Swains Lock

by Edward A. Stabler

  SWAINS LOCK

  Edward A. Stabler

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2017 Edward A. Stabler. All Rights Reserved.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  SWAINS LOCK is a work of fiction and its characters are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance of these characters to actual persons living or dead is unintended and coincidental.

  Larger versions of the maps below are available on the author’s website, at http://khola.com

  *****

  For Martha, who made this book possible, and for those

  who have walked the towpath or put their feet in the river.

  *****

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Blood Pendant

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1 – Figure Eights

  Chapter 2 – Discovery

  Chapter 3 – Whites Ferry

  Chapter 4 – Candles

  Chapter 5 – Sightseeing

  Chapter 6 – Books

  Chapter 7 – Newspapers

  Chapter 8 – Spanish Ballroom

  Chapter 9 – Snowshoeing

  Chapter 10 – High-Water Marks

  Chapter 11 – White Mules

  Chapter 12 – Falling

  Chapter 13 – Fever

  PART TWO

  Chapter 14 – Locking Through

  Chapter 15 – Paying for Ten

  Chapter 16 – The Big Fish

  Chapter 17 – Shadowmen

  Chapter 18 – Cordwood

  Chapter 19 – Silver and Gold

  Chapter 20 – Sunset

  Chapter 21 – Unwinding by Starlight

  Chapter 22 – Swains Lock

  Chapter 23 – Angling

  Chapter 24 – Pennyfield Pages

  Chapter 25 – Grave Dance

  Chapter 26 – Paper Spear

  PART THREE

  Chapter 27 – Rising

  Chapter 28 – The Level Trade

  Chapter 29 – Edwards Ferry

  Chapter 30 – Emmerts Lockhouse

  Chapter 31 – Archives

  Chapter 32 – One Red Leaf

  Chapter 33 – Reeds

  Chapter 34 – Sharpsburg

  Chapter 35 – Pas de Deux

  Chapter 36 – Joined Sycamores

  Chapter 37 – Full Circle

  Chapter 38 – Revisiting

  Prologue

  Blood Pendant

  Tuesday, May 3, 1831

  The two men sat on sloping rocks shaded by a Bear Island hackberry tree. Sweat trickled down their backs and foreheads and their reddened hands were streaked with dirt. Five hours of work on a spring morning had raised a thigh-high stone wall that bisected a swampy drainage. The feeder was operating now, watering the C&O Canal down from Seneca, and the sixty-foot depth of Widewater across the towpath was slowly filling. When their half-built wall was finished, it would prevent this grafted vein of the canal from draining out across the island toward the Potomac River.

  Glancing through slender trees toward the towpath, the man with curly hair noticed the girl when she was still forty paces away. He caught the other man’s attention with a low whistle. Screened by sunlit trunks, they could watch her approach without being seen. She wore a tan skirt that might have been buckskin and a long-sleeved blouse. Her hands and dark hair swung a gentle rhythm as she glided forward with feline grace. A grin widened on the face of the man with curly hair as he watched the girl.

  “She moves like an animal, eh Richard?” He gathered a clot of saliva in his mouth and spat it out tersely between his feet. “Bet she fucks like one too.”

  “Just one way to find out,” Richard said, stroking his red-gold mustache. He rocked forward to crouch in the shade on the balls of his feet.

  “No sign of poppa today,” the man with curly hair whispered, grinning again.

  “Probably sleeping off his whiskey back at the quarry,” Richard whispered back. “It’s lonely out here on the island today, Johnny.”

  Johnny pushed himself away from the rock and crouched alongside Richard. The girl was only twenty feet away now and they could hear her singing softly to herself, the tune rising and falling as she passed. Richard stepped quietly to the towpath and Johnny followed. Their eyes met and they loped toward the girl. When she turned toward the crunch of footsteps, Richard’s arm encircled her neck. His hand clamped her mouth as Johnny lifted her legs to his waist. The girl shook her head and tried to scream but her voice and teeth were overpowered by Richard’s calloused hand.

