by Ann Towell
The woman came to be paid for the food and Lem pulled a little money sack out of his pocket. I heard the scrape of a chair being pushed back, along the floor. Without looking, I knew it was that man. I heard the heavy trudge of feet coming our way and hoped they would keep walking right past us and out the door.
Lemuel looked up at someone behind me and asked, “Can I help you?”
“Where you headed?”
Lemuel hesitated, “Enniskillen Township.”
“The oil fields?”
Lem’s eyes flashed, “How did you know?”
“Nothing else worth anything in those swamplands.”
“Well I guess we should push off. Come on, Titus.”
“Wait a minute, mister. I could make it worth your while if you were to take me with you,” the stranger said. “Us miners need to stick together.”
The man took a small pouch out of his pocket, much like the one Lemuel had. “This here is filled with money. I’ll pay you twenty dollars to take me with you. My horse died just last week and I can’t find another in these here parts.”
He took off his hat and put it over his heart as if he was mourning the death of his horse, and maybe he was. Some men like their animals better than people. It’s a known fact. I’ve seen it often enough since moving here.
When Lem still hesitated, the man said, “It’s a princely sum.”
“Well I figure twenty dollars is a good sum. I could take you for that, mister. The name’s Lemuel Sullivan, and this here is my brother, Titus.”
“An Irishman, eh? The name’s John Longville.” He reached out his hand to shake.
“How long do you figure before we get there?” Lemuel asked.
“Well … if the rain holds off, another day or so. Once she rains, the road is mucky and mean.”
So we left that place, and we had us a traveling partner. John and Lem hit it off at the beginning, but me, I never trusted him. I had the welt on my neck to prove he was a mean-tempered man.
CHAPTER
3
I was glad to be out in the open. I never saw such beautiful maples. When we drove under them, I felt totally covered in yellow light.
We were still on that corduroy road and my backside could attest to that. So far the rain was holding off. Lemuel and John Longville were talking up front. Lem said I was supposed to call him Mister Longville because of the difference in our ages. When I refused, John Longville looked at me, mean-like.
Then he smiled, “Why, the boy can call me John, just like everyone else does. I was never one to put on airs.”
Who was he kidding? There didn’t seem much about him that was honest and true. He never looked either Lemuel or me straight in the eye when he spoke.
Sometimes I wonder how Lemuel and me can be brothers. He is trusting while I am suspicious of everyone. Lemuel is strong and handsome. I am downright puny next to him.
Uncle Amos tells me to be patient. “A man in the making takes time,” he says, patting me on the head like a puppy dog. But I don’t really mind being patted like that by him. He doesn’t mean to put me down by it.
John talked about the oil fields and some friends of his there. He said he had been to Enniskillen, but I found out different when we got to Oil Springs. Only one man knew him and his name was Max McQuarrie. Longville got talking about the gold rush in California and said he had been there too. Whether that’s true or not is anyone’s guess. I, myself, don’t believe him. He’s what Aunt Sadie would call a veritable blatherskite.
It made me smile to think of her. She has a sharp tongue and uses it regularly, but it’s only now I appreciate that in her because she’s nowhere near me. Living with her and thinking of her are two very different things.
We passed tollbooths, and the money always came out of Lemuel’s pocket. Not once did John open up his pouch to help out. He brought it out of his pocket now and then to shift it from one hand to the other. It jingled as if to remind us of our payment when we would finally be rid of him. I was going write reward instead of payment, but Uncle Amos said that it wasn’t like we were doing something above and beyond just being neighborly. At that time, I thought we were saints to take him with us. Now I know better. We weren’t no saints. We were so wrong to bring him to Oil Springs.
While Lem and John were getting friendly we got farther into the country. I was angry that John and Lem got to sit up front, and I got stuck rolling around in the back of the wagon. Lem seemed impressed with all John’s stories but I wasn’t. They were just stories to my way of thinking.
