If It Is April

by Edward A. Stabler

  “That’s the problem with hunting dogs,” Zimmerman confided to Skeeter. “Some of ‘em just don’t got the nerve for it.”

  Chapter 41

  Down the Road

  Saturday, May 10, 1924

  As the road crested the tailbone of Cacopon Mountain and began a gradual descent, Jake glanced back to confirm that April was still following the cart. She’d started to fall behind Friday morning and hadn’t brought Gladys alongside Bertie since they’d crossed the rain-spattered Shenandoah River early that afternoon. The crossing had been the halfway mark of yesterday’s thirty-mile ride, and Jake had hoped the weather would clear for the lazy climb to Winchester. Instead the warm rain had fluctuated since Thursday night, advancing and withdrawing but never giving up.

  On the approach to Winchester they’d passed a collapsing barn in an untended field just off the road. When Jake found a path Bertie could negotiate with the cart, he’d led him there on foot. He and April turned the mules out to graze and found a dry corner in the barn where they were able to light a fire. They’d eaten canned pork and beans and laid their clothes out to dry. Huddled together under damp blankets, they hadn’t had much to say during the night. April had seemed distant when Jake volunteered his impressions of the road they’d traveled and what was left to come.

  Today she seemed even more remote. They’d stopped for an hour in Winchester this morning, both to buy bread and cheese and to get out of the rain. Sitting at the counter in a general store and watching raindrops ripple the puddles outside, Jake had mused that the fat pickles they were eating might make good ammunition against Cole at the tunnel, if they could somehow get their hands on a sling-shot. April had just smiled and looked away.

  There’d been no use waiting for the rain to let up, so Jake bought an oil-treated cotton jacket for April and a rubberized canvas sheet to cover their thoroughly soaked possessions in the cart. Then they’d set off again, stopping periodically so Jake could check for sores under Bertie’s harness pads. Now Winchester was seven hours and almost twenty miles behind them, and the late afternoon sky looked like a dripping gray sponge in all directions.

  Thinking about his plan for the encounter with Cole tomorrow, Jake was a little worried about the flash powder. Shortly before you wanted to ignite it, you mixed two powders together. These two component powders were each housed in water-tight tins, and the tins were inside a cardboard kit box with the touch paper, matches, and a small flash tray. The kit box was in the tackle box he’d taken from the shed at Pennyfield. So the powders and the matches ought to be dry, but after two days of constant rain it was hard to be sure.

  He was also starting to worry about April. Would she be engaged enough to play her part? He was planning to help her stake out a position in the tunnel before the scheduled meeting, then come back alone to the entrance to wait for their adversary. Jake would send Cole into the tunnel to meet April, who would blind him and flee. Cole would pursue her when he recovered his bearings, and Jake would ambush him when he emerged.

  Maybe by lying in wait on the rocks above the tunnel entrance and dropping a loose boulder on his head. Or by tripping him with fishing line, pinning his neck to the canal floor with an osage orange branch he’d cut this morning, and then pressing his face into the mud until he suffocated. April could help hold the branch. Even if he’d had a gun, Jake mused, he wouldn’t want to shoot Cole. Better to cripple or kill him and make it look like an accident.

  He would have to wait to see how the entrance to the tunnel looked before settling on a tactic. Like the rest of the canal, the tunnel level had probably been blown out and drained six weeks ago by the flood. If the canal bed had dried into cracked mud at the entrance, it would look different now after all this rain.

  Jake shifted his feet, feeling tired and sore from sitting so long on a folded blanket over a simple bench seat. He was ready to find a dry spot to stretch out, but riding two more hours today would mean less road to travel tomorrow. They could reach the tunnel by mid-afternoon and have plenty of time to prepare the ambush.

  And then there was Pete, he reminded himself. Pete had sounded the alarm that allowed them to flee back at Edwards Ferry, so Jake guessed that Cole hadn’t won him over yet. He probably still felt more like a kidnap victim than an adopted son. Let’s hope so, Jake thought, since rescuing him was a fundamental reason for tomorrow’s confrontation. He didn’t want to think the word explicitly, but the concept hovered just below the level of his conscious thought. Redemption. Freeing Pete and returning him to his family would help to wipe the slate clean – in the estimation of others, at least. Rescuing April might provide redemption in his own eyes.

