The Sons of Adam (21 page)

‘I believe in you. If ever a man stood a chance of succeeding, then it was you.’

Alan smiled. He adored this woman. He longed to make love with her; to spend hours learning every contour of her body beneath his hands. When he spoke again, his voice was thick and harsh.

‘That’s a sweet thing to say, but remember what we’re talking about. This is oil, a business equally divided between man and God. If I sink a well in the right place, I’ve made it. If I deviate by a hundred feet, I may miss it altogether. I’m afraid your father’s perfectly correct about my financial prospects at least. I’m unbankable now and I probably always will be. Goodbye, my beloved. Goodbye.’

‘Shirt off, please.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Please take your shirt off, then climb those stairs.’

The official’s voice slurred all the words into one long groan of tedium, ‘Pleasetakeyourshirtoffthenclimbthosestairs.’ He pointed at a flight of fifteen wooden stairs that led nowhere. A bored doctor in a blue uniform looked dully at Tom, before his glance drifted back to the newspaper sports report. Tom removed his jacket, shirt and tie, then ran up the stairs and down. His pulse hardly accelerated. After five months of cattle wrestling on board heaving Atlantic cattle ships, his physique had regained nearly everything it had lost in the prison camp. The doctor looked curiously at the purple stains round Tom’s shoulder where he’d taken his first bullet wound, and the other light scars that Tom had collected either from shrapnel scratches on the front line or from injuries received in prison.

‘You’ve taken some knocks, huh?’

‘A few.’

‘Brawling?’

‘War. No problems now.’ He wriggled his shoulder to show off its mobility. In truth, although his shoulder was fine now, his wounded leg had never quite felt right since. Although he could walk on it all day, the wound fell into a dull red ache at times, especially if he twisted his leg at all or put his weight on it awkwardly.

‘Epilepsy? Any diagnosis of tuberculosis?’

‘No.’

The doctor nodded. ‘OK. Shirt on.’

The immigration official stamped Tom’s card. ‘Move on to the Public Examination hall. Out here, right, right again, get in line.
Next!
’

Tom moved off. Behind him a Polish immigrant with a terrible limp was trying to conceal the fact as he puffed his way up the stairs. ‘OK. Geddown. Gimme your card.
Next
!’ The official sent the Pole in a different direction from Tom and the Pole wept bitterly with disappointment.

The Public Examination hall was packed. A long line of humanity snaked its way up and down the long bare room. Notices on the wall explained who was prohibited entry: ‘
All idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons
–’ Tom half read the notices as he walked past. The would-be immigrants were mostly badly dressed and poor. There was a preponderance of men, and a mixture of voices and accents that reminded Tom of nothing so much as prison camp. ‘
Persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority; persons with chronic alcoholism
–’ A few of the men were sneaking bites of food from parcels carried in their pockets: hard biscuit and fried pork, with the occasional strong smell of cheese or sausage. The air was cloudy with tobacco smoke. ‘
Paupers; professional beggars; vagrants
–’ Tom was better dressed than average, though nobody would have guessed that he’d grown up in the twelve-bedroomed Whitcombe House, with an English aristocrat for foster uncle. He shuffled his way along, feeling the mixture of hope and fear common to everyone else in the room.

After queuing for three hours, he arrived at the head of the line. A door banged open in front of him and an official gestured him forwards. He entered a small room, decorated with an American flag and a poster advertising the Keystone Kops. Two uniformed men sat behind a simple wooden desk, with a mound of forms in front of them, half blank, half already filled.

‘Card, please.’

Tom presented his card.

‘D’you speak English?’

‘Yes, sir. I am English.’

‘Huh.’ One of the officials grunted, as though Tom had been impertinent, but pens marked boxes on the relevant forms. A tattered leather Bible sat like a paperweight on a stack of blank forms. The official who’d opened the door to Tom, and who seemed to be acting like the master of ceremonies, shoved the book into his hand.

‘Can you tell me what this is?’

‘It’s the Holy Bible, sir.’

‘Please take the Bible in your left hand, raise your right hand, and do you swear to answer all questions truthfully?’

Tom did as he was told. ‘I swear to tell the truth.’

Then the interview began, questions like rifle-fire, pens scratching down answers like some mad dance of the bureaucrats. Tom resented the brusqueness of his interviewers – he disliked any situation where he was in another man’s power – but he kept his face and voice calm as he replied.

‘Nationality?’

‘Date of birth?’

‘Country and town of birth?’

‘Vessel of disembarkation?’

‘Do you have any money in your possession?’

‘Any gold, jewellery or other valuables?’

‘Please lay your money on the table.’

‘Please count it for us.’

‘Forty-eight dollars. That’s fine, you may pick it up.’

‘Can you read English or any other language or dialect?’

‘You can? Then please read the text set down on the printed card.’ The card contained the first few lines of the American Declaration of Independence and Tom spoke the lines with a ringing forcefulness, giving particular emphasis to the line saying ‘that all men were created equal’.

‘Do you have an address to go to in New York or elsewhere in the United States?’

‘Please state the address and your relationship to the resident.’

Luckily Tom was prepared for this question, and was able to give the name and address of a former shipmate whose wife ran a boarding house up in Connecticut.

‘Do you have a promise of employment in the United States?’

Tom hesitated.

‘I asked if you had a promise of employment? A job?’

Tom continued to hesitate.

