3stalwarts (86 page)

“I’ve been livin’ too strict these past six weeks,” he said. “I’ve got to limber me up. I need a little corn juice for my inwards.”

He walked down the plank and waved his hand to them from the dock.

The Xerxes had been tied up at the west end of the basin. Boats lay before them in a long double line. From some of the screw docks they could see smoke rising from the cabin stovepipes. The city basked in its Sunday quiet. The thump of a boater’s heels walking over the dock accentuated the stillness.

Wilson came up to Dan.

“Me and Ben’s going ashore,” he said. “William will stay on the boat. You can come along with us if you like, or stay here, or do what you want. We’ll pick up those ashes in the morning about four o’clock, so I guess you’d better be aboard tonight.”

“I guess I’ll walk round a spell,” Dan said. “I’d like to look at some of the streets.”

“Go ahead,” said Wilson. “Me and Ben’U be at Bentley’s most like after six. It’s on Liberty Street. Any boater’ll tell you where.”

They went down the plank.

In the cabin William Wampy had cooked some lunch for himself. He made no comment when Dan sat down across the table, but helped him to food. Dan did not try to talk; neither he nor William wanted to talk; there was no point in it. The flies of the city had found their way into the newly arrived boat; their buzzing was as much as conversation.

Dan went ashore and walked eastward along the course of the canal. Every once in a while he crossed a low bridge under which the canal let into the screw docks by the sides of warehouses. The boats looked deserted for the most part, though now and then he saw two or three women out on deck hobnobbing while they sewed.

He walked as far as the Genesee Street bridge and there turned to the right and went up into the city. The streets, too, were quiet. A couple of gentlemen in high black hats, black coats, and velvet waistcoats and grey trousers, swinging silver-headed canes; a lady ribboned and faintly scented, entering a smart brougham, drawn by a nervous pair of bays, and handsome in basket paneling. He wandered up one street and down another. In the residential district elms grew and the houses stood back behind their brownstone steps. It was quiet there, not with a noonday hush, but with habitual quiet. He tried to visualize the people behind the half-shaded windows, but he saw them only as the two men walking and the lady entering her carriage.

He came to a square which was shady and cool and which had boarded walks running under the trees. There were benches. And all round the square the houses stood on lawns, and the branches of trees showed be-yond the corners of their walls, and some smelled faintly of manure spread out in orchards. Dan sat down on one of the benches, where he could drink in the smell, a homesickness in his eyes— not for the meagre Tug Hill meadows, but for a place which, in a way, he could imagine for himself. Now and then a man develops from his labor on his barren land, not an envy of the valley farmer, but an admiration of rich soil.

So Dan’s imagined farm was vague in its outlines. But he could see himself feeling of the bags of his cows, hauling his manure, ploughing in the fall, and, when he was done, polishing his plough. He did not see the house, but he had a vague notion of a hip-roofed barn, like one he had seen outside of Rome… . And then he started to hear faintly a horn blowing to the north, and he realized that a boat was sounding for a lock.

He was working on the canal. He had left the land. Before him was a product of the life he was to lead. These many fine houses were made possible by the canal… .

He was aware of someone walking past him, and then of a catch in the person’s breathing, and he glanced up and saw Molly Larkins. She looked very fresh and pretty with the sunlight spilling through the shade on her red dress. And there was a light of genuine pleasure in her dark blue eyes that brought Dan eagerly to his feet.

“Why, Mr. Harrow,” she exclaimed in her low voice, “I didn’t think to see you here.”

He blushed as though he had been caught at some offense.

“I’ve been walking round the city,” he explained. “I’ve been walking quite a while. So I set down here for a while.”

“Well,” she said, “I come here once in a while, too. I like to see the people that live here.” She gave a little laugh, not self-conscious, but with an undertone of irritation in it. “I’m notional this way, I guess.”

They sat down together.

“I didn’t think to see you here,” said Dan, after a moment.

“I didn’t expect to stop here, myself.”

She seemed a little depressed.

“Have you quit Klore?” he asked.

“Yeanh. Yes, I quit him. I didn’t want to work for him any more. I didn’t like him.”

“He looks mean.”

“He is mean. But not like you say it. He spends easy and he’s a fine powerful man. He’s a good man taking a girl round. I had a lot of fun with him.”

