The Town

by Conrad Richter

  So this, she told herself, was where Huldah came with nary a stitch on to cover her nakedness! That was two evenings back. Now where in here could a young woman like her have laid herself down in the night time? It had no loft, only rafters with a few loose plank for extra stuff and fixens. If George Holcomb had more than one bed, she couldn’t see it, just this good walnut bed standing in the corner with a blanket, scarlet as sin, laying on top. A man’s things were bunched around. His clothes hung from wall pins. His boots stood on the floor and his account book and pipe lay on the high desk in the corner like he just set them there. But the man himself was no place around that she could see.

  Rather would she have stayed clear of thrashing this thing out with Huldah, but sometimes you couldn’t go on your “rathers.”

  “You been living here all this time, Huldah?”

  “I’ve been here since the gypsies brought me.”

  Sayward let that fiddle faddle about the gypsies pass. She had no heart for this business. Even on the way in here she wouldn’t admit to herself that this thing could be true. Why, Huldah looked no more than a child now with her short skirt and red plaid hair ribbon.

  “Anybody else in this house with you?”

  “Just him and me.”

  “You been living with him, Huldah?”

  “Where’d you expect me to go?” Huldah jeered so it sounded like Achsa. “It was night time when I got here.”

  “Well, I’ve come to take you home,” Sayward said shortly.

  “I’m not in your house now!” Huldah flared at her. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

  “Oh, yes, I can, Miss Huldah,” her mother said grimly. “What’s more, I can pick you up and carry you out to the rig if I have to. You’re coming home with me and he’s a goin’ to ride his horse along.”

  The first concern showed in her face.

  “Who’s going to? What do you want him for?”

  “What do you suppose? The least he can do for you now is stand up with you in wedlock.”

  “Not him. I wouldn’t marry him if he was the last man!”

  Sayward considered. Well, she could let that go and see what came out of this. There was no use making more trouble than you had to. She also better let Huldah’s other dress go till she got her home and got it out of her where she had hid it. Then Guerdon could come over sometime and try to find it. Now Sayward unfolded the plum-colored dress she had brought along.

  “You can put this on to come home in. That red check, I take it, don’t belong to you.”

  “Don’t you say anything against my dress!” Huldah threatened. “I cut it out and sewed it myself from some goods he rode out and fetched me.”

  “I think you did a real nice job, Huldah,” Sayward told her kindly.

  But toward her mam, Huldah stayed sullen as a young spider. She was bound to keep that red-check dress whether George Holcomb bought the goods for it or no. She had made it herself, hadn’t she? Besides, he said it was hers. She would come along home with her mother if she had to, but she wouldn’t take this dress off, nor would she say much once they got in the rig. After a try or two, Sayward didn’t push her. She hadn’t looked for Huldah to thank her for coming and fetching her home. As they went, she saw two men watching them from the furnace bridge, but if one was George Holcomb, he never came down to his house to see what this woman with a horse and two-wheeler wanted with the girl. He must have half mistrusted all the time that Huldah wasn’t all she made out to be.

  When they came to the river, the ferry lay on yonder side. It was supper time and still as could be. You could hear the bell ring plain when Huldah got down and yanked on the wire. Somebody came out of the back of the Ferry House to see who was this in a hurry to get across, but the ferry stayed lying there like a dead thing on the town bank till teams and folks afoot piled up on both sides waiting to cross. When the ferry did come at last, Sayward saw that King Sam himself was on it. Now what did this spell out, she wondered, for the place he liked to be was behind the bar of his Ferry House. Only to usher some celebrated body across on his old scow would he come down to help, for he claimed to be a celebrated body himself and that’s how he got his name, for kicking a king out of his tavern once when Louie Philippe of France was over here in Ohio and complained his accommodations not good enough for one of sovereign blood.

  No sooner had the ferry landed, till King Sam was out on shore like a marshal, holding up his arm and ordering passengers to come or halt. When all were off, Sayward would have driven on, for she had been first to the water, but he held her back and waved others on till the scow was full.

