by Unknown
“I’ll start supper afore milking.”
“I wish somehow your ma had lived to see it.”
She was silent.
“Right where them stakes run.”
He picked up his cradle, but his left arm pointed. Both traced the triple line of red stakes westward through their fields past the house, three at the yard fence, three beyond the barn, then on through the potato piece, the cornfield where the corn was rustling torrid sabre-leaves, past the hillside where the land leveled into the tamaracks.
“They’ve done it quick,” said Adelphus Burns. “A week, maybe.”
“Yes.” Her lips compressed. “A week, last Monday.”
She had brown hair, the color of crisp leaves. She stood straight, broad-shouldered as Adelphus; but under the linsey dress her bare legs showed a woman’s ankles, and the curves of her hips and breast surged strongly.
“I’ll miss them both even the old one,” said Adelphus, pushing back his hat. He let out his breath. “Well, after harvest I’ll go into Fayette and look me up a gang. Then we’ll have more company a spell. They say two years afore the water comes.”
She said nothing, but walked at his side until the time came for her to branch off to the house.
Adelphus leaned his scythe against the wall of the new building and went inside. In the kitchen, he found Jerry and Self Rogers inspecting the box-iron stove.
“Hello, boys,” Adelphus said. “It’s all complete. You’ve done it fast.”
He sat down on the cook’s bunk and looked the shanty over. The stove was set halfway into the partition so that the heat could lend some warmth to the men’s sleeping room. He could see into that through the open door, the three tiers of bunks, the long table and board benches, a single sash and an outside door.
“Yes,” said Self Rogers, pulling out his thin moustache. “It’s another one of these damned chicken boxes knocked together.”
Adelphus grinned at Jerry, who grinned back.
“Self gets kind of disgusted sticking up these shanties,” Jerry said. “You may have noticed.”
“Thirteen of them,” said Self. “Thirteen. It’s got to be a habit with me. It comes natural now, like spitting out a chew.” He cupped a full cheek in one hand.
“Thirteen?” Adelphus looked round. “That’s how you laid it up so quick. ‘Tain’t a bad job, neither. Not that I aim to sleep into it. Not with my own bed over there. No, sir. Built for forty men? It ain’t too bad for eighty dollars. Sound boarding. Maybe when I’ve dug my length of this-here ditch I’ll seal it up inside and make a store to sell to boats with. I’ll use a part of it for poultry maybe.”
“Pullets!” ejaculated the carpenter. “Them bunks would make good nesting boxes!” He spat. “I signed a contract up with Hammil to build him nine more. Contract! Now I’m caught, legal. I never seen nothing like this contracting that everybody’s doing. You’ve got one?”
“Yes,” said Adelphus. “A B-contract for digging out a mile. There ain’t no grubbing. I done all that when I come here ten years ago. I get twelve and a half cents the yard of dirt. It makes a twenty-five-hundred-dollar contract. I have good credit, so they give me a hundred dollars to buy tools with and I paid Hammil for this shack myself.”
He turned to look through the open door at his clean fields.
“Do you suppose there will be heavy boating past this place?”
They didn’t know.
Bending over his tool chest, Jerry wrapped his tools in greasy rags.
“It’s been nice working here. We had some bad times back in the Rome swamps no farms no decent food, and rain all the while.”
“You’re moving on tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Me and Dencey’s going to miss you.”
“It’s been nice for us, ain’t it, Self?”
“I ain’t had the toothache, anyway,” said Self. “A good thing, too. Out here a man can’t get no ether-paint upon his cheek to drink the misery out. I’m caught here with a contract. Afore this damned canal a man just said he’d work. Now he signs a paper. A man is captured and held legal.”
He bent to his tools. The farmer stared out. Beyond the door, a red stake showed its shadow like an hourglass upon the trodden sod.
