If It Is April

by Edward A. Stabler

  As Cole watched a fallen tree trunk swing loose from the clot and drift away, he wondered where Zimmerman had taken Pete. Maybe down the ravine and back to the truck, if he reckoned the canal was rising over the towpath and he didn’t want to get stranded, like Cole was stranded now.

  It was past six and shadows filled the ravine below him. He could take the trail back up toward the ridge, and that overgrown road might lead down the other side, but there was probably two more valleys and ridges to cross before he could find a draw that led to the river near lock 61. That was five or ten miles of bushwhacking if the road petered out. Not worth it with less than two hours of daylight left. Better to find level ground off the trail for the night. He could assess the towpath tomorrow.

  A segment of joined planks and railing tilted and flipped and the raft began to nudge the remaining pile apart. A thick forked branch came free, accompanied by floating scraps of planks and posts. Current that had been diverted around the strainer began to attack its remains. What was left of the pile fell apart and dipped out of sight or slunk away downstream.

  After watching the debris pile grudgingly yield peripheral pieces over the course of twenty minutes, Cole saw its core collapse in a matter of seconds. As its vestiges were swept away and the raft gained momentum, he wondered if a body or two would surface alongside it. That could be good or bad, he conceded, squinting at the shadowed current. It depended on the bodies. But no corpses appeared, so he turned and made his way back to the trail.

  Chapter 48

  Tracks

  Monday, May 12, 1924

  “Pete!” Jake whispered, peering into the cart as the sky turned gray an hour before sunrise. The boy slept on, curled under a blanket on the tilted floor of the unhitched cart. Jake put a hand on his shoulder and shook it until Pete half-opened his eyes.

  “Pete! I’m going to look for Katie. When you get up, stay here and keep an eye on the mules. There’s a bottle of water in the basket, and bread and jam. Don’t worry – those men won’t find us here! I’ll be back in a little while.”

  He set out on the dark dirt road that slanted between hillocks on its final descent to the canal. Halfway there the road angled across railroad tracks that ran straight to the river, crossing the canal and towpath on the way. Jake veered onto the tracks and tried to align his steps with the ties. After driving most of the night and sleeping only a few hours, he felt bone tired and blurry-eyed.

  Starting from their perch on the shoulder of the ravine wall, he and Pete had climbed past the tunnel entrance late yesterday afternoon and continued up the wrong slope, reaching the ridge on the far side of the ravine. They’d wandered along it until they found a road Jake hadn’t known about, then followed it downhill, stopping at the only cabin they passed to ask for directions. A toothless man with one dead eye had waved them inside. While his wife plucked a scrawny bird, he drew a map with a piece of charcoal on the worn wood floor next to the fireplace.

  “Paw Paw,” he said, gumming the words emphatically as he jabbed a mark. Arm’s length away he jabbed another mark. “Orlins. Mare-lyn side.” Then he connected the two marks with a winding charcoal snake to represent the Paw Paw Bends and the downstream curves of the Potomac River. He raised his good eye to confirm they were following. Jake nodded.

  The old man drew a line that would have run straight from Paw Paw to Orleans but was shifted a few miles northwest, into a valley beyond the ridge guarding the river. “Oldtown – Orlins Road.” The road to Paw Paw, where Jake and April had left the mules, met one end of this road. Five miles toward Orleans, Jake found the old man’s third charcoal slash, a back road he’d turned onto while Gladys followed behind the cart and Pete slept inside it. They’d wound along a minor draw, climbed a shoulder of the guardian ridge, and eased down to level ground near the railroad tracks.

  As he followed those tracks now, a pre-dawn fatigue kept last night’s forebodings in check. Driving for miles in the dark, he’d been haunted by questions about April. Was she alive? Unhurt? Had Cole recaptured her? If she’d escaped the tunnel, would she remember where to meet him if things went wrong?

  That first night outside Leesburg, before the rain began to wash them apart on the long ride to Paw Paw, Jake had described a railroad bridge four miles down the towpath from the tunnel. You could reach it from the other side, by following the tracks that paralleled the tunnel and canal a mile to the east and crossed the river into West Virginia. Or you could reach it from the Maryland side, along the quarter mile of track he was walking now. The canal and towpath passed underneath it so the bridge was an easy landmark to spot, but it wasn’t a place where Cole would be lying in wait for them.

  The tracks cut through a small rise and continued level onto a short bridge as the hillside fell away. Jake stopped to make sense of the unnerving view. The river had risen to swallow the towpath and the canal. A few steps ahead it rolled and undulated ten feet below the tracks, where the canal’s berm should have been. The silhouetted stalks and clouds looming over the water were the upper halves of trees on the submerged apron. Beyond them, the shifting dark surface stretched to the West Virginia shore. Like a needle poised above the flood, the tracks before him pierced the shapes on the apron and led to a humble truss bridge that spanned the main current, suspended by two almost-buried piers. The outline of the bridge was starting to emerge as the sky gained light. It was still too dark to see anything clearly.

  Standing above the edge of the flood, Jake sat down on the tracks. This was the end of the canal, he thought, a mercy killing. Whatever progress had been made rebuilding it was being dismembered before his eyes. Two once-a-generation floods in six weeks would silence any calls for its restoration. He carefully took off his jacket, favoring his wounded left arm. The toothless man’s wife had insisted on replacing his bandage last night. She’d dressed the wound with a mixture of honey and spruce resin.

