SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1)

by Edward A. Stabler

  ***

  “I’m slipping off!”, Katie screeched, her laughter extending the last syllable into vibrato.

  “I got you,” Lee said earnestly. He stood on the pedals and supported her back with his shoulder while gripping the handles and pedaling hard to maintain momentum. She braced against his shoulder while trying to balance her thighs diagonally across the bars. The wheels crossed a fallen stick on the towpath that set the bike wobbling, and his foot slipped off the pedal when Katie’s weight shifted. It was no use. He squeezed the brake and brought the bike to a stop, planted a leg on the towpath, and lowered the frame until her feet reached the ground.

  She straightened her coat and dress. “Is that the end of my ride?” she asked with unconvincing indignation. “We barely made a quarter mile!”

  Lee shook his head apologetically and smiled. “I guess I need more practice before I join the circus.”

  “I’d say so,” Katie admonished. “I think circus riders can cross a tightrope on a bicycle.”

  “But they don’t have a pretty girl distracting them,” he said, heart pounding both from exertion and the exposure of its intent.

  Katie looked away. “I think they have a balance pole. You might try one of those.”

  Lee conjured this circus image to avoid parsing her response. “How could they hold the pole and the handlebars at the same time? Maybe you meant a unicycle.”

  She looked at the empty stretch of towpath ahead. “So what about your plan to watch the sunset?”

  “The spot’s only a mile away. We can walk.” He leaned the bike against a young tree, then opened the tool compartment and pulled out the leg-irons he used as a lock.

  “Who are you planning to arrest with those? They look like they fell off a chain gang.”

  “I found ‘em at the war surplus store in Georgetown,” he said. “They work OK as a lock.” Both cuffs were open, so he clamped one around the top tube and the other around the tree. They fit with an inch or two to spare. He tugged the chain to make sure both cuffs were locked and propped the bike against the far side of the tree. “It’s Charlie’s bike, so I need to make sure some towpath drifter don’t ride off with it. I reckon we’ll be back before anyone decides to cut down that tree. You ready to walk?”

  “The sunset won’t wait.”

  He thought about offering Katie his hand but decided to wait. It was better to build up to that. They walked side by side through the slanting rays of early evening. He asked about her visit to the Glen Echo amusement park with Pete and her friend. The season was just starting and the roller coaster wasn’t open yet, but they rode the Carousel and tried the bumper cars on the new Skooter ride. And Pete had loved the Hall of Mirrors.

  Alexandria was nice, Katie said, but not as interesting as Georgetown. One of the things she’d liked best was crossing the river from Georgetown to Rosslyn on the new Key Bridge. It seemed like the roadway was a hundred feet above the water, and you could see the Washington Monument and the Capitol presiding over the D.C. skyline to the east. Looking west you saw the tiny Three Sisters islands poking up from the middle of the river, and beyond them the tree-lined banks and the broad Potomac receding into the distance upstream.

  When she occasionally boated with her father growing up, she said she always looked forward to the days they spent unloading in Georgetown. After visiting the paymaster’s office, her father would give Katie and her brother George two dollars each as payment for the run from Cumberland to Georgetown. Then Katie and George would go up to M Street, to the Candy Kitchen. Mostly they bought caramels and black licorice, but when it was really hot they bought ice cream and banana splits. That was when she was ten. After that Katie stopped boating so she wouldn’t miss school in the spring and fall. Cy and George quit school after eighth grade and worked on the canal during the season and around Williamsport during the winters.

  Shortly after the towpath began to curve, Lee pointed to a narrow seam that carried a small spring down to the canal from the steepening berm. Past the drainage, the berm rose into wooded cliffs that looked out over the canal, the towpath, and river to their left through the trees.

  “That little creek comes down the hill from Blockhouse Point,” he said. “So the 21-mile marker should be just ahead.” When they reached it, the apron of woods between the towpath and the river was only thirty feet wide. Lee helped Katie down onto the path to a cove-like eddy fringed by a sandy beach and thick sycamores leaning out over the water. The sun had fallen below the horizon and pale pink and orange streaks were emerging in the sky.

