And that’s the way it worked out the rest of March when the soft baby fur of the pussy willows opened to them by the tow path, and in April when the yellow daffodils bloomed in the locktender’s garden and the white blood root in the woods where on Sundays they wandered. After May, they met on the other side of the level, in the boat yard, where they sometimes glimpsed others beside themselves meet like shadows and disappear into one of the long line of boats moored for repairs. More than once as she and Chancey sat rocking on the deck or in a sheltered cabin from the rain, she caught sight of a pair of eyes from an adjoining cabin staring at them. But she knew that she and Chancey were safe. Such as they would never tell.
Often on a condemned boat, watching rings in the murky water where a catfish had come up to gasp, or hearing the endless wash of waves against the hull, Rosa could not help but think of those who had drowned here. There was the Man with the Hook. Though his arm had been lost at the elbow, his hook, they said, was just as good at work or fighting. But when he got drunk and slipped in the water, the hook was no good at all, and he never came up. Then there was Florry Hughet, who fell in too, the wife of a boatman, and Polly Baker tried to reach her with a pole. Ever afterward Thirsty Hughet used to say, “Polly Baker, you drowned my Florry with your pole.” But the worst was the Early girl who threw herself in the canal none knew where, and when they found her and fished her out, her body was covered with eels.
Oh, whenever she thought of the Early girl, Rosa would give a secret shudder. Not an eel had she eaten since that day. She would rather have put the waterfront behind them on their holidays, but Chancey liked the basin. He used to say that ever since he had gone down the river on the old bridge, water and boats were in his blood. Rosa didn’t mind stopping with him to watch the Privateer as they called the Flour Inspector. A little man with a long hollow augur like the letter, U, with a screw bit on one end, he would run it down through a barrel head and draw it out full of flour, then hold it over his bucket to sift it through his fingers. If free from specks, he branded the barrel, SUPERFINE, otherwise FINE. From every boat he took home a bucket of flour.
The trouble was that Chancey would stop and spend their precious hours talking to anybody they met. He liked to visit Bigger, the black who lived on his boat with a white woman and six mulatto children, and Teeny, the biggest boatman on the canal, who on a summer’s day would float in the water asleep or reading the paper, his head resting on a block of wood; and Paddy Doran, born in Ireland, who always told the same tale, how his mother was a maid of the sea and had swam up the River Shannon and shed her scales by a hay rick, and after bearing him, she had put on her scales one night and left his father, swimming out to sea again, and never had she been heard from since, so they mustn’t take offense if he had been drinking.
Oh, Chancey was a strange one, interested in all these things. It was to gather material for his writing, he used to claim and that’s what made him curious. But what made him stubborn and willful he didn’t say, or why he leaned on her like a cane. She had to stop with him and listen to all he talked to, though she’d heard the story many times before. When summer and camp meeting came around, she had to go along and stand in the shadows with him and listen to the praying and preaching that Chancey ever claimed he didn’t believe in.
The first time Rosa heard how God told Abraham to kill his own son and sacrifice him on the fire; when she heard that God ordered Joshua to destroy the people of Jericho and of Ai and Makkedehad and Lachish and Libnah and Hebron and many other cities so that not a single man, woman or child nor even a calf or lamb had dare to remain alive; and that all who disobeyed would go to hell and burn in pits of fire forever, Rosa put her fingers to her ears and wanted to cry out, “Liars! Stop!” The savage preaching, the gloomy singing, the violent praying, the threats and imprecations dismayed her. One preacher would fall from exhaustion and another and still another took his place till a dozen had manned the pulpit. Under their unceasing fire, the people would stir and moan, cry out wordless things, throw up their arms, leap and wrestle with each other. Often a mighty jerk would go among the women like the plague, their heads snapping and their hair coming down to lash and crack like bull whips in hypnotic unison. Then Rosa would close her eyes from the terrifying spectacle and not look save now and then at Chancey. There he’d stand pale and irresolute, consumed and tortured by what he saw and heard, yet drawn and held to it like he couldn’t help himself.
But the good of summer far outstripped the bad. What atoned for the blot of camp-meeting was God’s country and the Welsh Valley. They’d walk up the tow path past Butterman’s Lock and cross the aqueduct over Welsh Creek. Here they’d leave the canal for a little road that ran through a break in the hills. It was just a small narrow valley, thinly settled and full of the wild beauty of God. The road wound along the creek. At every step you had the curve of the road and the white of the water through the leaves. In the lanes you could stand on log bridges and look up the stream and down. Such particular beauty she had never seen, the long reaches of water with the trees meeting overhead, the wet mossy stones and logs below, and the clear water tumbling through.
Oh, she loved every minute in Welsh Valley. She liked the natives they made friends with, and the best were the Griffins, all brothers, all bachelors and never a woman over their log doorsill till she had come, they said, to bless their house. The oldest brother would show her his corn and hogs. The middle brother showed her how he wove his homespun and mixed his salt rising bread. And the youngest brother would play for her on his shepherd’s pipe, walking up and down and only stopping to tell her where he had first heard the air in the old country.
