Crystal Lake occupied an exceptionally lovely setting, heavily wooded, with a few farmhouses scattered here and there along the length of Camp Road. The local community furnished the workers, which at peak harvest time numbered over twenty. The ice company provided a welcome wintertime employment opportunity in an isolated area where little else existed. The citizens of Freedom showed their value by being a grateful hardworking lot.
Chronologically, Thomas had more than a year on Daniel, a fact the older never let the younger forget. Accustomed to giving orders and pulling rank, only just recently Daniel had shot past Thomas in height. He was now a full half-head taller and substantially more muscular, which distressed skinny Thomas no end. Now, every time their eyes met, Thomas was forced to look up at his little brother for the first time in his life. Adding to this distress, even though Thomas was himself a fine-looking young man, Daniel was all the more handsome. Thomas’ social life and his ego were suffering. When the two brothers were out and about together and encountered girls that Thomas fancied and had successfully flirted with in the past, Daniel now stole their attention away completely to the point where Thomas no longer entirely welcomed the younger’s company.
Habituated from childhood to begrudgingly dragging him along wherever he went and getting satisfaction from showing him the ropes, Daniel was sometimes now a begrudged distraction. Daniel no longer required mentoring, as he was being introduced to a good deal without any help from his brother. Upon becoming tall, athletically built and unusually attractive, he had discovered that the world delighted in bestowing gifts at the feet of rarefied icons such as he. Daniel had recently become the recipient of more than his fair share of favored treatment.
His mother had noticed, and she was worried.
“JP, have you had The Man’s Talk with Daniel yet?” Annie asked, timidly, as she ironed the alderman’s shirts.
“Annie, let Sophie do the ironing, that’s what we have her for,” evaded the alderman.
“The reason we have Sophie here is to help me, JP, and if she can manage to keep the babies quiet then she’s worth her weight in gold. Ironing relaxes me, you know that. Especially when I can do it undisturbed. And don’t change the subject.”
“Um, well, no, not yet Annie, he’s still a boy. We have time.”
“Still a boy? He’ll be graduating high school! Are you blind? He’s a foot taller than you are and looks just like them fellas in the Arrow shirt collar illustrations in the magazines! Girls have certainly taken notice, JP, fallin’ all over him! It’s time for the talk, before it’s too late,” she admonished.
“He’ll be all right, Annie. Don’t worry.”
Annie just glared at him, then pulled out the Big Gun. “Must I have your brother do it?”
The Alderman was not at all looking forward to the uncomfortable task, being a decidedly prudish sort.
“All right, then, JP.” Annie said. “There’s something here I need for you to see.”
Annie put the iron back on its heater and went into the boys’ room, returning with a thin publication, authored by Mark Twain.
“Maybe this will change your mind,” she lectured. “I found it under Daniel’s mattress.”
“What in heaven’s name are you doing going under the boy’s mattress, Annie? What has he ever done, or Thomas for that matter, to send you digging into their privacy?”
“Just look at it, JP.”
The title read, Some Thoughts On The Science Of Onanism, by Mark Twain.
He took the booklet, opened it, and began reading:
The monkey is the only animal, except men, that practices this science; hence he is our brother; there is a bond of sympathy and relationship between us. Give this ingenious animal an audience of the proper kind, and he will straightaway put aside his other affairs and take a whet; and you will tell by the contortions and his ecstatic expression that he takes an intelligent and human interest in his performance.
Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it. As an amusement it is too fleeting; as an occupation it is too wearing; as a public exhibition there is no money in it. It is unsuited to the drawing room, and in most cultured society it has long since been banished from the social board.
JP stifled a smile, then gulped.
“Okay, you win, Annie, I’ll sit him down.”
“Where did he get something like this, do you think? Where would someone be able to get his hands on such a dirty thing?”
JP shrugged, indicating he had no idea. But considering its author, he strongly suspected it might’ve come from right next door.
