The Children's Blizzard(5)
Come to Nebraska, the Garden of Eden!
GAVIN WOODSON LEANED BACK IN his chair, the cigar between his fingers forgotten so the ash now was about an inch long. He had just pinned the Come to Nebraska newspaper clipping to the scarred wall to the left of his cluttered desk. Blots of ink marred the other clippings he’d been pawing through, so that this was the only one he’d managed to salvage. He didn’t know why he’d pinned it. It was pabulum, pure and simple. Maybe he’d decided to display it not as a trophy but as a taunting reminder of how far he’d sunk, here in Godforsaken Omaha.
He ought to be in New York right this minute, in the bustling offices of The World. Making plans for dinner at Delmonico’s, followed by drinks at the White Horse Tavern. Or he might stroll along Fifth Avenue and gape at the mansions, then watch a skating party in the park, maybe help a damsel in distress on the ice and hope it would lead to a carriage ride later. Or he could stay in his boardinghouse, a civilized place with musicales in the parlor in the evenings, a gentleman’s game of cards in the library, interesting and palatable food produced by dimpling young Irish girls who let you put an arm around them without automatically thinking you were engaged.
Instead, after a falling-out with The World’s then-new owner, Joseph Pulitzer, Gavin found himself in Godforsaken Omaha. He couldn’t say the name of the town any other way; it was never merely “Omaha.” It was godforsaken, pure and simple. As was this entire region, this desert, this prairie, these plains. And the poor sons of bitches he’d lured out here with his pen.
He glanced back up at the clipping and laughed. Jesus Christ, what a job he’d done! But that was actually his job—writing for the state’s boosters and railroad investors. Hammering out “news” articles that advertised this place as something it was not, pieces that got picked up by the wire services and placed in other newspapers or were used in pamphlets put out by the railroads. All with the same intent: To sell Nebraska. To sell all these acres, recently won from the Indians, to rubes and immigrants who didn’t know any better. To settle this state, grow the population—because there weren’t enough citizens in this country to fill up the ever-expanding territory, so they had to import bodies, pure and simple—and make the businessmen, the investors, and the railroads happy. And very rich. Because what good was a railroad snaking from coast to coast if there weren’t towns along the way, grain and wheat and corn and livestock to transport, not to mention people? How else would you get enough bodies inside a territory to turn it into a state? So the railroads and the boosters employed washed-up reporters to lure those people across an ocean. Reporters like Gavin.
Gavin reached for his pen with a sigh. His desk here at the Omaha Daily Bee was the smallest, his cubbyhole the farthest away from the editor’s desk. He wasn’t technically employed by the Bee, but he was given a desk here, for appearance’s sake. After all, to the public, he was a journalist.
But he wasn’t, and he knew it. And while that had once outraged him, he was growing used to the insulating feeling—like a ponderous buffalo coat keeping him warm while simultaneously weighing him down—of acquiescence. He even felt, after a couple of whiskeys at the Gilded Lily down the street, rather noble for admitting his failings. Wasn’t it best to acknowledge the limitations of a life and find a way to live within them, rather than constantly trying to push up against a fixed fate, like those ignorant sodbusters who’d believed his seductive prose, trying and failing every year to make a garden out of a desert?
It sure as hell was, Gavin had convinced himself. Most of the time.
“Writing something up about that sleighing party?” Dan Forsythe was standing next to him, in his usual sloppy attire—frayed, black-stained cuffs (he refused to wear paper cuffs to protect his shirts from the ink); heavy trousers, like farmers wore; heavy boots, too, that Gavin could easily imagine covered in muck and manure. Yet he was the star reporter for the Bee, the publisher’s pet.
“Yep.”
“Hadn’t you better go out there with them, then?”
Gavin had to laugh at this. “Why? That’s not what I’m paid to do and you know it. Nobody wants the truth from me. I’ll give ’em a pretty picture—the gay party, accompanied by a brass band, rode triumphantly east on Douglas Street toward the river, the ladies’ velvet outfits—one bright red, jaunty cap in particular stood out—providing splashes of color against the pure white of the gently banked snow.”
Forsythe laughed, and Gavin even enjoyed the admiration in the man’s eyes; he couldn’t help it, he was proud of his imaginative powers, even though they had no place in real journalism.
“You’ve got it about right,” Forsythe said, still chuckling. “I saw them heading toward the river myself, right down to the jaunty red cap. And the brass band in the last sleigh. It’s a helluva party—the whole town is having a holiday. Must have been a couple of hundred sleighs. The mayor’s even out there.”
“Well, it is big news, that bridge. It’ll be good for everyone.” Omaha was on the west bank of the Missouri River; Council Bluffs, Iowa, on the east. Originally, Council Bluffs was the bigger town; it was assumed that the new Union Pacific Railroad would build its terminus there. But Omaha won out, and there was a bitter rivalry between the two. Still, this new bridge could only help both towns. Previously, horses and wagons had to take a ferry across in summer, or trust the ice in winter; the only bridge had been the train bridge.