by Unknown
Jerry hesitated.
“It looks like a considerable piece of work. How far is the whole of it, Mr. Hammil?”
“The Erie’s three hundred and sixty-three miles as drawn. And that leaves out the Champlain Canal. I don’t thing the Champlain’s worth for much but lumber trade.”
“That’s a long way to dig.”
“Oh, the digging don’t count for so much. It’s just a matter of time. It’s the locks and aqueducts that count. Take the Genesee! That river’s more than twice the size of ours and yet we’ve got to cross it. I don’t know who’s tackling that, but I’d hate to have it contracted up with me.”
“How long do they think it’s going to take?”
“Five years. Perhaps a year more. They’ve done a thorough scout, but you can’t ever tell what you’re going to come across underneath the ground. Marl would make slow digging. But marl is worth something. And gypsum. They might get coal in some of them westward counties. Coal enough to pay the whole expense.”
His eyes glistened as he sat back once more.
Behind him, through the window, Jerry noticed the shadows lengthening from the trees and daffodils. Some hornets, nosing the swelling plum buds, sparked like jewels. He had never heard any discussion of the canal before. But now he realized that it was a job about to be tackled; and the magnitude of its conception thrilled him. Here he had taken better than a week to come this far west, and yet he was less than a third the length of the canal. He had walked. Other men would have to dig that distance. Dig a ditch for water, forty feet across, and four feet deep.
Outside along the pathway quick steps disturbed the gravel. Looking forth together, they saw a woman in a print silk dress, full-skirted and high-bodiced, with a shawl drawn over her shoulders and across her breast. The fringed point at the small of her back fluttered to her walking.
“There’s Mrs. Hammil,” said the fat man with an air of pride.
She looked much more at home in her surroundings than did Hammil. From the small fingers protruding from her crocheted mitts of silk to her small oval face with the dark hair and eyes and composed mouth, she was daintily made. She walked as if the world were hers; and when she mounted the stoop and paused at the door, her figure was poised and graceful.
“There’s something for a man to work for,” said Hammil. “Well, Jerry, we’ll have to be stopping. I didn’t notice it was late. I’m busy tomorrow. You mind the horse. Next day I’m driving westward, and I’ll want you with me.”
He got up and again they shook hands. As Jerry came round the house to the street, he heard the woman’s silvery voice greeting her stout husband through the open door.
“I’ve just hired a young man,” he heard Hammil say. “A clever boy. He looks ambitious.”
Ambitious. Jerry stepped out. His chance lay clear before him. Hammil had succeeded in an earlier day; but a greater day was coming. And he, also, had something to work for. As he went along, he thought of Mary and how he would tell her his good news.
Walking back towards Genesee Street, Jerry heard beyond the city limits the bells of cows coming in from pasture. The streets were quiet in the late afternoon. Down Genesee Street he saw the storekeepers in their doorways taking a look at the weather or talking back and forth across the roadway. A party of movers were coming up the hill. They were poor-looking folk. The men’s faces were sullen; the women’s dull. A troop of children of all ages padded barefoot in the dust. They eyed the sights of the town with half-wild eyes.
Watching them pass, Jerry’s senses again reacted to the ceaseless travel of this road. But he saw it now with new eyes, a choked thoroughfare, carrying in driblets but a portion of its natural trade. Eastward, towards Deerfield corners, where the afternoon sun was brightening the great hill, he heard the sound of Pennsylvania Bells. There had been scarcely an hour, he realized, since he had left Albany that he had not heard that chime. He saw the hood gleaming white far down below in the valley where it crept along the causeway; and the distance made it a small thing.
As he went down Genesee Street, people nodded to him. He nodded back; but his pace quickened. Time was getting on for supper, and he wanted to tell Mary. And at the same moment it occurred to him that, poor as their room might be, this was the first time in his life that he was coming back to his own home.
