3stalwarts (97 page)

She stood up lithely, her eyes shining.

“Why, Dan.”

Dan gave an inarticulate grunt and leaned forward to open the draft of the stove, his face red.

She caught him by the shoulders and held him down, shaking him.

“Why didn’t you tell me right off?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“You old surl,” she said, stooping to kiss him. Then she jumped away from his arm and picked up the mirror. “There’s a wire on to it to hang it broadways, Dan. It’ll just fit over the table.”

She took down the little mirror that had been Samson Weaver’s and hung the new one in its place.

“Now I can see to do my hair.”

She took out the pins and shook it down over her shoulders. He stood behind her and gathered it into a handful and pulled her head back against his chest, grinning at her. She pushed his face away.

“Don’t, Dan. Not now.” She turned her eyes to the sleeping cuddy. Dan laughed. “Listen,” he said.

Fortune Friendly’s deep breathing purred suddenly, unmistakably.

“Let’s look for Samson’s money,” Dan said. “It’ll be our money when we find it.”

She put a finger to her lips, and smiled behind it, a conspirator’s gleam in her eyes.

“Fortune’s a good enough body,” she whispered. “But it’s just as well he didn’t know.”

Dan nodded.

“Where’d the old boater say it was?” she asked.

Dan lowered his voice.

“He didn’t say— only that it was in a beam, and that part of it lifted out.”

Together they looked round the cabin from the middle of the floor. There was a beam across the middle of the ceiling, and one across each end, and a heavy beam sill jutting out of each rear corner. Dan began running his finger along the middle beam.

“It would be on the back side,” Molly said. “The light wouldn’t hit there.”

They found no crack in the middle beam, and Dan began feeling along the end ones. Molly began to examine the corner sills. Suddenly she made a little crowing noise, and, looking round, Dan saw her hunkered down in the corner. She had lifted out a false front close to the floor and was holding out to Dan two limp rectangular packages wrapped in dirty brown paper.

Dan took them back under the lamp and sat down in the rocking-chair, and Molly perched herself on his knees. The packages were tied with red cord, a bowknot directly at the crossing, the ends corresponding exactly with the loops, as though old Samson had taken care and pleasure in wrapping them. The paper was thumb-marked and stained, and when Dan opened the first package some tobacco ashes slid down on the back of his hand.

Molly drew in her breath and looked down at him. There was a friendly feeling in the touch to Dan, and he held his hand close to his eyes. Spidery long ashes, made from Warnick and Brown, that Samson had smoked.

“He was a nice feller,” Dan said seriously. “I think he was a good man, though he was bothered with Annie’s running off.”

Molly blew off the ashes suddenly. They rose in a burst, and scattered in an indiscernible fine powder. She leaned closer and kissed his hand.

“Let’s count it, Dan.”

He stared at her as he did not quite comprehend.

“Let’s see how much there is,” she whispered again.

He tossed both packages into her lap. She took out the bills and started laying them down one by one on her knee.

“You’ll have to steady them,” she told Dan.

He pressed his hand down on them and lifted it when she put down another bill. It became a kind of game for the two of them to play, like children stolen out of bed when the house is sleeping— a fugitive, trembling sort of game, requiring a touch of hands. Molly frowned and kept the tally with silently moving lips, heedless of Dan’s watching gaze on the curve of her cheek and the soft mass of her hair.

Finally she stacked the bills together with firm little raps on her knee.

“Dan!” she exclaimed softly. “There’s eight hundred and thirty-five dollars. Eight hundred and thirty-five dollars. My, that’s a lot of money for a man to have!”

She caught Dan’s left hand and brought it round her waist, and let herself lean back against his shoulder, her face close to his cheek.

But he was staring at the opposite wall. Eight hundred and thirty-five dollars— it was a lot of money. It represented many things. With it a man could start a farm, a small farm. As he sat there with Molly against him, he seemed to see again the hip-roofed barn, and himself behind a heavy team going out to plough long furrows in rich earth. He saw more than he had seen before; he saw Molly churning on a kitchen stoop. He heard the lowing of cows; and he saw himself and Molly moving from one to the other in the hay-smelling shadow to milk them.