  He squinted at the macadam road ahead, which swung long curves north and west as it sought the lowest path through wooded hills and scattered farmland. Brown rivulets beside the road were following that path down to the Cacopon River. The rattle of a car engine grew noticeable, so Jake angled Bertie further right. A Ford farm truck rambled by, an empty chicken coop on its flatbed. The driver waved without looking back.

  Jake exhaled a wistful breath. With a car, they could have driven from Leesburg to Paw Paw in a few hours. If he’d never lost his job, never gone to prison, he’d still have a car to drive. Riding to Sharpsburg and back with April, traveling the deserted towpath by night and hiding from real and imagined threats by day – that had seemed like an adventure. But this ride to Paw Paw was just a three-day slog on rain-soaked roads, through rolling green country that looked much the same, mile after endless mile.

  Something down the road brought his thoughts back to the present. A quarter mile ahead, the farm truck had turned around and reversed course. Jake steered Bertie rightward again and reined the mule to a stop. He looked back at April, who caught his eye and almost nodded, drawing Gladys up behind the cart. They watched the truck approach unhurriedly up the slight grade. Its driver pulled to a stop alongside Jake and rolled down the window.

  “Where you headed?” he said.

  “Paw Paw,” Jake said. There was no point in mentioning the tunnel.

  “Not today, I reckon,” the man said. He had a graying mustache and an easy, gap-toothed smile, with tired green eyes flanked by crow’s feet. He leaned far enough out the window for his fedora to start catching raindrops. “Less you plan to ride all night. Paw Paw’s the best part of twenty miles from here.”

  “We’re going to camp along the road,” Jake said, trying to sound optimistic. “When we find someplace out of…”

  “Tell you what,” the farmer said. “I got a barn behind my house. There’s a couple of straw ticks to sleep on, and you can light the wood stove and dry off. Got a stall with a horse in it, but he won’t bother you none. You can put your mules in the other stall for the night.”

  Jake stared at the man for a moment, thinking there must be a catch, but the farmer just smiled and glanced at the clouds behind Jake’s shoulder. “Don’t look like it’s letting up,” he said, “so you might want a roof over your head tonight.”

  Reminding himself that outside of prison most people were well-meaning and sincere, Jake nodded and thanked the man. He repeated the directions to himself as the truck turned around and receded down the road. Cross the Cacopon River, take the first right turn, and look for the first driveway on the right. A six-mile ride from here. That would mean two more hours and a chance to get off the road before dark. Then drying off in front of a hot stove. He couldn’t resist imagining that the farmer might have a wife who would bring them something warm to eat, and his stomach growled at the thought.

  He turned to smile at April, who had pulled Gladys within a length of Bertie, close enough to overhear the whole conversation. Rain was dripping from the brim of her flat cap and her hair hung in wet strands against her neck. She met his gaze with unblinking eyes that were only half open.

  “What did he want?” she said.

  Chapter 42

  Into the Dark

  Sunday, May 11, 1924

  Driv
ing the cart through the small town of Paw Paw, Jake felt the warmth of the mid-afternoon sun on his shoulders for what seemed like the first time in weeks. Steam rose from Bertie’s wet haunches. He assessed the sky; the drenching vortex that had wheeled out of the southwest for days was dissolving into fair-weather clouds. He twisted to check on April, who was still following a few lengths behind. Gladys bobbed her head and shook her mane a little, as if to express relief she was finally out of the rain.

  Paw Paw was built on a fan of level ground cradled by a curve in the Potomac River. Traversing its center – two intersections, houses, a few shops and a huge orchard-company warehouse – took a matter of minutes. Then the town gave way to fields and a quarter-mile fetch to the bridge.

