3stalwarts (139 page)

“That’s driving, Jerry boy,” howled Caleb. He was rocking with excitement, springing his knees where there was no call for it.

The little doctor heard him and looked back. He had been sitting back with an evident sense of his reputation being comfortably in his hands. Now Jerry saw him eye the new horse, eye the flared nostrils and the splendid forward thrust of the front hoofs, with their steady rhythm, as easy as flowing water.

“Free road, Doc!” Caleb bawled. “Free to the river bridge! First over for five dollars!”

The doctor nodded, faced his horses, and began to drive.

Almost at once he opened the road.

“That gives you five miles, Jerry— four and a half maybe. Can you do it?”

“Let’s try,” said Jerry again. He ate back an inch of reins with his hands and steadied Bourbon down. But even so the doctor had to whip it. “They’ve been racing quite a ways.”

Bourbon chose the pace, settled himself, and went like a machine. He was behind, but he was setting the pace. The doctor didn’t dare let him up again. And yet, between applications of the whip, he saw Bourbon’s sharp ears steal up against his eye. He grinned in his small trimmed beard and drew away again.

Caleb laughed. Way back somewhere the Bagg boys with their white stallion were eating dust. Old Bagg probably paid a hundred dollars for that horseflesh.

The doctor was holding his side of the road. His hub-tips reached just to the middle. For two miles the seesawing of the chestnuts against the cob continued, but now their bursts carried them less and less to the front. And Jerry began to ease the reins once more.

There was a faint light behind them when Jerry made out the dew-wet back of a barn ahead.

“The bridge is round back. You make a slow turn,” bawled Caleb.

Jerry nodded. He paid out leather and Bourbon took the wagon out from under them. Hammil sat back hard.

“Set down!” roared Jerry. He was running this race. At that instant, he wouldn’t have minded Caleb’s pitching over the wheel. Two hundred pounds of extra weight.

The doctor went to the whip, but too late. Bourbon had looked the nigh chestnut in the eye, and the horse faltered. Jerry’s nigh wheel went way down to the ditch; Bourbon lunged left and right, and snapped the wagon back onto the crown, and they had the open road ahead. Behind them the doctor was hauling in. The bridge was a single track and he was fairly beaten. Jerry felt rather than heard the thunder of the planks; and he caught a glimpse of water. The doctor pulled up beside them and the wagons rocked to the panting of the horses. The little man leaned over, passing bills into Hammil’s red paw.

“I’d been racing those Bagg boys, Caleb, but you were carrying double. What would you take for that horse?”

Hammil chuckled.

“Free road and no favors.”

The doctor sighed and pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his spectacles.

“I don’t blame you, Caleb. That means I’ve got to nose around for something faster. I can’t have the second-fastest horse in Utica. Who’s your driver?”

“Jerry Fowler, Doc. He’s working with me on this canal contract.”

“You’re a good driver, young man,” the doctor said with a crisp little bow. “Hammil couldn’t have managed it.”

Jerry flushed and grinned.

“I’ll repeat it,” said Hammil heartily. “Gospel truth. Did you see him nip the Bagg boys, Doc?”

“No.”

Hammil succulently described the manoeuvre and the doctor raised his pointed beard and broke out into peals of laughter.

“That’s worth the five dollars, Caleb! Lord, they must have been surprised at being nosed out by a cob. They fancied that pacer.”

They started on, the doctor leading the way at an easy trot. To their left the morning mist was lifting from the river. A heron broke from the bank and flopped ponderously aloft. As it topped the mist they saw the light from the yet invisible sun glinting on its crest.

“There’s Rome.” The doctor gestured with his whip. “We’re in good time.”

The village on their right was just stirring to daybreak. In a moment they were trotting along the southern edge of it. A moment more and they had come to James Street and turned left.

Wagons were crowding the short stretch of road, and Bourbon had to slow down.

“Come on,” cried the doctor. “I’ll clear for you, Caleb. You’ve got to be up front. Stick to my tail, Fowler.”

In one last smart burst they swung to the outside, and, crowding the wagons over, made for the Arsenal, whose cream-colored brick walls were faintly washed with pink.

The sun was rising through the eastern notch of the valley— placid, large, and red.

“You tend to Bourbon, Jerry.”

Caleb sprang out and trotted heavily for the little knot of men who stood together in the swale grass.