  Richard lowered her to horizontal, hand still across her mouth, and the gesture jerked open her top button, displacing the silk cord of a pendant necklace that lay against her dust-colored skin. She writhed and twisted as the men carried her back into the Bear Island woods. Past their half-built stone wall, a fish-shaped pond occupied the lap of the drainage. They carried the girl along a slope of brown grass toward the tail of the pond.

  “I think we’re beyond earshot,” Richard said over his shoulder.

  “Aye. We ain’t seen no one pass in hours anyway.”

  Together the men dropped their arms to the ground. The girl tried to roll onto her stomach, screaming as her mouth came free, but Richard quickly muzzled her with one hand and pinned her arm with the other. He knelt facing Johnny, who pressed her ankles to the earth.

  “Well now, Johnny,” he said with a smile. “You seem to have ended up in the favored position. I guess that means you get the first taste.” He looked down at the girl. Her gleaming hair was speckled now with dried grass and her dark eyes oscillated wildly under an emerging skin of tears. “You just relax and enjoy this now honey. Might be the only chance you get with two full-blooded white men.” She bit at the fingers of his hand, but they were tough and thick and he waggled them to avoid her teeth. When he looked up again, Johnny had already dropped his trousers and was yanking down his grimy undershorts, still pinning her thigh with one hand as she frantically tried to twist away. Johnny cradled his craning member and shuffled toward her on his knees.

  “Here I come, darlin’,” he said, pawing at her underwear and smiling, “like a big old barge sliding into a tight little lock.” With his hands still pressed to the girl's mouth and elbow, Richard glanced down and saw that her eyes had dried. She was reaching inside the neck of her blouse and pulling something with her free hand.

  “Hey, Johnny,” he said, looking up again. “I think she likes the look of your boat. Seems she fixin’ to open the gates for…” Before he could finish he saw a moving shape and a flash of white light, then felt a stabbing pain. His left eye closed reflexively as warmth flowed down his face and trickled onto his lips. Turning back toward the girl, with one eye he saw his own blood raining onto her face and neck. His occluded left eye was buried behind a red, throbbing field.

  “God damn it!” he roared. “Fucking half-breed whore!” Johnny jerked back onto his knees in surprise. The girl stopped struggling momentarily and Richard saw a thin smile form on her lips. Her free hand was clenched around a reddish stone shaped like an elm leaf and stained a deeper red with his blood.

  In one motion he grabbed a fistful of hair and stood up, yanking her to her feet. He pressed his wrapped fist to her scalp and dipped to sweep her legs off the ground. When she tried to scream, he pulled her hair until the tears resurfaced and her voice trailed off. The pond was a half-dozen pace
s away and he strode quickly toward it. Johnny had hoisted his suspenders and was shambling to catch up.

  “I told you she was an animal,” he said. “Fucking injun blood.”

  “Well she better ask her medicine man to turn her into a fish,” Richard said as they reached the water. Johnny gestured toward the stop-gate near the tail end of the pond.

  “Let’s go behind it. Too open here.”

  Past the stop-gate, Richard thrust her down at the water’s edge, then bent her right arm behind her back and forced her to her knees. “Time to join your ancestors, you pagan bitch!” he said as the blood slowed and grew viscous on his face. The girl inhaled sharply as he thrust her head into placid water discolored by decaying leaves. Her body was quiet for a moment, then lunged violently upward. Johnny placed his hand on top of Richard’s and together they held her head below the surface. Still clutching its weapon, her left hand flailed for another target.

  The girl’s resistance subsided and her body grew quiet. Her dark hair fanned out across the water, like an aura surrounding the oppressive hands. She pulled her free arm into the pond and groped for leverage in the muck at the bottom. Then her legs and arms erupted in another spasm as she fought to push upward and back. The reddened hands and arms held fast. She tried to dive forward but was tethered by Richard’s grip on her bent arm. Her third and final lunge was a fading echo of its predecessors, and after that the girl was still.