“Don’t be upset now, JP,” said the Detective, taking a satisfied gulp from his schuper. They were relaxing in the parlor on the second floor of the boathouse. Jim glanced out the window at the back of his own house. Hannah was taking down the curtains in the rear bedroom to wash them, unaware she was being observed.
“Daniel came to me a few months back and asked a few questions, that’s all. He’s growin’ up fast—in case you hadn’t noticed. We can’t be competitive about our kids, JP. We’re all family. It just happened. The time was right. He asked and I answered. We need to answer their questions right when they’re asked or else they’ll go elsewheres and pick up some wrongheaded ideas. There’s nothin’ wrong with masturbation. Everybody does it,” Jim chuckled. “Not least of all, you.”
“I do like hell!” JP responded with indignation. “I’ve got a wife and a wagonload of children. I have absolutely no use for it!”
“JP...” Jim smirked knowingly.
“What?”
“I grew up with you. Remember? We shared a bedroom together. As I recall, you were a very busy boy. Probably still are.”
JP fell silent, concluding it best to keep bygones gone.
“When my Junior was about thirteen I noticed he was suddenly a nervous wreck,” recalled Jim, “and one day Hannah asked him why his handkerchiefs were abruptly missing from the wash, and he turned beet red. So I put two and two together and we sat down and discussed it. I knew that the little bookstall at the Chippewa Market sold certain kinds of books under the counter, so I asked that Gilbert fella there if he by chance had the famous Mark Twain essay on the subject. Who better than my old friend Sam Clemens to help me deal with a sticky situation like that?”
“Sticky situation?” blurted the Alderman, coughing and choking on his brew. The brothers laughed themselves silly.
◆◆◆
Their initiation at Crystal Lake a success, the boys moved on to the Hamburg turnpike ice house on Lake Erie. By New Year’s Eve Thomas and Daniel had been members of the large and boisterous Lake Erie ice cutting crew for two days, and were beginning to feel their oats. The endless white void of the vast frozen lake blended seamlessly into the white sky, the horizonless effect dizzying and disorienting. The weather was warming and a light rain added to the misery.
“Cold and snow I can manage, but cold and rain, that’s pure torture,” complained Thomas in a confidential tone.
The brothers were stationed with forty other men alongside the open channel. As it neared the shore at the ice house the channel branched off in two directions. One channel was intended for the blocks meant to be loaded onto the railroad cars. The other was for blocks headed for the icehouse’s conveyor. Most of the day’s harvest was earmarked for the railroad, which had cars at the ready, doors open, behind the icehouse. The huge cars were loaded just as fast as the workers could harvest. The crew record stood at twenty-six rail cars filled in a single day.
The boys’ charade of anonymity was abandoned after Crystal Lake due to the Lake Erie crew consisting mostly of old hands who’d all known the boys since babyhood. But regardless, neither JP nor the boys anticipated the warm welcome the rich-man’s sons received when they enthusiastically joined in with the tough work of the field crew. This act alone garnered respect instantly; Thomas’ innate instincts and capacity for heavy labor did the rest. Thomas in particular had
so quickly aligned with the other crewmen, and enjoyed the work so much, that JP for an instant grew concerned that he might want to rise no further up the company ladder than this. Daniel on the other hand was more his usual reserved and cautious self.
On their first day on the crew, Jerry Scanlan approached the boss’ eldest son out on the ice as Thomas chiseled vigorously at a score line to break off a block.
“Tom, I think I’d be of better use down the line with number one, if that’s all right with you.”
Thomas replied with a momentary glance up the line, “You’re askin’ the wrong fella, Jerry. The boss is standin’ right over there,” and went back to chopping. The foreman, Ed Cleary, a longtime friend to the Sullivans, was heartened by Thomas’ tact and respect.
The confluence of four of North America’s five Great Lakes occurs at Buffalo, where nearly five quadrillion gallons of lake water funnel their way toward the comparatively tiny mouth of the Niagara River. This gargantuan volume, one-fifth of the earth’s fresh surface water, propelled along by the gravity of the vast unrelenting volume behind it, creates deadly currents as the waters migrate toward their headlong rush over the brinks of Niagara. It might not have been realized, despite the solid covering of twelve inches of motionless ice, that beneath the frozen translucent cover the lake’s flow relentlessly proceeded.