“I settled here on Limestone crick ten years ago. It was quite a piece off the pike, but then I didn’t want my fields broke in with movers, or my rail fence lifted all the while by teamsters prizing out their wagons in the wet, and disremembering to put them back. I picked this land to build a barn there’s nothing like a sidehill barn to winter beasts in. You could have knocked me double Injun when them surveyors come along and sighted their levels right against the barn. I’ve got to move it, even though I’m paid. It’s going to save a little digging, though.”
“When do you commence your digging?” Jerry asked.
“After harvest I’ll hire a gang. Eighty cents a day I figure for a digger’s pay.”
“Well,” said Self, strapping up his tool box, “I’m glad it’s done. Caleb’s due to fetch us out tomorrow.”
“You boys have been going it quite a while.”
“I ain’t been home since July sixth,” said Jerry.
Dencey
Jerry milked for Dencey. She had picked blueberries on Sunday; so she made him a blueberry pie to pay for his kindness. Now they had a clear evening, with the sun gone down beyond the red stakes, and a full moon rising. Self had gone to bed. The boys were fishing in the creek, and her father was sitting up alone reading out the paper, the Christian Visitant, that came once a month when they had time to ride four miles to Fayetteville to get it. There was a story that he fancied, “Little Annie’s Sparrow” a pretty story. She had read it two days ago.
Down by the shanty, she found Jerry in the moonlight sitting on the dew-less grass. She sat beside him. There was a little wind that drew across the flat of the meadowland.
Jerry turned his head in the darkness.
“Do you mind if I come down and visit with you, Jerry?”
“No.”
“I brought my crochet along.”
“What are you making, Dencey?”
He saw that she had put on shoes and stockings low-heeled black shoes, and stockings of white cotton.
Her head was bent.
“Oh, I’m crocheting.”
“Can you see to do it in the dark?”
“Finely.”
“It’s a wonderful thing the way a woman can crochet out of light.”
“A woman gets able to do it after a while.”
He looked away. The hillside sloped against the sky.
“It’s pretty down here tonight. The bugs are all after Pa, where the light is.”
“Yes, I come down away from the buzzing of them,” said Jerry. “Back home in Uniontown we don’t have flies so thick.”
“Is that where your girl is?”
Dencey spoke with a soft huskiness, a slurring of her words, as if a pulse were beating in her throat.
“No. That’s where I was born. No. My girl’s in Utica. We’re wedded, Dencey.”
Dencey’s strong hands plied the needle.
“Is she pretty?”
“Yes,” said Jerry. “She’s pretty.” He stopped.
“Don’t fear to tell a girl.” Dencey’s voice was low.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
“How tall is she?”
“Not tall.”
“Not so big as me?”
“No. She’s not small, neither.”
“Not so big as me,” repeated Dencey. “I’m big. I look most like a man.” Her bitterness hushed them both.
Jerry stirred uneasily. She was giving him something to read, under the bitterness, and the kindness.
He saw her chin against the western luminance. The world was still. Crickets were fingering the harvest strings.
“I’m going to miss you, Jerry. It’s been pleasurable here lately. More pleasurable than I can remember, but I gues
s you’ll be anxious to get back home.”
“Yes.”
Dencey was still.
“Jerry, hear that bird? What do you name it?”
“It’s a thrush.”
“Thrush. That’s a pretty name. Out here, we call it ‘brown-bird.’ “
“That’s pretty, too, Dencey.”
“I hear it nights this autumn time of year. Did you ever listen to it, Jerry? Didn’t it make you have thoughts in yourself? A kind of pain?”
“No. Not pain.”
“Plain people have got pain more easily, I guess.”
Jerry looked down to the dark trees.
“What do you think about, Jerry?”
“I’m thinking I would get back home inside the month, maybe.”
“And then?” Her voice was resigned now, muted, slow.
“Then I’m building a lock for Caleb out by Cossett’s. Maybe.”
“All alone again?”
“Maybe.”
“I’m going to miss you, Jerry.”
Silence: the tick of insects in the grass; the stars beyond the hill-back; the girl still, her face bent, her hands working.
Jerry sat there, with his thoughts on Mary, fingering grass. The night stirred him, and Dencey’s voice in the sultry hush. He raised his shoulders. Tomorrow he would be going on. He asked her, “Dencey?”