  Rolling up his jacket to serve as a pillow, he laid on his back between the rails, feet stretched toward the far shore. Seconds later he was riding in a truck driven by his prison friend Ben Carlson, along a straight dusty road flanked by cattle fences. The road bore down off a low plateau and ran beside a clear, twisting river.

  “That the Pecos?” Jake said, raising his voice against the warm breeze through the cabin.

  “That’s it! The ranch can’t be more than another mile or two.”

  “What ranch?”

  “Feller who owns it found a seep. Thinks we might hit it big if we drill his property, so we’re going to meet him and take a look.”

  A gust ascending from the floodwaters chilled his short-sleeved arm and woke him up. The sky was a pale blue wash trampled by a herd of cats with pink paw-prints. He raised himself to look down the tracks and past the treetops, at the trussed portion of the bridge. No sign of anything moving, just the rise and fall of waters beneath. He lowered his head back to the cross-ties and drifted away again.

  He and April were galloping across green and gold grasslands, dismounting at a creek beside a stand of cottonwoods to let their horses drink. Jake walked to a nearby tree, where a lone gravestone marked a patch of level grass near the trunk.

  “Z. B. Keeper,” he read out loud. “Born 1874, died 1924.”

  April came over to observe the stone alongside him.

  “That’s a funny name,” he added.

  “It wasn’t his real name.”

  He glanced at her as the sun broke free of a cloud, illuminating her ashwood-colored hair. She was wearing a faded blue shirt, riding breeches, and dusty black boots. She caught his eye and smiled.

  “And this isn’t his real grave,” she said.

  A groan in the ironwork brought him back to the bridge. He propped his good elbow and peered down the rails. Past the trees, halfway across the main thrust of the river, someone was walking across the bridge. Approaching. He pulled his legs underneath him and stood, squinting for a better view. The bridge crosser was dressed like a hatless boy, with neck-length hair
blown by the breeze.

  Is it her, or is it a stranger?

  It might be both, even though she’d found her way to the meeting place. Like the girl he’d encountered six weeks ago in his father’s lockhouse. If it’s a stranger, he thought, those weeks mean nothing. That’s what she’ll always be.

  The walker was passing the treetops now. He recognized her gait, the way her arms moved as she stepped evenly from tie to tie. Maybe it’s Katie, he thought. Maybe it’s April.

  If it’s Katie, this flood has restored what the last one washed away. She’ll remember what happened and know how to explain herself to the sheriff. She has a life to return to. Our time together was just a towpath dream. She can go back to her family with Pete.

  But if it is April, he thought, and his hands balled up as she drew close. If it’s April, then a passage to the future is opening. And a door is closing on the misfortune and misguidedness of the last two years.

  She came to a stop two cross-ties away and met his gaze.

  “You made it,” he said. “I was worried. “I have Pete and he’s OK.”

  “Pete who?” she said, and he thought he saw a conspiratorial flicker in her eyes.

  “Katie Elgin’s brother. We rescued him. At the tunnel.”

  She smiled but said nothing.

  “How did you get here?” he said, hope diminishing. Was this a stranger?

  “Through the woods,” she said. “Then I followed the tracks. I don’t remember why, but I knew that was the right way.”

  “What happened in the tunnel after I left?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember the tunnel.”

  “Did you see Cole?”

  She shook her head.

  “What’s your name?”

  “April,” she said. She pre-empted the next question. “And you’re Jake Reed.”

  He felt as if an osprey had taken flight in his chest.

  Her gaze drifted to his severed sleeve and the bandage above his elbow. “How did you hurt your arm?”

  “Just a little bee-sting,” he said, smiling and stepping forward to place the other hand on her shoulder. “What else do you remember?”

  “We were past Leesburg,” she said, “on our way out to Texas. And then it started raining.”

  ************

  Thanks for reading IF IT IS APRIL. If you enjoyed it, I’d greatly appreciate a brief positive review on Amazon or Goodreads.

  If you recently finished SWAINS LOCK and BURYING ZIMMERMAN (books one and two of the River Trilogy), you know the answers to questions that animated the characters in book three, like “where is Kevin Emory’s toolbox?” and “who is the man with the funny first name that April thinks will try to kill her?” You also know who slashed Lee Fisher’s neck, why the scow burned, where the mason’s mark came from, and much more.

  If you haven’t read SL and BZ, then you waded into IF IT IS APRIL with no more context than Jake Reed or Delmond Cole. I plead ignorance as to whether the story stands on its own without the background provided by its predecessors. You can find descriptions of all three novels (and larger maps) on my website, at http://khola.com .

  If you want to visualize the terrain of the Potomac River, the C&O Canal, and the Paw Paw Tunnel, Google Earth explains everything. For reminiscences about the canal era from the last generation who lived it, I highly recommend Elizabeth Kytle’s HOME ON THE CANAL. And if you think a span of fiction should rest on a few factual piers, I can offer this: the devastating Potomac floods of January and September, 1996; June, 1972; and March and May, 1924 all struck in real life on the days depicted in this trilogy.

  Edward A. Stabler