3stalwarts

by Unknown

  He gazed up the canal. He wished that he might have seen the man’s face. Stepping back round the corner, he picked up his bag and walked on down the dock to the lighted window.

  The Ella-Romeyn

  A few steps more, and he found himself staring through the lighted window in the cabin of a boat which had been tied up to the dock, stern on to the bank. The name of the boat was cut in two by the tiller shaft, rising stubbily above the roof of the cabin to the ponderous sweep. The name, which had once been dressed in gilt, still carried enough of its paint to be legible. Though Dan spelled out the frank capitals— Ella-Romeyn— he scarcely noticed them, for his eyes had been caught by the dark band above the windows. Brown in the lamplight, it would look red to the sun.

  He stood back a pace and looked the boat over carefully. Freighted to the gunwales with early potatoes, the Ella-Romeyn squatted on the water with the pregnant massiveness of a farrowing sow. Now and then her timbers grunted under the new load as she shifted against the tie-ropes.

  Through the window and the geranium leaves that made a fringe along the sill, Dan caught a diagonal view of the cabin. The cookstove stood against the forward wall with the dish cabinets on each side of the stovepipe and the iron ventilators up above the heating shelf. To the right, under the windows, was a small sewing table, with a shelf over it bearing a ball-dialed clock on a shaft of imitation crystal. And on either side of the clock were cast the shadows of the occupants of the room, themselves invisible from the window.

  Using the shelf for a table, and oblivious of the clock, these shadows were playing a comedy at cards. There were three of them: a stoutish man, with his back to the light, who played cautiously, putting his cards on the table with deliberate motions of his invisible hands; a very small man, his right hand to the light, with an egg-shaped head drawn out ridiculously by the angle of the wall; and opposite him an enormously fat woman, gesturing her paddle-like shadow hands with irrepressible flair. The two men were solemn in their game, though the little man was nimble in putting down his cards, in motions which the light carried clean across the shelf to the end of the fat woman’s nose. And she, with indefatigable good humor, leaned forward to meet the thrusts, and then leaned back, with chuckles that reached all the way to her bonnet, until the ribbons quivered in grotesque parody of her Gargantuan heaving. He was infected with the fat woman’s sense of humor, ridiculous in its parodied motions on the wall; he wanted to see her in the flesh, to mix with her kind, to be accepted as one of kindred joviality. As the comedy proceeded, he chuckled to himself and went aboard the boat. The unfamiliar feel of the gangway beneath his feet brought back the timidity he concealed under his slouch; yet he felt his way aft to the steersman’s position, where sufficient light escaped under the cabin door to show him the steps down.

  The fat woman’s laughter echoed against the panels.

  “Mix me another of them rum noggins,” she said, “and put in lots of lemon, and don’t forget the sugar like you did last time. Dealing makes me dry. What’s your bid, Sol?”

  “Two hundred!” exclaimed a cracked voice in high determination.

  “It’s by me,” said the third player mournfully.

  “I got two suits stopped right here,” said the fat woman, “so I’ll say two-twenty.”

  “Two twenty-five,” said Sol, with returning caution.

  “Thirty,” bid the fat woman.

  “Five,” said Sol, grimly hanging on.

  “Take it,” said the fat woman, after the figure had reached three hundred and forty-five.

  They must have looked at the “kitty.”

  “Oh, my God,” wailed Sol’s voice. “Three hearts and two of them nines, and me with one hundred and fifty in spades and diamonds, lacking only queen and jack.”

  “Them’s the suits I got stopped with my double pinochle!” shrieked the fat woman. “Three hundred points, not counting them hundred aces. Look! Look!”

  “My God, Hector, let’s quit!” cried Sol.

  Hector! Dan knocked.

  “Come in,” cried all three beyond the door.

  Dan opened it and stepped into the room.

  “Hello. Is Mr. Hector Berry here?”

  He took off his hat in deference to the fat woman. About the table, which had not appeared in the shadow pantomime, sat the three players, and, facing the door, the medium-sized man stared at Dan over square spectacles, a look of bewilderment on his plump pink features.

  “That’s my name, young man,” he said. “My name’s Hector Berry. Now what do you want? You needn’t be afraid to speak to me, young man.”

  “No,” said Dan, slowly. “I ain’t.”