  Shallow whitewater twisted through a field of low rocks in the center of the river. Lee pointed upstream past the rocks and a narrow island. “If you listen hard,” he said, “you can hear the rapids above that island. That’s Seneca Falls, though it ain’t really much of a falls. Just fast, shallow water. Above Seneca Falls is Dam 2, where the feeder comes in at Violettes Lock. And Seneca Creek, where I growed up, is less than a mile past Violettes.”

  “I remember seeing rowboats and kids swimming when our boat crossed over Seneca Creek on the aqueduct,” Katie said. She sat down on a fallen trunk at the near end of the cove, facing the sunset with her feet on the sand. She gestured for Lee to join her and a little surge of pride rippled through his chest as he walked over.

  “Did you do all your boating and fishing in the creek, or did you get out onto the river?”

  “We’d do both,” he said. “Fish in the creek sometimes, or take canoes out under the aqueduct into the river. Come downstream and explore. We could pick our way through the rapids along the Maryland shore, then paddle home on the canal. There was a rope swing into the river from a tree just down the shore, near where that creek come down from Blockhouse Point. Or sometimes we’d pull our canoes up on this beach and carry ‘em up to the canal. We’d paddle to that gulch, leave the canoes on the berm, and follow the creek uphill into the woods. Climb up to the cliffs and look out at the river.”

  He turned to look at Katie. She was staring at the colors of sunset over the water upstream, seemingly lost in thought. He waited for her to say something but she just turned toward him and smiled, which encouraged him to finish his story.

  “The Union Army used to scout the river from these cliffs during the Civil War,” he said, looking back at the steep slope of the berm. “They’d try to stop the rebels from fording the river and raiding the canal. If the rebels could split the towpath and drain a level, that would cut the supply lines to Washington. So the Union built a blockhouse camp up there in the woods. Once my friend Raymond and me went exploring up there and found some old foundation walls near the creek. Raymond found a medicine bottle and I found a bayonet blade. I took it home and I still have it.” He turned toward Katie again and exhaled, happy to have shared his reminiscence. She was idly toeing an eyebrow-shaped arc in the sand.

  “Did you ever find something as a kid that you kept and still have?” he asked.

  She turned as if pulled back from a distance and her hand floated to the reddish sandstone pendant that hung against her breastbone. “I found this necklace on the riverbank when I was nine,” she said, her hazel eyes focusing intently on Lee for a second before drifting again. “I had never seen anything like it before. I remember thinking that it must be very old.”

  “I ain’t seen anything like it either. I don’t know what to make of that symbol.”

  “I was boating with my daddy that summer,” she said, “and there was a break in the towpath above Cabin John. It took them all day to repair it and we got stuck behind a line of boats waiting to get down through Seven Locks. We knew we was going to be there for most of the day, so Daddy let me and George go off to play after we finished taking care of the mules.

  “We found a trail down to the river from the towpath…they’re not too close together at Seven Locks. So we followed it to a line of huge rocks in the woods near the water’s edge. The boulders were almost as tall as the trees. While George was trying to climb, I
walked along the base of the rocks on a bank that got narrower as you went along. Then the rocks met the river, so I had to turn around. Walking back I saw a small, flat stone lying against the roots of a tree on the riverbank. It was tangled up in fishing line and tied to a piece of driftwood. When I picked it up and untangled it, I guessed it was a pendant or part of a necklace. I thought that it must have been made for someone and then lost.”

  “Maybe it was made for you. Or maybe it was lost so you could find it.” He took the opportunity to gaze at the pendant resting against her chest, just above the swell of her breasts. “It’s yours now, anyway. I think it looks nice on you.”

  Katie smiled again, her lips slightly parted. He thought he saw her eyes mist over but they cleared quickly. She stood up abruptly and stretched her arms overhead, then brought them together over her stomach. “Well now that it’s past sunset, I’m getting hungry! Did you remember to find us some dinner?”

