last stages of the First Transcontinental Railroad. You know what that is?”
This was my father lately: red-eyed, jumpy, implacable. I turned away from him and stripped myself of my coat. “I’m in school, aren’t I?”
“It was the first railroad to connect the country,” he raved. “When the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines met at Promontory Summit in Utah in 1869, they drove in a ceremonial spike to mark the final tie.”
“Big deal.” I moved toward the sink and he kept right at my elbow.
“It is a big deal,” he snapped. “They actually drove in four spikes that day to commemorate various rail lines, but the last spike, the so-called Golden Spike, was seventeen-point-six-karat gold, engraved on all four sides by various bigwigs. This was a major event. Do you understand the significance? The conquest of the West. The annihilation of the Indians. It’s huge, monumental.”
There was nothing in the refrigerator. I threw the door shut in irritation—Harnett’s erratic behavior meant that once again it would be up to me to fill the shelves. Distantly I recognized the unjustness of such an arrangement. In my former life it had not been up to me to plan the menus of two people. I threw open a cabinet.
“The Golden Spike’s in a museum,” I muttered. It was about the only thing I remembered about the story and I hoped it would shut him up.
Harnett’s eyes blazed. “Right. But read here. Right here. In the last months of construction, Peter and Paul Eccles were hired—hired by President Ulysses S. Grant himself, who’d just taken office. You know why?”
I banged through empty cupboards. “Because they were cute?”
“Because Grant had gotten word of an Indian uprising that was going to bloody up the completion of the railroad. The Eccles brothers had fought with Grant about five years earlier at Shiloh, and they’d been living out West with the Indians ever since. When Grant hired them to keep the peace, they took the job—he was their friend and their president—but they didn’t know what taking the job really meant. You know what it meant?”
Slowly I faced him. I had some idea.
“It meant they had to kill Indians,” he said. “Lots of them. Hundreds, maybe. These Indians were their friends. Men they had hunted with, passed the pipe with. And now they were turning around and raising their government rifles and slaughtering them.”
I slumped against the counter, waiting for the inevitable grave at the end of the story. My hand crept to the side of the sink, where I could feel the scars of my calendar: five days, ten days, one month, two, four, six.
Harnett lifted the newspaper. “This is Thursday’s paper from Dundee, Iowa, and this here is an article about the town’s links to the Civil War. It talks about how Grant showed his gratitude by giving both Eccles brothers a replica of the Golden Spike with his personal thanks carved into the gold. Each spike was worth a small fortune then; what a museum would pay for them today, I don’t even know. Peter Eccles is buried in Dundee, and the town rumor is he took that spike to his grave.”
“Just Peter? What about Paul?”
Harnett snatched up some crumbling newsprint from the counter. “This is an issue from October 1988, from Miller’s Field, Illinois, where Paul Eccles is buried, just across the Mississippi, and it repeats the same rumor. That’s independent confirmation, kid. It’s true, all of it, I know it is. After the railroad was built, after they’d killed all their Indian brothers, after their president had given them these spikes that, in their eyes, were soaked in blood, they gave up on life, both of them. They put the length of Iowa between them and never spoke, and never, ever displayed the spikes, but they both kept them until they died, or so go the stories. Both the stories.”
He stood with the two papers in either hand, gloating over his discovery. My anger was dimming; I felt a familiar tingle of excitement and my eyes found the Root where she waited pensively in a darkened corner. “Which one do we go for?”
“If Boggs is doing his homework, he could be reading the same article about Peter. But he won’t have the Miller’s Field story to cross-reference. He’ll suspect it’s just rumor; he’ll hesitate. We won’t. We go now, to Dundee, and we get President Grant’s spike.”
Harnett was nearly slavering. The fact that my new semester had just begun didn’t even enter his