  He glanced at the fat woman. The chuckle he had heard still lingered in her snapping grey eyes.

  “The young man ain’t afraid to speak to Hector Berry,” she whispered to the little man.

  “Not a mite,” agreed Sol.

  “Desperit character,” said the fat woman, shaking her head seriously. And she burst into a fit of laughter, till the ribbons of her black silk bonnet appeared to topple for their balance, and the leaden yellow cherries rattled like dice. Her face became redder and redder; her cheeks bulged explosively; and the red-centred paisley shawl on her shoulders worked up the back of her neck to her high knot of red hair.

  Berry rubbed his hands nervously and compared his watch with the clock.

  “Now,” he said irritably to Dan, “what did you say you wanted?”

  Dan looked again at the fat woman.

  “Set down,” she suggested, pointing to a chair.

  “Thank you, mam.”

  “Looking for a job?” asked Sol, with impetuous inspiration.

  “Yeanh. I wanted to see if Mr. Berry would take me on as a driver.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dan Harrow.”

  “You ain’t kin to Cap’n Henry Harrow, be you? He was captain of the packet boat Golden City. He made the smartest run, Schenectady to Buffalo, of any captain on the Erie— three days, eleven hours, and thirty-seven minutes. Three hundred and forty-six miles.” Hector Berry clasped his hands over his belly and sighed. “Figger it out for yourself— it’s a danged sight better than four miles the hour. Them was the days! Speed? You’ve got no notion how them boats could travel! Son, you ought to have been there then.”

  “Well, he wasn’t,” said the fat woman, “so why not give him a chance to answer what you asked?”

  “What was it?”

  He cast a reproachful look at her.

  “Be you kin to Henry Harrow?” she asked Dan.

  “Pa’s name was Henry Harrow. I didn’t know the rest.”

  The little man glanced up.

  “Where’d he go? I always wondered where he went to.”

  He nodded his head briskly and put his feet on the rungs of his chair.

  “Had a farm up Tug Hill,” said Dan.

  “Just think of it,” exclaimed the fat woman. “Way up there, and him so fancy-dandy in his ways!”

  “How is he?” Sol asked.

  “He’s dead.”

  “My, my,” sighed the fat woman, pushing her hand up to her heart. “We all suffer. Give the young man some rum noggin, Hector. I’ll have another glass.”

  The canal folk looked at each other.

  “My, my,” they said.

  “Good with horses?” asked Berry after an appropriate interval of silence.

  “Yeanh,” said Dan, looking into his hat.

  “Well, the man that drives for me’s to Rome. I’ll take you on that far; I’m pulling out tomorrow. I’ll pay you a dollar for driving me to Rome.”

  “Thanks.”

  Berry handed out glasses all round.

  “Now, then,” remarked the fat woman, when they had all sipped for the taste, “make the young man to home, Hector. Introduce us.”

  Hector blushed.

  “I’d clean forgot. Beg pardon, folks.” He cleared his throat, turned to Dan, and began, a trifle pompously, “Young H
arrow, this lady, which I want you to meet, is Mrs. Lucy Gurget— Mrs. Gurget, this here’s young Harrow. Mrs. Gurget cooks for this gentleman, Mr. Solomon Tinkle. I’m Hector Berry— you know it; and I’m real sorry my wife, Mrs. Penelope Berry, ain’t with us now.”

  “She ain’t dead, be she?” Dan asked commiseratingly.

  “No chance—” began Berry; then hastily, “No, she’s a-visiting with some of her folks to Westernville. We’ll pick her up off the towpath when we get through the Lansing Kill.”

  “You don’t play pinochle, do you?” Mrs. Gurget asked hopefully.

  “No,” said Dan. “I ain’t a very good hand at cards.”

  “That’s a shame. Now we might have had another game if you was. But I guess Sol, here, he’s too sick^of my skillful playing anyhow.”

  “Skill!” snorted the little man, slapping his hat on. “It’s time you went to bed, talking that way, Lucy.” …

  Left alone with Hector Berry, Dan found the time dragging. He was sleepy under his long walk; and the warmth of the fire and the rum noggin in his insides started him nodding. The kettle purred, the clock ticked, and Hector talked.

