3stalwarts (138 page)

That was the last he saw of Hammil for two weeks.

Jerry first went to Nailer Devlin for a hammer, saw, and shingle hatchet which he charged to Caleb’s account. The Nailer was a hearty man, with hands that smelled of iron. “It’s a fine morning,” he said, and offered Jerry some hammers for heft. Jerry chose deliberately.

“Here’s a bender saw,” said the merchant. “Ready set. You wanted a cross-cut, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

Jerry bent the saw against his knee and then tapped it for the temper.

“Working hereabouts?” asked Nailer Devlin. “You are? Hammil, hey? He’s a good customer. Surely. I’ll charge it to him.”

Jerry took his tools and went outside. A man with a misanthropic face and an axe on his shoulder stopped to look at him.

“Morning, mister.”

“Morning,” said Jerry.

“I couldn’t interest you in a town lot, could I?”

“I don’t know as you could.”

“Utica is a hell of a town,” said the man. He pulled a snuff-stick from his pocket. Little bits of bark and dust had furred it over, but he bit off a nibble and worked it over his gums with his tongue.

“Me, I was an early settler hereabouts. I aimed to farm it. Look at it now. If a cow strays, she don’t stand hardly no show at all. If the movers don’t snatch her, a teamster carves him out some tenderloin.”

His mouth delivered itself of the excess juice.

“So I’m selling my land. Three dollars the acre, cleared. I got a nice lot west of Bagg’s.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Over there.” The man pointed. “I’ve left a elm a-growing. See the top to it. Over the Northern Hotel there.”

Jerry considered. He had a half hour yet to lunch time and Rogers didn’t expect him till afternoon. And he had in his pockets two week’s wages in advance, against Hammil’s trip to Albany.

“It ain’t but three minutes’ walking,” said the man. “My name is Charlie Green. It’s a well-dreened piece.”

“All right,” said Jerry. “I’ll look at it.”

Charles Green turned himself round to lead the way at a shambling walk. There was a kind of subdued eagerness in his face.

Back of the Northern Hotel, which was the teamster’s stopping place, was a long barn and shed. In the yard an aged stable hand was sitting on a bucket, plaiting his summer hat from stable straw. A Pennsylvania wagon stood in the noon glare, and from under its hood came a strong smell of barreled whiskey. One of the kegs was leaking, a drop at a time, and the hat maker had placed a broken teacup on a brick to catch the drip.

Beyond the stable, Jerry saw the acre, backing on the town, a mass of spiraea bushes and old dead goldenrod. The corpses of a dozen trees lay here and there over the ground.

Charlie Green pointed.

“Next wet,” he said, “I’ll burn it over for ye.”

Jerry walked the length of it. At the far end, where the ground rose to the town’s slope, a pair of red stakes forty feet apart were driven. To the right, the line they marked ended in an open street.

Green spied them.

“Blast,” he said. “They’re always sticking in them sticks. There was a big bezabor told me not to pull them out. I guess I can, on my own land. I guess I ain’t going to let no canal come spoiling of my land.”

He stopped, eyed Jerry shrewdly.

” ‘Course it ain’t but just talk. There’s a couple or so of cranky cusses hereabouts that spend their time a-planting of these-here sticks. It don’t mean nothing.”

But Jerry caught his breath. Canal-side land was bound to rise.

“I’d have to have a deed,” he said quietly.

“I’m full of deeds,” said Green. “It’s all I got. Deeds and this blasted ground. I got nigh onto a dozen acres, and yesterday I said, ‘I’ll just rid of it and mosey me out west.’ You’re the first man I spoke, having just cleared this first acre.”

He fished a paper from inside his shirt.

“Just come with me down to the bank. It won’t take half a minute there for Mr. Kip to deed you.”

“All right,” said Jerry. “I want to start me a bank account anyways.”

He concealed his own excitement under a casualness as apparent as the older man’s. They returned to the square and entered the bank. Green loudly asked for Mr. Kip, and, as if they had known him for some time, the bank people humored him.

“I know Green’s title’s good,” said Mr. Kip. “Where’ve you been all this time, Charlie? I thought I might buy a piece of your holding, myself.”

“If you’ll buy the rest of them eleven acres,” said Green, “I’ll offer you a straight figger for thirty dollars.”

“Just wait till we’ve finished with Mr. Fowler. You’re working with Hammil, aren’t you, Fowler?”

“Yes. I want to open an account.”

“All right. We’ll soon fix that.”