“What did you quit him for?”

“You remember he said he’d lace me when he come into Hennessy’s?”

Her eyes grew dark.

“Yeanh,” said Dan.

“He done it.”

His face slowly reddened and his hands shook.

She went on quietly, her voice cold.

“He didn’t say anything when he come to. He didn’t say anything about the other man. But he said no cook who took his pay could be another man’s”— she hesitated and looked at Dan and her eyes held his honestly— “whore and not get a lacing till she learned better or left. I told him he was crazy and to mind his own business. But he grabbed my arm and walked with me down to his boat and took a strap and give it to me.”

She moved her shoulders away from the back of the bench. “He’s a strong man. He give it to me. I can feel it.”

Dan clenched his hands.

“It ain’t right,” he said.

“Course it ain’t. No man can treat a woman that way without she’s married to him.”

Her eyes snapped.

“I quit him dead in Utica last night”

“It ain’t right,” he repeated harshly.

She glanced at him. He certainly looked big and strong, and he’d knocked Klore dizzy, but she remembered his expression when Klore came in on him.

“Well,” she said dryly, “what’re you going to do about it, then?”

He stared down uncomfortably at his fists.

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” she said. “I wouldn’t try to do anything.”

He was nothing but a country lump anyway; he didn’t know a hotel from a hall. She had seen that in Hennessy’s, and had stood up for him.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I can look out for myself. A girl gets the habit living on the Erie.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. He generally winds up his likker in Bentley’s.”

They fell silent. Out beyond the trees they heard the brisk trotting of a pair of horses, and a carriage drew up in front of a house. A gentleman and two ladies got out and went up to the front door. Molly drew in her breath ecstatically and pointed out particular things about the women’s clothes.

Dan hardly noticed. To him she seemed as pretty in her plain red dress. It brought out the flush in her smooth cheeks and matched her bright mouth. Her position, leaning back on the bench, moulded her figure under her clothes; and sitting there in the quiet shade with her, with fine houses and strange people about them, gave him a sense of intimacy. His inarticulate anger against Klore was swallowed by a growing excitement.

“What’re you going to do next?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Get another job, maybe. I got some money saved; maybe I won’t do anything for a little while.”

She regarded him with a sidewise glance. He was staring at the toes of his dusty cowhide boots; and his attitude brought out the muscles in his neck, the swell of his shoulders. His hands were heavily boned; she knew he was strong; and his thin face seen in profile with the curved nose and high cheek bones, and the short straight hair on the back of his neck, was attractive.

“I’ll wait a couple of weeks,” she said, almost as if it were a promise. “I’ll see what turns up.”

He stared out across the square, above the roofs of the houses. Sparrows were circling there in flocks, all jerking as one in their flight, all atwitter. Her eyes softened.

“What’re you planning to do, Mr. Harrow?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d scarcely thought. I guess I’ll go on down with Julius W. as far’s Albany. Then I don’t know who I’ll come back with.”

He looked round at her suddenly.

“But I aim to get a boat some day soon.”

“You’ll find it hard unless you’re awful lucky.”

“Maybe. Maybe I could get Mr. Butterfield to help me.”

“Maybe you might.”

“Listen,” he said, “if I got a boat of my own? …”

“Yeanh.”

“Would you— I’d need a cook,” he said.

“That’s right,” she said, puckering the corners of her eyes. “You’d need a cook and a pair of mules and a driver.”

“Yeanh,” he said, swallowing.

She laughed, putting out her chin at him a little.

“And you’d like for me to be your cook?”

“Yeanh,” he said. “That’s right.”

“Well,” she said, “when you come and ask me, I’ll let you know.”

“Where’ll you be?”

“If I ain’t otherwise taken, I’ll be at Lucy Cashdollar’s Agency. That’s over Bentley’s.”

He leaned back heavily against the bench.

“Mr. Harrow—”

“Yeanh?”

He glanced up; but she was looking at her lap, where her fingers were opening and closing her reticule.

“If you’d ask me, I’d say I’d like to cook for you a lot.”

His breath caught. After a while he managed to say, “I aim to ask you, Molly.”

They did not speak, but watched the shadows come in under the trees and lights spring up in the windows over the front doors of the houses. A couple walked past them without noticing them. And a flock of sparrows took possession of a tree near them for the night.

