Bellagrand

“Me too,” she says, almost whispers.

“But I am pared down to my most basic elements. I’ve got to rise above the purely elemental, don’t you agree?”

She doesn’t know if she agrees. She fears she doesn’t. She tries not to glance above his head where the hands of the clock are stopped motionless, as if dead.

May the Lord remember all your sacrifices and accept your burnt offerings. May he give you the desire of your heart.

Two

GINA HAD NEVER SEEN anyone get as animated and lost in the topic of conversation as Ben when he was talking about his years in Panama.

No, that wasn’t entirely true. Harry would get the same intense, far-away look, maintain the same consuming focus when they would talk about harmonizing the world, remaking it into the image of what he thought it should be and not what it was. And though she still, as always, admired Harry’s learned passion, she had heard all she could stand for the time being about the Reeds and the Debs and the Haywoods. What she wanted to hear about was Panama.

“All forest and mountains. Impassable forest combined with tropical temperatures. And mountains like a spine. I should’ve just thrown up my hands. We couldn’t get a canal from north to south to connect. We excavated, we dammed off the Chagres, we built a lake. We worked from two seas inland, from Cristobal to Miraflores into the center of the country, we were diligent as beavers, and when we designed and built the concrete locks that moved the sea levels up and down, I thought there was nothing harder than that or more accomplished than that. Until we got to the Continental Divide. There was no river, no water, no field, no stream. It was just mountain.” Ben shook his head.

Gina shook hers. “I don’t know how you did it. I still don’t understand it.”

“Me neither.”

“But seriously.”

“We blew it up.”

She laughed.

“I’m not being metaphorical. Or rhetorical. We actually blew it up.”

“You blew up a mountain?”

“We drilled holes, placed explosives in the holes, and detonated the mountain, yes. After the rubble settled, we used enormous steam-powered shovels to load the loose rock onto freight trains which carted it away to landfills.”

Gina exclaimed in frightened but impressed astonishment. “You must have had to drill a lot of holes to make a valley in a mountain, no?”

“Six hundred holes a day,” Ben said. “We drilled the holes and detonated twice a day. Then the trains would come. So we had to build a railroad and lay new tracks constantly as the valley got longer and wider.”

“Oh, my word. How long did this valley become?” It was called the Culebra Cut.

“Nine miles.”

“Ben!”

“What? Too long or too short?”

“Impossible!”

“That’s what everyone said to my boss, Colonel Gaillard, the most gallant and patient of men. What you’re doing, it will never work, they said to him. It had been my honor to work with that dedicated, quiet man side by side, but I can’t tell you how often he expressed his doubts to me, how often he would say, This is just a fool’s errand, isn’t it, Mr. Shaw, what we’re attempting here? To move a mountain to let ships pass through? And I would reply, despite my gravest doubts, no, Colonel Gaillard. We must succeed, and so we shall.”

“The newspapers were merciless,” Gina said. “It will never work, they wrote, just like it didn’t with the French. It will cost tens of thousands of lives, like it did with the French. This is a waste of human and material resources.”

Ben sighed, as if even success in the present was not sufficient to gloss over the monumental crises in the past. “It was the Culebra Cut that had felled the French.” He shrugged. “They were trying to excavate too high. Sixty meters above sea level was too high for the valley. We made it only twelve feet above. That was better.”

“Not good, but better?”

“Not good, but better. This is one of the reasons I’m cautious and not yet fully optimistic. I know what it took. And that was before the landslides.”

“The what?”

“Oh, yes,” Ben said. “We at Army Corps told everyone to beware of the landslides. Gaillard was very afraid of them. But the International Board of Engineers overseeing the project decreed we had nothing to worry about. They had deemed the Divide sufficiently stable. Except they didn’t count on water from the rains infiltrating a previously impregnable mountain. This, of course, caused a weakening and then a mass wasting of half a million cubic yards of clay.”

“Ben!”

“Oh yes. And this clay was too soft to be excavated by our steam shovels.”

“Like a mud volcano.” Gina recalled the mighty and fearsome Etna, what it was like living under the volcanic threat her entire childhood. Yet she didn’t feel as afraid then as she sometimes felt now in her folk Victorian on Summer Street.

Ben glanced at her approvingly. “Except we can’t have a tropical glacier made of mud lying in the path of our ocean liners, can we?”

“Mud lying in the path of civilization? Certainly not. So what did you do?”

“Nothing.” He shrugged. “What could we do? We climbed the mountain, sluiced the clay down with water from great heights, and continued detonating.”

She was thoughtful. “But won’t water keep getting into the rock? How are you going to keep the torrential rains from coming? Are you going to control the skies as well as the seas?”

“Clearly we’re not. This will continue to be a problem.”

“I read that just last month the canal closed for a week because of another landslide.”

“Yes, the canal will continue to close intermittently so the falling debris can be cleared. No way around it.”

She patted his arm affectionately, and quickly withdrew when she realized that etiquette had been breached.

“I heard the valley is going to be renamed after your general?”

“Colonel.”

“What’s the difference?”

Ben laughed. “Right. But yes, next year it’ll be called the Gaillard Cut.”

“Such a shame he didn’t live long enough to see the canal completed,” Gina said. David Gaillard died of a brain tumor in 1913.

Ben stopped smiling. “I even grew a bushy mustache in his honor. I shaved it before I returned home,” he added when she stared at the smooth skin between his nose and mouth. “He was a West Point man. Which may explain why he succeeded where others had failed.”

She resisted the impulse to touch him again, though he looked exhausted by the exertions of his memories. “You certainly did make the dirt fly, didn’t you?”

They walked on, lost in their thoughts. They were headed back to the Wayside after a three-mile excursion to buy a few apples.

“So was it worth it?” she asked.