She gave a little cry of pain that day in August to think that summer was almost over. Why, in June it had seemed that it would last forever. She had put out of her mind that there could ever be an end. Each week, she fancied, was a little warmer than the last, July hotter than June, and August than July. Then suddenly she saw the first buckwheat shocked in its dark green forester shade in the field, and a hurt gripped her heart. Why, only the corn-cutting in late September was later than buckwheat harvest. Now she held to what was left of summer with all her might, trying to hold it back, praying it to slow down and linger, that it would not pass. But in her heart she knew that winter was just ahead, that soon all the flowers, open windows, green leaves, birds and grasses would be gone. And where in the cold and snow could she and Chancey see each other then?
Even if it hadn’t been for the shocked buckwheat, there would have been the Sign to tell her. It had been their last day at the Griffins, such a wonderful day with the air clear as Welsh Creek water, the sun like a bright shining stove and all the grasshoppers still calling in the fields. They had stayed till late, and evening was clear with stars when they reached the aqueduct. Here they waited for a down boat to take them to town and the Basin.
They were sitting on the locktender’s bench outside his cottage when it began.
“Did you see it?” asked Chancey who saw everything.
“I see you,” Rosa said softly. “What else must I see?”
“It was something in the water,” he told her.
She watched, and there it was in the brimming lock like he said, a streak like phosphorus this way and that. It brought to her mind the tale a riverman had told her father, that far around the curve of the earth under the Southern Cross every creature left its trail of light in the warm sea water. You need only dip your hand and see the mysterious light glow and sparkle. Watching now in the full lock, Rosa could almost feel herself on some far-away isle watching the train of some strange swimmer in the tropical ocean.
“Rosa, did you see it?” Chancey cried.
She looked up and found that what she saw was not in the water but in the sky. Over the face of the heavens, stars were falling, not directly down as a stone would plunge but across like cannonballs fired from heavenly breast works. They left in their wake long trains of white fire that died slowly in the black
velvet night. Most of them seemed far away, but now and then a huge bolt of blue or greenish light would flash dangerously toward them or another streak so low across the face of the earth that it seemed they must hear the hiss of its passage and the violent report when it landed. The lock keeper, aroused by their excited voices, came out to see and called his wife who looked for a brief moment and then ran back to hide her head under the bed covers. All the time the spectacle was growing stronger, grander and more terrifying. In the end the heavens appeared to be raining fire and that surely they, the lock house and canal must presently be hit.
In the midst of all this celestial display, a distant earthy horn sounded for the lock, and a down boat loomed up calmly in the eerie light. The boy on the mules looked panic-stricken, but the tall old boatman at the helm said he had seen snow and hail that bothered him a sight worse than falling stars. He hadn’t heard a single splash or come on any “b’iling” water. Furthermore he wished one would come a little closer. He’d like to catch it in a wash basin, cool it off in the “drink” and tie his rope around it for an anchor.
Chancey seemed to shrink from boarding a boat whose master dared the stars to strike him, but Rosa felt a sense of strength and safety in his presence. All the way down the long ride to the Basin, she pondered what could this sign mean to her and Chancey? That it tokened something, she felt certain, for if she and Chancey hadn’t gone to Welsh Valley this day, if the Griffins hadn’t asked them to stay for supper, if it hadn’t been the summer’s last weekend so that they agreed, and if it hadn’t turned out that for the longest time no boat came so that they had to wait out here on the locktender’s bench, they would never have seen the sign. She would have been asleep in her bed and Chancey in his. But the sign spoke to both of them together, and that it was a true sign, she knew, for stars ever spoke the purest truth. The sailor on the trackless oceans sailed by them and never did they lie. Nor were they lying now. But what they said in their fearful message, neither she nor Chancey could make out.
When she got home, the lamp still burned and her mother sat in her chair, her old brown shawl around her shoulders. Her eyes you couldn’t see behind the clouded glasses, but her face looked sharp and the mouth bitter and thin.
“Where have you been on a night like this?”
“Out in the country.”
“Till this time in the morning?”
“I just got in.”
“Who with?”
“I didn’t say I was with anybody, Mama.”
“What were you doing?” insinuating, incriminating.
“I was walking.”
“All alone at this hour?”
“I didn’t say I was alone, Mama.”
“Don’t tell me you went against the law with that young hellion?”
“I don’t know who you mean, Mama.”
“You know exactly who I mean—that degenerate Wheeler?”
“He isn’t degenerate.”
“So that’s who it was, was it?”
“I can’t tell you, Mama.”
“You needn’t tell me, I know.”
“All right, then you know, Mama.”
“Don’t all-right me, Miss Rosa! If you don’t want to tell your own mother, I can’t make you. But don’t tell her, either, when the law brings your sin out in court. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Never did I dream I would have a daughter like this!”