He saw the shop ahead of him, a trail of violet smoke ascending from the kitchen chimney. As he came abreast he had a glimpse of wash hanging out upon the line behind the house. At the corner of the gunsmith’s a small boy, obviously one of the Charleys, was having a parting word with a companion. They eyed Jerry cautiously when they saw him turning towards the door, and he was aware of their making comments.
“Hello,” said Mr. Charley from the dusk of his store. “We didn’t see you for dinner. Did you have any luck?”
“Some,” said Jerry, as he went by towards the stairs. He mounted them two at a time and swung himself through the trapdoor. It was shadowy in the narrow loft. A breeze was drawing through the south window.
“Mary,” he said softly.
There was no answer.
He walked the length of the room to the window, where a chair had been drawn up to get the light. Beside it on the floor his bundle lay open, and on top of it one of his shirts. He saw that she had been sewing, for the threaded needle was stuck through the eye of a new horn button.
Suddenly he sat down and took up the shirt. It was one of his old work shirts, badly worn; and as he turned it over in his hands he saw how she had been reenforcing the elbows with new scraps of flannel. He sat quite still, holding the shirt in his hands, and bis eyes slowly roved the room.
All the musty smell was gone. The boards gleamed clean with a faint scent of lye soap. The bed had been moved farther into a corner and the old trunks that belonged to the Charleys dragged out of sight beyond the trap. A piece of calico had been tacked to the rafters halfway down one side. He got up slowly and went over to it. His hand fumbled as he lifted it. From more nails driven in the rafters hung her wedding dress and clothes. And next to them his own meagre stock side by side.
He came back to the bureau. Her name mug was set out to hold a little bunch of Mayflowers. He wondered where she had found them. He noticed that the water bucket was filled and a clean towel hung on either side of the wash-hand-stand. And he sat down again, realizing the privacy she had created with the stamp of her own cleanness. Overhead he heard a flutter of wings, and then the soft voice of the cock pigeon.
He heard her feet in the hall below. He knew they were hers at the instant they stepped out of the kitchen. She was mounting the stairs. Her head shone with a faint coppery lustre as it came up through the trap. Then she was in the room, her arms stuffed out with bedding, her cheeks pink with the ascent.
“Jerry!”
Her grey eyes were blue, and her voice was glad. But she dropped the blankets on the bed and started quietly to make it up.
“When you didn’t come back to dinner, I thought I might have time to get the room all ready.”
He watched the efficiency of her hands. In giving her back her papers he had given her more than her freedom; he knew it now, and he was not sorry. When she had finished she sat down on the bed and let her hands rest in her lap. She had asked him no questions. But as she regarded him now, her eyes were confident; and he found it difficult to tell her.
“It looks as if you’d been busy all day.”
She smiled.
“It looks nicer, doesn’t it? It was pretty dirty.”
“It’s real nice.”
“I wanted it all done for you to come back to.”
“It’s nice, Mary.”
She got up slowly and came forward to his chair. Her eyes were happy, but her face wore the quiet, submissive look that he had seen there ever since their wedding day. He felt that in another moment he would have to shout. As she bent down to pick up the unfinished shirt he put his arms round her waist and drew her down on his lap.
He tried to mask his voice.
“Tell me all you’ve been doing all day, Mary.”
She gave without objection to his arms, but her head she kept bent over the shirt. Her fingers drew the needle from the cloth and began stitching.
“First,” she said in a low voice, “I cleaned the roof, after I’d hung out the bedding, and then I cleaned all the floor and moved the trunks. I didn’t get done till nearly dinner time.”
“How was dinner?” he asked when she paused. He was intensely curious now to find out how she occupied her time.
The twilight in the loft, with the muffled quiet of the street outside and the spring-scented breeze drawing across them, made the day mysterious.
“It was all right. Mrs. Charley isn’t a cook like Ma Halleck, I guess, and she appears all the time to be distracted.”
“What did you have to eat?”