“Yes.” Her hands were quiet and her face was turned. Between them in the little space each heard the other breathing.
“You ain’t told me what your crochet was.”
She laughed; close, hard laughter.
“Just a pretty. Just a private pretty.”
Suddenly she bundled up the work in her hand and rose strongly to her feet.
“Nighttime for sleeping, Jerry.”
He got up with her. They started for the one lighted window of the house. A cowbell clanked.
“What for?”
“Just for myself. A little dainty, Jerry. It gives a girl an ease to make her one.”
“It’s a wonder,” Jerry said. “A crochet in the dark’s a wonder to me.”
“It’s easy enough with practising, Jerry.”
They came to the house. Dencey went to bed. By the light of her own candle she looked down at the hopeless snarl of white cotton thread.
Lock-site
They stood together in the swamp. A haze was low over the grass. October smells of woods fires somewhere made it heavy. The young engineer shook Jerry’s hand.
“When you get started next week, I’ll come along from time to time. But it seems to me you know about as much as I do in this line. I’m just beyond my prentice surveying days myself.”
“I read those plans,” said Jerry. “I’ve got them memorized.”
“None of us know anything about locks or aqueducts. Till Canvass White gets back from England, I guess we’ll have to work them out as we go along. All I can do is see the work is done honestly.”
“You’ve got quite a lot of ground to cover, Mr. Roberts.”
“I don’t have to worry about your and Caleb’s work anyway.”
He looked down at the trodden grass. Split-wands marked off the space for the well. Ninety feet by fifteen. And east and west, ghostly in the haze, the red stakes marked the line.
“It seems funny, doesn’t it? Digging a lock here all by itself. Setting up the gates and all. And no water possible for over a year. But we’ve got to practise.”
“Is there much work back east?”
“I came straight out from Rome, Jerry. Three sections are half dug. It’s awful slow-seeming work. I don’t think us Yankees are much good at shoveling. The English and Irish and even the Dutch dig better. They don’t wear themselves. But one man is using a horse scoop. That’s going to work. And the grubbing goes fast. Getting out the roots. But every time I pass a section it seems so small a way, I feel afraid.”
Jerry nodded.
“If we had machines to get rid of the stumps,” said Roberts. “We can’t afford to blast them. Powder’s high. You never know anyway how it will work on a stump.”
His face, bareheaded, touseled hair, looked boyish.
“I’d like to get back home,” said Jerry.
Roberts gave a sympathetic smile.
“Yes. I don’t wonder. Caleb told me about you. Just married, weren’t you? And he’s had to keep you way out here. He says you’re the only man he has to trust.”
Jerry flushed.
“If you like I’ll go around and see your girl,” said Roberts, “and let her know how you are.”
“I’d like that.”
“I’m coming back in two weeks’ time.”
“I’ll be glad to see you.”
Jerry looked out at the tall lines of grass. Here and there a dead cedar or a small tamarack poked up pathetically.
“I’ve got to stay to weigh the stone.” He looked at the scales beside the space marked off for the lock. Already a tier of stone, grey, squarely cut in eighteen-inch blocks, was piled there like a wall. Behind them a shanty, like all the ones that he and Self had built, raised its new walls in the haze.
They walked round to the shed, where Robert’s little sandy pony dozed under her saddle. Roberts loosened the bridle reins and led her out.
“She’s getting to know the route as well as I do.”
He mounted.
Something he saw in Jerry’s face made him linger.
“Why don’t you bring your wife out here?”
“I’ve been thinking of it. Maybe she could board at Melvilles.”
“I’d do it.”
The pony trotted off.
Dorothy Melville
Dorothy Melville, with her wispy hair knotted tight behind her homely face, greeted them cheerfully.
“I’ve milked early. Dumple didn’t like it. But I wanted supper cooked for you two traveling men and time enough afterwards to get to fixings.”