Mr. Kip passed the deed to a clerk and brought a bill of sale for both of them to sign. Charlie Green signed with a cross and Mr. Kip wrote his name for him. Then he handed Jerry over to the cashier and Jerry deposited the remnant of his two weeks’ earnings. He felt embarrassed to put in seven dollars among all these gentlemen, but they seemed to take it as important business, and called him Mister; and when he was headed for home again he felt that he had made a distinct step forward. He decided that he wouldn’t tell a soul. It seemed a foolish thing to sink most of a week’s pay in land; he wouldn’t really have considered it if he hadn’t caught sight of those red stakes. It was a lucky stroke… .

During the rest of May and most of June, he worked at odd jobs with Self Rogers.

The weather continued warm and dry. Working on a roof, Jerry could see out over the town to the fields that were becoming green. A haze hung over the valley. Under it the travel of the road was indistinct. At times a fierce impatience uprose in him.

After work hours, he hitched Bourbon to the rig to exercise him, and he and Mary took long drives together. They would head out with a supper in a bag and sometimes cover fifteen miles. Mary was quiet on these drives, as she was always, watching the land, admiring Bourbon when Jerry called her attention to the horse. She seemed in her placid way to have accepted her new life. Her eyes had completely lost their look of fear, and Jerry had less and less often that memory of her standing among the other redemptioners on the sloop deck by the Greenbush Ferry dock.

Sometimes they took the Charleys with them— Bourbon made nothing of the extra load— and Mrs. Charley would dress herself in her Sunday clothes, regardless of the appearance her family made at her back. Mr. Charley would direct them out to Clinton to examine the college, or they would drive out to Paris Hill, where a few carrier pigeons still nested, and Mr. Charley would tell about the great flocks he could remember as a boy.

An era of prosperity had started for the Charleys. Mrs. Charley was getting a reputation for washing linen. Jerry had erected new poles for her in the yard. Once he had remonstrated with Mary for helping her, but Mary said that she needed something to occupy her and she only helped occasionally.

July came hot, and on the evening of the third, Hammil, who had returned the week before, said, “We’re going out to Rome tomorrow morning— making an early start, Jerry. I want you to hitch Bourbon up at two o’clock.”

“That’s Clinton’

Jerry had borrowed a clock from Mr. Charley, a queer little brass affair with a noisy tick, and placed it on a chair beside the bed. He had left the glass open so that he could feel of the hands in the darkness. And now when he woke again and touched them the minute hand pointed to six, and the hour hand was a little way off twelve. He lifted the bedding to slide out; and, from the dark, Mary whispered, “Is it time?”

“It’s thirty minutes after one,” he whispered back.

She slid out on the other side like a conspirator to help him dress. She had pressed out his homespun coat after supper and washed and ironed his best shirt. The little Charley boys had stood around to watch him oil his boots. Fine people, the papers said, were going to attend the breaking ground of Mr. Clinton’s Canal. It would be a ceremony with cannon and speech-making; all the northern country would turn out. Jerry had gone down to Samuel Stocking’s in the afternoon to buy himself a hat— six shillings, a dark-grey felt, flat-crowned. It hung on the back of his chair where all the family could admire it.

Mr. Charley had drunk his beer and read out excerpts from the paper. In its last two numbers the Columbian Gazette had given considerable notice to the canal project, and people in Utica had begun to talk about the possible effect of a canal on the town, should such a canal ever be completed.

“Mr. Clinton is going to make a speech, and maybe Simeon DeWitt. A regular party, by the sound of it.”

And Mrs. Charley had sniffed a little as she said, “If you was half a man you’d be there, too.”

“Nobody asked me, my dear,” said Mr. Charley calmly. “And any-way I never did like the noise of cannon… .”

Jerry felt a shiver as he put his shirt over his head.

“It’s cold, Mary,” he whispered. “You’d better get back to bed.”

She was standing in her nightgown, barefooted, holding out his coat.

“I’m not cold.”

He held back his arms for the sleeves and she drew the coat onto his shoulders. He took his hat from the bedpost and put it on and looked a moment at the white blur of her face. In the window beyond, the stars were dim.

“Good-bye.”

He kissed her and left her standing there. The ladder steps creaked under his weight. No sound came from Mr. Charley’s room, but one of the boys was snoring in his sleep.

Outside the door, Jerry took a deep breath. The town was absolutely still. He began to run, keeping to the road, to. deaden the thud of his boots.

Bourbon scrambled up as he opened the stable door. He blew a shuddering blast to open his nostrils. Jerry’s hands trembled in buckling the bridle latch. As he led the horse into the yard, Hammil’s back door opened and the fat contractor sneaked out.

