3stalwarts (135 page)

He’d have to think of a name out of their own country, maybe. Washington wouldn’t do. A great man, but he didn’t belong to New York. Now Andrew Jackson was more to a man’s liking. He was a man, all right. He was a comer, and just getting up his steam. Reckon the British got a dose off him. There was talk about his being President. Hammil would like to vote for him some day. No hanky-panky gentleman farmer with a black man to blow his nose between the Senate and the House, like Madi-son, who vetoed the surplus bill for state improvement and signed the Lord knows how many thousand dollars into his own Virginia’s reticule to build her Cumberland road with. To hell with them all! Von Steuben was a foreigner, but Hammil couldn’t forget how his uncle looked after drilling under the old German beer-swizzler. Drill, drill, right, left. My God! It made him scant right where he sat to think of it. Hammils always had been fleshy fellows. Perry— he was a good man; McDonald, that was the Irish of it— you couldn’t get away from the Mc’s. Weren’t there names in history books? Darius? Cyrus? Didn’t mean a thing.

He knew a man had named a horse after a drink. Now that was an idea! Take the wines. Ports didn’t have good names, but the sherries had Lobo, and Amber. Sherry didn’t go with a horse like this one, though. Nor did Madeira, even if Kirby was a good name and a good drink too. Governor Kirby’s Old Original. Hammil smacked his lips. There was Calcutta (good for a filly some day) and Hollo way and Bobby Lennox. Rum was more in the line of it. Jamaicy, Barbados, or Medford. Cheap names. Whiskey? Whiskey was a man’s drink. By God, he had it!

“Bourbon!”

“It’s a good name,” said Jerry.

Bourbon! There was a name. What if it was furrin? Queens and kings was named it over there across the ocean, but here in North America it stood for whiskey— the primest in the world.

“Git you, Bourbon!” shouted Hammil. And the cob laid back his ears and shook out half an inch of the reins and laid his belly to the road.

“He’s recognized it,” cried the fat man, clapping Jerry’s shoulder. “By God, I’ll give him a drink of it at noon!”

And he did just that. In Canaseraga Hollow they put up at Webb’s. They came down Quality Hill to the tavern ahead of a rush of dust. A stage was standing beside the door and the driver gave them a toot; and, as they drew up under Jerry’s neat driving, he got down off his seat, and while the passengers waited impatiently, he went all over the horse.

“Hye, Caleb,” he greeted them. “Where’d you happen onto this?”

Caleb narrated the purchase, and this time mentioned the price with confidence.

“You’ve got a bargain,” said Apollos Smith, the driver. “I never seen a double for him, but I know an original horse. When did you leave town?”

“At seven o’clock.”

The driver fished in his pockets for a chew, then put it back.

“If I got a chew working, I’d lose it sure in my horn. That’s a horse. He ain’t even hard-breathed. Look at his eye, will you! Well, my freight is getting anxious.” He stepped deftly round the corner of the inn to kiss a chambermaid and came back stroking his moustache. His lank figure slouched to his seat. An inside passenger eyed him indignantly, snapping her shawl into place, folding her hands and setting her lips pursily. Perhaps she had seen the chambermaid’s petticoats. The stage rumbled up the hill on its red wheels.

They ate in a half-filled dining room.

“I’m scouting for timber,” Hammil explained to Mr. Webb. “Me and Jerry Fowler, here.”

“Is it right the canal’s going through?”

“Sure as shooting,” said Hammil, mouthing down some turkey and reaching for the salt. “It’s going to cut into your business, Webb.”

“Time enough for me to worry when it’s built,” said Mr. Webb, showing his teeth in an elegant smile. He was a curiosity of the westward counties. He took a fashion magazine and dressed himself according to London. To-day he was got up in skin-fitting fawn-colored trousers that were strapped under his Russia leather shoes. His linen was daintily fine; his blue coat, high-waisted and roll-collared, fitted his elegant figure as a silk stocking might snug a lady’s ankle; and he wore white buckskin gloves on his hands with a gold ring over the leather on his little finger. He walked back and forth among the tables, elegantly on his pointed toes. But his board was one of the best on the Pike.

“You don’t happen to want to sell your horse?” he inquired.

“Bourbon?” Hammil flourished the name. “I wouldn’t dicker horse meat with you, Webb, not even if I was a Jew. Bring me a pint of your best Bourbon.”

And when it was brought Hammil led a small procession round the yard to the stables and poured from the bottle onto Bourbon’s corn. The horse scented it daintily and then ate with lifted lips. When they started out after dinner again he was rolling his bits like a charger.