  “I got no room now,” he called, and then what sounded like, “You and that young slut’ll have to wait.”

  Sayward sat there swallowing back her dander. Why, lucky he hadn’t come any closer to say that or she might forget herself and answer with her horse whip. Nobody could say a thing like that to her face about her own, even if it was true. Oh, she could see that his small brain had schemed this all out and it had worked like clockwork. Now she and Huldah could sit over here in their disgrace, he thought, and wait till he felt like coming back for them.

  Well, maybe they could and maybe they couldn’t. More than one person she had seen fording the river to save ferry toll, especially in the late summer and early fall when the water was low. It was good and high now but she recollected one time she and Genny had gone to visit Tod Wylder’s woman. This was long ago. The river was high then, too, and Tod had come over with his spotted ox and ferried them across on its back one at a time. Surely, she reckoned, Hector ought to be good in the water as Tod Wylder’s spotted ox.

  When King Sam saw her drive in the river, he must have wondered had he done right after all, for he called back from his end of the scow.

  “Go on back, Miz Wheeler. I’m coming back for you directly.”

  But seldom had Sayward turned back in her life, and hardly would she now. She pulled Huldah’s hand from where she was thumbing her nose at the ferry. All the time Hector was settling in farther and farther in the river. It got no deeper for a long ways, than his belly, then all at once the river started squirting through the cracks and joints of the gig box.

  “You kin put your feet up under you on the seat,” Sayward told Huldah. As for her own, she’d keep them down on the floor where she’d need them to hold Hector’s head up once he went down in some deep hole and had to swim for it. The two-wheeler heaved up over unseen rocks and sunken logs. Deep water lifted first one wheel, then the other, and for a while the rig floated like a snug little black and red boat on the river. Hector was in now well over his shoulders and once or twice the brown water floated over the sway of his browner back. But it turned out that his feet found bottom all the way, not that he couldn’t have swam for it if he had to, Sayward reckoned.

  When they rared dripping out of the water on the far side and Sayward had a chance to look up, it seemed like half of Water Street was up on the bank a watching, General Morrison among them. He came out in the road holding up his cane respectfully.

  “Are you and Huldah all right, ma’am?” he inquired.

  “We’re fine, thankee, General,” Sayward said, matching his dignity with her own, but in her breast it felt warm and good to have kin that stood by you in front of everybody at a time like this, even if they were only kin by marriage.

  Once she had time to think on dry land, she reckoned she had been a little hasty fording the river. She might have drowned Huldah and some folks would say she could have done it on purpose. What’s more, had she waited till King Sam got good and ready to fetch her, it might have been too dark for half the town to see her fetch Huldah home. Now every tongue would wag in Americus tonight. For a long time to come they would joke about Huldah’s gypsies. But Huldah didn’t let on she minded. She sat up beside her mam as big as you please. And when she got home, she acted the same way among her sisters. Oh, she was somebody more than they were now, somebody older and wiser. And when they spo
ke to her, it was almost like should they call her Miss Huldah or Mrs. Holcomb, they didn’t know rightly which.

  Sayward said nothing to Portius till she and he were in their bed that night and all the girls in the other loft out of hearing. Then they had a grave talk. Oh, she knew and he knew that fetching Huldah home didn’t mean all was now in apple pie order. You couldn’t send a woman to a man’s cabin without a stitch of clothes on and then take her off two nights later like nothing had happened. But Portius, who always knew just what to do for his client, was confounded when it came to his daughter. In the end Sayward had to fall back on herself. Always in the past she told herself if worst came to worst, she would just have to live it down. But something like this could take a mighty long while to live down, and she wasn’t young as she used to be. She could only pray the Lord to give her a long life till she could square herself and her family with the world.

