SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1)

by Edward A. Stabler

  The view in front of him wasn’t what he expected. He was on the towpath and the dark water of the canal before him was alive with wind-driven ripples reflecting light from the moon. He turned back toward the door flapping in the wind and saw the old Pennyfield lockhouse. It was dark except for a light in the bedroom upstairs, but its whitewashed stones glowed softly in the moonlight. He took a long stride down the towpath and broke into a run. A low shape hurtled toward him from the dirt yard, and he instinctively twisted to dodge it. The shape jerked to a stop and let loose a ferocious vocal assault. All he could see at first were gleaming white teeth. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a powerfully-built black dog on a long tether. A Rottweiler. He turned back to the towpath and ran toward Swains Lock.

  With a southwest crosswind flowing over him, he felt like he was flying down the dim ribbon. The ripples along the canal fled toward the berm at his approach, and the bare trees creaked and groaned in the wind. The river was somewhere through the dark trees to his right, running with him. It approached and receded, approached again. Where the canal was carved into rock faces on the berm, the river ran fast alongside him down a steep, twenty-foot slope. It ran like a line of dark horses and sounded like rain. The apron widened and the river disappeared as the trees guarding the towpath grew taller.

  Vin ran effortlessly, realizing at some point that his hip no longer hurt. His thoughts drained away and he became the motion of running. He came to the spot where he and Nicky had picnicked while canoeing last fall. They had pulled their canoe into the overgrown meadow where the trees had been felled for the buried gas line, then eaten apples while watching a beaver swim figure eights and thwack its tail in warning. But now there was no meadow; the trees were unbroken and had yet to feel the thwack of an axe. Thwack. Warning. His thoughts fell back into alignment. He had to find Nicky at Swains Lock before the flood arrived!

  The towpath grew darker as the woods deepened on the apron. He rounded a shallow bend and saw a bright light in the distance, at the level of his eyes. It expanded slowly and seemed to radiate through an arc in his direction, like a wide-angled flashlight or the headlight on a train. Through the swirling wind and between the thumps of his footsteps, he listened for the sound of a train. Instead he heard a fleeting sound of bells. The wind rose up and the sound was lost. The light grew brighter and seemed to shift left of the towpath, still several hundred feet away. Another trace of bells and the thump of a heavy footstep that wasn’t his own, from somewhere downwind, ahead of him, as he flew on down the towpath. And suddenly the dark beasts filled his vision, ten paces ahead. He straightened his legs to brake with each step, veering to the fringe to avoid a collision. He heard a whinnied protest and the strenuous shaking of bells as a huge head and mane bobbed away from him, toward the canal.

  “Jeepers, mister!” cried a young voice above him. “You about scared the mules half to death!” Vin edged along the fringe toward the second mule, which followed in line, harnessed to the first by straps, a spreader bar, and chains. This mule eyed him nervously as it passed.

  “Giddap, Berniece!” called the boy as Vin heard the slap of hand against haunch. The bells resumed a walking rhythm and the towbar floated past. A taut, dark line angled out toward the light, now a hundred feet away. The bow-lamp cast a ghostly aura over the snub-nosed front of the barge, which rode high in the water and was painted white above the waterline. Framing the bow-lamp, black square windows loomed like eyes.

  Vin walked quietly as the barge slid by him. Near its stern, a square cabin rose above the level of the deck, and a canopy was suspended above the cabin’s flat roof. Low voices drifted across the water from beneath it. A silhouette leaning on the stern rail turned to face him as the barge passed by, and Vin saw the dark shaft of the tiller extending from the man’s arm. He leaned into a jump-step and resumed running.

  He was sweating now, so he pulled off his sweater and tied it around his waist. He pushed the sleeves of his turtleneck up and the breeze across his forearms cooled him down. A formless white shape materialized in the distance and bobbed closer as he ran, gaining definition. It was the lockhouse at Swains. He slackened to a fast walk. The water in the canal looked higher than usual and the wind blew ripples across it toward the entrance to the lock. The upstream gates were open – set for a loaded boat. He strode toward the footbridge but it wasn’t there. Water lapped at the stone walls of the lock, a few inches from the top. In a small yard beside the unlighted lockhouse, he noticed a clothesline of drying laundry blowing in the breeze.

