She opened her eyes, tugged at her braid. “I should like the lily box,” she said abruptly. “I was just thinking about my father. He met the same young man, this Brother Able, the one that Chauncey met, surely. Is not that fated? A meaningful thing. It must be.”
“Coincidence,” I said, and saw in this another tack of hers: the fixing together of rags and shards to make a tidy sense.
A MID-MARCH IN ARCADIA and the weather is at last allowing John to labour constant on his house. His latest additions are a side pantry and buttery. Next he plans to add a water-closet. It will be inside the house itself and wide enough for this fashion of ever-widening petticoats. And all these plans have a cord-taut urgency. His wife, Leah, Lizzie, Maggie, Katie. It has been five years since the cholera, since his prodigal women spent any notable time at home. But that will soon change.
“This was at the post for you, Pa.” The letter is like a playing card in David’s massive hand.
John Fox cracks the seal in puzzlement. Adjusts his spectacles. Peers close. Leah. She reports that they have moved into a Manhattan brownstone on a street where the majority of the ambulatory could find them. She writes that her court case against the dreaded Reverend Chauncey Burr has been won. She is ten thousand dollars richer; though of course the money cannot repay the grief his slander cost her. And she with all her expenses …
His eye skips down. The flock.
On the canal, Pa, while I as en-route to the Columbus courthouse. They were returning very early in the season from where-ever it is they disappear to, and this I could not help but think is a propitious sign. It was not a unending flock like those when we lived in Ontario, but still a goodly sized one. Do you recall when I was lifted up to the heavens? Surely you do. You were the only living person who witnessed what must have been a sight wondrous beyond description. I suppose it will not happen again as I am too grown. And by the by I do still cherish the bible box you gave me, the one so finely carved with the lilies entwined. It has been of great use.
Your loving daughter,
Leah
John reads it three times over. Lifted up? To the heavens yet? When the flock passed over he found her crumpled by the stump where he had seen her last. She was bloody and senseless and he’d thought her certain to die. He had nearly begun a wailing when she stirred and smiled.
John folds up the letter, wonders if mayhap she had been borne aloft. The flock had obscured her. It was possible. Anything seems possible where Leah is concerned.
I should have carved a swarm of pigeons on the lid of her bible box, he thinks, and visions Leah standing at the canal-boat prow, the flock a black and tattered cape stretching from her shoulders and over half the world.
The canals. John lives far from them and now eschews canal travel completely. Still, even now, if God’s grace would allow it, he would be of the watered world. He walks back into his house. Steps over the planks and tools and sits at his makeshift desk. He considers for a while, but a direct response to Leah’s letter fails him. Instead, he takes the scribed papers out of their keeping. Fires the new-hung betty lamps. Dips a nib.
… Year of Our Lord 1825 and you’ve never seen a Celebration the like of what marked the opening of the Canal. Some hundred cannons were booming along its length entire and there were brass bands playing on the berms, and roman wheels exploding overhead, and flotillas of boats in the harbor of New York, and one of these boats was festooned up like Noah’s Ark, complete with stuffed pairs of exotic animals and a pair of bona fide Indian children shivering in their loincloths …
Five days later at an Utica barbershop, John met one Erastus Bearcup, captain and owner of the Morning Star, a bullheaded boat that hauled flour from Rochester’s mills as far as Buffalo in the west and Albany in the east. Erastus wore his mat of dark hair long and pulled back with twine. His beard, stained with tobacco juice, was a shade lighter, and spanned his wide chest and obscured his mouth and crawled up to his cheekbones, above which were eyes of bottle green. For all that, he was a style-setter in this canaller world. Wore red suspenders and red garters over a smocked shirt. Wore a black sack coat, a straw hat banded with paisley, and gummed boots toed with steel.
John had heard of the man, his boat. No scolding wife hanging petticoats out like frilled flags. No thumb-sucking, nappy-shitters tied to the rail so as not to plop overboard. Just a crew of five, men of free ways all.
Erastus finished his whisky and took his place at the barber chair. The barber tossed back his own whisky, then sharpened his razor on a strop.
