The End of the Line

To Jenn, Silas, and Rio: my family.

With gratitude to those who helped build this country by toiling on the
CPR
, and for whom this undertaking was the end of the line.

DEEK PENNER THUMBED THE WORN
edges of his hand of cards, his twisted and blackened fingers stiff despite his youth. He was unaware that before the night was over he would be dead, his face pulverized by the ragged edge of a star drill, his body left in a heap by the frozen banks of the Bow River.

He glanced around the table illuminated by two oil lamps hanging from wires affixed to the ceiling of the rough-hewn log cabin. The seven men assembled for their nightly game of cards seemed like ghosts. Faces drawn and gaunt, eyes dark under the shadow of their weary brows, these men were among the five hundred who had come to populate the railway siding of Holt City, just below the crest of the Kicking Horse Pass late in the fall of 1883. It was here that the steel rail had reached on December 8th, the snow already amassing in great heaps along the path of the Canadian Pacific mainline.

Penner regarded the men, and then glanced again at his hand. “One,” he finally said, discarding an ace high into the pile of cast offs, drawing a five of clubs, ruining the full house he had put together. He let a faint smile curl the corner of his cracked lips. He had to work with these men; he couldn't afford to win every hand.

As they often did, the men were gathered in the comparatively spacious log cabin of Frank Dodds. Like Penner, Dodds was a foreman on the winter operation. But unlike Penner, Dodds viewed the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway as his best chance to get rich: Frank Dodds was a moonshiner.

The hand of cards was played and a nervous, slender man in a bowtie surprised himself and everybody else by winning the pot. “Blind luck,” slurred Dodds, his disgust with the slight man obvious.

“You played a good hand; take your winnings,” said Penner, as the fellow pulled the coins and tattered script towards him, wiping his brow despite the cold.

“Time to get me another cup of
tea
,” said Dodds, standing up abruptly and knocking the table so that the paper money and coins the winner was pulling toward himself slid towards the floor. Several of the players' stacks of money were sent flying so that everybody had to scramble for their coins and paper.

“Take it easy, Frank,” said Penner in a low voice.

Dodds took an awkward step backwards from the table and seemed to have trouble focusing for a moment. “Shut your yap,” he growled at Penner, and then turned towards the tin pot next to the stove in the corner.

Two of Dodds' sawyers picked up their cups and made their way to where he was pouring his elixir. Dodds filled their cups and they each took a satisfying drink. It was obvious from the contented look on the men's faces that Dodds' tea was in fact the moonshine everybody in camp knew he brewed.

Penner shook his head. Whiskey made a man act like a fool, he thought. In the middle of the winter, when all that needed doing was cutting timber for ties and putting away cordwood for fuel, it was bad enough. But in less than two months there would be ten thousand men in this camp, all needing organizing into teams to make the ambitious descent down Kicking Horse Pass. Those men would need their wits, or more than a few of them would be killed. It was to be a dangerous summer even without whiskey. The bottle would make it downright treacherous.

And Deek Penner knew that whiskey wasn't the only thing that would make the summer of 1884 deadly serious for those blasting tunnels down the limestone slopes of the Kicking Horse.

The room was silent. The bowtied clerk looked from one man to the next.

“You should leave it alone,” said a man who worked for Penner, looking uncomfortably at his hands.

“What's that?” asked Penner.

“Leave it. Ain't none of your business.”

“What ain't none of my business? Its just tea . . .” sneered Penner.

The three men found their seats. The stench of whiskey was palpable in the close cabin.

“Let's play poker,” said Dodds, sitting down next to the mousey clerk. “You think you can pull another flush?” he asked, his breath like a heavy fog over the table.

Penner took up the cards, shuffled and cut the deck, and dealt the hand. The betting commenced, and both of Dodds' sawyers and then Penner's man folded. Dodds raised the bet, his eyes glassy in the half light of the lantern. Beneath heavy lids he stared at Penner.

“Let's see your cards,” Penner said when the round was done.

“Got me a gunshot straight,” Dodds said, showing a seven, nine, ten, and jack of clubs.

“Not so fast,” said Penner. He put one card down in front of him. It was the six of hearts. Next the eight of hearts, nine, and jack of hearts. Without even a hint of a smile, he placed the ace of hearts on the table.

“Son of a bitch,” said the man who managed the stables, sitting next to Dodds. “He beat you with a flush. Deek beat you with a flush!”

Dodds wheeled on him, his bulk toppling the table, cards, coins, and script sent in a shower to the floor. The three tin cups of whiskey splashed across the table and onto the smooth planks under foot. Dodds' fist connected with the man's nose and a crimson spray of blood erupted from his mangled face. The stable manager was on his feet, backing towards the wall of the log cabin, as Dodds advanced on him, yelling incoherently and throwing punches at the man's face and body.