“We had some corned mutton and samp cake. Mrs. Charley hadn’t ever heard of capers.”
“Were the children too bad?”
“Just noisy. Mrs. Charley tried to make them wash, but it didn’t do much good. Mr. Charley brought in a book and read out of it, but I didn’t understand much of it. And anyway he read to himself most of the time. Mrs. Charley talked about people that live here and complained that flour cost so much.”
“What did you do afterwards?”
“Henderson said he knew where there were some Mayflowers and asked if I would like some. I said I didn’t know what they looked like, but I would like some very much. He said he knew there were some near, so we went to get them. Don’t they smell sweet? He picked a bunch more and took them to the lady Mrs. Charley washes for to sell them.”
She twisted the thread round the button and bit it off close. Her eyes met his sidewise. She bent for another button, put it in place, and anchored it.
“Then I finished cleaning and made us a place for our clothes, and then later I sat down here in the window to sew and look out.”
“Were you watching for me?” he asked.
“Yes.” She turned over the shirt and sewed from the back, by touch.
“Stop sewing,” he said. “Throw the damned thing away.” He snatched it from her and tossed it across the room. He heard her sharp breath and saw her quick glance at her thumb. A spot of blood domed slowly where the needle had caught.
Jerry’s dark face bent over it, flushed and excited.
“Let me have it.”
He sucked the blood away, and inside of himself he was glad. His arms tightened.
“Did you miss me?”
“Yes. But I kept busy.”
“Kiss me, Mary.”
She bent her face obediently and as he drew her closer a wave of tremulousness passed over her. Her eyelids quivered as they closed. And yet when he let her go she seemed as usual to withdraw into herself.
“You haven’t even asked me one question,” he said accusingly.
Her eyes opened wide, and the faint pucker came between her brows.
“Didn’t you care, Mary?”
“I was afraid you mightn’t have found anything.”
He loosened his hold and looked across at the distant window. The arms of the old maple in the yard beyond were just visible. Mrs. Charley’s voice was shrilling.
“Alva, wash your feet. My land, where have you been treading?”
“I don’t know, Ma. Honestly. I just went down by the mud flat and then me and Josey Wood was playing Castle King behind Bellinger’s barn.”
But the voices were removed from their quiet room. Jerry did not turn his head. His words came slowly, as if he found speech difficult.
“I happened into luck, Mary. I met a man that’s got a contract for all the locks on this part of the canal they’re going to build.”
“Yes.”
“It’s the Grand Canal. It was being passed by the Senate when we came through Albany. Do you remember, when I left you on the corner to go get food?”
“I remember that,” she said in a hushed voice.
“I heard them talking about it then in the coffeehouse. It will run from Albany to Buffalo, three hundred and sixty-three miles!”
“Yes, Jerry.”
“I don’t suppose you know what that is locks, and things. But this man his name is Caleb Hammil is going to give me three dollars a week to start with, and then five if things are all right.”
“That’s fine, Jerry.”
“It’s going to mean I’ll be away a lot of the time. We’ll have to scout for timber. And when the work begins I’ll be out west a lot the first lock’s fifty miles from here. Will you mind being alone?”
“No, Jerry,”
“But you’ll miss me, won’t you?”
“Yes, of course.”
Here and there through the town they heard hand bells rung for supper, and under them there was a sudden noise of feet Mr. Charley coming out of his store, Mrs. Charley shrieking to Henderson to tell the Fowlers supper was on the table, and the bare soles of the boy’s feet as he crept up the stairs, and his head poked over the floor.
“Ma says supper’s ready.”
Mary had sprung up, and now Jerry hurried to wash.
The Charley family were assembled when they reached the kitchen. Mary’s and Jerry’s chairs were together on Mr. Charley’s right. The little bookseller was helping large slices of corned mutton, over which he poured a vinegary syrup from a small pitcher. Mrs. Charley helped the plates to boiled potatoes. There was a glass of beer at Jerry’s place which a neighboring small Charley eyed curiously. His smutted cheeks kept puffing with a hidden breath, as if he were barely able to keep himself from scudding off the froth. For those that wanted it, Mrs. Charley poured tea into deep brown saucers.
