring. Such a nasty-nasty taste.”

“What you care how it taste?” Clement said. “Quinine keep malaria away. Just drink it down like a man.”

“You saying I not a man?”

“No. I saying drink the quinine so you don’t get sick.”

“No pay if you sick,” Prince said. Then he corrected himself. “Unless you American.”

Clement nodded. “Americans fall sick, they still earning money in the hospital bed.”

“But not us?” Berisford asked.

Prince shrugged. “Such is life in the canal.”

The Quinine Man stopped in front of Omar and poured the bitter liquid from a canteen into a small paper cup. Omar, shivering in the rain, took it and drank it as fast as he could. The Quinine Man poured more and gave Berisford and Clement one cup each. Clement took his and drank it all in one gulp. He made a show of smacking his lips and smiling at Berisford when he was through.

Berisford held the cup between his fingers and peered at it with disgust.

“For your health!” the Quinine Man encouraged.

“You can do it,” Omar said.

Berisford sighed. “I rather it be rum.”

“We all rather that,” Prince said, chuckling.

Joseph nodded his assent.

Berisford kept staring down at the cup, and Omar watched with dread as Miller ambled over.

“There a problem?” Miller asked, after he took the stump of a cigar out of his mouth.

“He don’t wanna drink,” the Quinine Man said.

“That so?”

Miller pinned his gaze on the man before him and sighed. “You again. Why you always causing trouble for me?”

Berisford stayed quiet.

“Drink the quinine,” Miller said.

“I drink it yesterday, sir.”

“Well, hallelujah, but it comes every day. Now, I know God might have shorted you brains, but that means today you have to drink it again.”

Berisford did not move.

“Goddamn it, hurry up now, you’re wasting precious time.”

In the drizzling rain Berisford looked down at the cup in his hand. In the parish of St. Andrew, where he was from, there was a pond he used to visit sometimes on Sunday afternoons after church. As long as no one was watching, he would take off his clothes and step into the water and swim. The water, dappled with shadows and sun, had as many cool spots as warm, and the sensation of his bare skin moving through them both was one he enjoyed. It was a different kind of wet than standing out in the rain, and he wondered if it was different because one was a wet he chose and one was a wet that fell down upon him whether he liked it or not.

“I got to move on,” the Quinine Man piped up.

Inwardly, Omar pled with Berisford to drink. He imagined Prince and Clement and Joseph were all thinking the very same thing.

“Drink the damn stuff now,” Miller said, emphasizing each word.

Finally, Berisford raised the cup to his lips and sipped.

Miller smiled. “That’s the way. We’re taking care of you, see?”

Omar saw Clement shake his head as the Quinine Man filled another cup and moved on down the line.

“Back to work now,” Miller said before he walked away, too.