Thomas on this day was in a bit of a snit. Daniel was again the object of the greater share of attention and compliments. As an expression of his pique Thomas was asserting more authority over his younger brother than usual, greatly irritating Daniel in the process. Thomas had only received a few days more training than Daniel, yet he was treating his younger brother like a mindless dolt, finding fault where none was evident. They had words. Peeved, Daniel removed himself down the gang line four or five places, situating foreman Cleary between them, to escape Thomas’ overbearance. Cleary took notice.
The air temperature was a degree or two above freezing, and a wretchedly cold rain had been drizzling down on the men, compounding the misery of their toiling. The ice had been cleared of snow by the horse plow; it was rain-soaked, slick, slippery as hell, and translucent to some degree. The men wore cleats strapped to their boots, but even so, the rain made the ice surface smooth and slithery. Extra caution was applied to their movements.
The gang had cut a railroad car-sized rectangle and were moving the huge berg down the channel with canal-hook chisels to where narrower boundaries would capture and hold it tight for its destined paring down to the requisite 300 pound cubes.
Thomas, having been lulled into a deceptive familiarity owing to the easy rhythms and jocular camaraderie of his agreeable new situation, stepped too close to the edge of the channel, slipped and toppled in. Daniel saw him lose balance and was halfway to reaching him even as his brother hit the freezing open water.
Thomas surfaced immediately adjacent to the channel, and as he reached for the eager clutches quickly extended by co-workers who had fallen on hands and knees to the ice, he began to disappear beneath the shelf, slowly but forcefully sucked under in the relentless pull of the current. Those holding canal hooks jabbed at him, trying furiously to catch his clothing.
They failed to do so.
Men grabbed desperately, but wet gloves groping at heavy wool in freezing water against the determined draught caused them to lose him. Thomas was dressed in layers of wool underwear, shirts, a sweater and a heavy long coat, all now thoroughly water-logged and weighting him down. Coupled with the numbing cold, these encumbrances made it virtually impossible for him to fight against the current’s motion. As he felt his saviors’ hands slip from him, Thomas took a deep breath and struggled to remove his gloves and coat as he was drawn helplessly under the ice.
Crew boss Cleary was down the line just a few yards with his extra-long canal-hook chisel. It was a fourteen-foot long tool having both a chisel and a large hook opposing each other at its end, a shorter eight-foot version of which was in other workers’ hands.
Daniel slammed himself down on his stomach, and hanging precipitously over the edge of the ice shelf commandingly bellowed, “Hold my feet!”
The men grabbed his ankles and dug their cleats into the ice to keep from sliding in with their capture. As Daniel’s head dipped under the freezing water, the cold-shock to his eyeballs was jarring. He was barely able to make out the grey shadow of Thomas, terror-stricken and struggling under the ice. He extended his hook under the ice shelf toward his brother in a vain attempt to grab him, but it was not long enough.
Almost instantly, crew boss Stanton landed atop Daniel’s back, reached down and grabbed the scruff of Daniel’s neck, pulled his head out of the water while screaming “Hold onto me feet!” back to the gang of men, now numbering about thirty, who had rushed to the spot, some losing their ice cleats in the bedlam. The boss then reached down and grabbed Daniel’s wet gloved hand with his own and curled Daniel’s fingers round the longer pole that he held in his right and screamed “Take it Daniel!” Without missing a beat Daniel released the shorter pole as he grasped the longer, bent at his waist to submerge, and upside-down, maneuvered the tool under the ice. The blinding pain on his eyeballs was excruciating.
Other men standing at the ready helplessly shouted in horror, “There he is,” pointing straight down to the ice upon which they were standing. The vague ghostly shadow of a person clawing at the roof over his head could be discerned through the translucent ice between their boots. The men began stabbing wildly at the ice with picks and claws insanely, knowing full well they could never break though a foot of solid glaze to save him.
