Boy's Town

by William Dean Howells

  IV.

  THE CANAL AND ITS BASIN.

  THE canal came from Lake Erie, two hundred miles to the northward, andjoined the Ohio River twenty miles south of the Boy's Town. For a timemy boy's father was collector of tolls on it, but even when he was oldenough to understand that his father held this State office (the canalbelonged to the State) because he had been such a good Whig, andpublished the Whig newspaper, he could not grasp the notion of thedistance which the canal-boats came out of and went into. He saw themcome and he saw them go; he did not ask whence or whither; his wonder,if he had any about them, did not go beyond the second lock. It was hardenough to get it to the head of the Basin, which left the canal half amile or so to the eastward, and stretched down into the town, a sheet ofsmooth water, fifteen or twenty feet deep, and a hundred wide; his senseached with, the effort of conceiving of the other side of it. The Basinwas bordered on either side near the end by pork-houses, where the porkwas cut up and packed, and then lay in long rows of barrels on thebanks, with other long rows of salt-barrels, and yet other long rows ofwhiskey-barrels; cooper-shops, where the barrels were made, alternatedwith the pork-houses. The boats brought the salt and carried away thepork and whiskey; but the boy's practical knowledge of them was thatthey lay there for the boys to dive off of when they went in swimming,and to fish under. The water made a soft tuck-tucking at the sterns ofthe boat, and you could catch sunfish, if you were the right kind of aboy, or the wrong kind; the luck seemed to go a good deal with boys whowere not good for much else. Some of the boats were open their wholelength, with a little cabin at the stern, and these pretended to be forcarrying wood and stone, but really again were for the use of the boysafter a hard rain, when they held a good deal of water, and you couldpole yourself up and down on the loose planks in them. The boys formedthe notion at times that some of these boats were abandoned by theirowners, and they were apt to be surprised by their sudden return. Afeeling of transgression was mixed up with the joys of this kind ofnavigation; perhaps some of the boys were forbidden it. No limit wasplaced on their swimming in the Basin, except that of the law whichprohibited it in the daytime, as the Basin was quite in the heart of thetown. In the warm summer nights of that southerly latitude, the waterswarmed with laughing, shouting, screaming boys, who plunged from thebanks and rioted in the delicious water, diving and ducking, flying andfollowing, safe in the art of swimming which all of them knew. Theyturned somersaults from the decks of the canal-boats; some of the boyscould turn double somersaults, and one boy got so far as to turn asomersault and a half; it was long before the time of electric lighting,but when he struck the water there came a flash that seemed to illuminethe universe.

  I am afraid that the Young People will think I am telling them too muchabout swimming. But in the Boy's Town the boys really led a kind ofamphibious life, and as long as the long summer lasted they were almostas much in the water as on the land. The Basin, however, unlike theriver, had a winter as well as a summer climate, and one of the veryfirst things that my boy could remember was being on the ice there, whena young man caught him up into his arms, and skated off with him almostas far away as the canal. He remembered the fearful joy of theadventure, and the pride, too; for he had somehow the notion that thisyoung fellow was handsome and fine, and did him an honor by hisnotice--so soon does some dim notion of worldly splendor turn us intosnobs! The next thing was his own attempt at skating, when he was setdown from the bank by his brother, full of a vainglorious confidence inhis powers, and appeared instantly to strike on the top of his head.Afterwards he learned to skate, but he did not know when, any more thanhe knew just the moment of learning to read or to swim. He becamepassionately fond of skating, and kept at it all day long when there wasice for it, which was not often in those soft winters. They made a verylittle ice go a long way in the Boy's Town; and began to use it forskating as soon as there was a glazing of it on the Basin. None of themever got drowned there; though a boy would often start from one bank andgo flying to the other, trusting his speed to save him, while the thinsheet sank and swayed, but never actually broke under him. Usually theice was not thick enough to have a fire built on it; and it must havebeen on ice which was just strong enough to bear that my boy skated allone bitter afternoon at Old River, without a fire to warm by. At firsthis feet were very cold, and then they gradually felt less cold, and atlast he did not feel them at all. He thought this very nice, and he toldone of the big boys. "Why, your feet are frozen!" said the big boy, andhe dragged off my boy's skates, and the little one ran all the long milehome, crazed with terror, and not knowing what moment his feet mightdrop off there in the road. His mother plunged them in a bowl ofice-cold water, and then rubbed them with flannel, and so thawed themout; but that could not save him from the pain of their coming to: itwas intense, and there must have been a time afterwards when he did notuse his feet.

  His skates themselves were of a sort that I am afraid boys would smileat nowadays. When you went to get a pair of skates forty or fifty yearsago, you did not make your choice between a Barney & Berry and an Acme,which fastened on with the turn of a screw or the twist of a clamp. Youfound an assortment of big and little sizes of solid wood bodies withguttered blades turning up in front with a sharp point, or perhapscurling over above the toe. In this case they sometimes ended in anacorn; if this acorn was of brass, it transfigured the boy who wore thatskate; he might have been otherwise all rags and patches, but the brassacorn made him splendid from head to foot. When you had bought yourskates, you took them to a carpenter, and stood awe-strickenly aboutwhile he pierced the wood with strap-holes; or else you managed to borethem through with a hot iron yourself. Then you took them to a saddler,and got him to make straps for them; that is, if you were rich, and yourfather let you have a quarter to pay for the job. If not, you putstrings through, and tied your skates on. They were always coming off,or getting crosswise of your foot, or feeble-mindedly slumping down onone side of the wood; but it did not matter, if you had a fire on theice, fed with old barrels and boards and cooper's shavings, and couldsit round it with your skates on, and talk and tell stories, betweenyour flights and races afar; and come whizzing back to it from thefrozen distance, and glide, with one foot lifted, almost among theembers.