  “Let’s go see,” Lee said. They returned to the towpath and swung downstream.

  ***

  The purple sky was bleeding to black as Tom stopped the mules at Widewater, about a mile below the Great Falls Tavern. Kevin tossed him the lines and he tied the scow to trees near the edge of the towpath. The Canal Company wouldn’t be running coal down to Georgetown for a few more days yet, so they didn’t have to worry about barges trying to get around them during the night. The repair scows were done with this level and were working out of Great Falls to Seneca and beyond. And those crews only worked during the day anyway.

  After the mules had been fed and watered, Tom led them a few feet into the Bear Island woods and left them in the small corral where they’d spent the night on the way downstream. A crescent moon hung in the night sky over the dark skin of Widewater as he returned to the scow. He crossed the fall-board and ducked into the cabin, where Kevin had lit the lamp and was stirring a pot of beef stew on the stove.

  “You thinking about playing a few hands at the Tavern?” he said. He sat down on the lower bunk and began tossing his knife and catching it by the handle as it spun. Kevin interrupted his stirring to pour himself a shot of whiskey from the jug.

  “Hell, no,” he said. “We got too much money on board to walk away from the boat, even if we lock the cabin. We don’t need no more paper anyway, and we got more whiskey here than you’ll ever find at Great Falls. You and me can play cards here. I’ll even try not to whup you this time.”

  Tom flashed a crooked smile and his obsidian eyes glittered. “Keep talking,” he said, ‘cause I been setting you up. You’re about to take a dive.”

  Chapter 21

  Unwinding By Starlight

  Friday, March 28, 1924

  Cy dragged the last dollop of mashed potatoes across his plate, accumulating stray morsels of shepherds pie. When the colored girl came, he asked for coffee. About a buck for coffee and dinner, he thought. That was the price of doing business at Great Falls Tavern. Five pints sold so far and two left, since he’d had to turn one into a tasting flask. The damn Englishmen didn’t know him, so that was what it took to get them to buy two pints, after they finally came around.

  Before that Clint Hillis and Frank Penner had come by, and both bought without needing a taste. They worked on one of the repair crews and remembered Cy from last season. They had gone back to their camp for dinner, but said they was planning to return later to play cards. No harm in joining ‘em, Cy thought. They might bring a friend. Customer relations was good for business.

  The colored girl brought his coffee. He nodded and waited for her to leave before surveying the brick patio. The other two tables were empty again. He pulled out the tasting flask and splashed a finger of whiskey into his coffee, then stirred in the cream and sugar. The shepherds pie and shots of whiskey were kneading an analgesic warmth into the knots of nerve and muscle in his hip. He stood up to stretch and transfer his weight from one leg to another, and the pain receded partway into its shell. His fingers stretched the skin beneath his eyes.

  What was Harriet doing right now, he wondered. On a mild Friday night in the first full week of spring, the streetlights of Philadelphia would draw her out into the evening like a moth to flame. That his ex-wife was better off without him, he had little doubt. After his injury, and after he left the Naval Yard to hobble around their apartment while sifting his limited options for less arduous work, he had served as a constant reminder of the constraints and obstacles that life could arbitrarily impose. Harriet had spent her life believing she was destined to pursue a bright line of opportunity and fortune that stretched to the horizon, and that obstacles to that pursuit could be sidestepped or cast off. And she had cast Cy off when his misfortune spun away from her bright line. The path to his horizon had grown shorter and darker during recent years and now stretched no further than Cumberland or Georgetown. And the slow current in the artery that connected those endpoints offered him predictable days of subsistence and pain.

