3stalwarts (172 page)

Jerry looked at the broad face, white in the moonlight.

“Lester Charley!”

A birdlike chuckle answered him.

“I’m a boater now, Jerry. How are you?”

The ex-bookseller shook hands.

“I skipped the family. Bought this boat on shares. I’m making money. I send Alice pin money now and then.”

He chuckled.

“I think you got me started.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. After you’d left Utica I got to reading about the ditch in the papers. Pretty soon I got to wanting to see the places they wrote up about. And the rest just happened.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s the life for me, Jerry. I used to sit around my store reading books and wondering about places. Now I ride along with not a blessed thing to bother my head. I stop in in the towns and get a good stiff drinking. I’ve got a tough enough driver, so we make a good average getting through the locks ahead of other boats. And now when I read a book it’s got a meaning for me.”

His eyes looked black as marbles.

“Are you going to haul a boat all your life?”

“Why not? I’m a misfit doing anything else. I’m one here; but on the ditch nobody notices it. And I do just as I please. Back home Alice makes money with the store. The children are learning manners, and when I come home I serve a moral lesson.”

They were turning north by Broad Street. The houses slid away behind them. Trees beside the towpath cast deep shadows. Under their feet in the freight hold snored the Irishers.

“I’ve got them loaded like cordwood,” said Mr. Charley. “Even on deck, a hundred of them.”

Jerry dimly made out their blanketed shapes. As he looked, one of them reared on an elbow to stare forward. His bat ears were pink against the bow lantern. Jouncy Hogan. O’Mory would be somewhere near.

“Tell me about yourself,” said Lester Charley.

“Nothing to tell. I’m going out to Lockport.”

“How’s Mary? How’s the baby?”

“Fine,” said Jerry.

“Heavy — down!”

“Wa-a-ay up!”

Jerry heard jouncy little Hogan’s voice at the front of the toiling gang.

“Heavy … down!” The clap of the sledge upon the drill reechoed flatly.

Jerry paused on the newly completed section of the towpath. Here, in the cut, the stone felt hot against his boot-soles. His eyes felt bare against the shimmer. The shape of the canal was carved in living rock. No men were working here, and only half a mile of the three and a half of deep cutting remained to finish.

Up ahead he heard the little Irishman’s voice: “Wa-a-ay up!” It rose through all the clatter of men nibbling at the indurated clay and gravel that blasting powder would not loosen. “Down!” It came again; and the neat clap of the sledge thrust after it.

Jerry looked down from the towpath. The water trunk was a smooth cut, nineteen feet on the bottom, twenty-seven on the top, to carry a five-foot depth. Rising sheer from the towpath side, a retaining wall of carved blocks made a six-foot horseway; and from that level and the equal level of the opposite berm, the rock sloped up at a forty-five-degree angle into clay, into gravel, into earth. The sky— the limit of the laborer’s view-blistered the earth with its blue glare twenty-five feet above their heads.

Jerry walked south until he overtook the mason. Two men with two-wheeled barrows fed the mason mortar, two more mixed it with hoes in a wooden trough, and four stood ready to lay down the stones. The pulley shrieked in the tripod and the grey block settled in the mortar. The mason tapped it with the butt of the trowel and stroked the blade across the joint.

“Morning, Hamlet.”

The mason looked up. His face was the color of half-cooked beef, his eyes carried blood from the reflected sunlight. One cheek bulged to his chew. He spat and wiped his ragged beard.

“Morning, Mr. Fowler.”

His voice was stupid with heat. The helpers leaned themselves gratefully here and there and took long breaths.

“Do you know where Roberts is?”

Hamlet Aimsley squinted back along the line of stone. Beautiful masonry, and he knew it. It ran as straight as a man could rule a line on paper. Engineers had drawn that line on paper; visitors to the work would speak their names in awe when they saw it; but Jerry knew, and Hamlet knew that he knew, that he had set those blocks without so much as a plumb string, with only his quid to balance his eye.

“I don’t know where Roberts is. God damn you lousy crumbs, feed me some mortar.”

He stretched out his trowel and his men shifted lazily to his low voice. Jerry grinned. Up ahead jouncy little Hogan’s voice sang flatly. “Wa-a-ay up!” And in a moment the sledge clapped for the everlasting encore.

