by Unknown
“Drive piles,” he repeated. “That’s all. Then nail on wood. People will look at it after and say how fine the engineering is.”
He listened to the creek.
Norah said, “I haven’t told you thanks for what you’ve done, Mr. Fowler.” Her eyes swept up from her hands to his face. And again she lowered the lids with that odd conveyance of humility and invitation. “I’m very grateful to you. There aren’t many men, I guess, would take such care of a strange girl. I take it very kind.”
Jerry’s hands plucked strongly at the grass. He felt a power in his fingers’ ends. An impulse stirred him to tell her she might always count on him.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I get tired of working on the same thing.”
Her voice came quietly.
“It must be hard upon a married man, so far away.”
“Who told you I was married?”
“Mr. Bennet said so.”
“Well, I am. I’ve got my wife in Montezuma and a baby.”
Her hand made a little flutter through the grass. The fingers were pale, slender as new grass leaves.
“I’d feel sorry for a married man.”
Jerry found his voice. He looked away for speaking.
“You could be a comfort for me if you didn’t mind my coming here sometimes to see you.”
“I’d be glad to have you come. It seems I’m grateful to you.”
He watched the shadows growing under the flags, the purpling of the stream. A tanager, like a spark flung from the sunset, darted past their faces. The water sucked hungrily against the banks. The night stole coolly inward.
To Jerry in the darkness came some understanding of the man who had bound up the girl in Lager’s cabin. And it made him afraid; for she was not afraid, but sat there waiting in her silence. She was not beautiful in the way he thought of beauty she was so small; but she put keenness in his senses to read her strength. In her slim body was a spark to start the forces moving fires uniting on a single stick, the eddy joining separate streams, the thrust of wind beneath the snow.
He was afraid.
He said, “The dew’s begun to form itself.”
“I like the feeling of it on me.”
In the gathered dusk, her face was like an orchid petal. Her dark eyes were large, and the lashes were shadows; and as she looked at him he felt as if he looked into a well at night, his eyes swimming with the darkness, until he saw the reflection of stars on the water, but so far away he could not tell whether he looked up or down. He felt his hands grow large upon his knees. His voice was thick.
“We’d best go back to Corbal’s.”
She made no answer. But when she rose to .her feet, her body was light in lifting. Her hands fluttered against his sleeves like pale moths; but when they touched his hands he felt them warm and dry, and the strength in them.
Corbal’s wife was placing supper on the table. A squat little woman, with brown, wrinkled features. She did not speak to them; it was as if she had not been aware of them at all. But the miller, with his hands red from washing, greeted them heartily.
“Come and set, boy. Kin to Ike Bennet is always welcome here, be they he or she. There’s lobbered milk for ye and cinnamon for sprinkling and corn pancake for sopping it. Lobbered milk is easy to a dusty throat.”
He squared his elbows and ate noisily, breathing upon each mouthful.
The girl occupied her place becomingly. She kept her eyes veiled. Mrs. Corbal sat next to the miller. Her appetite was frugal. Watching her stolid brown face, Jerry wondered whether she carried Indian blood.
It was a strange meal, taken so in utter silence. But the slovenly kept kitchen was cool and dry, and the door was tight against mosquitoes.
When he was done, Corbal sighed and pushed himself away from table.
“That wheat I ground to-day smelled colicsome. Bottom-land growing.
I argued against Dan Ledyard many’s the time.” He shook his head. “He’ll have an ailing family this winter.”
He made the remark at his wife as if he expected no answer. He stroked his beard, patting out small clouds of mill dust. He did not look at either of them.
“Any time you’re wishful to come visiting, boy, you’re welcome.”
He stamped through a door. They heard his bed strings creak, his boots thud on the floor. A wooden clock ticked steadily. The woman gathered up the dishes, took a pan from the fire, and dumped them in. She washed them stolidly.
When she was done she looked at them. Her eyes were black and lustreless against the light.
She said, “Good night,” with surprising clearness; then she followed her husband.