  He was excusing himself for not offering Dan a longer job. But then he was a poor man, and his wife would probably object anyway… . This man Calash made him think of old days. Two thousand dollars reward! He’d like to get it. Perhaps he would. He wondered where the man had come from… . Now in the old days such doings weren’t unusual. There were a bunch of them. They used to hang out at Joshua Ricket’s place in the Montezumy swamp. Dan’s pa used to be a light in those days. Snabbest packet on the Erie. Great hand to race. Full of dodges as a rabbit’s hind legs.

  Hector looked at Dan, and Dan looked back sleepily. He had been barely listening, catching the drift but not the words. Hector suggested bed, showed him a bunk forward beside the two horse stalls. The blankets smelled a little sour from lack of washing, but the bunk had a good straw pallet. Dan glanced at the rumps of the horses as he passed— a big black team.

  He blew out the lantern after Hector had left, listening to the breathing of the horses and the insistent slapping of the ripple below his ear, and breathing in the sweet smell of new timothy. One of the horses grunted; and Dan turned to the wall and slept.

  Early Morning

  Dan might have been sleeping in the lonely house on Tug Hill in which he and his father had lived by themselves ever since he could remember. He lay straight out upon his right side, never moving, while the first white bar of light tunneled the dusty air of the stable. A fly buzzed in along a beam, and its wings, brushing Dan’s cheeks, woke him.

  It was a cold morning, with a smell of frost in the air. The horses were on their feet stepping from side to side in their narrow stalls, nosing their mangers.

  Mechanically, Dan heaved his feet to the floor and began pulling on his trousers and lacing his boots. Pans rattled in the kitchen aft, heralding an early breakfast. He brushed the horses down. The off one, which had white stockings on its hind legs, fidgeted; but his quiet words and the un-hesitating movements of his hands seemed to reassure it; and it stood easily, leaning against the brush, skin twitching with enjoyment. Dan looked up from finishing the white stockings to see Berry in the door.

  “Say, Mr. Berry, how much do you grain ‘em?”

  An expression of amazement lengthened Hector’s usually round face.

  “You are pretty good with horses. Say, that off horse, he won’t let my driver touch his heels.”

  Dan was embarrassed.

  “Why,” said Hector after a moment, “give each one this measure level full.”

  “Them’s their regular harness?”

  “Yeanh. Come to breakfast when you’re done.”

  Dan harnessed the horses and fed them. In five minutes he was walking back along the left-hand gangway. The eighty-foot boat looked older by daylight. Her timbers were scarred along the edge of the pit, and the rail was worn smooth, to the detriment of a coat of white paint, now weathered as grey as the wood. But the cabin walls, with the small square curtained window and the blue vein of smoke coiling from the hooded stovepipe, gave her a comfortable hominess.

  Berry appeared in the cabin door.

  “Come on, Dan. Ain’t got no time for daddling. We want to be the first two down-boats into the gorge.”

  Dan went down the short steps into the kitchen. Sunlight streamed into the small windows and shone on the varnished maple walls. On the table, covered with yellow oilcloth, stood two plates, bearing three fried eggs, bacon rare, and a piece of chocolate cake. Beside them Berry placed two cups brimming with black boiled tea.

  They ate silently, until Dan reached for the sugar bowl. It was empty.

  “By Cripus!” exclaimed Hector. “Nell said she’d filled it.”

  He got up and went over to the sink, lifted the gingham curtain, pulled out the garbage tin, and filled the bowl.

  “We plop scraps out there,” he explained, pointing to a little sliding door in a corner of the wall. “Every man scrapes his own plate. It all goes down to N’ York anyways; and the tin is real useful for sugar.”

  He sat down again.

  “You see, we pick up rats every time we stop to a port. They travels into the country by our boats— five years and they’ll be the only packet passengers left to the canal. You pick up lots in Albany, and if you goes to New York you’ll fill your pit up with ‘em enough to give your boat the itch. And they’re masterful fond of sweet.”

  He grew melancholy.

  “Every time we hit the Erie by Rome, Nell she’ll up and moan for me to drive out the rats.”

  “Whyn’t you get a cat?”

  “Jeepers! A cat wouldn’t stand no show at all. Them rats’re that savage they’d drink the sweat off a man’s back.”

  Footsteps suddenly banged on the deck, clattered on the stairs, and, turning, Dan beheld Mrs. Gurget.