“What’re you going to do with it, Dan?”

He took hold of her hands with their strong long fingers. She watched him carefully, almost jealously, and cast a worried glance at the side of his lean head, tracing the curve of his ear. Beyond the curtain they heard Fortune Friendly’s even, sure breathing, purring a little now and then at the end of the breath. The canal beyond the curtained windows was silent and dead.

The stillness was very close to them.

“What’re you going to do with it, Dan?”

“It’s a lot of money,” Dan began uncertainly.

Suddenly, thin and faint, they heard the blast of a horn, blowing for the weighlock; and when the silence came again they were conscious of the ripple of the water. The horn sounded a second time— louder.

Molly sighed and stirred against Dan’s shoulder, and he twisted his neck to look at her.

“I guess I’ll buy a good team,” he said. “A good heavy team. I’ll want ‘em in the spring for heavy hauling.”

She drew a deep breath of relief.

The clock whirred and rapidly beat out ten strokes.

“Good land! Dan, it’s time we went to bed.”

They returned the money to Samson’s bank and blew out the lamp; and when the east-coming boat passed they were asleep.

Ecclesiasticus

Five days later the Sarsey Sal was nosing along southward up the Black River behind a string of four boats. Leading the string, the sidewheel tug-boat smacked the river with her paddles and belched a line of dark smoke in which hot wood cinders swirled. The northwest wind blowing on their backs carried the smoke free.

It was midafternoon. Small cold showers coming with the wind at intervals of an hour all day had washed the air clear under the tumbling grey sky. Once in a while a spot of sunshine running across the valley would cover the boats for an instant with a bright warmth; but the cloud-shadow swooping down after it immediately brought back the darkening chill.

“It feels quite a lot like snow,” said Dan, who was steering.

“It does, at that,” said Fortune Friendly. The old man was stamping up and down the deck beside the cabin windows, smoking at an alder pipe he had cut and baked himself. The wind had whipped a bright red into his cheeks and nose, and his sharp eyes glistened.

“This is the good part of boating,” he said. “The walking ain’t so bad now my boots are broke in,”— he glanced down at them,— “but I like riding the river this way, when all I’ve got to do is take a turn at steering.”

They were almost opposite Lowville, now, on their way back from Carthage. To the west, the great hogback of Tug Hill began climbing over the bankside trees. As they went on, the edges of the nearer hills crept up against it, until they were winding through a flat deep valley.

The hardwood was turning to sombre browns and yellows; even the maples were rusty; there was no brightness in the leaves. The poplars on the hilltops shook and leaped in the pitch of the wind; but the great pines on the valley floor stood straight, only their tops stirring with a slow lifting of arms. The entire land brooded before the solemn approach of winter; it appeared to be breathing the clear bite of the air; and on it, with the rolling sky above their heads, men and animals moved with circumspect minuteness. A woman stood in a yard, pumping glittering water; two dogs stalked a woodchuck taking his final meal of the year; two men spread manure, tossing forkfuls first on one side, then on the other. Back and forth across a slope a farmer moved behind a dappled team, uncovering dark threads with his plough.

“It’s a fine land for farming,” Dan said.

The old man knocked out his pipe and sat down on the cabin roof, clasping his knees with his smooth hands.

“I was born in this section,” he said.

“Yeanh?” said Dan. “Was it good for dairying?”

“Sure, as good as any land. My folk were related to folks at Lyons Falls. We had a good farm. And then Pa come into money from some city kin, and Mother said I’d ought to be a minister. So I went to college.”

“Yeanh,” said Dan.

“I learned a lot it wasn’t good for me to learn,” said the old man. “But my pa had money, so it didn’t do no real harm. But when I come back I didn’t go to preaching, as I might have if I’d growed up here. I’d learned a lot to make a man afraid of preaching.”

“Yeanh.”

“I come back and said I’d settle down. I married and I lived on a farm my wife’s kin owned by Lyons Falls. I built barns and I planted an orchard, and I dammed a brook and made a fishpond. I had three men working for me, and there was a maid in the house. And when my pa died and the money come to me I got a good dairy started and my wife was happy.”