It started to rain in earnest. There was no way we were going to keep ourselves dry. My clothes were soaked in a matter of minutes, and my teeth began to chatter. I could hardly see through my wet glasses. I suppose we could have sat under the wagon, but the ground was wet too, and surely getting muddier by the minute.
John kept talking even though his hat drooped around his ears, dripping rain onto his hunched shoulders. Finally, the rain was enough, even for his constant talking. The sky was getting darker, and a few times thunder rumbled. There were so many trees you couldn’t see the lightning, only the effects of it. The trees flared off and on while the sky danced a merry jig with the storm clouds.
We weren’t on a corduroy road anymore. The horses’ strength was flagging with the heavy work of pulling us through all the mud. Lemuel shouted for us all to get down off of the wagon. John wanted to stay on and said as much.
“I’ll hold the reins and guide them,” he suggested hopefully.
“Get down!” Lemuel yelled at him and me. I scrambled off as fast as I could.
“I’m holding the reins. See?” He held them up to John’s face only inches from his own. I guess he had had enough of all that talk, and his anger was getting the better of him.
Lemuel led the horses down the road while we walked alongside. The mud grabbed at our boots like slippery hands. The slurp with each step sounded eerie in the approaching darkness. We were all getting tired when the back wheels bogged down in the muck. All the straining with the horses couldn’t get us out. Lemuel cut down a sapling and we tried to use it as a lever to free the wheels of the muck. Nothing worked, and it was getting very dark.
I asked Lem if I should maybe light the lamps he’d rigged up on the front of the wagon so we could see better. I was looking under the sacking for the matches, when I heard John holler.
He’d noticed lights up ahead. “Praise be!” He took the hat off of his head and whacked it on his leg. Water sprayed off of it and into my face. I sputtered, but he didn’t seem to notice.
He laughed. “I’m heading up to that house. I’ll come back with help to get the wagon out.”
Well, I’ll tell you, Lemuel and me waited there a long time. Drops fell from the leaves above, though it had stopped raining. The air was still, except for the steady drip, drip. The quiet around us was sometimes pierced by the wail of a wild animal. Once it was an unearthly scream we heard and I stepped closer to my brother who was sitting on the end of the wagon. He put his arm around my shoulders and never made fun of me because I was scared.
“It’s probably a rabbit caught in a snare.” I could tell he was trying to calm me by acting so matter-of-fact about the eerie sounds. Mist could be seen in the shrouded light ahead.
Being so soggy you could just lie down and cry is an awful feeling. I don’t think I’d ever been so miserable and cold, except, of course, the day we buried my parents. I could tell Lemuel was getting impatient.
“Now, where in heck did John get to?” he asked himself out loud.
Then he apologized. “I know I shouldn’t have said that, but I’m real angry right now.”
“I heard that word before, don’t worry none about me,” I was trying to act worldly as if foul language was a part of my everyday life, though Aunt Sadie would’ve washed my mouth out with soap if she’d heard me use such words. If only I knew then what I do now, the different kind of words that can come out of a man’s mouth. Bitter, nasty w
ords that can lead to violence.
Lemuel wasn’t stupid. He knew how Ma and Aunt Sadie had raised us – “I’m used to working around men, and the word just slipped out. I’m really sorry, Titus.” He roughed up my hair a bit and then laughed. “May as well unhitch the horses and take them up to where the light is coming from.”
Our fingers were cold and damp. Lem fumbled with the leather straps and buckles, while I unhooked one of the lamps and held it high, so he could see what he was doing. Finally, we got the harness all undone. Then the four of us went toward the light.
There was a house with a barn out back where we hoped to bed down the horses for the night. We also hoped the folks who lived there would take kindly to having strangers as houseguests.
There was no use telling me rain was better than snow for if it had snowed, we wouldn’t have been in the rut we were in. Winter was always better for traveling. These muddy roads in the country were a colossal nuisance, as Aunt Sadie would say. I had to get Uncle Amos to help me spell that because it had me stumped. He sometimes laughs at the way I spell words, but he’s willing to spend time helping me get them right when I ask.