  “Morning, mam.”

  The fat woman was dressed in a red flannel petticoat and a yellow blouse. But on her head she wore the same bonnet. It was becomingly rakish, and under it, with her vivid eyes and sturdy carriage, Mrs. Gurget assumed a kind of unflinching handsomeness.

  “Say!” she cried. “Somebody laid out Jotham Klore last night with a bang on the head. Young Uberfrau found him around back of the Butterfield warehouse, dead for all. But he come to after a while. And he claims it was this Joe Calash. Gentleman Joe done it, he says, and took twenty dollars off him. Ain’t it awful!”

  “I’d say it was a good job,” said Hector.

  “Well, you boys’ll have to step smart. Sol, he’s harnessing his mules, and he aims to start as soon as you’re ready.”

  “We’ll be ready right off. I’ll show young Harrow here how to get out the towrope. He’s good with horses; brushed that off black of mine clear down to the heels. That shows he’s good with horses, sure’s my name’s Hector Berry.”

  “Sure,” said the fat woman, giving Dan a smile that set him blushing to his hair. “I could see that right off. All animals like him.”

  She shooed them to the door with her hands.

  “Now, then, hustle along. I’ll give the dishes a rinse while you’re getting ready.”

  “You get the team out, Dan,” said Berry, after they had run the rope out to the towpath and hooked it to the heavy elm evener. “Lift the hatch they’re facing and leave ‘em be.”

  Dan went into the stable and bridled the team, then swung up the hatch, which raised half the wall of the boat with it, and watched the team pick their way off the boat and over to the whifEetrees as nonchalantly as if they were leaving a two-story barn.

  “Last link of the traces!” shouted Hector, standing by the gangplank. The fat woman came down and hurried ahead to Solomon Tinkle’s boat. There was amazing elasticity in her step.

  “Thank the Lord!” she sighed gustily to Dan. “I declare to gracious I’m glad we’re leaving this town.”

  She ran aboard the other boat and swung in the plank just as
Solomon started his mules. Then, running to the sweep, she bore it to the left, and the boat nosed out into the water round the bows of the Ella-Romeyn and swung into line with the towpath. Little ripples jerked round the corners of the blunt bow, and evened into lines that grew and grew until they touched either shore. The fat woman swung the rudder away from shore to keep the nose of the boat in midstream. She sat down in a rocking-chair with an abbreviated back, to miss the low bridges. She reached down with her left hand into a box beside her chair, drew out a glass and a long-necked bottle, from which she dexterously poured a measure of whiskey.

  “Bridge!” called Solomon from the towpath, his bowlegs trotting nimbly beside the mules.

  “Bridge!” roared the fat woman.

  As the boat passed under the Main Street Bridge of Boonville, Dan saw Mrs. Gurget tilt her head until the cherries on her bonnet hung as on their native branch, and she downed the whiskey in a single gulp.

  “Here’s going down to Rome!”

  The full light of the early sun followed her broad back under the timbers; the two stern windows of the boat glistened like eyes; and under them Dan read the name, Nancy Haskins, Utica.

  “Well, we might as well get a-going,” cried Hector.

  Looking over his shoulder, Dan saw him standing spraddle-legged be-hind the cabin, the rudder sweep grasped in both hands, a low black flat-crowned hat upon his head, a huge cigar, tip-tilted, filling his lips to capacity. His was a mouth made for nestling a cigar.

  The team picked up a smart pace. They were fast walkers and would quickly overtake Tinkle’s mules.

  Dan felt the shadows of the Main Street Bridge over him.

  “Bridge!” he shouted in imitation of Solomon Tinkle.

  “Bridge!” replied Berry with an approving grin, adding, “Better hop up. Going with this flow even with a load on ain’t nothing for a good team. It’s a five-mile current.”

  He pointed, and Dan, looking ahead, saw the little man straddling his off mule. Dan looped the reins over the hames of his off horse and vaulted to his back. Evidently it was a customary thing to do, for the animal merely shook his head and grunted once. Dan hooked one knee over the hames and sat sidewise, facing the canal. The swift walk of the blacks had brought him opposite the stern of the Nancy Haskins; but there, they took their stride from the mules and kept pace so evenly that the two boats might have been hitched together.