  The one small satisfaction she had as she went to sleep was the way Huldah had looked up to her and listened when they got home. It was fording the river, Sayward thought, and not knuckling down to King Sam that did it. Huldah didn’t know that her old mammy had it in her.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE BRIDGE

  A bridge’s business is to stand

  And join two severed spheres of land.

  RIPHEUS (CHANCEY WHEELER) IN THE AMERICUS CENTINEL SOME THIRTEEN YEARS LATER

  IT was King Sam who started the bridge, and Guerdon that gave it a good push, though neither one might ever know it.

  This rainy evening the Wheelers were sitting around drinking green tea in the kitchen. Hardly did Sayward ever remember feeling better or laughing so much. Was it that Resolve and Fay had a young one on the way and Huldah hadn’t, which was as it should be but not always was. But she knew that last night and night before. Was it the tea then, or why did she make so much high jack tonight? she wondered. After while Guerdon said he heard they were spanning the river with a bridge at Maytown. He reckoned he would go down. He could catch a ride on Sam Hendler’s boat and get a job bridging.

  Not till then did Sayward remember the old saying how close laughing was to crying.

  “You think you’d like it down there?” she asked, sober.

  “Nothin’ I’d like better than bridgin’, Mam,” he told her.

  “You’d come back, Guerdie?” Massey wondered.

  “Oh, I’d come back some day. With my pockets full.”

  “Will you bring me a present?” Massey asked.

  “I won’t stop at you,” he said. “I’ll bring you somethin’ gold, and Chancey somethin’ silver and Mam somethin’ fixed with ruby stones.”

  Sayward gave him a steady look to show she appreciated it whether or not it ever came true. Before she went to bed that night she went to the shellbark box Will Beagle made for her long ago. Not often had she looked in this since she was married. Mostly the box held keepsakes, the tattered letter her father had somebody write, a broken breast pin of her mother’s, her father’s and mother’s marriage paper now torn and faded from use as a window light. You could hardly make out a word any more, only the red pictures of birds and flowers. But the most precious keepsakes were the locks of hair tied with thread by her mother long ago. Jary said she wanted something to remember her young ones by once they were grown and nothing was like a curl of their hair to bring them back. You could lift it in your hand and see the tyke that used to be. Wasn’t it strange, Sayward thought, how hair never died like the rest of the body! A person could be rotted away in the ground but his hair stayed like it was when he was alive. You could still see and feel with your fingers how he was. The whole lot weighed nothing at all in your palm. Hardly could she believe that her own head had ever been so yellow or Genny’s hair like the finest tow. Her sister Sulie’s curl was soft as beaver and Achsa’s coarse and black as a horse’s mane. Not even in the wettest, foggiest weather would the hair on Achsa’s head curl, but it did in the old shellbark keepsake box. She only wished she had cut a lock from her own little Sulie in time. Afterward it was too late, when the fire had singed it to the flesh.

  The last curl she held up was the shaggiest of the lot. Many a time had she seen that shock of sandy hair on her brother Wyitt’s head. Law, how many years had it been since she saw him! And where was Wyitt now? He had gone and never a word from him. The Country of the Western Waters had swallowed him up. She didn’t even know if he was dead or still among the living. And now Guerdon was talking of going. Of all her children, he was the closest to Wyitt. Not in looks but in ways. Hadn’t she seen the signs ever since he was little? Never would he go in for schooling or be satisfied long in a job. No, he always wanted a new one. Last time it was working in a sawmill. Once he had the smell of fresh sawn boards in his nose, he claimed, he’d be satisfied. That was about a year ago. Now he couldn’t wait till he gave it up and went to bridging.

  Oh, Sayward knew what was the matter with him. It was his Monsey blood that wouldn’t let him be, the same as Wyitt and Worth before him. He thought all he wanted was to go to Maytown. He felt sure once he got there, he’d be satisfied to hang up his hat and afterwards come back to Americus and settle down. But never would he. No, let him have one job for a while and he couldn’t wait till he had another.

  The next time Portius told of trouble somebody had with the ferry, Sayward kept her counsel till they were getting ready for bed that night.