  Jake felt his heart sink when he saw the river. This far upstream it was usually two hundred feet wide, with sliding water the color of unpolished emeralds. But now the Potomac was a rolling brown torrent, with seams and whorls appearing and vanishing, fallen branches and rotting trunks littering the flow. The river hadn’t broken free of its banks, but its eddy waters were licking the tops. He solemnly steered Bertie across the span, trying to keep the mule’s attention on the road instead of what coursed beneath it. The river had risen halfway to the bridge. April and Gladys bobbed along behind, seemingly unperturbed.

  Jake turned his eyes to the river’s path downstream, where it began a series of elongated hairpin turns. The Potomac had cut this path through the eroding mountains over millennia and the remains of those mountains descended steeply to its side, like a glove of green-fleeced rock caressing the elongated fingers of the Paw Paw Bends.

  For the architects mapping the canal’s westward path to Cumberland, tracking those lazy fingers for six miles had been too frustrating a prospect to contemplate. Instead they chose to veer away into a shale-lined ravine, follow it dead straight for a mile to a steep face, and then blast a thirty-one hundred foot tunnel through the guardian ridge. The canal emerged from the upstream end of the tunnel to find itself inside the glove, a stone’s throw from the river.

  That upstream entrance was drawing near, Jake thought; just follow the road to the canal and turn onto the towpath for the last half mile. He eyed the terrain ahead skeptically. They couldn’t leave Bertie and Gladys on the low ground between the river and the canal. He and April would have to take them over the ditch and up the first slope of the hillside. When he swiveled in his seat to tell her that, Gladys met his gaze but April’s eyes were angled off the road. She was staring across the field to the trees that flanked the towpath.

  “Have you been here before?” he asked.

  “No,” she said without changing her focus. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Jake had started to associate her remoteness with the rain, and he’d hoped the real April would re-emerge when the skies cleared. That wasn’t happening yet. Instead she seemed to be undergoing some kind of distillation, her spontaneity and charm boiling down to an unblinking essence. Late yesterday afternoon, on the last stretch to the house of the farmer who’d offered them his barn, they’d encountered a herd of cows blocking a narrow bridge over a branch of the Cacopon River. As Jake stopped the cart, April had calmly led Bertie into their midst and shunted the bellowing beasts aside.

  This morning at dawn, while he was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, she’d left the barn during a downpour and returned with two buckets of water for the mules, then climbed to the loft to pitch down a bale of hay. And during a winding ascent on today’s twelve-mile ride, without saying a word she’d dismounted to walk alongside Gladys, prompting Jake to do the same for Bertie.

  Jake crossed the spare metal bridge over the canal and towpath. Not far up the easy slope a strip of lush grass grew alongside the road, so he dismounted and unhitched Bertie. The mules grazed while he and April climbed into the back of the cart to eat beef jerky and stale bread, then stretch out and rest. When he rolled upright and checked his pocket watch it was half past three. April was already sitting up, staring down the road with her arms wrapped around her knees. He reached for the tackle box and re-checked its contents.

  “The nectar looks good, even if it’s not what he wants. Think it will catch us a stinger?”

  April didn’t answer.

  “He’ll probably be mad as a yellow-jacket after driving all the way out here. Let’s hope the Tobytown kids came through. And that he keeps his word about Pete.”

  “The lies don’t matter anymore,” April said, still squinting into the distance. “He’s coming. It’s his turn.”

  Jake let the cryptic comment pass and hopped from the cart. They tied the mules to trees and started back down the road on foot. From the skeletal bridge he could see the canal curve gradually clockwise, disappearing into the foliage after a quarter mile. He led April down the abutment stairs and they set out on the puddled towpath. The dirty water in the canal was only two feet deep, so he guessed the prism must have blown out somewhere along this level during the flood. Probably upstream. Maybe the break had been fixed by now. The foam-flecked water drifting alongside them was either rain that had fallen directly into the canal or overflow from a surging creek.

  For the canal, what really mattered was what happened on the river, and what drove the river was the upper watershed. A few miles west of Paw Paw the two main branches of the Potomac came together, both carrying runoff from a hundred miles of the Appalachians to the southwest. If it had been raining hard in those mountains since Thursday, there was no telling how much further the river might rise.