  Johnny pried the object from her fingers and laughed. “Some kind of stone leaf. Maybe a necklace…with an idiot symbol. She’s a fucking native, like we thought.” He tossed the sandstone pendant onto the bank. Richard pushed her head under the surface in disgust, then brought his hand gingerly to his face to gauge the damage while Johnny knelt back from the water and watched.

  “I don’t think she caught you square in the eye.”

  The girl’s head bobbed to the surface and her hair undulated on the water like sea moss.

  “Maybe not,” Richard said, “but that whore got a piece of me. My eye’s too swelled up to open.” He gently washed drying blood from his face with wet fingers. “Let’s get rid of her,” he said, spitting savagely at the dirt.

  The men stood up and Johnny pulled her limp body from the water and laid it on the bank. Her dark eyes were fixed at infinity and a stream of water trickled from the side of her mouth. Johnny bent to grab her ankles. One of her heels had twisted out of its shoe, and the shoe hung from her toes. Richard gripped her wrists and turned toward the thin tail of the pond.

  They carried her along the drainage, continuing straight through sparse trees over flat terrain when the outlet stream swung away to the left. Accustomed to lifting heavy stones, they bore her body easily as they wove through a cordon of boulders and approached large rocks that rose to a rounded ridge. Beyond the ridge crest was blue sky.

  Dragging the girl’s upper body with one arm, Richard climbed onto the base of the ridge and waited for Johnny to scramble up alongside him. The girl’s loose shoe fell and rolled into a crack in the rock. The men reclaimed their grips, sidestepped to the crest, and looked down at the river below. It ran swiftly and impassively between the cliffs of the gorge.

  Staring at the swirls and folds of the current, they rested for a few breaths. Richard caught Johnny’s eye and Johnny nodded. Holding the body by its wrists and ankles, they swung it like a pendulum toward the river. On the second swing they let go at the height of the forward arc, and the girl’s body soared out into the air above the river. Her arms flew free from her sides and hung in the air like those of a dancer as her body carved a graceful arc toward the water. From the cliff above, they saw an ephemeral flash of bright water, its sound lost in the rush of the current. The body knifed into colder water beyond the reach of the sun, then rose slowly toward the surface as the river carried it away.

  ***

  Sunday, May 8, 1831

  Greyanne Alstyne pressed the sandstone pendant against the smooth stick of driftwood she held in her palm. She carefully wrapped the cord around the leaf-shaped pendant and the stick, knotting the end to hold the two together. Looking down at her husband Parry, she saw tears streaking his sunburned cheeks as he worked, and she brushed a tear away from her own eye. Sitting on a broken log he had set across the tail of the pond, he leaned forward, tools in hand, toward the stone wall.

  On a waist-high block on the southern face of the stop-gate, Grace’s symbol was taking shape. He had already inscribed the curve of the G and was tapping out the vertical arm. It was a mark that Grace had designed and drawn herself, to surprise her father when she was only seven. Greyanne watched as Parry gently set his chisel to the stone and tapped rhythmically with his hammer. The prominent veins on his large hands were stained with sweat and dust. She curled her fingers around the cord that lashed the driftwood to the pendant and turned away.

  Searching for Grace, they had found her necklace yesterday in the rough grass near the tail of the pond. It was only a few feet from the stop-gate that had been built last month by the vermin who killed her, with stones that Parry and the other masons had cut. Grace had met a friend at Great Falls on Tuesday morning, and a few people at the Tavern had seen her set out downstream on the towpath early that afternoon. She never made it home to Cabin John. That was five days ago now.

  On Friday night one of the masons had heard the English laborer Richard Emory, whiskeyed up with his work crew, brag about how he and “Johnny” had “had our way with that little half-breed Alstyne whore out on Bear Island and then fed her to the fishes.” The mason had said that Johnny was another laborer from Liverpool – John Garrett. And that Emory’s eye was hemorrhaged and blackened.