Her mother went about making herself ready for bed then, and soon her peculiar breathing rose to the loft, but Rosa in her bed could not sleep. Too much hung over her this night, her mother’s talk, the warning of the stars, the close of summer as if she had come to the end of a golden rope. But what Chancey told her before he left was the worst. It might be better if they didn’t see each other for a while, he had said. The coming week he would be busy. The week after that was the Americus fair, and never dare they be seen together in front of so many people. Rosa wasn’t sure that she heard him right at first. Then something like a wheel stopped inside of her, and all night his words lay like a dark unknown specter by her side. Was it going to be like last fall and winter, she kept asking herself. Was it truly the end of summer then, and was this the start of his forsaking her and perhaps of their final parting?
When a week went by and not a sight of his thin unforgettable face, Rosa turned at last to her other self for aid. Always before had this other self helped her. Who or what it was, she didn’t altogether know, save it might be her conscience or the self she might have been had her hopes had their way, for its qualities were nearly all those she had not. No matter how upset she could be, her other self was always cool and unalarmed, as much as to say to her, very well, it’s all right, go and do it then if you must, the world won’t come to an end. Sometimes when in great emotion or pain, Rosa thought her other self calloused and aloof. If it had to suffer fever or shame as she did, she thought, if needles could pierce its fingers or its back ache, then it would soon learn to have more pity and feeling. Just the same it was a comfort and a friend, like an older, sometimes difficult but infinitely wiser sister whose counsel was ever open to her.
But tonight when Rosa turned to it for help, no other self was there. Never had this happened up to now. Why, she couldn’t recall the time when it had not been ready with an answer. It shared her every thought and feeling. Indeed she always fancied it part of herself and that when she died, it would have to die with her. How then could it have vanished while she was still alive? In faint panic she turned, calling within herself and then, still in her mind, to the spaces about her. No answer came, no feel or intimation of that familiar and dependable presence, no characteristic words of advice or rebuke rising in her mind. It was as if she had called into a great void, empty of life, one that had never known her existence.
If only she could talk five minutes with Chancey! What a bitter thing that never could she see him or share his company up town like other young folks, but must meet him by stealth down here at the waterfront behind boats and people’s backs. She would not endure, she told herself, such a life of disgrace and debasement any longer. Often had Chancey talked to her of leaving Americus. They could go to Cincinnati or Indiana, he said, and start anew. No one would know them there or care. They could live their own lives without interference or dishonor. But always when he begged, she had held back from such cruel leave-taking of her family, never to see her mother or brothers again, not even to let them know she was still alive. Now she had waked up with a shock. God give her another chance, and she would in a moment leave them all behind. Hardly could she wait till she and Chancey went away and started their new life together.
Such a week she hoped never to live through again as this last. Monday and Tuesday of the new week were interminable. Wednesday she grew hopeless, and Thursday desperate. Friday she told herself she could hold back no longer. By noon the waterfront looked almost deserted. Every one else had gone to see the balloon ascension, the great bag and its fearless rider mount the sky. Under the silent accusing gaze of her mother, she washed and dressed in the brown dress that Chancey like best. Then she took the precious gold piece from her keepsake box and slipped out into Dock Street.
If she were blind, she thought, she could find her way today. The great voice of the fair drew her, like the voice of the sea she had never heard but always hoped to. Could this be Brown’s field where the peaceful white cows had grazed all summer, this city of booths and stands, of tents and enclosures, of the calls of show folk and medicine men, the blare of horns and beat of drums all playing furiously! The rich booths stood laden with goods and trinkets. She could smell the frying fish and warm pop corn of the stands, the pickles and mustard. Men dipped from tubs of lemonade and from huge black kettles of coffee. Outside the tents, posters and barking men pictured the marvelous sights within. But today she had no taste for the giant giraffe, or the snowy bear, or the hairy woman from Abyssinia or the dreadful Turk who swallowed fire. For small silver she could have heard David’s Pedal Harp play
ed by one of his descendants or the Campanologians, the Swiss Bell Ringers, in rusty coats, red boots and blue pantaloons, their caps with white plumes and a bell in either hand. She could have seen rope dancers, sapient and performing brutes, the wax figures of Cain and Abel and of Delilah cutting the hair of Samson.
But all that mattered today was Chancey. From every part of the fair she could see the monstrous bag of the balloon floating, bobbing over the tops of booths and tents, straining with the breeze on its slender rope mooring. All day it had carried people fifty or a hundred yards into the sky. For two dollars each a pair of passengers could ride and see the world as a bird saw it. Then the balloonist’s crew would pull them down. Four times she came back to the balloon without finding Chancey. The fifth time there he was, climbing into the basket.
“Oh, Chancey!” she cried aloud before she thought. “Take me with you!”
By the look on his face she knew she had made a mistake in front of all the people. The balloonist looked at her coldly, guessing something was wrong. “The aeronaut par excellence” Chancey in the Centinel had called him, and he looked it, dressed in black jersey trunks and slippers.
“You can go up later, Miss,” he said.
“But I must go with him!” she testified, trying to reach the basket.
“It would cost you two dollars, Miss!” he said sternly, barring her way, hoping to put her off, but her hand in her purse quickly found the gold piece.
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