John spoke in his usual clipped tones. “I can fix near anything. Worked on the locks. Worked in the building yard. I’m a blacksmith by trade. Looking for work as a bowsman now.”
Erastus said to the looking glass, “We could use a bowsman. Ours just up and died of some fucking ailment of the heart.”
“He damn well drowned.” This from a man with a bulbous nose that ill-fit his gaunt face. He returned his attention to a periodical, said, “Keeled off a bridge after a Saturday spree. Not easy to drown in four feet of water, but he always was determined. Veni, vidi, vici.”
“That there’s the cook, Jeb O’Doul from the Carolinas, he’s a swell at the Latin,” Erastus explained. “Attend and you might start jawing like a learned man same as him.”
“He won’t,” Jeb said, eyeing John.
“Or I might.”
“Why, just for exempli gratia?”
“That’s it,” John said.
“And by the by,” Erastus warned. “There’s not a fuck-all thing Jeb won’t contradict or argue on about.”
“There shore is,” Jeb said. He stabbed at the periodical and nodded at some outrage. Such was the way of the man, John soon learned. Convincing him of anything through conversation was nearly impossible. He held only with what was in print. Scorned using his fingers to guide his reading, an odd thing to see, though often, as now, he licked a stubby lead to underline this important fact or that.
Erastus snorted and ordered the barber to trim his ear hair, said to John, “You’re a little shit of a thing. What’s your tipple?”
“I’d drink the Holy Spirit itself if it had any bite, but I’ve never slept past the bell. I’ve never slipped up.”
Erastus eyed him appraisingly. He stumped out of the barber chair, adjusted his suspenders, then heaved his fist at John’s head. John ducked, sprang up and kicked at Erastus’s knees, dealing him a glance-blow to his throat at the same time. Erastus staggered into a shelf of hair tonic and oils. The bottles rattled but held.
Erastus grimaced. “Fuck-lucky for you I were holding back.”
“Fuck-lucky for you I were too.”
Erastus straightened. Jed flipped a page with a wetted thumb.
“Well, that satisfies,” Erastus said.
The Morning Star was seventy-eight feet long and ten feet wide. She was flat-bottomed and squat like all canal boats so as to fit under the bridges and aqueducts. Had a long, covered hold for the cargo, stacked bed-slots for the crew, and an oak stable for the resting mules. Her paint was a ravishment of vermillion, blue and panoma green. Her rails were nickel-plated and polished to a gleam. “A flesh woman couldn’t be more beautiful,” Erastus said, and his crew chorused agreement.
Ambrose York was the steersman, a heavy-framed man near to forty who lacked most of his hair and one of his front teeth. He contended he lost this tooth when he was held captive during the Indian wars. “They pulled it out to torture me. Some squaw is wearing it round her neck even now, such are their adornments, I’ll have you know it.” He told this with a genial snort, as if recalling a fatherly beating. Ambrose, John soon realized, was one of those who lived in the sun-shaft of nostalgia. By afternoon he was missing the morning. By evening he was missing the afternoon. As for his tales of his life as a boy, his life as an Indian captive, John was to hear them relentlessly.
Clement Kinsworth was the mule hoggee, and was near big as a mule himself though not yet eighteen. His strength
was legendary. Once a gangplank slipped when Clement was tailing on a mule; mule and hoggee should have crashed into the canal but Clement kept hold of the mule’s tail and hauled it back to the towpath as easy, it was said, as if he were hauling up a baby. Erastus depended upon Clement, not just to rescue his mules, but to do his ledgers as well, for the boy could cipher in a blink. Still, he was often taken for an idiot given his toad-wide mouth, his swivel eye and lumbering gait. Or else a constant drunkard, which he wasn’t. “Christ’s truth is that the boy don’t drink a thing except ale,” Erastus said with faint disdain.
He had no such disdain for John’s drinking abilities. “Never seen your like. Liquor must pour out your damned fingers for all it marks you.”
John was set to earn ten silver dollars a month with his board an inclusion. His unit of monetary value was whisky gallons. At twenty cents a gallon, that meant ten dollars a month was fifty gallons. A decent wage, then. Not even he could drink that amount.