“My land!” exclaimed Molly. “It’s time I was getting back to supper.”

Bentley’s

On Genesee Street Molly left him. He walked slowly down the hill to the canal. The moon was still low in the eastern bowl of the great valley, and it sent an uneven thread along the course of the canal. Through the city, the warehouses cast black shadows far into the stream, at times cutting off the thread of moonlight; but every here and there night lanterns hung in the bows of boats pierced the blackness and traced the ripple. A wind was rising out of the northwest, and rumpled clouds were bearing down upon the moon.

Dan paused for a time on the bridge. It was very still there. Close at hand was Bagg’s Hotel; but it was quiet— whatever noise issued from its windows was hidden by the slap of the ripple on the piles. He stared away to the east and thought of Molly. “By grab,” he said under his breath, “if I had a boat I could have her. She said pretty near that much.” But there was small chance of his getting a boat. He could ask Mr. Butterfield for a job, maybe, and make more money than he was making now; but he would be asking in his father’s name, and he did not want to do that.

“There ain’t much chance,” he said to himself. “I guess I’ll find Bentley’s.”

But as he turned to take his course along the canal there was still a glow in him. “Like to cook for you a lot,” she had said.

Coming along the dock were two men, one a stockily built boater, the other a mild-looking clerk. They both stopped when Dan asked them where to find Bentley’s.

“Keep on how you’re headed,” said the boater. “Turn into Liberty Street after you pass Gridley’s warehouse. Walk a block to your right, and if you can’t detect it by the noise, ask a man and he’ll do it for you.”

“It would be simpler—” began the clerk.

“Now you shut up,” said the boater. “Don’t listen to him. It’s folks educated like him lead people off the track.”

Dan went along slowly. The city down by the docks seemed to have come to life. There were few lights, and the warehouses loomed high and dark. But in the streets round them there was a pulsation of indistinguishable sound. When he passed a corner, he sometimes heard voices in loud talk, or a fiddle playing high and fast, or someone singing a snatch— a snatch of “Hoosen Johnny,” and other voices coming into the chorus:—

“Long time ago, long time ago. The little black bull came down the meadow. Oh, a long time ago.”

He stopped to listen to it. While he stood there, a man passed him, smoking a cigar. The wind brightened the ash, and, dimly lit as they were, Dan recognized the bulging eyes and pursed mouth of the fat man, Henderson, who claimed to be a horse trader. He was walking along slowly, his gaze on the upper windows of the warehouses.

Dan went on, turned into Liberty Street as he had been directed. A little way down, an alley branched off on the right, and from the end of it sounded voices singing, men’s voices, with a swing and bellow that filled the air. It was a canal song.

“We were loaded down with barley, We were chuck up full with rye; And the captain he looked down at me With his goddam wicked eye.

“Oh the E-ri-e was arising, The strap was getting low, And I scarcely think We’ll get a drink Till we get to Buffalo, Till we get to Buffalo.”

The swing of it took hold of him and drew him towards the door. He did not need to be told it was Bentley’s. It was a three-story building with an eaveless roof, standing stiff as a box at the end of the alley. Bentley’s Bar, a boaters’ hangout; it hadn’t had “Oyster Booth” put into the name then.

Dan pushed his way through the door, and his eyes blinked. The air was thick with tobacco, the sharp-smelling heat of oil lamps, the heavy sound of men talking in a close room.

“Well, well! Look what just come in! And on Sunday, too!”

Someone guffawed.

Dan paid no attention, but let the door swing to behind him. Running down the length of the room on his left was the bar. Four keeps were working behind it in their shirt sleeves; they worked hard.

Dan wedged into an opening in the line before it.

“What’s yours?” asked the nearest keep.

“Whiskey.”

The glass slid up to his hand. He paid and made his way to a table in a corner of the room.

He drank his whiskey slowly, and its sting brought water to his eyes. Two boaters at the next table were grumbling over low wages. “Good solid rates, heavy trade, where does the money go?” said one. “We don’t see it.” The other nodded. He wore a cap tilted back on his head and blew his nose often into a red handkerchief. His forehead bulged like a philosopher’s. “The coat and pants does all the work,” he observed, “but the weskit gets the gravy.”