They had gone so suddenly that Jerry had had no decent chance to take his leave. He stared across at Norah.
She was sitting at the table still, her hands folded in her lap. Her face was calm, her cheeks smooth, pink and white; the blackness of her hair was almost stormy.
Then she raised her eyes. Her small mouth smiled.
“Just like that every night. First him, then her.”
Jerry said, “She’s strange-appearing.”
“Yes.”
The frankness of her eyes on his disturbed him.
“But I’ve gotten used to it. I suppose now it is my turn. I take the candle and go through that door. The stairs are built against the wall.”
Jerry felt his hands upon the table. Outside the spilling water hushed and roared. Looking at him, she laughed softly. “Good night, Mr. Fowler. Come again sometime.”
She left him seated in the darkness.
He sat there like a fool, staring at the dark space of the open door. He watched the candlelight creep after her up the stair wall. He saw the cracks in the plaster fade away. He heard her feet move overhead; he heard them in her shoes; and then he heard them bare. He swore at himself.
Then he got up. He hesitated. His hands felt hot as they groped for his hat. “Mocking of me. Let her stay there.” His hand encountered his hat brim. He fumbled for the door. He tried to go quietly that she might not hear him. “Leave out of here, you fool. Leave her be. She doesn’t know.” The cool was against his face. He closed the door behind him. The latch clacked in its notch and he pushed in the string.
There was no candlelight upstairs. He strode out savagely. “Get back, you, Jerry Fowler, and don’t come back or you will be the Lord’s own fool.”
He walked away.
“You hold to be a decent man. Leave out of her. Blast her, if she mocked you.”
The mill was quiet as an empty church; the dew was heavy on the grass.
“Go now, and don’t consider coming back.”
He would go now; but he knew too that he was only serving time. He was afraid.
Day after day, the men at the crossing drove their piles. They had to sink a staging to work on, for the piler broke the mud crust and a man would lose his boots in quicksand. They drove two hundred piles. In June they drove two hundred more. The crowns stuck up through the muck like cobble-heads. The sun hung high in the blue sky over them, or they had rains. A dank, outpouring stench followed the rain and made mias-matic shimmers in the men’s eyes. They ate into the great stack of piles, dragging them one by one to the edge of what had been the pond with an old, chest-foundered horse whose lungs rattled in the heat; they dragged the piles out from solid ground by hand, rolling them through the muck with peavies, and staggered them up to feed to Josey’s beetle jaws. For days on end they seemed forgotten of the world. Mann had left to spend the summer in Canandaigua on the strength of the state’s rental of his mill. Even Bates had had to leave them.
They had three cases of fever in the barrack; and as the men did not get better, they used a Saturday and Sunday to set up a shanty on the brow of the hill where the men could lie looking down at the driving in the muck. They built the shanty out of the lighter timbers that had been stacked to build the ordered wooden aqueduct. A solid structure, it might serve some day to house a watchman for the earth embankme
nt.
The provision wagon came in once a week. But the driver always was anxious to get back again. Sometimes, though, he brought a paper in which they read that boats had come to Montezuma. They read about that for three weeks it had made a deep impression on the editor. The first boats bore the canal commissioners and gentlemen and ladies, and a brass band in blue uniforms. As Bemis read it out to them, they watched the fireflies weaving patterns over the mud flats that had been the mill pond. Water-logged tree trunks and stumps, from whose roots the mud had shrunk in drying, sprawled in monstrous shapes that waited only for a devil’s word to rise and walk. A brass band! Gentlemen and ladies!
When they came in at evening, they left their shoes outside the door and put their socks in a common tub to soak the mud out. Now and then one of them would make a fuss at mending clothes, for the cook had an oldish needle he would lend. One of the men knew barbering and shaved their heads to make them easier to wash. They saw the shapes of each other’s heads as ivory images; and all the shapes seemed wrong. There was no tavern in four miles; so each man kept wage-whiskey in his leather bottle or Hessian wood flask hung on the wall above his bunk, and drank it lying there while Bemis read the paper. A brass band, gentlemen and ladies!
