3stalwarts

by Unknown

  “But he never stayed long. Till I got well, he brought in game twice a week and stayed for a meal. After that he only came round once in a while. The winter dragged through. We’d see him once in a while in sum-mer. He’d bring fish. He’d took a fancy to Ellen, I guess. But if there was anybody with us he’d leave the fish by the door, and we never knowed he was there till we went out and found him gone.

  “That summer word come through that they was planning to start the canal. People talked about that like it was Judgment Day getting close. They’d commenced to dig in Rome. People said it would be fifty years by the time it got to Black Rock, and others said it would be three. We’d hear from time to time how it was getting along. The first year they did fifteen miles. The next year there was three thousand men working on the line, by all accounts. In ‘19 they turned the Mohawk water in at Rome and ran a boat to Utica. That was late in the fall. We heard about it a month later where we were.

  “There had been two farmers moved in within walking distance of my place. I helped them build. My wife went over to help in their houses. She’d got a loom now and was handy at making cloth. In ‘19 a mill was built up above us on the Creek. The man that built it was looking forward to the canal. I did the work and hired a man to mind the farm. I made money, but I worked on half pay, meaning to take the rest out in lumber. I’d got it fixed I’d build a real house and barn. And after planting, next spring, I commenced the work. The rest come round and said I was building too big, but me and my wife knew now that we had to settle there for good or give up the country. It was a notion I had that that would be the last carpenter work I’d do. I wanted to build my own house. Ellen and me’d dreamed about that house, just how we wanted it— two stories with a peaked roof and dormers.

  “It took me a year to build. It was right on the rise I told about, and I’d put a long stoop round the side facing out. There was more people going through. By this time the canal had opened beyond Syracuse, so there was less space for them to haul across in wagons. I made money selling them food and grain. My wife was handy making cheese. That sold well. Only now and then she’d go give a cheese away. Just when she saw a young wife that couldn’t buy it. Them would look at the house I was building like it was the last they’d ever expect to see.

  “Old Parchal Smith come round less. Three other families had moved in,-but none more,-but that was too much for him. He only come in the middle of winter or late at night in summer. He was getting restless. He’d leave his hound outside, and as soon as he’d hear the dog growl he’d go out. He didn’t like the talk of the canal.

  “It was easier for Ellen now, with three other women round. They’d hold parties ‘mongst each other, and make us get dressed up to go. They’d send round letters by one of the children, when they could have walked as well themselves. They figured out a lot of manners that way. And they was particular about them.

  “We’d talked about the canal. It didn’t seem like it would ever get to us. They’d surveyed in ‘19, and the route would come close to my place. We knew it would be good for trade, and Winster, who had the mill, figured he would sell planks for boats.

  “It was different with the women. They watched the news; they got it out of everybody that come along. They wanted the talk about it, I guess.

  “I’d moved into my big house, though I hadn’t enough to furnish it decent, and the neighbors had said I was foolish to build so big. But me and Ellen didn’t care. We guessed they’d wished they’d builded that way to begin with. It was the finest house west of Rochester.

  “Then, first thing we knowed, in ‘23, men commenced working on the route between Black Rock and Lockport. Black Rock figured they would be the port, and Buffalo figured they would. Once a month one of them would hold a celebration, according to the news. We’d hear the guns and fireworks clear to Tonawanda Creek. The men that worked was Irishers mostly, though we hired out teams.

  “I remember, two springs after that, how me and Ellen sat on the big stoop in June. A warm afternoon. The word come the water would come in from Erie. And after a while we seen it come. Brown and muddy, very slow; so’s not to rip the banks. It went by us in a little creek. We watched it rise all day. At night it was still getting up. Brown and muddy. Me and my wife just set there holding hands, and we dassn’t try to speak. It seemed like the garden would have more flowers that year— there’d be people to look up and see them on the rise. Then she put the children to bed, and come out again. We didn’t have no supper. We didn’t want it. We’d listen to the water eddy down below all night. In the morning it had come off blue in the sun— pretty near that color.”