Uncle Amos is good that way. He has always had lots of patience, except when I used to talk too much. That was when I first moved in with him and I talked his “blamed ear off.” He said words were supposed to be used for more important things than being irritating.
He sat me down one day and said real solemn-like, “Boy, you got to like yourself. Cause if you don’t, no one else will. Talking is just covering up something you don’t like. Once your tongue stops wagging, you’ll be able to hear yourself think and know what you believe. If you like what you hear in that ol’ gob of yours, why then, you’ll like yourself.” He gave me a quick rap on the head to emphasize his point. I don’t think he knew that my feelings were hurt. But now that I can sit back and think, I figure he was right.
But there was a time went Uncle Amos talked too much, too. That was when he was in his cups, as Aunt Sadie would say. He could tell a tall tale at those times and I heard some of them when I lived with him.
Uncle Amos is a teamster, though he was trained to be a doctor. Lem told me that Uncle Amos was part of the Seminole wars down in Florida. He was a doctor in the military. What he saw being done to the Indians he don’t talk about much, but it was enough to make him turn against mankind. He was heartily sick of it all, so he moved out of the United States of America and came to Canada.
When he was at the land office of the Canada Company he asked where there was land that no one else wanted. He figured he wouldn’t get neighbors that way. He’d rather live alone in a swamp than be with people. But with the discovery of oil, people soon caught up with him. By that time he was ready to come back to the world of the living. It took something more to bring him back to the world of doctoring.
But, there I go, getting ahead of myself again, because I haven’t told you about what happened at the house we stopped in for the night. Well, Lemuel figured if I knocked on the door and a lady answered, she wouldn’t be scared, so he sent me up to the rough wooden door. It was opened almost as soon as my knuckles hit the wood. But it weren’t no lady who answered. It was a boy about my age who smiled at me right off. It wasn’t exactly a friendly smile; it was more like a baring of teeth.
Lemuel spoke up because the cat had got my tongue. There I go sounding like Aunt Sadie. I never realized she is so much inside me that I can’t get rid of her. It seems I can’t run far enough. I hope that’s some consolation to her.
“Is there a place we can stay for the night?” Lemuel’s voice was gentle and kind. “The barn would be good enough for the likes of us.”
“It seems the other gentleman that came didn’t think so. He’s making himself right at home warming his feet by the fire.” The boy pulled a face. “I figure I’ll probably have to give up my bed seeing I’m the youngest here.”
Now I understood why the smile wasn’t real. He probably figured we were shady characters like John, without a care or thought for anyone else, excepting ourselves.
I smiled at him to show I meant no harm to him or his kin. “He’s traveling with us, but we don’t really know him,” I whispered.
“Who is it, Thomas?” A woman’s voice came from the warmth of the house.
“Two people, Ma, and they need a place to spend the night.”
She came up behind Thomas to look at us. “Well, come in and rest a spell.” She opened the door wider and shooed Thomas out of the way so we could enter.
“It’s a wretched night to be out.” She showed us the hooks on the wall so we could hang up our wet coats.
I was shivering by now and couldn’t keep my teeth from chattering. My glasses were fogged up, and my nose running. I wiped it on the back of my sleeve.
“Get the boy some of your clothes, Thomas, or he’ll come down with pneumonia, sure enough.”
I didn’t dare get farther into the house, in case I dragged in more water and mud on that lady’s clean floor. Sure it was a board floor, but it was clean. The place was small and cheerful. John was sitting down with another man, talking. Thomas’s father got up to introduce himself to us.
“I’m Garrett Johnson, and this here is the missus,” he gestured to his wife and to us to sit down on the two wooden chairs by the table.
“Do you have something hot to drink for these travelers, Ma?” His wife went to the sideboard to get a pot of tea that was already steeping.
