Sweet Song (22 page)

“How much?”

“Half-dollar.”

“I’ll take one. In fact, how about I stay two nights.” Leon didn’t want to stay two nights. He wanted to find his way across the river.

“Pay the bartender when you pay for your meal.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She brought his water and set it down. She lingered a moment as though she were trying to figure something out and the answer was written all over Leon. When she deciphered the code, she shook her head and walked away.

Leon only stopped lifting the fork to his mouth for that moment the waitress hesitated. The rest of the time he managed to chew and swallow long before the next forkful entered his hard-working jaws. He scraped the plate the best he could without lifting it up and licking it. Then he downed his water. He sat back in his chair and glanced around the room. He took a few deep breaths and reached for the money from inside his bedroll. He pulled out what he needed without exposing what he had. He counted it out. He stuffed the rest back farther inside the pack, deep into his burlap sack. Leon grabbed his bedroll and stood. The chair squealed across the floor. Several people looked up for a moment, but didn’t linger. It had been nothing but noise. Leon wasn’t different. He wasn’t anyone to be watched or concerned about, and he felt better about that than ever before.

As he paid for his cot and meal, the bartender said, “Cot’s in the back. Room three. You can sleep anywhere there ain’t already a body.”

“Thank you, sir.”

As Leon gathered his pack, the bartender looked over his shoulder and said, “Hey, you ain’t left nothin’ for Mary. You get bad service?”

Leon didn’t know what the man meant, but he met a set of flaming eyes stuck into a square head with a week’s beard on it.

“Left what?” Leon managed to say.

The bartender leaned closer to Leon’s ear. “A tip for her good service.” The man nodded toward the table.

Leon turned in time to see another customer leave a coin near an empty plate and got the message.

“I forgot,” Leon said. He reached deep inside his bedroll and grabbed two coins. Without looking at them, he walked back to his table and placed the coins next to his empty plate. He stepped away quickly and went past the end of the bar and out the back door.

A dark hall led him ten feet where there were four doors, two on each side. A number was painted on each door. At the end of the hall was another door, which stood open. Leon guessed that it led to the outhouse.

He opened the room three door. Cots lined each wall. The center of the room opened to enough space for another three cots if needed. Not one window breached the wall space. Three cots were occupied. Leon took an empty one to his left. Next to each sleeping area lay a candle and three wooden matches. The well-swept room smelled of food cooking from the pub in front. One man’s candle flickered in the half-dark.

Leon unrolled his bedroll in a careful manner, tucking his wages deeper into the burlap sack and shoving the sack against the wall. While maneuvering his collected wages, Leon pulled out his book and placed it on his cot. He sat and bent to light his candle.

The room was the most comfortable and clean space he had ever occupied. He had a full stomach, a cot to sleep on in a clean room, and a candle to read his book by. The air inside the room was chilly, but not cold, not in the open weather. Leon settled back on his cot. He raised the book above his head and turned slightly to catch the candle light across the page. He read.

“You. What you readin’ there?”

Leon turned and the man in the other cot with his candle lit, across the room, had a newspaper in his hands.

“Henry Longfellow.”

“A fine poet,” the man said. Then he snapped his paper and returned to his reading.

Leon returned to his reading as well.

As the evening wore on, the room filled with boarders. Before Leon blew out his candle to go to sleep, he grabbed his sack and went to the outhouse. The acrid smell lifted from the pit. He sat down, protected from the rising wind. After finishing his own business, Leon stepped outside and around to the back of the building. He took a deep breath. Down over the bank rolled the Suquahanna River. The water sparkled as if there were stars in it. The familiar smell, the familiar sound, rose from the strength of the never-ending movement of water. Trees overhead stood black against the cloud-covered sky. A bright spot where the moonlight tried to creep through the clouds intensified the contrast between the black of the trees and the white of the clouds. It intensified Leon’s feeling of being grounded in his blackness and also in the whiteness
he had been forced to reach for in the clouds. The trees knew no more of the white cloud than the cloud knew of the trees. Always visible to each other, they could never really touch.

Leon went back to his cot, blew out the candle, tucked his sack next to his chest, and fell asleep.

The next morning, he woke to the sound of an argument.

“You stole my money!”

“What the hell you talkin’ about?”

One man shoved another against the door.

Leon checked his own stashed wages and felt satisfied to find it in place.

The man with the newspaper broke up the fight pretty quickly. “Take this outside. It’s between you two, not the rest of us.”

Leon could tell that the accuser didn’t want to listen, but the newspaper man stood over six and a half feet and was as broad as the door. He didn’t look threatening, not in his demeanor, but he could have ripped both men’s arms off if he had wanted to. The two arguers could see the big man’s potential and decided to take their argument outside.

“Well, that’s a night,” the newspaperman said.

The others laughed.

Leon pulled his things together. The smell of bacon and eggs filled the air. He put his bedroll under his arm and went out back to the outhouse. It was occupied, and Leon could hear someone groaning inside, so he stepped to the back of the outhouse and peed down over the bank. The river seemed to have picked up speed even from the night before. Leon felt a stronger urge to get across where he felt there’d be more opportunity for work.

The noise that occurred in room three must have awakened the rest of the place. As Leon came back inside the other room doors leaned open and the men inside milled around packing their things and leaving to go into the dining area.

The pub was as much a dining hall as anything. Mary was back on the floor taking orders. Only a few people had food. The tables filled quickly. Leon sat against one wall, taking his seat before anyone else could. The newspaper man came through the back door,
looked around the room, and headed for the same table where Leon sat.

“Mind if I sit here?”

“Not at all,” Leon said.