  Clint Hillis appeared on the patio, coming around the corner from the entrance. He spotted Cy and raised a hand in greeting as Frank Penner followed him to Cy’s table. “A bit quiet here tonight,” he said, casting his eyes at the empty chairs. Hillis was hatless and lean, a few inches shorter than Cy, with a weathered face and an auburn mustache that defied the graying hair on his head. Canal work can age a man quickly, Cy thought; Hillis was probably in his early 30s. His sleeves were pushed partway up his sinewy forearms, revealing the talons of an alighting Great War eagle tattooed beneath his right sleeve.

  “It’s not too late,” Cy said. “I expect that will change.”

  Hillis nodded, twisting one end of his mustache with his fingers. “Maybe so. Join us for a hand or two while business is slow?” Cy pushed a chair toward Hillis with his foot and the two men sat down.

  Hillis passed a well-worn deck to Cy, who examined it and nodded his assent. Hillis called the game and the men threw their quarters into the pot. Penner shifted to align his broad waist with the table as the cards were dealt. Younger than Hillis and as tall as Cy, he had an unwhiskered, fleshy face that conveyed his affable demeanor. A drooping Stetson covered his bald scalp and his jaws always seemed to be grinding some invisible morsel of food. He had joined Hillis’s crew this season and taken readily to the card games that occupied many of their evenings.

  The first hand went to Penner and the second to Hillis. A few hands later Cy drew a third jack, overcoming Hillis’s three sixes and Penner’s pairs. All three men bet heavily on this hand and scowls from Cy’s opponents reflected the sudden redirection of fortune. Hillis pushed up his sleeves and the tattooed war-eagle joined the game.

  Cy gave back a few dollars before winning another high-stakes hand. After attributing his first large pot to luck, he began to reassess the game’s dynamics upon winning his second. He’d begun with about twenty dollars, including the proceeds from tonight’s whiskey sales. Now he had almost thirty. Hillis and Penner were average card players, like most of the men he ran into on the canal, and he had always considered himself an average player as well. Maybe he was better than that. Cards and whiskey traveled together, and maybe poker could be part of the equation that would allow him to break free of the canal’s limited horizons. Doing that required more money than he would earn as a boat captain. Gambling and whiskey might be useful means to an end, and that end was to escape this grinding, clawing life.

  When the Englishmen returned to greet Cy with inebriated affection and acquire his last two pints “for a long automobile journey tomorrow,” the equation began to seem compelling. He’d left Swains a few hours ago with twelve dollars and eight pints, and he now had thirty-three dollars and half a tasting pint left. Along with his stash at Swains, he only needed nineteen to settle with the Emorys tomorrow. After paying them he’d be debt-free, with forty pints left in his second cask to sell on the run to Cumberland – assuming them new colored boys from Georgetown showed up on time, and that his boat was ready to go when the whole canal opened on Tuesday. />
  He slipped the tasting flask to Penner, who gulped a surreptitious slug and passed it along. Penner shuffled the deck in his meaty hands, let Cy cut, and dealt the next hand.

  ***

  Sitting on the porch swing at Charlie Pennyfield’s house, Lee and Katie finished the sausages and potato salad he had heated up at the lockhouse. Lee knew Charlie wouldn’t be back to tend Pennyfield Lock until the coal boats started running early next week, and he considered dinner on Charlie’s porch a perquisite of his commitment to keep an eye on the big house until he had to leave with the Emorys. He’d brought the oil lamp from the shed down to the porch this afternoon, along with the pencil he’d used for marking the poles, since maybe Katie would tell him something that he needed to write down. Like where to meet her in the weeks ahead. And he’d moved the boat poles to the other side of the porch, which was now uncluttered and offered a nice view of Pennyfield Lock as the last light receded from the sky.

  Lee got up to retrieve the cherry pie; when he returned to the porch swing, Katie had already produced Cy’s leather-holstered flask from her jacket pocket. She untwisted the cap and passed it to Lee. “One of the advantages of having a corrupt brother,” she said.

  He rotated it toward the lamp to read the inscription “C.F. Elgin” on the holster. “So I see,” he said. He took a swallow and coughed. “Tastes familiar. Does Cy know my cousins?”