“I wouldn’t do it again,” said Jerry.

“All right.”

“I’ll drive him easy for a few miles, till he gets his hang again.”

“All right, but I didn’t give him the whole of it. Just enough to baptize him. Here.”

“No, thanks.”

“A swaller.”

“Just a swallow.” Jerry tilted the bottle.

“I’ll down some,” said Hammil, “and we’ll nurse the rest. Cossett has poison only.”

But his method of nursing consisted of ticking off the milestones with the bottle. He grew eloquent as he called Jerry’s attention to landmarks and described the people who lived on places familiar to him. His impressions were slightly blurred, but abounding with color. It was only in the nick of time that he recognized Chittenango village and pointed out to Jerry the turn-off for the Orville road… .

The sun was waning westward and drawing long shadows over the rolling country. Houses and farms were scarcer. This was no turnpike they were traveling, but a local track, with here and there corduroy bridges and long stretches of scant, brushy woodland. They met only one wagon between Chittenango and Fayetteville and that was a farmer’s bolster carrying rails for the spring fence-work.

Bourbon had found his wind again and bowled them along steadily. His shod hoofs were muffled by the dirt surface. His withers were streaked with sweat and the light traces had edged themselves with lather; but his stride was as unfaltering as ever. Jerry saw that he was an honest traveler, who held to the pace selected. In a race he would not take the first five-mile heat from three horses, but he would place second in the third, and finish the last two in the lead.

The wheels went quietly, with a faint mutter inside the boxes, and a continual whisper of dust back from the felloes. The road was following higher ground, a low ridge, apparently, and to the right Jerry caught glimpses of flat country.

Hammil, rousing himself, caught the direction of Jerry’s glance and stared with a kind of owlishness.

“That’s the beginning of the swamps,” he pronounced. “They’ll bring the ditch in there from northeastward.”

He relapsed into solemn silence, eyeing the mouth of the bottle held upright between his hands.

Suddenly he jerked himself from another doze.

“By crinkus! You’re a carpenter, Jerry!”

“Arn I?” Jerry grinned.

“Sure-ly. You’re a carpenter.”

After a while he added, “I’m a carpenter.”

He eyed the horse for a moment.

“Bourbon’s a carpenter,” he announced. His voice rose. “We’re the whole of us carpenters. And by thunder we’re all three of us a-going to build Clinton his canal!”

“Sure,” said Jerry, keeping an eye on the lurching fat body.

Hammil was serious. He looked down over the dashboard, his neck arched. Suddenly his chin emerged from its folds and a tremendous bubble of air escaped him. He smacked his lips to sing, and Jerry smelled the Bourbon.

“The world it is a bag of nails, And some are very queer ones, And some are flats and some are sharps, And some are very dear ones.”

Hammil’s voice had a surprising depth and resonance, but, being still a little mixed, he had adopted the refined nasal interpretation that a churchgoer would give his hymns.

“We’ve sprigs, and spikes, and sparables, Some little, great, and small, sir. Some folks love nails and monstrous heads, And some love none at all, sir.”

A snore punctuated the stanza, and, in a friendly way, the fat man leaned himself on Jerry’s shoulder. Jerry might have been alone now, except for the weight of the sleeping Hammil, and his thin face grinned as he thought to himself that he understood why Hammil might like to have a man to drive him. Probably in Utica the fat man didn’t dare get drunk. He had a reputation there that he had to maintain. Mrs. Hammil looked like one of those dainty, sweet women that stood for no nonsense. Most likely she had no inkling of Hammil’s overflowing pride and joy in this contract; she would have no conception of the magnitude of the work he had under-taken. It had seemed to Jerry extraordinary that, in a town like Utica, through which the great canal was bound to pass, there was not more talk about it.

“Come along, Bourbon.”

The cob switched his tail affably. He had made a monumental journey that day and he was leaning a trifle against the bit; but he still put out his front hoofs courageously. It was stirring to watch him all day long. A runner was a handsome thing to see, but a fine trotter was beyond all other things eye-filling to a horseman.

Evening was coming after them from the east. In the Mohawk Valley you could see it taking form between the hills; but here in this vast rolling country it came more gradually, like a cool breath behind the sun, giving the traveler a notion of the earth’s rotation.

Jerry tried to make a picture of what Mary would be doing now. He saw her moving about the room, quietly preparing the order for night, and he wondered if it seemed empty to her, and if she sat down, perhaps, at the window, to think of him.