One of them was speaking, a man with collected eyes and an uncon-querable squareness of shoulder. Jerry caught some of his words over the heads of the other listeners.

“Canal … as to the countries it will connect … as to the consequences it will produce … without a parallel in the history of mankind.”

There was a disturbance in the gathering of onlookers. Heads turned angrily and people split apart and Jerry caught a glimpse of Caleb’s gleaming black straw hat. Then the people closed behind it like water be-hind a boat, and Caleb’s fat face, triumphant as the sun, solemnly composed itself behind the speaker’s back.

Another speaker addressed them.

“We have assembled to commence the excavation of the Erie Ca-nal… .”

He held a shovel in his hand. Now he passed it over to the first speaker; and once more Jerry was impressed by the man’s square shoulders, and strong, still eyes.

“That’s Clinton,” said the doctor.

The man with the square shoulders was setting the point of the shovel in the sod. He stood back, leaving the shovel upright. An older man stepped from Hammil’s side. “That’s Judge Forman,” said the doctor. He put his shoe upon the shovel’s edge, he grasped the handle with a laborer’s hand. As he paused a moment, looking eastward, Jerry caught another glimpse of Hammil, grinning, and still blowing, and wiping off the sweat with a gorgeous handkerchief in red and yellow.

The shadows of the men were born suddenly upon the grass. The outline was defined. They reached westward through the crowd, and the crowd’s shadows stretched westward over them. The sun was up.

Judge Forman leaned upon the shovel with his heel, lifted it loaded with black muck. Water dribbled from the point. He tossed the load aside. It was lost in the grass.

From the Arsenal wall a cannon boomed. The muscles jerked in Bourbon’s loins; his head sprang up. The doctor’s pair no more than lifted their slim heads. A flock of crows flapped out of a meadow with raucous indignation. The Baggs’ white pacing stallion reared, whirled, and set out for home. The mist rose and the heat of the sun struck on them all.

Standing on the wagon, Jerry looked out over the heads of the people, —perhaps a hundred men and women in their Sunday clothes,— and his hands made fists; for east and west, as far as he could see, the red marking stakes stood perpendicular upon their shadows. And the little knot of men grouped about the tiny shovel hole were shaking hands.

Interlude “Just this one passway”

The Shanty

Adelphus Burns left off cradling his wheat. The scythe rested upright on the cradles, the snathe curving its back like a snake. The wheat-piece fence enclosed eight acres; there was a morning’s mowing left to do along the south boundary. The farmer stretched his stiff arms overhead, and then let go his muscles and looked down upon his farm— a double log house near him, and a new frame barn built into the hillside. The shorn meadows wore a fresh green; there was a rank grass smell in the still air; and all day he had found the ripe wheat pliable before the scythe edge.

His grown daughter came up behind him and her shadow fell back as she bent to bind the last armful of wheat. Adelphus Burns did not look around. His burned Yankee face was turned, with its grey eyes, to where two men were hammering in the last sheath of a bark roof on a building forty feet by twenty wide. The bark was lovely silver grey, but the new planks shone yellow in the evening sun.

Behind him his daughter bent up stiffly and eased her loins. At the new building, one of the men climbed down and went inside. Presently, through the roof hole, a smoke pipe was stuck up and the man remaining steadied it.

The farmer said, “They’ve got it finished.”

“Yes.”

She moved slowly to his side. Her height matched his to a hair. She had the same lean face, the same still passion in the eyes, but there was a strong repression in her mouth.

“Ralph’s gone after the cows,” said the farmer.

“Yes.”

“Me, I’m going down to see it.”

“I’ll start supper afore milking.”

“I wish somehow your ma had lived to see it.”

She was silent.

“Right where them stakes run.”

He picked up his cradle, but his left arm pointed. Both traced the triple line of red stakes westward through their fields— past the house, three at the yard fence, three beyond the barn, then on through the potato piece, the cornfield where the corn was rustling torrid sabre-leaves, past the hillside where the land leveled into the tamaracks.

“They’ve done it quick,” said Adelphus Burns. “A week, maybe.”

“Yes.” Her lips compressed. “A week, last Monday.”

She had brown hair, the color of crisp leaves. She stood straight, broad-shouldered as Adelphus; but under the linsey dress her bare legs showed a woman’s ankles, and the curves of her hips and breast surged strongly.