Jerry went on towards the sound of drilling. The men were working almost as deep as the finished cut at the mouth of the mountain ridge, but beyond them the bottom narrowed and sloped upwards into the burning sky. Fringing the lips southward, hand-worked cranes lifted up baskets of broken stone that the Irish had blasted, and returned the baskets empty. Cranes, the men called them. They moved their necks like cranes; and Orange Dibble had taken that name for his invention.

The two-foot shoulder that Hamlet Aimsley had yet to convert to a towpath made uneven footing. But Jerry followed it to look down on the Irish. Sweat blotched their undershirts; it stung their eyes when they looked up. Those who noticed him grinned, the long upper lips tightening comically. Jerry waved back. Fifty of them were drilling, but the sledge of the boss gave them time, and Jouncy Hogan’s voice compelled them.

“Wa-a-ay up!” O’Mory, his black beard thrusting out, swung the sledge behind his right calf. His long back hollowed as the swing continued in a circle upward behind him. “Heavy,” chanted Hogan, and the sledge poised shoulder high. “Down!” The hammer met the drill head; white dust, like smoke, sprang out of the clay and gravel indurated solid as stone; and the clap of it cut through the rattle of the other drilling like a stallion shouting down the whinnies of his herd.

Squatting on his hams, Jouncy Hogan shifted the drill cunningly and O’Mory drew breath and began again the rhythm, effortless to see, but pouring the sweat out on his throat and shoulders. To watch the grey iron sledge traveling its circle made Jerry forget the sweat stench, the reek of stagnant water lying in the rubble, the blaring heat of the sky. Jouncy Hogan cocked his bloodshot eye, squinting upward to spy Jerry. He grinned as he cried, “Way up!” O’Mory caught the grin, but his eye was fastened to the drill head. His back hollowed, the arms lifted on bent elbows, his back arched, burying the beard against his chest, and the clap drew smoke from the drill point. “Wan more for luck,” he growled to Hogan.

Hogan’s cry dinned into Jerry’s blood with the bite of the sun; his ears rang with it. For a year he had listened to it, creeping farther and farther south through the cut. He woke up with it at night in his ears.

O’Mory let the sledge stand upon its head and wiped the sweat from his eyes. The black hair, drawn flat by sweat, won free as his chest rose and fell.

“How are ye, Misther Fowler?”

His teeth were white in the black beard. Jerry grinned. Seeing O’Mory stop, all the rest of the gang were taking a drop of ease.

“Have you seen Roberts this morning?”

O’Mory turned to Hogan.

“Have ye, Hogan?”

The little man cradled the drill in his leathered palms.

“I seen him passing by a while back, Misther Fowler.”

“He seen him passing a while back,” said O’Mory. “Myself, all I see is that drill head. It’s dancing in me eyes this minnit. Wance I thought I was going to crack Hogan’s head, I seen the drill so plain against it. There’s no wan else can set for me.”

Hogan’s hands became affectionate with the drill.

“Who would ever think so small a man would have the hands like his own?”

Even Hogan looked at his hands in wonder.

“Which way was Roberts going?”

“South,” said Hogan.

O’Mory nodded.

“South.”

“Then I think I’ll move on. How’s the work going?”

O’Mory grinned.

“Foine. We’ve a hundred yards’ lead on the black bhoys, and we’re houlding it now. But they’re right along themselves.” His shoulders twitched as the sun burned off the sweat; he felt the salt. “We’ve put a mark up to work to, to finish up against this fall. I’ve always claimed with Jay-Jay that his bhoys was second best to mine. I’ll show him when I come to the mark.” He grinned delightedly. “And then I’ll prove it to him.”

His fist reached for the sledge-helve. But at that moment the air of the cut pushed suddenly against them. A dull thunder echoed past, stone crashed.

O’Mory’s jaw fell open.

“The divil!” he said. “They’re back in solid rock again and using pow-dher!” His eyes took in his idling gang.

“Blast yez!” His roar fell on them. They jumped to their drills and sledges. “Wa-a-ay up!” Hogan’s voice slid into his and the sledge seemed to swing itself in his hands.

The embryonic towpath stretched its narrow way along to where the local men were hollowing down to the solid rock. They moved slowly, wearily, leaving behind them a jagged path to be shaped and leveled. In the blistering cut only the black gang and the Irishers could stand up under hand labor.

Jerry found Roberts watching the shapes the morning blasts had left. His face was drawn.