  Greyanne and Parry, and others who offered to help, had scoured Bear Island in search of Grace, hoping the boast was only half truthful, clinging to the prospect she might still be alive. They hadn’t found their only child, dead or alive, on the island or along the banks downstream. But they had found Grace’s bloodstained necklace by the stop-gate. And then worse, one of her shoes lying upside-down in a crevice on the ridge, only a few paces from the cliffs that lined the gorge.

  Greyanne walked toward those cliffs now. She clenched her fingers in anger around the driftwood, knowing that even if Grace’s body were found, her killers would go free. At the base of the ridge, she fixed her long black hair into a loose knot, then climbed up onto the rocks. She switch-backed toward the rounded crest and continued a few steps to the precipice.

  Two hundred feet away across the gorge, the Virginia cliffs were lit by the warm morning sun. Below her the broad coursing river reflected the soft blue sky of mid-spring. She turned toward the upper gorge and the indomitable falls beyond it, as her ancestors had while fishing this river five hundred years ago. A light breeze stirred as she spoke to her lost daughter in a clear voice and a forgotten tongue.

  “Grace, those men have taken your life and cast your body into the water.

  They have stolen the lives of your children and ended your line forever.

  Now for ten generations, your spirit will rise with the river

  to drown a son of Garrett or Emory.”

  She held the driftwood with its sandstone rider aloft and flung it with all her strength into the sky above the river. It arched through the sunlit void between the cliffs and dropped into the water with a silent splash. A great blue heron on the rocks below unfolded its wings and took flight. She watched Grace’s talisman bob away in the current, then softly finished her invocation.

  “In their dreams they will see and fear you,

  but they will not recognize you in their waking lives,

  until the floodwaters come to carry them away.”

  The driftwood disappeared in the march of water and time.

  Chapter 1

  Figure Eights

  Saturday, October 21, 1995

  Vincent Emory Illick opened the sliding glass door to the backyard and stepped outside as Randy bolted past him, headed for the woods. He closed the
door, leaving it unlocked, and turned to follow. A barely visible trail descended a wooded hillside and he shuffled down it, dodging the branches that occasionally blocked his path. Halfway down he saw the decaying shed he used as a navigation reference, a hundred feet away through the trees. Moments later he saw ghostly white walls emerge through foliage at the base of the hill. He left the woods and entered a field of uncut grass next to the fenced-off remnants of the Pennyfield House, at Pennyfield Lock in the Chesapeake and Ohio National Historical Park. Randy was already across the canal, urinating on a tree next to the towpath. He turned back to locate Vin, wagging his tail in anticipation. Vin jogged across the meadow and the wooden bridge that spanned the lock, then turned south with Randy following for the three-mile run down the towpath to Swains.

  Thin gravel on the towpath crunched beneath his feet, beating out a melancholy rhythm that had stalked him the last few months… thirty – five – thirty – five – thirty – five. On October 22 – tomorrow – Vin would be thirty-five. That was almost half a life and he didn’t feel like he had much to show for it. Twelve years of experience along a career path he cared less and less about. A few months severance and some stock options he’d been able to cash in as part of the buyout. A small network of family and friends scattered across New England and the west coast. And as of three weeks ago, a new city, a new place to live. With Nicky – that was one positive. And at least Nicky was sanguine about her own career. He also had a vague and inchoate sense that he belonged here, was here for a reason. He’d never lived in the mid-Atlantic before, but long-dead ancestors on his mother’s side had roamed the Maryland hills near the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers for generations. For Vin, moving here somehow seemed like coming home.

  As the towpath curved clockwise in a shallow bend, he watched his shadow slide in the opposite direction, out over the leaf-spattered water of the canal. It bounced rhythmically forward over the sun-drenched and slowly drifting pool, keeping time with the thumping of his feet as he ran. Sycamores, swamp oaks, and maples soared high overhead, sending gold, green, and vermilion branches arching toward each other above the water. The arms receded along the axis of the canal but never embraced. He felt the uneven northeast breeze stiffen into an extended gust. A shower of leaves took flight and the clear skin of the canal morphed into a fingerprint of ripples. The falling leaves spun a slow descent toward their graves along the canal and the towpath, as they had for a hundred and sixty-five years.