“I’ll miss them both— even the old one,” said Adelphus, pushing back his hat. He let out his breath. “Well, after harvest I’ll go into Fayette and look me up a gang. Then we’ll have more company a spell. They say two years afore the water comes.”

She said nothing, but walked at his side until the time came for her to branch off to the house.

Adelphus leaned his scythe against the wall of the new building and went inside. In the kitchen, he found Jerry and Self Rogers inspecting the box-iron stove.

“Hello, boys,” Adelphus said. “It’s all complete. You’ve done it fast.”

He sat down on the cook’s bunk and looked the shanty over. The stove was set halfway into the partition so that the heat could lend some warmth to the men’s sleeping room. He could see into that through the open door, the three tiers of bunks, the long table and board benches, a single sash and an outside door.

“Yes,” said Self Rogers, pulling out his thin moustache. “It’s another one of these damned chicken boxes knocked together.”

Adelphus grinned at Jerry, who grinned back.

“Self gets kind of disgusted sticking up these shanties,” Jerry said. “You may have noticed.”

“Thirteen of them,” said Self. “Thirteen. It’s got to be a habit with me. It comes natural now, like spitting out a chew.” He cupped a full cheek in one hand.

“Thirteen?” Adelphus looked round. “That’s how you laid it up so quick. ‘Tain’t a bad job, neither. Not that I aim to sleep into it. Not with my own bed over there. No, sir. Built for forty men? It ain’t too bad for eighty dollars. Sound boarding. Maybe when I’ve dug my length of this-here ditch I’ll seal it up inside and make a store to sell to boats with. I’ll use a part of it for poultry maybe.”

“Pullets!” ejaculated the carpenter. “Them bunks would make good nesting boxes!” He spat. “I signed a contract up with Hammil to build him nine more. Contract! Now I’m caught, legal. I never seen nothing like this contracting that everybody’s doing. You’ve got one?”

“Yes,” said Adelphus. “A B-contract for digging out a mile. There ain’t no grubbing. I done all that when I come here ten years ago. I get twelve and a half cents the yard of dirt. It makes a twenty-five-hundred-dollar contract. I have good credit, so they give me a hundred dollars to buy tools with and I paid Hammil for this shack myself.”

He turned to look through the open door at his clean fields.

“Do you suppose there will be heavy boating past this place?”

They didn’t know.

Bending over his tool chest, Jerry wrapped his tools in greasy rags.

“It’s been nice working here. We had some bad times back in the Rome swamps— no farms— no decent food, and rain all the while.”

“You’re moving on tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Me and Dencey’s going to miss you.”

“It’s been nice for us, ain’t it, Self?”

“I ain’t had the toothache, anyway,” said Self. “A good thing, too. Out here a man can’t get no ether-paint upon his cheek to drink the misery out. I’m caught here with a contract. Afore this damned canal a man just said he’d work. Now he signs a paper. A man is captured and held legal.”

He bent to his tools. The farmer stared out. Beyond the door, a red stake showed its shadow like an hourglass upon the trodden sod.

“I settled here on Limestone crick ten years ago. It was quite a piece off the pike, but then I didn’t want my fields broke in with movers, or my rail fence lifted all the while by teamsters prizing out their wagons in the wet, and disremembering to put them back. I picked this land to build a barn— there’s nothing like a sidehill barn to winter beasts in. You could have knocked me double Injun when them surveyors come along and sighted their levels right against the barn. I’ve got to move it, even though I’m paid. It’s going to save a little digging, though.”

“When do you commence your digging?” Jerry asked.

“After harvest I’ll hire a gang. Eighty cents a day I figure for a digger’s pay.”

“Well,” said Self, strapping up his tool box, “I’m glad it’s done. Caleb’s due to fetch us out tomorrow.”

“You boys have been going it quite a while.”

“I ain’t been home since July sixth,” said Jerry.

Dencey

Jerry milked for Dencey. She had picked blueberries on Sunday; so she made him a blueberry pie to pay for his kindness. Now they had a clear evening, with the sun gone down beyond the red stakes, and a full moon rising. Self had gone to bed. The boys were fishing in the creek, and her father was sitting up alone reading out the paper, the Christian Visitant, that came once a month when they had time to ride four miles to Fayetteville to get it. There was a story that he fancied, “Little Annie’s Sparrow” —a pretty story. She had read it two days ago.