“Gol!” said Dan.

“But it was the same thing every year. First the winter, and then the summer; calves dropped, and growed and milked, and the crops sowed and harvested. And the field ploughed in the fall, when the ducks went south. I finicked with my orchard, and I raised some good horses. I was a regular farmer. And the second year Hester had a child. And she did the third year. It became a habit with her.”

“Yeanh.”

“Then one day, when the canal had been put through, I saw a girl on a boat. She had hair as black as a crow’s, and she had an orange-colored dress on, and she waved her hand when she went by. And I went home that evening. It was in August, near the end, and the men were drawing oats. I saw nothing in it, just the bundles staggering up on the forks. So I said to my wife, ‘Let’s quit this country. There’s no profit in just farming. We’ll go to the city; I’ve got money enough. We’ll live in New York.’ And she said, ‘Fortune, I wouldn’t want to move the children.’ “

“Yeanh.”

“It don’t count, farming, or anything else a man does. Where does he get to? He works his fields and gets crops and raises cattle and builds a house, and he says it’s his. It’s the same way in everything. There’s nothing we’ve got under the sun. We haven’t even got a hold on our selves. We’re just a passing of time. So next morning I got up early and took a hundred dollars and cleared out, and that was twenty years ago. I’ve been on the canals, I’ve been out West, I’ve been on the sea and sailed in ships. And it’s just the same as if men were asleep, making a dream with their business. And it don’t get them anywhere, does it?”

“It’s how you look at it, I guess,” said Dan.

“They learn new names to call things,” said the old man. “But they always call the new names by the same old one. They say progress is what they’re making. But progress is like time. It’s just the same from beginning to end, because it can’t move. ‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.’ And that’s true, Dan, no matter what you say it about. All we’ve got is the working of our own minds.”

He refilled his pipe.

“I went down the canal, Dan, and when I was hungry I played at cards. A man I lived with at college had taught me the tricks of that. And once in a while when I needed money real bad I’d preach, which is another kind of game, only the preacher holds the trumps and the temptations are very strong. I saw people fold their hands round a prayer on Sundays, Dan, as if they were doing business; but there’s a peculiar comfort in it for some people. And I’ve preached funeral sermons for people I never saw the face of, for a meal and five dollars. I did it once for an Oneida half-breed for a glass of liquor and a venison steak, and the men’s kin were real pleased with what I told them. Only his wife went off in the woods when I was done and mourned. There ain’t anything new under the sun, Dan.”

Molly, who had been listening at the cabin door, came up on deck, and the wind caught hold of her dress and hair.

“Did you ever see the gal again with the black hair, Fortune?”

The old man looked at her, sombrely.

“No,” he said. “I was telling Dan that.”

He went down to smoke his pipe in the quiet of the cabin.

Molly sat down in his place, drawing the collar of Dan’s shirt up about her ears.

“I was talking with a woman on one of the boats.” She nodded ahead at the string. “We’d ought to get into Lyons Falls this evening.”

The queue of boats followed the tug round a wide bend to the right. The brown-and-gold tints of the sunset merged into a pale green twilight, with copper edges to the lower clouds. The beat of the paddles slackened and the roar of falling water increased in volume. Still, through heavy mut-ter, Dan’s ears caught the clear ring of cowbells, and looking away to the left he saw a great farm opening out through the pines, a long herd of cows tailing through a pasture, the pale light washing the white on their bodies to silver, and, against the faint glow of the eastern slope, the white skeleton of a rising barn.

“Look at them cows, Molly.”

“They’re pretty, Dan.”

“That barn they’re building there’s the biggest barn I ever see.”

“Why should anyone want so big a barn?”

He did not answer her.

Little figures of men in blue overalls were coming slowly down the ladders, backward, their faces turned on the work they had done.

“It’s as big as a church,” Molly said.

“It’s bigger,” said Dan.

Then the river straightened ahead of them, and the tug swung in by the side of the lock that let the canal into the river. A string of boats was forming to go downriver. Another tug, beside the pier, was spouting up columns of oily smoke, a white hiss now and then escaping the valve. Men were loading five-foot logs aboard for the fires.