  “Nicky!” he yelled. No response but the creaking of branches overhead. He proceeded to the closed downstream gates and stepped onto the plank walkway. “Nicky!” he called again. No answer. He edged cautiously out over the dark water. A horizontal iron rod, curved up slightly at the end nearest him, angled toward his knees and he stepped carefully around it. It was a lock-key, he realized, seated atop an iron stem. He sidestepped a second lock-key to reach the center, where he felt the support of converging swing beams underfoot, then negotiated the remainder of the plank to the other side. He jogged to the lockhouse and banged on the front door. No lights came on and no one answered. Another knock brought nothing.

  Where was she? Where was everyone? Had they all fled for high ground? Had they already been told? He looked past the lock at the scattered trees on the apron. There was no sign of life. Moonlight glinted off the undulating river as it poured between the Maryland bank and one of the ragged island stitches sewn into its heart. He passed two old benches in front of the lockhouse and turned the corner into the side yard. White shirts, colorless trousers, and small white sheets fluttered on the clothesline. He circled to the backyard and saw a forlorn picnic table near its center. A bare shade tree rose beyond it, overseeing packed dirt and patches of trampled grass.

  A line of low shapes guarded the border of the backyard and the ascending berm, and drawing closer he realized they were gravestones. A row of eight, all facing the lockhouse. The first stone was tilted and looked ancient. Though the moonlight caught it from an angle, he couldn’t read the engraving on its eroded face. He paced the row of leaning, weathered stones, tracing their inscriptions with his fingers. The writing was intact but indecipherable. When he reached the last gravestone, he could see that it was different – planted dead straight, its face unscarred by time. The inscription looked freshly carved and the shadowed grooves were legible in the ambient light.

  Nicole Callahan Hayes

  1965-1996

  He knelt and stroked the letters of her name with his index finger, choking back sobs. It was too late for Nicky. She was gone.

  He blinked away tears and continued his circuit around the lockhouse, turning into the upstream side-yard that bled into the dirt driveway. Two racks of canoes stood across the parking area on the berm. He walked to the nearest rack and touched the inverted hull of a canoe in its middle row. The hull was birchbark, painted black, and he tapped the woodwork of its gunwales and thwarts. He tried to lift the canoe but its central thwart was cabled to the rack. He let go and turned back to the canal.

  Across the water on the towpath stood a girl, staring at him. Her eyes were lapis lazuli embers and her hair fell in glowing green and gold braids like the tails of fireworks. She wore a long-sleeved top and a simple skirt above calf-high boots. A bracelet of thin bands circled each wrist and a glowing red feather trailed from each bracelet. Her face was in shadow, but he could see her lips part and her white teeth emerge as she started walking straight toward him, across the towpath, down the bank to the water, and across the surface of the canal.

  When Vin woke up again he was screaming. Nicky came running into the bedroom, and he rose up through his fever and pain to embrace her.

  Part Two

  Chapter 14

  Locking Through

  Monday, March 24, 1924

  Two fallen red-maple blossoms drifted slowly with the current toward Pennyfield Lock. On the towpath, the young man stood transfixed watchin
g them. One was closer to the berm, and it was drawn inexorably away from its partner and into the breakaway current descending the flume. The blossom bounced and accelerated down the stone ramp before vanishing into the chute, where it was swept to the cataract that tumbled into the next level of the canal. Its companion curved idly into the eddy above the closed gates of the lock.

  For Lee Fisher on this sunny Monday afternoon in early spring, everything was a metaphor for his future with Katie. The blossoms were pulled apart so he forgot them and got back to work, alert for the next harbinger of fortune or loss. If he was going do some drilling in the shed, he needed to reset the lock for a loaded boat. He leaned against the end of the beam to swing the gate; when it met its counterpart in the center of the lock, the downstream gates were closed.