  The old man pointed.

  “We hadn’t realized the water would come so close— but now it was there we liked it. People said there would be noise, but we liked it. They finished Lockport that fall. Tolls was taken on the first of October. It had been a fine farming summer. I’d had more money in than I’d expected for a single year. Then on the twenty-sixth the opening come.”

  He stopped again, his eyes far off, as if he listened.

  “It was a masterful event. The leaves had turned late that year, and there was still color to the woods. Wednesday night, me and my wife was waked up by a knock, and, going down, there was Parchal. He’d heard. He’d been down to the water of the canal. He had a pack on his back and his long rifle in his hand. The dog looked gay. He knew he was going on a hunt.

  “They had put cannon— you know how— all along the canal and down the Hudson. There was an old ten-pounder mounted on my rise of ground, its snout pointing west, and there was one of McDonough’s sailors— an old horny man snoring upstairs in the best room— there to touch it off. The neighbors came next morning early. Ellen and the women had gotten up a big feast, and a lot of the Irishers had come in from Lockport, remembering us, to get the food. Old Parchal that night took us out and showed us a doe deer, fat and prime, he’d brought for us. ‘I had my eye on her all summer,’ he said. But his eyes was cold and kind of still.

  “That next morning we got up and the women went to work. The men sat on the porch, looking down the canal to the lake. I had some Jamaica and Golden Medford for them— it was a brisk morning. Cool from frost at night, but no wind at all. The smoke from our pipes hung under the roof. The children played round— noisy. The cook smells came out to us. The sailor, Benjy Wright, sat on the cannon’s butt, patting her once in a while, and telling us how he used to shoot her. Parchal stood off by himself on the grass, leaning on his rifle, the hound dog sitting right in front of him. Both their heads was still, but they both looked westward. And the hound was working his nose. Some of the men laughed at the lean old feller and his big dog, but when I told ‘em how he’d fed me and my wife one winter, they stopped.

  “About nine o’clock Benjy cut him a hard plug with his sailor knife. He had a tail of hair on his neck, and he’d oiled it that night, staining the piller till my wife could have cried. He wore a red-and-white striped shirt and had pressed his pants himself. They was wide pants. Now he petted the butt of the old cannon and he says, ‘Lilah, when it comes your turn to talk, you talk out loud.’ He lighted his match and we stood waiting. Then a cannon sounded down by Buffalo. And Benjy touched the match to the fuse and in a minute the old gun bucked and roared, and a glass broke in the window of the parlor. The Irishers jumped up cheering, and the little girls commenced to cry. And the women come out. They wasn’t crying, but they had wet eyes. Then we sat down and watched Benjy load up the cannon. And an hour and forty minutes later there was a cannon faint to eastward of us. And our gun bucked and shot again and we heard a gun boom in Buffalo. But with that sound from the eastward of us we knowed that New York knowed. The sound of it told us that.

  “All to once we knowed there was other people back east who knowed about us. We were in a country as big as half the world, but with that shot it all come closer together. We weren’t alone.

  “My wife,” said John Durble, “come and sat in my lap and cried.”

>   “Yeanh,” said Dan.

  For a while there was silence.

  “Clinton’s boat come along a while later when we were eating dinner. The food got burnt somehow. But we cheered him by and his four grey matched horses, and he waved to us. And we cheered the other boats. We finished eating. But it was only when my wife and I put the children to bed that night we noticed Parchal Smith was gone. When the shot sounded eastward he must have gone. Him and the hound both. I never heard of them again. But nights now me and my wife hear the boats once in a while— a horn, maybe— or, when it’s still, the clink of a trace chain. Or we see the night lanterns. The railroads come in time. But here it didn’t make so much difference. They come too easy and quick.

  “The canal brought us money, and built great cities along the line— it’s building this one. But it brought something better to me and my wife. I couldn’t tell you, son. We hear the horns.”