  “Now I think Americus has put up with King Sam long enough,” she said.

  Portius stood in his stocking feet, his coat and waistcoat off, his white shirt bulging around him starched and full, a mass of wrinkles and sweat stains.

  “You want to franchise some other ferry?” he puzzled.

  “I’m talking for a bridge,” Sayward told him. “One like I hear they’re getting down at Maytown.”

  Portius bent over to draw his shirt over his head as if he didn’t hear or want to hear any more, but when his face came bottom first out of the white tunnel, his eyes observed her.

  “I never knew you so devoted to progress before.”

  Sayward had let the upper part of her dress down to her waist. Now she pulled on her bedgown and let it drop so she could draw her dress out from under it. That’s the way she had done it ever since she was big enough to know she was a woman.

  “So long as the old works, I don’t believe in throwing it out for the new. But Americus is getting too big for a huffy old man who reckons he’s king and can run his ferry just when it suits.”

  Portius had taken off his pants. He hung them over a chair where the legs still stood out with the doughty roundness of their master’s hams. You could see those hams now, white and hairy, as Portius stood there considering.

  “I’ve been thinking of it myself but the river’s too wide here. It would be cheaper to bridge at the Narrows.”

  “And make everybody go two miles out of their way?” Sayward retorted. “No, Americus is the place it should be.”

  That’s all she would say. She didn’t hold with Zillah Harris that women should stand up in men’s meeting and tell what ought to be done. Oh, she believed women had as much sense as the men and as much right to have their way, and as long as she knew anything, women had always done it. Why, forty years back when there was nothing here but a howling wilderness, her pappy had to listen to what his woman wanted, and so did Portius all his life. The men could have the satisfaction of talking it over and carrying it through. But many times it was the women who put it in their heads in the first place. And the place to put it in their heads was not in public but at home.

  —

  Long before it came, that bridge was a wonder of the world to Chancey. He felt toward it like it belonged to his family like the barn or pasture, although other folks could use the bridge if they paid. Hadn’t his father been the first to talk it! Wasn’t Guerdon going to build it, or help anyways, which meant he needn’t go to Maytown to be a bridger now. Only last night hadn’t their father settled the fight over where
the bridge ought to be! For a while it looked like the bridge would get nowhere, for every man in the county wanted it handy to his own house and place of business. They had a monster meeting by torchlight and nobody would give in.

  At last Portius got up in front of the crowd.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “I move we bridge the whole damn river from Tateville to the Forks.”

  Chancey knew those words by heart, how some men looked sheepish and others laughed, how the meeting broke up in good feeling with the commissioners setting up three men to view and survey for a bridge.

  Sunday afternoon Guerdon carried him over to Water Street, and Massey ran along. Right here, Guerdon said, the commissioners wanted to put the bridge.

  “Will it go across the whole river?” Massey wanted to know.

  “Clean from this side to that over there,” Guerdon told them.

  Chancey’s gray eyes trembled and strained. A man on the far bank looked littler than the trained monkey a dark man brought through Americus last week on a chain. Between here and yonder yawned a wide gulf with nothing save space and air to hold anything up.

  “I can’t see a bridge right here,” a man standing by told Guerdon.

  “I can’t see it myself yet,” Guerdon told him.

  Now never had Chancey seen a bridge save for small rumbly ones over the race. And yet he could look right out there and see it in his mind hanging over the river, though what it hung on, he didn’t know. One night he dreamed he saw keel boats floating over him in the sky. What made them stay up, he didn’t know, but he could still see them in his mind, and that’s the way he could see the bridge, with horses and wagons going across it. Not only that, but teams of oxen and herds of cattle, sheep and hogs trotting over it, whichever way they wanted to go. The bridge wasn’t even started yet. King Sam had a case in court against it; claiming it a foolish and malicious scheme to persecute him and ruin his ferry business. And yet Chancey could see it hanging so high over the water that birds could fly under.