  He stepped onto the walkway on the upstream gates and swung the first lock-key. Water flooded through the square wicket below him and kicked up a gushing fountain of whitewater in the lock. She loves me. He sidestepped to turn the second paddle. She loves me not. He continued across, opening the wickets on the berm-side gate. Four surging fountains reveled below him; he dismounted to the lock wall as the water rose.

  He checked his pocket watch and wound the stem. It was 3:15, and the canal had been running at Pennyfield since early Saturday. Over two days now since they opened the guard lock up at mile 22 and started watering the canal from the feeder at Dam 2. So by now it was a clean run from Seneca Creek down to Georgetown. With three straight days of mild weather, the winter’s heavy snow and ice should be gone out to Harpers Ferry and further west. If the canal company also opened the feeder at Dam 3 on Saturday, his cousins should have been able to get their scow moving early Sunday morning, since they tied up for the winter just below the feeder level at mile 62.

  Knowing them Emorys, they’d be driving a single team of mules, with no sensible schedule for work and rest. They’d just boat along until the mules or the driver didn’t want to walk no more, then tie up, put out the feed trough, and take a nap. And since the canal wasn’t officially open yet, some of the locktenders wouldn't be at their locks. So his cousins might have to set some of the locks themselves. Even allowing for all that, they should have been able to make twenty miles from Harpers Ferry yesterday, easy. Another twenty miles would get them here to Pennyfield. So they might be here late this afternoon.

  Lee watched the upwelling fountains subside into swirls as the water in the lock reached the level of the canal upstream. When the swirls dissolved, he criss-crossed the lock to open the upstream gates. Set for a loaded boat.

  He headed for Charlie’s house across the meadow. The house was quiet, since the Pennyfields were still in Baltimore visiting with Louise’s family. Lee was staying in the lockhouse and keeping an eye on the big house for Charlie. Everything looked proper. On the side porch were two piles of the pine poles that Charlie used to make the pole-hooks he sold to boatmen. The larger pile was the raw poles and the smaller pile the ones Lee had drilled already – two holes for the clevis pin that held the hook. He collected ten undrilled poles and headed up the hillside to the shed. Entering the woods, he noticed the fingertips of branches were tinged red with the warming blood of spring, the season he’d been waiting for.

  Inside the shed was a solid wooden workbench that Charlie had outfitted with a vise. He propped the ends of the poles on the bench, laid one inside the vise so that six inches were protruding, and spun the screw to hold it tight. The eggbeater-style hand drill was on the bench and he examined it again before resuming work. Charlie would be happy with it. A gear tooth on his old drill had broken a few weeks ago and he had left Lee instructions to buy a new drill in Georgetown, along with money and permission to use the bicycle Charlie kept in the shed to get there. Bicycles were outlawed on the towpath during boating season because they scared the mules, but Lee had been able to ride to Weaver’s Hardware and back on Friday, before the repair scows started running. Riding along the towpath, the sensation of speed was intoxicating. The best part was the locks, since the towpath had a little downhill slope at each one, and you could fly down those hills and gather speed. Of course, it was the opposite coming back upstream.

  Since then he’d managed to sneak in a ride on the towpath every day. The only way to do it was to keep the bicycle down at the lockhouse rather than in the shed. It looked almost new and Lee would hate to lose it, so he knew he needed a lock. Things that weren’t nailed down had a way of disappearing on the canal. Luckily there was a war surplus store near Weaver’s, and he had found a pair of old leg-irons there for sixty-five cents. The cuffs were adjustable out to a four-inch diameter and had a key lock, so he could use them to lock the bicycle to a thin tree or a railing. Katie would be back from Alexandria on Friday and they had plans to meet that evening for a picnic at Pennyfield. Maybe he’d be able to convince her to go for a spin with him. That would be the cat’s meow. He put the drill down and used the pencil and ruler to mark spots on the pole for the pin holes. The bit was tight in the chuck, so he started the outer hole.