In the presence of a new male boarder, the boys were unaccountably quiet. Mr. Charley helped himself and said, “Well, young man, did you find any work?”
Jerry nodded. Two tallow candles in their individual basins lighted the kitchen. He could see the remnant of clothes in a basket half hidden in a corner. The baby’s cradle was out of sight beside Mrs. Charley, conveniently placed for her foot to rock it if the child should waken. But noise meant nothing to the baby, and it snuffled away as placidly as a well-fed little pig.
“Who’re you working for?”
“Caleb Hammil.”
“The contractor. What’s he going to do now?”
“He’s got a contract on the canal. Locks and aqueducts.”
“Greek to me,” said Lester Charley. “But it sounds like a lot of work.”
“It’s a big thing to tackle,” Jerry said, accepting a buttered slab of bread from young Henderson.
“What are you getting?”
Jerry told him.
“That’s good pay. Well, I had an idea you’d have luck, young man.”
He raised his eyes to meet Mrs. Charley’s expected comment.
“Luck!” she said sniffing. “When did you ever make three dollars a week? He went to look for it, that’s how.”
Lester Charley grinned to himself.
“Alice,” he said soberly, “you know if I went out for a job like that you’d lose half your pleasure in life. There’s nothing you like better than working to keep me comfortable, and then complaining about me to everybody.”
She sniffed.
“A person has to say something.”
“I suppose so,” said the bookseller, with a sigh. “Apple pudding? That’s nice of you, my dear. It’s a difficult dish to make. Next time I’d recommend more cinnamon.”
“It’s awful expensive nowadays, Lester,” she said apologetically. “But if you want a little extry to sprinkle on I’ll get it.”
“Thank you, I would.”
He grinned sardonically at Jerry, but his eyes twinkled at his wife while she sprinkled on the cinnamon.
“I suppose you’ll be away a lot with Caleb,” he said to Jerry.
“Quite a lot.”
“I can’t reduce the rent,” Mrs. Char
ley said defensively.
“It doesn’t matter now.”
She sighed with relief.
“Alva, you get me some wood for tomorrow morning.”
Alva lowered.
“Me and Robert was going fishing for bullheads.”
“It won’t take you long to get in the wood.”
“Bullheads are chancy, Ma.”
“Alva,” said Mr. Charley, “if you don’t get it I shall have to.”
“Do as you’re a mind to,” said his mother, “but if the wood ain’t in tomorrow morning, you’ll get a trimming.”
“Ain’t it time Purly was getting it in? He’s big enough,” suggested Alva.
“No.”
Alva resigned himself.
The rest finished their supper to the sounds of the boy’s groaning in the woodshed. He came staggering in with a small armful that would not have disturbed a boy of half his size.
“Now I’m all of a sweat,” he grumbled. “And if I get the ague in the cold, I guess you won’t be sorry.”
Nobody paid him any attention, and a moment later they heard his voice whooping down the street for Robert.
“Catching bullheads must be very fascinating to Alva,” observed Mr. Charley. “I never liked them as fish.”
He got up to go out for his evening session at Bellinger’s, pausing to light his pipe at the kitchen fire. Jerry declined his invitation.
He had not looked at Mary all evening. But now he met her glance in the smoky tallow light. She lowered her eyes. His hands were trembling.
He waited for her at the trapdoor and watched her through and closed it. It was quite dark in the room. Beyond the window he saw the stars down the long reach of the valley. Peepers in the swamp filled the air with a continual rhythm. A whippoorwill was singing in the middle of Genesee Street. He undressed slowly, feeling the breeze on his bare body. The bed strings creaked under Mary’s weight.