“Mr. Johnson, I have some horses that need bedding down for the night,” Lemuel began in an apologetic voice. “Do you think you have room to spare in your barn?”
“Sure son. I’ll get my eldest, Joseph, to do that for you.”
At first I hadn’t noticed the person sitting on the floor by the stove. He turned a page of the book he was reading by candle light, but he got up quickly when his father said that. I don’t suppose he was much older than sixteen. He laid the book gently on the table and went to get a coat. Not a word was said between the two, but the son did as his father said.
I slowly made my way to the side of the table because I wanted to see what he was reading. The title of the book was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I had heard of it, but had never read it. It looked like a book I would really like.
Thomas came down the stairs with some dry clothes for me. Lem and John had to do with what they had on. I don’t suppose there was any fear of them coming down with pneumonia. People always think I look sickly and try to take care of me. It’s enough to make me sick for real.
I went to the corner where Joseph had been and changed there. Mrs. Johnson took my clothes and draped them around the room so they would dry. It was awkward, changing in the same room, but no one seemed to notice. They were all too busy talking about the oil wells to the southwest of us.
Lemuel didn’t say much but he was listening, his elbows on his knees and his head cupped in his large hands. He was sitting close to the fire so he could dry out faster. Every now and then you could hear the drip of water on the floor. But he didn’t seem to notice or care. Mr. Johnson was talkative enough and shared with them any news he had of the oil town.
He told us it was a rough town full of men and maybe not the best place for a boy like me. Lemuel raised his eyes to look at me when Mr. Johnson said that. I suppose he was regretting taking me. But he never said a word, just listened.
I wish I could have said the same for John. That man could talk the hind leg off of a dog, to use another of my Aunt Sadie’s sayings.
John spoke again about California and the gold rush of ’49. To hear him tell it you would think he discovered the gold all by himself. He had carriages, a mansion, and a wife. Well, it appeared to me that he probably had none of these things. He either never had them, or he lost them to some foolishness.
“I lost it all in a poker game,” he said, as if he could read my thoughts.
That seemed pretty stupid to me, and I almost said so, but Lemuel warned me off with a look. Thoma
s was sitting next to me and whispered that he wished he could have traveled with Mr. Longville.
“You’re welcome to him,” I whispered back. “He’s a mean old cuss and that’s a fact. He left us out in the rain, and we’d be there still, if we didn’t have enough sense to follow your light.” I pointed to the candle in the window.
Thomas only nodded as if he weren’t listening to me. He didn’t want to miss a word of what they were saying. John’s face looked eerie in the flickering firelight. It cast shadows over his face, making his eyes seem to swivel back in his head and his cheekbones jut out so his head was like a skull. His face was like a warning – like the bell from the fire hall in town, ringing out danger.
Joseph read quietly all the while, and I wished I had the courage to talk to him. He was in his own world and wanted it that way. Books were like that for me too, and I didn’t feel I could bother him.
I must have dozed off because I felt Lemuel shaking me and getting me up to go to the barn. John claimed he had weak lungs, so he needed to sleep indoors. They put him on a blanket in front of the fire.
Lemuel and I headed outdoors. The stars were out. The rain had stopped. It was a clear night. Things would be more hopeful in the morning. Mrs. Johnson had given us a crazy quilt and a woollen blanket to take with us. Lemuel checked on the horses while he ordered me to the loft. Because he was holding the lantern, I couldn’t see so well where I was going once I climbed the ladder. I crawled carefully around looking for a warm pile of straw. I flattened it out somewhat to make a bed for the two of us. It would be warmer if we slept close together.
The rustle of the straw, the smell of the hay (I knew better than to sleep on the valuable hay) made me realize how fortunate we were to find a place to stay for the night. The Johnsons had been more than amiable. I was wearing borrowed clothes that were clean and neatly patched. I was healthy and lucky to be with my brother. I breathed a sigh of relief and lay down. It wasn’t long before Lemuel got down beside me and sheltered me in the crook of his arm.