Daniel was now writhing against those holding him back in his attempt to gain a better position to snag his brother, His crew mates slipped wildly on the ice, forming a chain of panicked men trying their utmost to keep the chain from sliding into the water wholesale. The crewmen flailed and dug at the ice with their sharp cleats, sending an eruption of ice chips flying into the air in their frenzy to gain a foothold.
Daniel focused on the fading shadow, farther away now, and jammed the end of the longer hook at it, now unconcerned with any damage he might do to Thomas’ flesh. Desperate with horror that he might be losing his brother forever, he thought of what that would surely do to his parents’ hearts. The situation was now in his hands completely.
He maneuvered the chisel hook pole under the shadow that was now just barely visible beneath its tomb of ice, a good nine or ten feet away from him at this point. Daniel jabbed desperately at it at an upward angle with all his ebbing strength. In Thomas’ flailing he managed to connect with the rescuing tool. He tried to grab ahold of it. He was beginning to take in water. His hands were so numb he wasn’t even sure his grip had successfully closed around the wood pole. Then fortuitously the hook caught his sweater. It held firm. Suddenly he could feel his form move in opposition to the deadly current, creeping closer and closer to rescue. Hand-over-hand Daniel and the rescuers inched their way along the savior pole, trying to maintain the upward pressure against the roof of ice so as not to lose their catch. Men piled atop men. Hands clutched ankles in a desperate grab for Daniel and the pole. Billy McMahon toppled in. Unlike the novice Thomas, Billy quickly swam away from the edge of the ice shelf, and immediately began shedding his heavy clothes so as not to be dragged under. Two men extended poles to Billy and hooked him so as not to be swept away, then ran toward the shore pulling McMahon through water.
At the same time, multiple hands grabbed Daniel’s numb arm and the pole, and working together were able to coax the tool toward them. When enough of Thomas emerged from under the shelf to allow grabbing something, they all did—clothes, hair, an ear—whatever their barely bending frozen fingers could grasp. They pulled him up, sliding their limp leaden burden onto the water-soaked ice, and plopped him on his back, every man adrenalized, but depleted of breath and strength, freezing, completely drenched. Daniel was almost too numb to move, but when he saw no one take instant action, he crawled to his brother, and re
membering with absolute clarity his grandmother’s story of the amazing resurrection of dead little Henry Zeller from the Buffalo River at the hand of Wilhemina Rapp, he sealed his mouth over his brother’s, tilted his head back, and blew the breath of life into him. A huge geyser shot out of Thomas’ mouth all over Daniel’s face as Thomas choked back to consciousness. Daniel grabbed his gagging brother’s face in both hands, pressed his own face to it and kissed him. But Thomas, still fighting suffocation, flailed and convulsed and pushed Daniel away in a panic as he continued the Herculean wrenching undertaking of replacing the water in his lungs with air.
Thomas had only been under the ice forty seconds or so, but to all involved it felt like ten minutes. Thomas had always been proud of his ability to hold his breath for long periods in contests with his lads swimming at Woodlawn Beach, but the shock of the freezing water, the weight of his wet clothes, and the terrifying current that sucked him under the ice shelf had sent him into an hysteria. Within just seconds of falling in he began vainly trying to prevent himself from breathing water and in doing so became almost incapable of helping himself.
Together the men scooped up the brothers. They hightailed it to shore slipping, skidding, sliding, clutching onto one other toward the life-saving warmth of the icehouse office and its potbellied stove. Some had lost their cleats, causing them to slither and coast on the rain-soaked ice. Uncooperative limbs were coaxed toward the frozen beach. The men supported the gagging Thomas, who could not stand upright and was as yet laboriously choking out more water. Cleary pounded on Thomas’ back as they scuttled. He was in a state of shock from his near-death encounter. Despite their own freezing paralysis, the others managed to drag both boys across the ice toward the huge wooden icehouse. Billy McMahon had already reached shore and was being helped out.
Murderers, Scoundrels and Ragamuffins Page 21