‘You have any way of making money or you gonna live on the bum?’

Finally, Tom shook his head. ‘No, sir. I’m going to pay my way all right.’

‘Uh-huh. And how d’you plan to do that?’ The official spoke to Tom as though he was dangerously close to becoming an idiot, imbecile or feeble-minded person.

A smile ghosted over Tom’s face. ‘I’m an oilman,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ve come here to drill for oil.’

The officials smirked at each other. ‘Right. You got forty-eight bucks in your pocket. I reckon you should get an oil well for that. Maybe something nice down in Texas.’

The other official grinned and nodded and nodded and grinned like it was the best joke he’d heard since President McKinley’s assassination. ‘Or Pennsylvania,’ he said. ‘Think about it. Should get plenty of oil well up in Pennsylvania. Ha! Forty-eight bucks!’

Tom became instantly angry at their jocularity.

‘I’ll earn what I need, then drill,’ he said.

‘Right. Which was what I was asking. D’you have a promise of employment?’

Tom gritted his teeth. He did have a promise of employment, as it happened. He had done well on his cattle ships, had been promoted once already and had been invited to continue with the trade as soon as he’d obtained his papers. He gave the bureaucrats the information they needed, which they wrote down with plenty of little nudges, winks, exclamations and puffs of laughter – ‘An oilman!’, ‘Hoo!’, ‘Forty-eight bucks!’ – that infuriated Tom. Then the interrogation continued.

‘Are you willing to abide by the laws and Constitution of the United States?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Have you ever been convicted of any crime involving moral turpitude?’

‘Are you a polygamist or do you believe in or advocate the practice of polygamy?’

‘Are you an anarchist, a bolshevist, or a member of any organisation advocating the overthrow of the US government?’

‘Yes, sir, I’m a Red Army colonel with three wives and a taste for choirboys’ – or so Tom almost said. In fact, he bit his tongue and answered, ‘No.’

‘Have you ever been arrested?’

Tom paused. The two pens quivered and halted. Two pairs of eyes settled on his face. Tom felt a flash of annoyance. Why in hell should he reveal anything to anyone about the time he’d slipped from his column of fellow prisoners on the way back to prison camp? What the hell would this brace of pale-faced paper-pushers understand about months of starvation, the crushing load of captivity? About the good-hearted American whose last words were ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ before the German bullets dragged him down, or about Tom’s leaden-footed surrender and rearrest?

‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘I was taken prisoner in the war in Europe, that’s all.’

The two pens hesitated another moment. It wasn’t quite a clean answer. The pile of nice blank forms preferred nice clean answers.

‘You fighting with the Brits?’

‘Yes, sir. Right alongside some very fine American units, if I may say so. Very fine indeed.’

It was a good answer, no matter that Tom had been taken prisoner a full seven months before the Americans had entered the war. ‘Wait for Uncle Sam to bail you out, huh?’ The senior of the two officials shook his head, and checked the ‘No arrest’ box on his form. His junior twin did likewise.

There then followed a handful of questions presumably intended to check whether Tom was an idiot, imbecile or a feeble-minded person. ‘You have fifteen oranges. You give five of them away. How many d’you have left? You give away another five. How many then? Apples cost ten cents, oranges cost twenty-five. Which is worth more, six apples or six oranges?’

Tom passed the exam with flying colours.

The master of ceremonies took a nod from the senior desk official and handed Tom a card, marked ‘Admitted’. In a slurred impatient voice, he said ‘WelcometotheUnitedStatesnextinlinetheremoveitonplease!’

Tom took the card with a surge of relief so strong, he hadn’t realised how nervous he must have been. The past began to slip from his shoulders. In America, if he committed no crime for five years, he could and would become an American citizen. He was dazed. How simple it had become. The whole tangled confusion of names, birth, breeding, inheritance, and all that Alan-and-Guy versus Alan-and-Tom competition had just dropped away. Tom had just emigrated to a country where no one even gave a damn. It was so simple, it seemed impossible.

He took his precious card – ‘Admitted’ – to a final line leading to the immigration booth. The immigration officer took the card, then a long drag on his cigarette.

‘Eight bucks, please. Head tax.’

Tom handed over eight dollars.

‘Full name?’

‘Thomas Albert Cree –’ Tom halted.

‘Just plain Thomas Albert? Or Thomas Albert Somebody? Which?
Jeez!
’ Another drag on the cigarette. The ash scattered on to the papers lying beneath. The man’s shirt cuff was grey from wiping over tobacco ash all day long.

This was it. The moment to drop the last unwanted stone in the cleansing ocean. The name Creeley was inextricably tied up with the name Montague. Right now, Tom wanted nothing of either. The cattle ship he’d worked on for six months, the SS
Calloway,
was a name he liked as well as any other – and one close enough to Creeley that he wouldn’t be dishonouring either his father or himself. With a firm voice, Tom spoke his decision. ‘My name is Thomas Albert Calloway, sir.’

‘Tom Calloway, welcome to the United States.’

‘Tie up the horses and pack the bags. No, not the tents, the rock-tools. Do it now!’

Alan’s tone of command was as unmistakable in Persian as it had been in English. His experience of war had given him a cool-headedness, a speed of resolve that nothing else could have taught him. He was just twenty-six years old, but spoke with the confidence of a field marshal. His team of horse-drivers responded instantly.

‘Tether the horses. Make them fast. There. That bush will do.’