They passed through Orville, which was no more than four houses, one a kind of general store with a grindstone and a table lamp in the window; and then the woods dwindled out on either side of the road, and Jerry had his first view of the flat country. On the left, a hubbly pasture extended behind a snake fence, showing moss through the grass, and bits of bogland with tamaracks growing beside them. Way ahead a small farm made a cluster of a log barn and house and a tool-shed. But to the right, the land sloped northward into a tremendous growth of marsh grass. Where it stood unbent by snow, Jerry had never seen grass so tall, and it looked old, as if its roots were bedded by layer upon layer of matted dead blades. Unbelievably great swarms of blackbirds kept lifting into the sunlight, their red shoulders sparkling like gems, their voices making a continual drone, as if they were a kind of monstrous swarming insect. When they perched, they lit only momentarily sidewise upon cat-tails. Jerry saw some crows cutting through the sunset from the southwest, and he noticed as they approached the swamp they were lifting steadily. It was no safe place for a crow or hawk or any predatory bird. Once the blackbirds were roused they would batter a crow to earth by sheer force of numbers.

As they neared the farm, Jerry saw a man coming in behind two cows. He waved to the wagon and Jerry pulled up the horse.

“Hello,” said the farmer.

“Hello,” said Jerry. “Can you tell me how far to Cossett’s?”

“Mile and a half, or thereabouts. Say, who’s that with you?”

“Caleb Hammil.”

“Thought I recognized the fat bezabor. I’m Bob Melville.”

At his name, Caleb roused himself. He blinked his eyes, spotted the farmer’s image, and said, ” ‘Evening, Bob.”

“What you doing this way? It’s good to see you. Why don’t you light down tonight? Dorothy’d be glad to have you.”

After his nap, Caleb seemed more able to collect himself.

“Thanks, Bob. We’re going in to Cossett’s. I’ve got talk for him from Holley. This here’s Jerry Fowler, working with me. We’re out scouting timber for the canal.”

Melville blew his long nose. His brown eyes stared steadily at the two men on the wagon.

“Canal, Caleb?”

“Canal!” said Caleb. “Sure. Clinton’s Canal.”

He twisted himself on the seat, causing the wagon to creak down on the left, and stared out over the marsh.

“I got the contract on this section locks. Look at right over there, beyond them cacktails where that cedar stub pokes up.” He pointed his thick arm. “That’s where number one will be. You see the drop of ground, Jerry, at the commencement of this marsh? Right there.”

They stared at him instead.

“I been through here,” said Caleb. “I seen Wright mark that spot. You’d see the stakes but for the grass being high.”

Melville was staring still. The humorousness that had invested his long-nosed face was gone. His Adam’s apple was hobbling in his throat and he spat once before his voice came out.

“Dorothy!” he called. “Dorothy!”

The door of the log cabin swung open on its squeaky straps. A tall, square-shouldered woman stepped out. Man’s boots were on her feet. When she caught sight of the wagon, her arm raised itself in greeting and a merry welcome broke over her large face. But her husband cried, “Dorothy!”

She came forward quickly, then, her eyes on her husband, and stood beside him at the fence.

“It’s going through,” he said. His voice was choky. They looked at each other, as if the two men and the horse and wagon were not there.

“It’s going through,” repeated Melville.

“Actual?” she said. Her deep voice spoke softly, vibrantly.

He nodded.

Jerry stared down at them, wondering what it all meant.

Then, suddenly, the woman laughed.

“Light down,” she invited. “I’m using our last buckwheat flour for cakes for supper. And I’ll mix a punkin flip.”

Caleb shook his head.

“We can’t. We’re going in to Cossett’s.”

But she did not heed. She and her husband still looked at each other laughing. And suddenly they looked away, and as the man’s face turned Jerry saw his eyes swim, and the woman suddenly sniffled, comically, for one who looked so strong and humorous.

Melville spoke.

“I’ve seen Wright going through, surveying, and I didn’t think nothing. I’ve seen Geddes here way back eight years ago. He said then it was just somebody’s idea. Not his, not Colden’s, not Dewitt’s. But they both of them stayed here, them and their levelers and rodsmen and axemen, and often me and Dorothy have thought about it. We used to tell each other how we’d put a porch onto the house and set here looking at boats go past. There ain’t a thing travels this road, you know, and it gets lonesome, not having even any children. And last year they went through boring holes down into the marsh, scaring ructions out of all the birds that live there. But we didn’t think nothing after— it’s been so long a time. And now you come along, sleeping like a fat old drunken ground hog, and if I hadn’t stopped you I wouldn’t have knowed.”