The Retaining Wall

Michael Fitzgerald stood knee-deep in the Truckee River in September 1936, setting forms for the concrete that would become the retaining wall along the south bank of Wingfield Park. The water was low and cold, running clear over the gravel bottom, and the morning sun had not yet reached the channel. He could feel the current against his shins, steady and patient, the way the river always was when it was not flooding.

He was thirty-seven years old. Nine years since the Riverside Hotel job, when he had worked the upper frames as a riveter, setting bolts in iron six stories above Virginia Street. That had been private work, Wingfield’s money, a hotel built for a man who believed that owning buildings was the same as owning a town. Now Michael was working for the federal government, a WPA crew of fourteen men building walls to keep the river from taking back what the town had built beside it.

The Works Progress Administration had arrived in Nevada the year before. Men who had been idle for months or years were suddenly employed, paid by Washington to build the infrastructure that the state could not afford. Roads. Bridges. Parks. Retaining walls. The work was not glamorous. It was not riveting at height or raising steel beams into the sky. It was pouring concrete and hauling stone and shaping earth, the kind of work that happened close to the ground and that nobody would notice unless it failed.

Michael did not mind. Work was work. His mother had taught him that, years ago, and his grandmother Bridget had taught his mother the same thing, the chain of practical wisdom that ran through the Fitzgerald family like a vein of ore through rock. You did the work that was available. You did it well. You went home.

The crew foreman was a man named Sullivan, who had come from the WPA office in Carson City with a set of plans and a clipboard and the particular manner of someone who understood that managing men required equal parts authority and patience. The plans called for a concrete retaining wall along both banks of the island that formed Wingfield Park, reinforcing the earth that the river had been slowly eroding for decades. George Wingfield had donated the island years ago. His name was on the park. His banks had failed, his fortune had collapsed, but the park remained, and now the government was spending money to keep the river from washing it away.

Michael found this ironic, though he would not have used that word. He would have said it was the way things went in Reno. A man builds something, the man falls, the thing remains, somebody else comes along to maintain it. That was the story of the whole town, as far as Michael could tell. The railroad men built it. The silver money sustained it. The divorce trade remade it. The gambling law transformed it again. And through all of it, the river ran, indifferent to the names on the buildings and the money in the banks and the laws that changed every few years depending on what the legislature decided the town should be.

By noon, the crew had the forms set for a twenty-foot section of wall. The concrete would be poured tomorrow. Michael sat on the bank and ate his lunch, a sandwich his wife Mary had made that morning, ham and cheese on bread she had baked the day before. They had married in 1930, a year before the bottom fell out. Mary worked at a laundry on Lake Street. Between her wages and his WPA pay, they kept a small house on Ralston Street, south of the river, in a neighborhood of working families whose homes had been built in the years after the railroad came through.

He thought about his grandfather Patrick, who had worn the uniform of a policeman and walked these same streets in the years before the war. Patrick had believed in order, in the idea that a man could hold a town together through the enforcement of rules. Michael believed in concrete. Concrete held. It did not negotiate. It did not change its mind depending on who was governor or what the legislature voted on. You poured it, it set, and it stayed, and that was enough.

The afternoon work was harder. They were reinforcing a section of the north bank where the current had undercut the earth during the spring floods. Michael worked the forms while two other men mixed concrete in a portable mixer that ran on gasoline and made a sound like a large animal complaining. The concrete came down the chute gray and wet and heavy, and they worked it into the forms with shovels and rods, pressing it tight against the earth, filling the gaps where the river had taken what it wanted.

Sullivan walked the site at four o’clock, checking the work against his plans. He nodded at Michael. Sullivan did not give compliments, but a nod from Sullivan meant the work was right, and Michael had been in construction long enough to know that right was the only thing that mattered. Not fast. Not impressive. Right.

At five, the crew cleaned their tools and walked off the site. Michael walked north along Virginia Street. The casinos were lighting up for the evening, the neon signs beginning to glow in the fading light. Harold’s Club had grown since it opened the year before. The Bank Club was still the largest. Smaller clubs filled the gaps between them, each one offering some version of the same promise, that money could be multiplied without labor, that luck was a force that could be harnessed.

Michael walked past them all. He crossed the river on the Virginia Street Bridge and turned south toward home. The retaining wall they had poured that afternoon would set overnight. By morning it would be hard. By next week it would be holding the bank in place against the current. Nobody would look at it. Nobody would know who had built it. But the river would press against it, year after year, and the wall would hold, and the park would remain, and that was the only thing that mattered.

Mary was in the kitchen when he got home. The house smelled of something cooking. He washed his hands in the sink and sat at the table and she put a plate in front of him and they ate together in the quiet of the evening, two people who had built a life out of available materials, and the river ran a few blocks away, held in place by concrete that Michael Fitzgerald had poured with his own hands.

---