Chapter 11 Part II

A Failed Homecoming

(Link to Part I)

“Oh, Jude,” said his mother, tucking her carders in her apron and wringing her wrists. “Please don’t upset Pa.” 

A thump shook the ceiling. The lamp’s glass chimney rattled in its ring. All eyes glanced upwards. 

“Too late. You have been summoned,” George dryly said. “Though why Pa wants to see you…” he drifted off, shaking his head.  

****

The Royer farm lay twelve miles outside Fredrick, which in turn was fifty miles from Baltimore. By the time Jude reluctantly ascended the staircase, he’d spent nearly three hours in a jolting train carriage that left him frumpy and sore, which was followed with a bumpy ride in the hired buggy over winter roads.

But if he’d been told as a child, watching the mammoth Conestoga wagons with ten-feet wheels plodding westwards at two miles an hour on the turnpike from Baltimore, that the day would come when he’d be able to fly across the countryside at twenty miles an hour, he’d have laughed.  

Then in 1850, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad tapped Frederick, the piercing train whistle forever ruining the silence of the countryside. He and his brothers had snuck from the farm to watch the iron locomotive belching great puffs of smoke in steaming into town. He’d stood in awe, suddenly made aware of a world of possibilities beyond the boundaries of Frederick County.  

Then it seemed like trains had been around forever and in only a few years it’d stretch all the way to California! The volumes of stages and wagons that once plied the turnpikes, stopping every few miles as the toll-collector ‘turned’ the blocking pike, declined in the face of the onslaught of progress sweeping the country. The old turnpike, built to fanfare on top of the Indian trails and the first of the major turnpikes westwards from an eastern seaport, was now gathering dirt and slowly crumbling. Jude wondered if the day would ever come when the same fate would befall the railroads, even if he couldn’t imagine what new marvel could replace it.   

Few people missed the uncomfortable stages and Jude appreciated the speed that allowed him to get to Washington for work and return to Baltimore in a single day. The railroads, canals, telegraph wires, factor smokestacks and the mills powered by huge new machineries, and all built within the last generation, had flooded America with stupendous wealth and radically changed the world into something his grandfathers wouldn’t have recognized.  

But upon retrospection, Jude now understood the old advantages of time and distance. And he was becoming more aware of how this brave new world was really two worlds: the world of men who embraced the technological revolutions, and the world of those left behind.

He also acknowledged an ugliness also hid underneath the newfound American prosperity.

And he knew what his father would say.