Erastus. Jeb. Ambrose. Clement. John. These five stopped each night at taverns or lock stations, even toll stations, anywhere the mules could be bought clean stabling and decent feed. There the five men of the Morning Star met with the crews of other boats, drank to oblivion, participated in foot races and wrestling matches and fist-fighting bouts until the acreage around was trampled. John worked from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. like all canallers. Sleep was a snatched luxury during idle hours.
… I’m telling of these men for a purpose, Leah-Lou. In the first instance you need know how one can get comfortable with others who sin in situ as you, how it seems then not a sin at all but just the way of it, and I know how the Lord gets distant when we find power in the company of the like-minded instead of prayer …
John’s first battle came one morning after his hiring. They’d been held up at the Cohoes Lock, a waste weir having broken through. Already they were running a half-day late for arrival in Buffalo. “A half-day less fucking profit!” Erastus roared. He called to Clement to kick the mule up a pace. Called to John to ready the tow line. John was confounded by this, then saw the boat, specking the distance. As the loaded boat the Morning Star should give the right of way and press to the berm side so that the lighter boat, coming unloaded from Buffalo, could pass over the lowered tow line. This was canal etiquette, such as it was.
Erastus looked through his telescope. “It’s the Sweet Eleanor G. That’s Severen’s boat. I’ve sworn to never give way to that son-of-a-whore.”
Childish. All of it. John-After can see that. But not John-Before. Already whisky-eyed he balled his fists. Erastus called to Clement to hitch up the mule and wade on over. Jeb folded up his cook’s apron and hefted a fry pan. Ambrose hauled out a length of chain.
The Sweet Eleanor G drew near. Looked to have a five-man crew as well. An equal match, then. Demands were leavened, and then insults hurled, and then they were poling over to the Sweet Eleanor G while the other crew cursed them on and the Morning Star men cursed back, gleeful as boys. The battle raged across both boats. John took on a man wearing begrimed cover-alls. They grappled, then fell into the prow. John’s head rang from a glancing blow and his nose dripped blood and then he gripped the man’s arm and wrenched it backwards. The man screamed out his surrender. John accepted and kicked the man into the shallow waters.
The Morning Star won the day easily. The right of way was theirs. It was not won without pain, however. Erastus had split and swollen knuckles. One of Jeb’s eyes was a flower of violet and black. John’s head had a lump the size of a ball of yarn, and Ambrose was missing half his remaining front tooth. Only Clement was unscathed. Had taken on Captain Severen as if he were a boy in short pants.
They stopped at the nearest canal tavern to doctor themselves and have a celebratory draft. Other canallers crowded round to hear the livid details of the battle. Erastus didn’t care that now they would be behind schedule. Erastus didn’t care that now they would surely be behind schedule. Severen and his crew had been the toughest on the canal. No longer. That honour now belonged to the crew of the Morning Star, and that honour was often challenged. They had to often fight for the right-of-way—a spectacle so common that children came running as soon as the shouting started. And there were arguments to settle at taverns and grog shops. But soon they wallowed in respect. They allowed the hurry-up boats to pass on to their tasks of repair and rescue, but they catcalled to the packet boats, those passenger-haulers with their velvet dining rooms and deck chairs of teak. The packet boat captains ignored the canallers as if they were calling out in Gaelic or Chinese. The female passengers shielded their faces with parasols. The male passengers shook their heads in disgust.
A year slid by and then another. In winter the Morning Star was mud-larked and the crew worked on caulking the seams with oakum. John could have visited his family during these months when the canal was drained. Instead he found work repairing locks and drinking, ever drinking. He missed his wife only in the rare evenings when he was vaguely sober. Had, for compensation, the paid attentions of a widowed seamstress whose breasts, though near the size of Margaret’s, lacked the musky scent, the moon whiteness.