  After a while he said, “I got to get home.”

  And he went away.

  But that evening, as the Sarsey Sal moved eastward by the intake gates of Tonawanda Creek, Dan looked up and saw a house on the gentle rise of ground. A white house, peaceful, comfortable, two stories, with dormer windows on the peaked roof. He blew his horn, softly. It sounded gentle on the air. Molly, who was standing close beside him, asked, “Why did you blow it, Dan?”

  Dan pointed to a lighted window. The shadows of two figures appeared standing together. Then one opened the window and leaned out, to follow with his eyes the light of the night lantern along the velvet water. The light caught a red glow in Dan’s high cheeks and traced golden threads in Molly’s hair as she combed it out and braided it there on the deck.

  It was very still; it was spring. Tree toads lifted clear treble voices against the black sky; and the chirrup of tiny frogs along the canal went with the Sarsey Sal in a rising throaty song.

  In Erlo’s Boarding House

  The horses had the rhythm of the long hauls. They went with a plodding stride, and Fortune went slowly behind them, head down and hands in his pockets.

  It was a warm April morning, and the sun had just cleared the light mists from the meadows. Tendrils of it still lingered where the balsams shaded the canal. A flock of ducks scrambled out of a setback, leaving a white trail of foam over the water, and started out again on their northward journey. A little later Dan heard a distant murmur, a cry taken up by twenty voices, and thrown back and forth between them, singly and in a swelling chorus. Fortune, too, heard the honking and kept his eyes on the sky. Dan called Molly on deck. Soon they saw them in the liquid, early morning sky, high up, a line of geese rippling northward.

  At Lockport they caught up to a long line of boats going down. Far below, the canal shot straight away, out under the high bridge. On their left the water thundered over falls. Boats, like tiny chips pulled by ants on a cobweb thread, moved out at measured intervals from the downward flight. All along the locks tenders worked quickly at the levers, their shirts soaked with sweat. Regularly, life-sized boats issued from the top lock of the upward flight and hauled past the waiting queue. Dan sat on deck by the rudder and watched them pass. The immigrant season had started. A line boat came by, bright yellow, one of the Michigan Six Day, with an old German smoking a porcelain pipe, his stocking feet straight out on the cabin roof in front of him, the soles turned to the sun. Women’s voices rose from the cabin, and the sound of a fiddle wheedling at a tune. Steering was a tall upright old man with a long white beard.

  “Ben!” Dan cried. “Ben Rae!”

  The Jew turned his fine face toward the Sarsey Sal, a puzzled light in his eyes. Then he recognized Dan and waved his arm.

  “Hullo, Dan. How be you?” He turned to the cabin door, his deep voice booming, “Hey, Julius! Julius! Here’s Dan Harrow.”

  The lanky black-haired Wilson sprang out on deck.

  “Hello, Dan. Glad to see you. Who’re you boating for?”

  “My boat,” Dan said proudly.

  “Say,” said Wilson, “I met Berry back in Rochester. He said to tell you Jotham Klore was hauling east, working on the Boonville feeder. He said you’d want to know.”

  Fortune had turned to see who was talking. He recognized the Jew.

  “Hey, there, how’s pinochle?” he shouted.

  “How’s preaching?” cried the Jew.

  Wilson laughed, shook his fist, and Fortune chuckled. The boat drew away. Line boats worked on schedule. Their crews could not stop to talk. Dan felt sad.

  The Sarsey Sal sank down between the stone walls, and down again when the gates closed, until it came out once more on the smooth flow. The big team waited for it, with their heads turned round, and stepped out on the towpath of their own accord as Dan tossed the towrope to Fortune. They heaved and went on.

  They kept the teams at a good pace that day, and late on the afternoon of the next they saw the roofs of the city ahead of them in the southeast. The windows were afire with the sunset, and, as the boat pulled forward, the red light moved from pane to pane along the entire city front. There was a slight haze of flour dust over the roofs of the mills. On their left the thunder of the swollen falls beat heavily.