  Beyond the pork-houses, and up farther towards the canal, there weresome houses under the Basin banks. They were good places for thefever-and-ague which people had in those days without knowing it wasmalaria, or suffering it to interfere much with the pleasure andbusiness of life; but they seemed to my boy bowers of delight,especially one where there was a bear, chained to a weeping-willow, andanother where there was a fishpond with gold-fish in it. He expectedthis bear to get loose and eat him, but that could not spoil hispleasure in seeing the bear stand on his hind-legs and open his redmouth, as I have seen bears do when you wound them up by a keyhole inthe side. In fact, a toy bear is very much like a real bear, and saferto have round. The boys were always wanting to go and look at this bear,but he was not so exciting as the daily arrival of the Dayton packet. Tomy boy's young vision this craft was of such incomparable lightness andgrace as no yacht of Mr. Burgess's could rival. When she came in of asummer evening her deck was thronged with people, and the captain stoodwith his right foot on the spring-catch that held the tow-rope. Thewater curled away on either side of her sharp prow, that cut its wayonward at the full rate of five miles an hour, and the team cameswinging down the tow-path at a gallant trot, the driver sitting thehindmost horse of three, and cracking his long-lashed whip with loudexplosions, as he whirled its snaky spirals in the air. All the boys intown were there, meekly proud to be ordered out of his way, to break andfly before his volleyed oaths and far before his horses' feet; andsuddenly the captain pressed his foot on the spring and released thetow-rope. The driver kept on to the stable with unslackened speed, andthe line followed him, swishing and skating over the water, while thesteersman put his helm hard aport, and the packet rounded to, and swamsoftly and slowly up to her moorings. No steamer a
rrives from Europe nowwith such thrilling majesty.

  The canal-boatmen were all an heroic race, and the boys humbly hopedthat some day, if they proved worthy, they might grow up to be drivers;not indeed packet-drivers; they were not so conceited as that; butfreight-boat drivers, of two horses, perhaps, but gladly of one. High orlow, the drivers had a great deal of leisure, which commended theircalling to the boyish fancy; and my boy saw them, with a longing tospeak to them, even to approach them, never satisfied, while they amusedthe long summer afternoon in the shade of the tavern by a game of skillpeculiar to them. They put a tack into a whiplash, and then, whirling itround and round, drove it to the head in a target marked out on theweather-boarding. Some of them had a perfect aim; and in fact it was avery pretty feat, and well worth seeing.

  Another feat, which the pioneers of the region had probably learned fromthe Indians, was throwing the axe. The thrower caught the axe by the endof the helve, and with a dextrous twirl sent it flying through the air,and struck its edge into whatever object he aimed at--usually a tree.Two of the Basin loafers were brothers, and they were always quarrellingand often fighting. One was of the unhappy fraternity of town-drunkards,and somehow the boys thought him a finer fellow than the other, whomsomehow they considered "mean," and they were always of his side intheir controversies. One afternoon these brothers quarrelled a longtime, and then the sober brother retired to the doorway of a pork-house,where he stood, probably brooding upon his injuries, when the drunkard,who had remained near the tavern, suddenly caught up an axe and flungit; the boys saw it sail across the corner of the Basin, and strike inthe door just above his brother's head. This one did not lose aninstant; while the axe still quivered in the wood, he hurled himselfupon the drunkard, and did that justice on him which he would not askfrom the law, perhaps because it was a family affair; perhaps becausethose wretched men were no more under the law than the boys were.

  I do not mean that there was no law for the boys, for it was manifest totheir terror in two officers whom they knew as constables, and who mayhave reigned one after another, or together, with full power of life anddeath over them, as they felt; but who in a community mainly so peacefulacted upon Dogberry's advice, and made and meddled with rogues as littleas they could. From time to time it was known among the boys that youwould be taken up if you went in swimming inside of the corporationline, and for a while they would be careful to keep beyond it; but thiscould not last; they were soon back in the old places, and I suppose noarrests were ever really made. They did, indeed, hear once that OldGriffin, as they called him, caught a certain boy in the river beforedark, and carried him up through the town to his own home naked. Ofcourse no such thing ever happened; but the boys believed it, and itfroze my boy's soul with fear; all the more because this constable was acabinet-maker and made coffins; from his father's printing-office theboy could hear the long slide of his plane over the wood, and he couldsmell the varnish on the boards.

  I dare say Old Griffin was a kindly man enough, and not very old; and Isuppose that the other constable, as known to his family and friends,was not at all the gloomy headsman he appeared to the boys. When hebecame constable (they had not the least notion how a man becameconstable) they heard that his rule was to be marked by unwontedseverity against the crime of going in swimming inside the corporationline, and so they kept strictly to the letter of the law. But one daysome of them found themselves in the water beyond the First Lock, whenthe constable appeared on the tow-path, suddenly, as if he and his horsehad come up out of the ground. He told them that he had got them now,and he ordered them to come along with him; he remained there amusinghimself with their tears, their prayers, and then vanished again. Heavenknows how they lived through it; but they must have got safely home inthe usual way, and life must have gone on as before. No doubt the mandid not realize the torture he put them to; but it was a cruel thing;and I never have any patience with people who exaggerate a child'soffence to it, and make it feel itself a wicked criminal for some littleact of scarcely any consequence. If we elders stand here in the place ofthe Heavenly Father towards those younger children of His, He will nothold us guiltless when we obscure for them the important differencebetween a great and a small misdeed, or wring their souls, fear-cloudedas they always are, with a sense of perdition for no real sin.

  THE SIX-MILE LEVEL.]

  "HE TOLD THEM THAT HE HAD GOT THEM NOW."]