“Shhh! Mabel’s sleeping sound. How be you, Jerry?”

The wagon squeaked as he climbed over the wheel. Neither of them spoke until they had turned into Genesee Street.

The windows of Bagg’s Hotel were dark. In the faint light the high brick walls were insubstantial. Out across the river, mist covered the alders, and the causeway seemed to float upon it. Somewhere underneath, a cow was floundering in swampy ground.

Caleb still whispered.

“It’s going to be fine, praise glory!”

He was rubbing his hands together. Jerry shortened the left rein and turned the horse into Whitesboro Street.

“Unloosen him,” cried Hammil. “We’re late, Jerry. Let’s see what he can do! By daggit, I’m notioned now to see him race!”

The sound of his voice set the cob flying. In a moment they had whirled by Jones’s smithy, with its old hoof smell strong in the dewy air, and were heading for the open country just ahead.

“Do you feel kind of queer, Jerry?”

“Sort of.”

“Me, too. It’s starting things for us.”

“Yes.”

Jerry found it hard to speak. For a moment they were both absorbed in the hard dry thuds of Bourbon’s slashing hoofs and the rattle of the spinning wheels.

“It’s fifteen miles,” said Hammil. “Do you reckon we’ve allowed time enough?”

“I guess so.”

“I’ve got to get there. Sunrise is a queer time. More special if a man has got to travel to it. Me, I’ve got to stand alongside Esquire Forman— right in back of Mr. Clinton!”

Bourbon had laid himself down in his trot. The hind wheels of the wagon were weaving slightly on the road-crown. It seemed strange to Jerry that there were not more rigs on the road.

Their flying passage reechoed from the Court House wall in Whitesboro; in a flash the village lay behind; and they were out again in farming land with the mist over the flat valley rolling uneasily above the fences.

All of a sudden, Hammil cheered up. He began to laugh over nothing at all, that Jerry could see.

“By daggit, Jerry, it’s like going to a party. It makes me feel like a young lad sparking… .”

He leaned out to peer along the horse’s side.

“Ain’t that a couple of rigs up there, Jerry? I seen a tailboard just skittle round that bend.”

Ahead of them as they took the bend in their turn, a couple of wagons were scudding through the duskiness. Bourbon pricked his ears and laid himself down. Foot by foot he gained. Hammil roared with laughter.

“It’s the Bagg boys racing Dr. Sweet.”

Jerry saw them now.

“Every time those rascals get a new horse off their pa they lay around to race the doctor. They’ve never beat him yet. Nor will they while he drives them chestnuts.”

The Bagg boys were driving a pure-white stallion with a long, combed mane. Jerry saw them draw abreast, but the doctor was coolly holding his course just off the middle of the road and the boys lost nerve.

“He ain’t put on real steam,” said Hammil. “Jerry, do you dasst race the doctor?”

“Sure.”

Jerry felt his heart beat time to Bourbon’s hoofs.

“He gives a man fair road room, but not an inch extry,” Hammil said. “Bourbon ain’t a sprinter, you say, but what can he do in five miles?”

“Let’s try it out!” cried Jerry.

“I’ve got money on it then,” bellowed Hammil. “Bring me up in hearing distance.”

Jerry did not speak to Bourbon. There was no need. Something had infected the cob that morning. He was really racing. No flash of blinding speed, but little by little he was adding to his stride. It was still dark. An angry dog barked at their passing. As Jerry let the reins creep in his fingers, he felt the dew in his face and a rising breath of wind.

He lifted the whip from the socket and just touched Bourbon’s flank. And Bourbon understood. His head dropped a trifle. There was no visible addition to his effort, but the wheels began whining in their boxes.

“I didn’t think a horse of his build could do this,” shouted Hammil. “Boy! Did I do a deal on him?”

Bourbon’s head and tail were joined by his back in a straight line. He began to rock a little to his stride. He went up and up; and the wind thrust against Jerry’s teeth, and all at once he noticed that Hammil was holding on with his hands between his legs, standing in an effort to spring his weight from dead to live by the bend of his knees. The rig seemed stationary now, and the road a streaming ribbon, ash-grey in the dusk. Then the Bagg boys became aware of them— but it was too late. Jerry had stolen in on the off side and put Bourbon’s nose against the doctor’s tailboard. The white stallion broke stride and Jerry swung Bourbon across and caught the key position beside the doctor’s nigh hind wheel, and the Bagg boys were shut out for good.