The man strained the chair when he sat down. The groan of the wood sounded deep and gutteral.

“Name’s Hugh. Hugh Richardson, ‘cept my pa’s name ain’t Richard.” He laughed and held out a broad hand.

Leon reached across the table. Hugh’s hand was big and rough, even to Leon’s battered palms. Hugh wore his dirty-blond hair a little long and shaggy. He fashioned two intensely deep blue eyes. His look intimidated, but his manner did not. Hugh opened a broad smile that cut through his oddly square head and showed off his mixed bag of multi-colored teeth, everything from white to black and most colors between.

Looking at that smile, Leon wondered what his own teeth looked like. He ran his tongue over the back of them and they felt rough. He rubbed at his face and felt the soft texture of a beard past prickly.

“I come here to work,” Hugh said.

“The same,” Leon said.

Mary stepped up to the table. “Breakfast, boys?”

Leon looked to the slate at the end of the bar.

“Ain’t no specials. Just two breakfasts. Meat an’ eggs,” Mary said, “or bread an’ coffee.”

“Meat and eggs,” Leon said.

“Bread and coffee,” Hugh said.

Leon looked at the size of the man in front of him, then looked at Mary. “He’ll have meat and eggs, too. I’ll pay.”

She turned away.

“Much obliged,” Hugh said.

“That’s all right. You look like you need the energy.”

“Read in the paper there’s jobs all over. Gettin’ ready for the flood time,” Hugh said. “There’ll be timber flowin’ soon.”

“If you can read, you don’t have to work with the other men, do you?” Leon said, his hopes exposed.

“Lot of men can read. Besides, hard work don’t hurt nobody. Wages are good. Jobs is plentiful.”

“There must be something else.”

“I hear the mill owners bring their own men to the job, but the paper says there’s openin’s.” Hugh paused, then added, “Bet you can get one.”

Leon felt his face brighten. “I bet I can.”

Mary headed for their table with two plates of eggs and bacon.

“Coffee be right up,” she said.

Both men dug into their eggs and each had two cups of coffee.

Hugh sat back in his chair at the end of his meal. “Easiest way to cross the river is to walk the tracks a little ways east of here.”

“You thinking we’ll go together?”

Hugh looked hurt right as Leon said that.

“I’d be proud to,” Leon said.

Hugh’s disappointment slipped away. “I’d like to travel with somebody smart for a change.”

“You can read.”

“I’m built for hard labor, nobody ever goin’ to see otherwise. I’m used to that and don’t really mind, truthfully.”

“Well, if you don’t mind, that’s fine, but I’d rather not wrestle with dead trees.”

“You be the right size to go either way. And you talk smooth enough to get what you want.”

“I never thought of myself as talking smoothly,” Leon said.

“Well, you do.” Hugh slapped the table and several people looked up.

Leon liked the idea of himself as a smooth talker in the educated sense. Leon felt healthy having eaten, and felt qualified even though he didn’t know in what. He got up and paid a dollar for breakfast and told Mary as he handed it to her that the rest was hers. She smiled broadly. Leon had no idea what breakfast really cost, but he was sure it was less than a dollar for the two of them.

He felt a little bad about paying for a second night in room three when he had no intention now to stay the night. But he felt rich and he felt lucky, and only the day would tell where those feelings
would lead him. Traveling with Hugh, even for a short distance felt like the right thing to do.

Outside the Timberline, Hugh asked Leon for his name.

Leon thought back to the friends he traveled with through the woods. He thought about Jacob and wanted to end that memory. He didn’t want any more questions about his name or what nationality he was. “Bob,” he said. “My name’s Bob White.”

“Proud to be travelin’ with you, Bob.” Hugh patted Leon’s shoulder as they headed for the railroad bridge.

A
chill air stirred songbirds to life. A cloudless sky called up insects from wherever they sit through the night, whether close to the ground or under leaves, against the stems of weeds.

The newly christened Bob White followed Hugh Richardson, single file into increasingly thicker underbrush. It wasn’t long before the idea that Hugh could easily rob him that Bob thought to turn back. He slowed.

“You ain’t tired already?” Hugh said. He stood twenty feet in front of Bob.

“Just thinking. How far is this bridge?”

“Not sure. Half mile maybe.”

Bob rose onto his toes and stretched his neck hoping to see down-river.

“It’s there. Bartender told me last night.”

“I could pay for a raft.”

Hugh walked back toward Bob. “Save your money. There’ll be plenty to spend it on if that’s what you want. The bridge will be just fine.”

Bob stiffened.

Hugh must have noticed. He shook his head and turned back around. “I won’t do nothin’ to you. Just wanted someone to travel with.”

Bob hurried forward. “Let me lead for a bit. It’s difficult to see past you.”

Hugh stepped to the side and Bob took the lead. In short order, his pack under his arm and the morning light dancing over the dew-moist
underbrush, Bob began to hum, then to sing. His mind focused on his song.

Hugh hummed along with Bob’s song.

A deer jumped from a place in front of them and both fell silent and stopped in their tracks. Hugh began to laugh. “That thing scared the hell out of me.”

Bob led Hugh farther into the thicket where the deer had been and two more bounded off. Another hundred feet and a clearing opened to gravel and hard steel. Bob’s heart raced. The bridge was there. Five hundred feet from the river, a road entered the area where the tracks lay black against the brown soil. “We could have taken that road.”

Hugh stepped up beside him. “We could have, I guess.”

The railroad bridge was open-sided, dropping into a cloudy, rushing river. Ice chunks sat piled along the banks and into ground protrusions. Some had jammed and locked themselves into tree roots.