  “I see it,” April said. “The entrance to the hive.”

  The tunnel crept into view as the towpath curved, and from a distance the pouting black mouth at the base of a misshapen gray face looked small enough to have been made by bees. As they drew closer the rough-cut granite slabs that formed the arch and abutments distinguished themselves from the weathered surrounding rock. The structure was small but dignified, with generous stone stairs on each side leading to a slab walkway across the top.

  When they were within a hundred feet, the entrance at the opposite end of the tunnel looked like a bright full moon suspended in a starless dark sky. Jake knew the downstream portal was over three thousand feet away, but it looked almost close enough to touch.

  The towpath entered the tunnel on the right and became a five-foot-wide platform that clung to the wall, with a heavy wooden railing at waist height to bear the towline and prevent mules and drivers from stumbling off the edge. The residual twenty feet of the tunnel’s diameter was consumed by the canal. A wooden bumper ran the length of the far wall near the waterline, to prevent boats from grinding against the tunnel’s bricks.

  If the canal were operating, Jake thought, there would be boaters or picnickers venturing here on a Sunday. But with the prism mostly drained and the towpath rendered sloppy by three days of rain, today looked as he’d expected – no visitors or repair workers in sight.

  He did see evidence that a repair project was underway, in the form of a hundred or more bricks loosely stacked on the fringe of the towpath. And an inch-thick rope was tied to the outermost railing post. The rope ran into the tunnel and was pulled taut, disappearing into darkness as it descended toward the water.

  Jake stopped near the entrance and turned toward April. She’d taken off his flat cap to let her hair dry while they rested on the cart, and the waves that normally hung against her neck had frayed into individual strands and curls. Knowing it would be cold and damp in the tunnel, she was wearing her new jacket over her velour jersey with the green and gold checks and Jake’s twill trousers. From the neck down she still looked like a newspaper boy on a chilly morning, Jake thought, but she had the eyes and expression of an angelic avenger.

  “Let’s try a test flash,” he said, kneeling on the towpath to open the tackle box.

  He pulled out the flash tray, a hinged metal container not much bigger than a cigarette box. Then came the tube that attached to the bottom and served as a handle. A long candle, a
pack of matches, and a strip of touch paper. And finally, two small tins of powder, both about half full. He emptied the contents of one tin into the other, replaced the lid, and shook the mixture. Then he tapped a teaspoon of powder into the tray and shaped it into a small cone with the touch paper, one end of which he left inserted in the cone. Carefully lifting the flash tray with the lid upright, he fit the handle into the socket on the bottom and rested its butt end on the ground.

  “Ready to light,” he said, swiveling the tray so the reflection from the lid wouldn’t reach them. April lit the candle and applied its flame to the touch paper; they backed their heads away as the paper caught. For a second nothing happened. Jake was tempted to check the powder. Then came a whooshing sound that climaxed with a pop and a bright flash, followed by the smell of metallic smoke.

  Jake grinned and stood up. “If you aim that at his face in the tunnel, he’ll think his eyes are on fire.” He checked his watch again; a few minutes past four, time to go. He put the flash kit away, gave April the tackle box in exchange for the lit candle, and led the way into the tunnel.

  The air chilled instantly and kept the sound close, conveying every footstep and breath. Daylight yielded to a wavering glow from the candle, which barely revealed the shadowy mosaic of bricks that enclosed them. Underfoot the dirt towpath was pressed into an endless chain of shallow depressions. The wooden railing felt worn and cool, polished by seventy-five years of wet, gritty towlines. Jake walked deliberately, keeping his eyes on the scalloped towpath and stepping diagonally past the occasional puddle where water dripped from the overhead bricks. A few minutes in, the bright circle at the other end looked no closer than it had from the entrance.

  “Where did it happen?” April said in a spectral voice.

  “What happen?”

  “Where did the preacher grow claws?”

  It took him a moment to catch the reference.

  “No one knows where,” he said. “It’s just a legend. Munson paddled into the tunnel and Five Claws paddled out.”