  There was an empty berth for the Sarsey Sal just under the Main Street Bridge. They ate in the cabin with the shadows stealing over the canal. Boats passed in each direction. But the shouts along the dock, where men had been loading, grew fainter, thinned out. The boats passing now were bound straight through.

  After supper, in the cool of the evening, Dan sat awhile on deck, smoking his pipe, while Molly cleaned the dishes. It was a peaceful scene he looked out upon from under the rafters of the bridge. The boats lay still all along the banks in a double row; smoke and the smell of cooking rose from their cabins. A horse stamped in his stall, and sighed over his oats. Along the wharf a few men moved leisurely; and a couple loitered on the bridge over his head, their voices falling toward his hands in a soft murmur.

  Fortune had gone off on his eternal pilgrimage to cards.

  Molly came up after a while in her street dress with its tight-waisted jacket and flaunting hem. At the news of Klore’s being on the Boonville canal, a worried expression had left her eyes. She had been quietly happy that day. Now she was smiling when she took Dan’s arm.

  “Let’s walk around a little, Dan, if you ain’t too tuckered.”

  They stepped to the towpath and made their way up to the bridge by a little flight of stairs set in against the wall. For a while they strolled up Plym-outh Avenue and through the streets of the third ward, past the fine houses with their lawns under towering elms. There was a misty vagueness in the line of the trees against the twilight, and the dusk about their roots was deep.

  They made their way down again toward the canal along Exchange Street, getting glimpses of the dark water of the river between the mills. The night had closed in. Lights came in windows on their left; roof lines were lost against the sky until the stars came out, when, gradually, they were born again.

  They went down to the canal and walked out along the towpath on the aqueduct. They leaned on the parapet, looking downstream. Here and there were lights in the dives on Water Street, and the reflections of them seemed to be running on the river. The thunder of the falls below came to their ears in a steady muttering and made speech an intimate thing.

  “I wonder where Gentleman Joe is,” Dan said after a while.

  Molly was standing close to him, her hand still in the bend of his arm. Now he felt her turn.

  “If he was here, he’d be in one of them houses, I guess.”

  She pointed to the row of houses on their right, rising three stories high, their foundations licked by the river. Their clapboarded sides, even in that dim light, had a neglected look, and their odd, old-shingled roofs made an unkempt line against the stars. The nearest of the row, not twenty feet from where they stood, showed no lights; but a wisp of smoke floated upward from its chimney. The windows of its second story, close to the aqueduct, were not more
than three feet above the parapet.

  Dan and Molly, taking up their stroll again, moved under it. As they passed, they heard a guarded voice call to them.

  “Say!”

  They both looked up. There was no one visible in the window, and the voice seemed to come from above it.

  “There’s a dormer set back on the roof,” Molly said suddenly. “I remember noticing it before.”

  Dan stepped back until he could see the dormer. He could barely make out a man’s figure leaning out of it.

  “Hello,” he said quietly.

  He caught a movement of the man’s head.

  “It’s all right,” he said. He had guessed who the man was. “It’s me— Dan Harrow. There ain’t anybody around.”

  He thought he caught a sound of sharply indrawn breath.

  “Say,” said the man, again.

  “Yeanh?”

  “Henderson’s watching all along the street. The only way I can get out’s by this window. Can you bring me up a line? They won’t be keeping people out of the houses. It’s people coming out they’re watching for.”

  “All right,” Dan said.

  “Listen. Do you know where Jannard’s stable is?”

  Dan felt Molly at his side.

  “I do,” she whispered.

  “Yeanh,” he said.

  “Then go there. I’ll make it worth while for you. The horse’s in the back box stall, saddle by the door. There’s a line hanging from the hook next to it. I seen it yesterday. Bring the horse here and come into the house. The horse’U stand. It’s straight up at the top— three flights.”