The rest of the men leapt to their feet, the lantern knocked swinging so that the light in the room swooned.

“Get off him, Frank!” Penner yelled. Dodds' sawyers grabbed at his wildly careening arms, each of them catching elbows in the face and chin as they tried to grapple their foreman as he continued to rain down blows on the smaller man.

Dodds' men finally managed to seize his arms, and Penner shouted “That's enough goddamn it! That's enough!” He wrapped his own huge arms around all three men and pushed them away from the bloodied man, who stood with his face a gory smear, his hands up in front of his mouth. The others rushed in to attend to him as he slouched over and spit a stream of blood onto the floor of the cabin. There were two teeth in the puddle he expelled.

“Get your goddamned hands off me!” Dodds yelled.

“Not till you settle down!” said Penner, his breathing hard but his voice measured.

Dodds struggled, but his sawyers held his arms and Penner held all three of them against the wall of the cabin. On the opposite side of the room, the bloodied stableman slowly stood up, wiping his face with the sleeve of his coat. “You knocked my teeth out.” he said matter-of-factly. “And you broke my nose!”

“Lucky that's all I did, you snivelling prick.”

“I didn't do nothing to you.”

“You're a pansy. You had it coming. You was making fun of my hand. You got what you deserved.” Dodds' body was relaxing, his words slurring.

“Frank, you're a disgrace,” said Penner, unhanding the man and stepping away from him. “It's really me you want to punch, but instead you pick on a man half your size. You're a goddamned coward.”

The sawyers eyed their boss and slowly released his arms. Dodds stood five feet from Penner. It was true that Penner was the biggest man in the room. Even with his heavy coat on, it was easy to see that his girth was massive.

“What's worse,” said Penner, turning to face Dodds, “is that you're a drunk and a moonshiner. You're supposed to be a leader for these men, and instead you're making illegal whiskey, robbing them of their hard-earned pay, and turning this camp into a bunch of drunkards.” Dodds just grinned. “You're a foreman, Frank. Don't that mean a thing to you?”

“Don't get all high and mighty on me, Penner.”

“Well then, do your job!”

“I do my job. Cutting ties. Cutting fuel. Don't tell me how to do my job. I do it just fine.”

“With no Red Coats for a hundred miles, our job is more than packing explosives or cutting ties, and you goddamned well know it Frank. Our job is to keep this camp dry. Make sure that when spring comes and this snow melts, we can push the end of the line down the Big Hill and get this job done. Instead, you're making whiskey enough to keep ten thousand men drunk for the summer. Ain't a one of them that will be able to work once you're through with them.”

Dodds ran a hand across his face, smearing saliva from the corner of this mouth across his beard. “You are such a high and almighty bastard, Penner. Think you're a big man. Think you're everybody's boss. I got news for you, boy. You ain't
my
boss. You're just a lick-finger of a man. You just keep your nose out of my business, or you're going to be damned sorry.”

“You're making this camp drunk, beating on other men. That's my business now, Frank.” Penner stood erect before Dodds. “It's my business now.”

“What do you aim to do?”

“You won't stop of your own accord; I'm going to shut you down.”

“You're a dead man if you try, Penner.”

“You threatening me, Frank?”

“I'm telling you to leave well enough alone.”

Penner turned to look at the bloodied man again, who was watching him. “Is this letting well enough alone, Frank? What do you think will happen when the first train arrives here come the spring? What do you think is going to happen then? You think those boys will be able to lay track down the Big Hill? What about my men, carrying nitro? What happens then?”

Dodds laughed. “We'll just get us some Chinese to do it. Won't matter then if they blow themselves up!”

“You're an ignorant swine, Frank. You know that?”

“Least I'm no pansy.”

“When the spring comes and my men are drunk or fighting when they're supposed to be picking their way down a sheer cliff with a pail of nitro, and they blow themselves up and kill a bunch of good boys trying to earn an honest living, it's you who will have blood on his hands.”

Dodds laughed again. “I got blood on my hands now,” and he spat on the floor at Penner's boots.

“Tomorrow morning this is going to end. Tomorrow morning I'm going to see Hep and this is going to end.”

The room was silent.

“You're a rotten fink, Penner,” said Dodds, “and it's going to cost you.”

“What are you going to do, Frank? You want to take a swing at me? Here I am. Go ahead. You and I both know what will happen. So go ahead.”

“You think Hep Wilcox don't know what's going on? You think he cares a damn?”

“
I
take it to him and he's going to
have
to care. He'll have to do something. We'll call the Red Coats in if we have to. He'll have to care if I take it to him. That's a fact. Come the morning, Frank, I'm shutting you down.”

The rest of the room watched as Penner pulled his cap down over his ears, turned up the collar to his coat, opened the door, and stepped out into the darkness.