To amuse himself the cook put in a dozen hills of potatoes; they sprouted quickly. Every day the cook would go out to see how much his potatoes had come up overnight. There was a patch of mallow just beyond the potatoes; but he never saw the mallow bloom. A blister beetle came one morning out of nowhere to eat the potato vines; and he brought it in to drown it. But Piute declared that only the most unmissionated cannibal would boil a living beetle in a pot; he saved its life and kept it under a tumbler next the salt dish on the table. For a while they played roulette with it. They whittled lines like sunbeams from the tumbler rim, and Piute with a watch kept time while they laid money on the lines. Whichever heap the beetle pointed to at the tenth minute took the pot. It was a slow game, drawn out like their nerves… . They fed the beetle on green leaves until he began ailing. Cosmo Turbe slipped out while the cook was snoring and cut leaves from the potatoes, and for a while it lived on them. But in the end it died.
Bugs came overland to infest their bedding. Bedbugs traveled an un-conscionable way through wilderness. They got rides on animals; but they always dropped off at the smell of human meat. Jerry ordered sage because he could find none growing round about, but it took two weeks to get it. The other men hunted out their bugs and passed them on to Bemis’s bed one evening while he tarred the piler. Bemis made easy pickings for a bug.
Sometimes they wondered how the boss found energy to take long nightly walks.
“Visiting somewheres, maybe.”
“Where’s a man to visit here, I’d like to know?”
“He’s not a drinking man.”
“Not enough to walk eight miles for plain corn liquor.”
“We’ve got better here, anyway.”
“A girl, most likely.”
“Where’s a girl, I’d like to know?”
“Sometime, maybe, when I have got the time, I’ll find that out.”
They pricked their ears.
“It ain’t possible round here.”
“A girl.”
Cosmo and Piute exchanged glances.
“You’re dumb crazy, Andrews. Fowler’s married.”
“What else would he sashay out that way for?”
“His wife’s a handsome article, I tell you.”
“She’s two days’ walk away unless he rides. He can’t get back to her. And he’s been here three months.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“It’s hard upon a married man.”
The speaker bent his thumbs back, each in turn, and snapped them forward. He had large hands; in the palm of one an R was burned. It was an old scar, hardly visible, dull grey; but when he used hot water for his washing, it stood out lividly. He was a runaway redemptioner; in westward land few people questioned such.
He got up slowly, sat him on his bunk, unlaced his boots.
“Christ! It was better breaking stone on the Cumberland. A man could find him a plantation nigger if he could dodge the dogs.”
He pulled his shirt off. His red undershirt had stains under the arms, the color of logwood dye. His forearms bulged under their straight black hairing. He stretched himself and yawned… .