  The work was simple – measure, mark, drill the first hole, rotate the pole in the vise, drill the second hole – and he soon found himself revisiting his encounters with Katie Elgin. Until two days ago, he hadn’t seen her since the canal stopped running last fall. She’d come down from Williamsport the Saturday after Thanksgiving to help her brother Cy close up his boat after a hard freeze hit out west and the company drawed the water off the whole canal. Cy was captaining the number 41 back from Georgetown to Williamsport after his last run of the season and he got stuck on the White Oak Springs level, just above Swains Lock, when the canal closed for the winter. When that happened you just had to lock up your boat and leave it there until they refilled the canal in the spring. All the boat captains knew that was the risk you took when you tried to squeeze in one last run to Georgetown that late in the year.

  Cy’s younger brother Pete was on the canal with him, but Pete was only ten, just a mule driver. Them two colored boys that Cy took on as hands last season disappeared the night they drawed the water off the canal. That was strange. Maybe they figured they’d already been paid in Georgetown for the last trip and Cy wasn’t likely to pay them again. So Katie had come down to help get the boat squared away and take Pete back to Williamsport to be in school for the winter.

  Lee had already finished his season boating with Ben Myers on the number 9 and had made his way down to his family’s farm near Seneca after Ben tied up for the winter in Hancock. As far as Lee could tell, Ben Myers and Cy Elgin didn’t have much use for each other. Cy looked to be in his late twenties, seven or eight years older than Lee, and even though Cy had only been a captain for one season, he didn’t seem too impressed with the other boat captains on the canal – not even the captains with decades of experience like Ben Myers. Cy seemed either aloof or surly; Lee wasn’t sure which. He and Cy had crossed paths once or twice while boating last season, so they recognized each other but had never actually met.

  All the same, when Lee heard Cy’s 41 boat was stuck in the drained canal just six miles from Seneca, he’d gone down the Sunday after Thanksgiving and climbed the plank up to the stranded barge to ask if Cy wanted help with his mules. They was company mules but two good teams, and Lee told Cy that he could take all four up to a farm near Seneca that occasionally took on mules for the winter, and then bring ‘em down to Cy’s boat again in the spring. That way Cy wouldn’t have to take them almost fifty miles out to the canal company’s main winter farm in Sharpsburg. That Sharpsburg farmer practically starved the mules all winter anyway, cutting straw into their feed, and in the spring they could barely walk, much less pull, until you fattened them up on corn and hay. Lee’s farmer friend in Seneca knew Mr. Nicolson, the manager of the canal, so Lee was sure his friend could get the company to pay for wintering the mules.

  Standing on the deck and leaning back against the windowless forward wall of the cabin, Cy hadn’t answered Lee right away. Instead he looked him ov
er like he was trying to decide whether Lee was working some kind of angle. It turned out Cy was right, but Lee didn’t know it yet, since he first met Katie a few minutes later! She came walking up the towpath from Swains, and Cy saw her approach from over Lee’s shoulder. A young boy followed a ways back, scavenging rocks that he could toss toward the scattered puddles at the bottom of the drained canal. Without saying anything, Cy walked past Lee and stepped onto the fall-board. Lee followed and they descended to the thawing mud on the bank below the towpath, then climbed up to meet her. Lee noticed that Cy walked with a slight limp on his left side, so maybe the surliness came from physical pain.

  It was the last day of November, opaque and dingy, but whatever sunlight managed to slant through the clouds seemed to get tied up in Katie’s face and hair as she approached. She was wearing a wool coat but no hat, and her wavy hair glinted in the gray light. Lee felt a strange current run through his chest. He tugged the brim of his flat cap down, pushed his hands deep into his coat pockets and kicked self-consciously at a lump of mud on the side of his boot. Katie stopped when she reached them and smiled at Lee before turning to Cy.

  “Did you find Jess Swain?” Cy asked.

  “Cyrus, don’t be rude. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend before you interrogate me?”

  Cy grunted and turned toward Lee, and Lee saw the dark depressions beneath his eyes that he hadn’t noticed from further away. “My little sister Katie Elgin.” The towheaded boy came trotting up next to her, stealing glances up at Lee and Cy, who ignored him. “And our kid brother, Pete.” Cy looked back at Katie. “This is Lee from Captain Myers’ boat.”