… I missed your ma sorely, Leah-Lou, and I missed you near worse, but I knew I were persona non gratis with my family unless I ceased imbibing. And I know, too, that God had his plans for me. I reckon you’d call this Fate because I’ve heard you toss that word about like a child’s ball, but I warn you, Fate is only God plotting hard lessons …
In the months of navigable weather John came to know every ingenious thing and every wondrous sight along the length of the canal—the weigh-locks with their front pillars sunk into the water like some ruins of old, the swing bridges and bascule bridges, the towns that were said to be alike to Venice, with water-streets lapping at the boardwalks and towpaths and house fronts, the aqueducts fenestrated with arches. He knew the towering rocks of the Niagara Escarpment, the green hills of the Mohawk Valley. He knew all the businesses crowding the canal’s edge—the provisionists and gin mills, the doggeries where a drink could be had for a twelve-pence, the boarding houses, barbershops and smithies, and the shops farther down watery alleys, too, where a man could tie a skiff, enter an unmarked door and have a go at the faro, the whores.
Erastus had a fondness for the shanty boat people, for their children swarming in the brown water and for the women, certainly, who in the limpid heat went without petticoats and wore only a single calico skirt that showed the outline of their legs. The crew bought whisky and vegetables from these folk whose skiffs nuzzled alongside the Morning Star. Not for these people the same patch of immobile earth; they moved every few months as they were forced. John could have lived among them, but not his wife, Margaret. She would never love this liquid world as he did. Here a man’s worth was measured by how well he fought and how hard he worked. But most of all, by how much he drank.
… and so you must see it, my girl, that my worth were sky high …
Five months later, on a transparent August day, John and the Morning Star crew listened all-humoured as Jeb read from a pamphlet: “… and so give your workers a bible and cold water and they shalt respect you as a wise father.”
Erastus laughed. Clement and Ambrose joined in; even John-Before gave his dry chuckle.
Erastus said, “Fucking what? Hah! Imagine the look on your pug-ugly faces if I gave yous all a bible and cold damned water as reward for your labour.”
Even Jeb—who usually held with the written—had to agree it was an idiotic proposition.
The Morning Star was awaiting loading at the docks on Rochester’s Warehouse Row. It was the third boat in line, but Erastus did not press the right of way as top boat of the Erie Canal, proving the truth of his near-daily remark that he had a magnanimous streak.
A wagon loaded with milled flour clattered up Warehouse Street. The wagon came from downriver where the mills and factories sheathed the cliffs aside the falls like battlements and the race chutes beckoned children and often drowned them. Even f
rom the dock John could hear the rumble of the Grand Falls. He’d been told it was ninety-six feet high and two hundred wide and that farther north the Lower Falls were higher yet and torrented through a gorge. John-Before had never trudged the few miles to see these lower falls, which were said to be so awe-inspiring they could flush a man clean of sinning thoughts. But it’d take more than some damn waterfall, John thought, to clean me out of sinning thoughts.
He looked over to see that some well got-up gentlemen had made a table out of barrels. Another unfurled a rolled-up plan for what looked to be yet another factory. A flat-boat captain offered a bottle of whisky and the gentlemen passed it round. Erastus added to the bounty from his own formidable stash and the wagoners were invited down. More bottles appeared. Only in America would there be such an egalitarian sight, thought John, and he was glad again he was not born into some foreign country.
Workers filed out of a tannery, some half-grown children among them. The owner was said to be generous; he allowed the child workers a frolic outside each day, allowed a crock of ale for the oldest ones, and reasonable compensation for the family when a child now and then got yanked into the machinery and mangled.
John watched these children as they shifted on the rock paths. One plucked at the sooty leaves of a shrub. Another dragged a finger through the green slick of the canal. It was as if they had forgotten the rituals of play. Or mayhap they were lingering over each clock-tick of freedom. He wondered if tannery work was worse than school.
… Then I clenched the boat rail so hard my hand ached, and this because I spied a girl exact to you, Leah-Lou. The world was small for all its waterways and I’d heard rumours that you and your ma and siblings had returned from your grandparents’ place in Ontario and were living in Rochester with Margaret’s sister, that is to say on plain sufferance, and so I wasn’t surprised overmuch but felt wretched all the same to think of you toiling in a factory. Then I realized that girl was mayhap seven, which was about your age when I left, and by then you’d be fifteen and a woman near grown …
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