“We’ll never get through in September,” he said. “October maybe.”

“But you’ll finish this fall?”

“Yes.” They watched two men crank up a basket; when it reached the block, the spruce saplings cleated in a V, turned on their wheel table, swinging the load out of sight.

“Yes,” Roberts repeated. “October at the latest. O’Mory and the negroes are working like all possessed. It’s a funny thing, neither gang knows what it’s all about. They’re working against each other. I had to get O’Mory and Jay-Jay in and make them promise to keep their boys in their own camps until the work was finished. Then they can maul each other as much as they want to.”

He shivered slightly from the heat.

“I’ll be glad when it’s done.”

He seemed to see Jerry for the first time.

“Looking for me, Jerry?”

“I came to tell you I was all through.”

Roberts stretched up his hand for a lift onto the towpath.

“All done? Let’s go back and look at them.”

He started walking back along the shoulder. As they passed the Irishers, Jerry caught Hogan’s wink. Beyond the mason, Roberts paused to let Jerry come up beside him. He was staring north to the end of the cutting.

“When the first section was shaped, I was discouraged, Jerry, because it seemed such a small bit. Even when we got through the second section it didn’t seem possible we could ever burrow through this ridge to a level with Lake Erie. Why, it took me hardly a minute to walk it every morning. But now it’s a long way from here to your lock gates.”

They looked along the steep trench. The sunlight poured straight down on the tilted arms of the gates. Beyond was the everlasting sky— nowhere a tree or a bit of green to quiet the eye; only raw stone, raw wood, and the raw sky.

“Come along, Nathan. It’s nearly noon.”

They trod their shadows under their feet to the end of the cut. The sweat poured out upon their faces; but when they came to the locks a western breeze drew across the mouth to cool them as they looked down on the stairlike locks.

“All done,” Roberts said again, as if he couldn’t believe it.

He sat down suddenly, looking down. “Lord, I’m tired.”

Jerry sat down with him.

There was no change to see beyond their morning inspection. The locks went down in two sets, the lower gates of one forming the upper gates of the next. They were separated by a flight of stairs. The planking gleamed white as fresh-gnawed bone. But since morning the balance weights had been hung from the beams and the sluice gate worms set in.

“Neat,” said Roberts. “If you’ve got the water, it’s the only way to build locks. Here we’ve got all Lake Erie behind us.” He laughed. “Just as much as Niagara has.”

Jerry gave him a queer look.

“Don’t worry now, Jerry. My brains aren’t cracked. But sometimes I laugh. Except for you and your helper, young Collins, there, and Thomas or Bates when they come around, there’s no one that realizes what’s going to happen. Erie water carried in a new channel— all the way to Montezuma. Ts it a brook, then?’ Hogan asked the other day.”

He leaned back against the lock beams.

“Thank God for a bit of cool.” His face seemed slowly to clear. He turned to Jerry. “It’s been a longer job for you than I anticipated. I couldn’t spare you the men to cut your wells. You’ve not lost by it though, have you?”

“No.”

They watched young Collins putting away tools in the new lock-tender’s house.

“Hamlet’s applied for the job of tending locks,” Roberts said suddenly. “I’ve worked it for him. A good man.”

Over by Eseck Brown’s Tavern the waitress beat her dinner gong, and in a moment the shanty cook came out to hammer on the wagon tire at the edge of the cut. The strokes boomed south along the cut.

“Dinner,” Roberts said mechanically. “What are you going to do now?”

“I guess I’ll go back to Rochester,” Jerry said.

“How’s the Six-Day coming along?”

“Hunter says we’re making money already. He’s made a first payment on our yard to Colonel Rochester.”

“That’s fine.”

“He wrote me the other day that Self asked him when I was coming back to work. We’ve got orders for more boats than we can handle.”

“You’re going to be a rich man some day, Jerry.”

Jerry nodded.

“I’ve always had the feeling. But it took a long time to get started. Now, when it don’t seem to matter, it comes almost of itself.”

“It has been a long time, hasn’t it?” Roberts leaned forward on his knees. “The papers all say how cheap the canal really was built. So does the legislature. Only eight years, they say. Only eight years. Jerry, that’s a long time for men as young as we are.”

“It does seem long.”

“Well, I suppose you’ll be going tomorrow. I don’t know how I can hold on here without you to talk to at night. Are you taking Collins back with you?”