All day long Jerry would find his thoughts veering away to Corbal’s. There it seemed like a different earth to him, as if when he put down his tools he had cast loose the anchors. Once, he remembered, before he found his manhood, a camp-meeting had been held near Uniontown. As he walked, the fireflies brought back the scene to him: the torches redly waving, spewing their resinous smoke into the air; the narrow redemption aisle that led to the exhorter’s pulpit four empty rum kegs from his father’s farm for pillars. The men stood to the right, their faces lean, their hands half closed, their breathing like a steady wind when there was silence. It made a deep impression on a little boy to find men he had seen bending easily to many toils suddenly grown so wooden that their bodies stood like trees. Across the aisle the women’s figures were pliable as grass before the wind of the exhorter’s words; and under the torches their eyes shone with the unfed fervor of their souls. Jerry remembered little of the afterspell, when the feelings were unleashed to the storms of preachment. Rather he recalled the quiet beginning; the white hair of the exhorter, his hollow cheeks, the fine mobility of his eloquential mouth. He had said that the soul of every man or woman was like a boat with sails, and life was like the sea to sail it on, with a wind that blew away from Heaven. The strong soul rowed against the wind, but the weak soul sailed with it. The exhorter’s hands performed a period; the meeting sighed in expectation of the agonies to come. Then he lifted his face to the sky; his lean chest swelled; with all his might he shouted, “Ain’t it so, Peter?” The woods were breathless; and from somewhere in the upper branches they heard the deep voice of Peter answering, “Yes, Brother Thompson, you have put it well.” Then the exhorter would begin again to work on their emotions; and again, at the tantalizing instant, he withdrew his fervor, calling upon a saint: “What do you say to that, Paul?” or “Come now, John, speak up and tell us.” Preacher Thompson had a speaking acquaintance with the saints. There was no question of it; a person could see that he saw them the gift was in his face. As he stole away, Jerry observed Saint Luke wetting his whistle with a bottle; Saint Luke was in a tree, straddling a branch, and hugging the trunk to his breast, and Jerry thought that his buttocks stuck through his coat tails uncommonly like the buttocks of Preacher Thompson’s lay companion, Arnold Jones. But the picture the old exhorter had drawn of his soul remained with Jerry; and now as he walked through Corbal’s meadow he felt it as a boat with sails.
He entered the mill and touched the miller’s elbow; and Corbal kicked out the trundle, shook his hand, and shouted against the silence, “Pleased to see you, boy. She said she would be down the meadow”; or, “She’s gone, I take it, gathering berries in the pasture”; or, again, “I reckon you’ll find her by the creek. She likes it there.” He beat the dust from his loose sleeves and said, “Stay back for supper with us.”
Jerry went forth as he had been directed, to find her waiting for him. As he sat and talked to her, the thought occurred to him that she was still awaiting. Her face was calm; but the blood that moved so close under the dark skin was always ready at a word to blossom. Sometimes she seemed to him like earth too rich for the sowing of plain seed; and again, her eyes were sad, as if she kept a secret self and it were hungry.
She looked so fragile then that he felt that if he could take her in his hands she would bruise like a leaf of maidenhair; the thought would leave him unprepared for her veering back into her mocking vein, when her small body became vibrantly provocative and her dark eyes tantalized him with a kind of dance. Yet even then she seemed to him like an over-gifted child… .
“Where were you bor
n, Norah?” he asked her one day. She had been gathering late strawberries along the woods edge of the pasture.
“I don’t know, Jerry, for a fact; but I expect it was in the tavern on Wood Creek.”
“Wood Creek? The one that passes Rome and runs into Oneida?”
She nodded.
“Yes, it was a wild place. Just the tavern. The sign said Jackson’s Tavern. But my father’s name was Ferris.”
“I’ve heard of Jackson’s Tavern on Wood Creek.”
“There’s only one, I guess. It tended to the Durham boaters.”
Jerry nodded.
“That must have been when the Inland Navigation Company was running its locks.”
“I don’t know. Ma was terribly fearful of the Durham boaters.”
“What was she like, Norah?”
“I guess she was a lot like me.” She took a strawberry from her basket and bit the end off. A drop of red juice formed on her lower lip. She sucked it in, smiled, and offered Jerry the bite from the hull.
“She hardly ever spoke. She never chided me for running in the woods. But when a Durham boat came up the creek, she’d holler for me, if Ferris wasn’t there, and hide me in a closet. She served them with a shotgun. She was fearful of them. I don’t know why.”
“I’ve heard they were a chancy lot,” said Jerry.
Norah shook her head to free her mouth of a bonnet ribbon curled up by the wind.
“Some of them looked so, I guess. But some were young.”
She munched her berries thoughtfully.
“Ferris could never like me somehow. Maybe it was because I was afraid of him. It makes a man cruel if a woman’s scared of him, I guess. He used to strop me sometimes. For being late, or little things however it fancied him. When I was thirteen and he once caught me bad for fair, though, it didn’t seem to make a difference to him.”
“What was your mother like, Norah?”