In the corner of the kitchen was the extra bed, the frame boards leaned against the Melvilles’ own. Jerry took his seat at table and glanced round. This log-house kitchen always made him comfortable.
Like many large women, Dorothy had a leaning to frills. She had frills on the gingham curtains bird’s-eye blue and ruffles tacked to the cupboard shelves. Her own bed had a quilt of brilliant patches and a spread in blue and white a pattern from down south, she said, where she had come from; “Wind in the Valley” was its name. There was an old Welsh dresser to the right of the clay-and-stick fireplace, an open-hearth fireplace with the clay back, and the chimney resting on an over-jut, like a French hood. It had the biggest trammel Jerry had ever seen; and there were copper kettles, many of them, for copper shone like glass in Dorothy’s strong hands. The two wheels stood in the corner with the spinning stools like terriers crouched down on guard. The bark-clad beams that braced the loft bristled like hedgehogs with iron hooks, and the orange pumpkin discs hung up for drying, the hams, the bunches of gathered herbs colts-foot, wintergreen and senna, camomile, euphorbia, pleurisy and blood roots all made a spice in the air.
“Set you down, you two travelers, and eat strong, for I’m going to work you after.”
Melville came back from stabling his horse and sat down at the table. The top was made of cherry planks, but rubbed and polished from long use to a mellow shine. The tea was simmering in the black lustre pot. The mush of green corn and milk in the yellow bowls was sweet. The long twist-loaf cut through like silver fluff.
“Do you reckon Mary will keep warm enough up there in winter?”
“Shucks-a-daisy, Bob! Most time she’ll be down here with me. At nights we’ll quilt her up like a March duckling. She’ll nest herself.”
Jerry’s face warmed. Something was tickling his inside at Dorothy’s words. “She’ll nest herself.” It made a picture.
“Look at him, Bob. Poor boy, it’s hard awaiting, ain’t it?”
Jerry nodded. These were like his own people, and tonight it seemed he loved them more.
&nbs
p; Dorothy emptied her bowl and leaned against her chair-back. She looked fondly at her husband’s long nose. It always quirked her lips to see it ever since she could remember.
“Hard awaiting! Honey, don’t I know? Hard for you, Jerry-boy. But harder for a girl. It tickles a girl to have a man await her, but when she is awaiting him, it stretches things inside of her. Especially me, that had my Yes all ready long afore poor Bob had even any idea.”
“You don’t know half of it!” Melville pushed back his bowl, and fished out his tobacco. His eyes were bright. “I was plumb terrified to ask a pretty girl.”
“Oh, lordy! A pretty girl!”
“Still are.” He nodded, tamping down his pipe. “I see with my own eye, Jerry. Can you see it, too?” His large mouth was agrin.
Jerry, looking, could see. For a trace of flutter in her eyelids and a flush in her hard, tanned cheeks still made Dorothy young. She laughed uneasily, within herself.
“To think I got that bed out! Years and years we’ve had it; ain’t we, Bob? I never thought to see it used, when we first come here, with the land so wild. There was a bobcat lingered in the buttonwood to catch our piglets.”
Melville nodded, balancing the hot coal on his pipe.
“He come at night. I placed the moon behind the tree and got him.”
“That ‘stead’s a plain thing, but the cords are easy. And this noon I sorted out the feathering of the bed. It used to be my Uncle Henry’s when he lived in Williamsport. It’ll be warm for Mary a nest for her and maybe for a little girl, some day. I’d like to live and see that.”
Something passed between the two that Jerry saw was not for him.
They took the bed upstairs and placed it in the loft. Dorothy held the candle to superintend. It was clean, and the smell of herbs rose sweetly. The candle flame was pooled in four glass panes set in the gable end.
“You’ve made a window for her,” Jerry said.
Melville smiled. Dorothy said, “There was a chink. It was as easy to enlarge as stuff it.”
They went down again and sat before the fire. One of the sticks burned bluely.
“Won’t you night it with us?”
“No, thanks,” said Jerry. Speech came hard to him.
Melville nodded.
“It’s been a long time.”