3stalwarts

by Unknown

  With staring eyes the men followed his pointing finger along the black muck track the grubbers left. They saw the marsh, and the shadow of a cloud slowly moving.

  Suddenly Caleb laughed and tossed his hands apart.

  “By gravy, boys! We’ve finished Number One!”

  Jerry looked up, and he became aware of Mary, standing off a little way, the slight wind riffling the edge of her shawl, a still figure against the snow… .

  Caleb said, “I’m closing up this shanty, now. Will you two ride along with me?”

  The men had moved on down to Number Two.

  Lewis had gone with his mule and his helper. The marsh was empty but for the three of them and Bourbon standing at the shanty door. The shadows had drawn out. The evening cold was stealing in.

  “I’d like to walk,” said Mary. “Thank you, Mr. Hammil.”

  She looked at Jerry. Jerry nodded.

  “All right, then. I’m going back to Utica, Jerry. I’ll deposit for you, shall I?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. I’ve sold this shanty as she stands to the man that’s got the digging contracts. A good sell. I didn’t lose a penny. Jerry, you’ll go down to Cossett’s lock and finish up the boarding. Maybe Lewis can lay stone for two weeks more if the frost don’t bear down too heavy. I’ll come up in two weeks if the roads are passable.”

  He poked the latchstring in.

  “Good-bye, you both.”

  He climbed over the wheel. Bourbon set himself to start. Jerry suddenly broke his silence.

  “Don’t leave Bourbon stand outside unblanketed.”

  Caleb looked down. He seemed to estimate the tone. His fat face was set seriously. Then he grinned.

  “I’m not a complete fool.”

  He waved his hand and rattled off.

  Mary touched Jerry’s arm.

  “What’s the matter, Jerry?”

  “There’s no matter.”

  “I thought the way you said that, that you and Caleb might have quarreled.”

  “No,” he said. His face stared sombrely at his toes in the snow. He walked slowly to the lock and took a last look at it. “I’m glad you wanted to walk. I wouldn’t want to ride with him just now.”

  Mary was concerned.

  “But why?”

  “Oh, he acts as if he’d built the lock himself. It’s funny, Mary. When he hired me and showed me that-there plan, I thought he knew a lot. He don’t. Self knows more than him. It’s me that did the work.”

  “But he put up the money. He’s responsible.”

  “Just the same, they think he did it.”

  Mary stole a sidewise glance.

  “They know your work. Caleb said so. Mr. Roberts must have said so to Mr. Wright, from what Mr. Wright said. I’d judge so anyway.”

  He looked down.

  “Anyway it’s good work, Mary. Lewis does fine work in his masonry. The gates fit tight. Look how easy they handle.”

  He swung one of them.

  “You could do it. Try against it.”

  Smiling, Mary tried. It was surprising how easily the gate swung.

  “I built them,” Jerry said. “Just from plans.”

  His eyes were moody. He did not seem to want to leave his work.

  After a while, though, Mary said, “I take so long to walk in all these bundlings. Hadn’t we better start?”

  He looked up quickly at her.

  “Yes. Let’s go. It’s cold.” He started out beside her. But as they came to the bend in the corduroy, he turned for a last look at the lock.

  “Eight weeks we’ve been there. Maybe I’ll never take another look at it. But it’s a good job.”

  Mary looked at his face, turned in profile. She could see a little muscle quivering behind his jaw bone. It seemed so silly to have an affection for a thing of stone that you yourself would never handle. He looked unkempt, but she loved him so.

  Beyond him, the sun was setting— a flat reddish disc, without warmth, giving no color to the sky, but touching the clouds with bronze. The horizon rose no higher than his shoulders, the marshland lay flat beneath his hand. Down by Number Two she saw a light gleam in the shanty window. Far away under the sun was Cossett’s tavern. It showed no light, only a line of smoke to northward of the sun. Everywhere between, the skeleton grass lifted broken leaves.

  He loomed before her, larger and larger as she saw these things, and the dim, half-felt sorrow that stilled his face also made it beautiful. He let out a steamy breath, and turned to her.

  “Why, Mary, what’s the matter? What are you crying for?”

  She sniffled up her sob.

  “It’s nothing, Jerry.”

  He put his arm across her shoulders. She could hardly feel it through the thickness of her wraps, but the weight of it lay on her.

  “What is it? I know something’s been troubling you.”

  “I want to tell you, but I can’t.” She tried to laugh. “It’s funny, ain’t it, Jerry?”

  “Tell me what you were thinking of, looking out over there.”

  “It looked so lonesome, Jerry.”

  “It does look lonely,” he said. “I never liked it just as land.”

  He shivered.

  “I’d hate to be that lock-tender.”

  “Esquire Forman plans a town here, Dorothy says.”

  “A town?” He laughed, his laughter making clouds. “I do believe a lot will happen, but not that.”

  He stared westward.

  “A town ‘twixt here and Cossett’s!” His arm tightened round her shoulders. “Mary, it makes me glad to be wedded to you, you coming along with me this way. It wasn’t just the lonesomeness that made you cry?”

  “I’m not crying now.”

  “No. But what was it?”

  “Jerry, why don’t we get land now that you’ve saved up money? We’ve got enough to start. I’ll work hard. I’m strong. I’ll make it comfortable. I want to work along with you.” Her voice grew lower; she spoke hurriedly, her eyes fixed straight ahead. “Now you’re just bringing me along, just as if I was a fancy—”

  She bit her lip.

  Jerry’s arm almost fell away. He was examining her with wide eyes.

  “Why, Mary. What made you think of that?” His face grew set and his eyes cold. “You know I never thought of no such thing.”

  “I don’t care. It makes me feel that way.”

  “Can’t you forget those papers?”

  “No. I never can. Jerry, I feel just like a satchel property.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

  She raised her eyes, and suddenly the tears broke out.

  “I didn’t mean it, Jerry. Honestly. I’ll go anywhere. I don’t feel so— only it seems you are way off from me. Back there in Utica.”

  “It was just as bad for me,” he said grimly. “Maybe worse.” He thought of Dencey.

  “Oh, but you were working, doing things. But it don’t matter, and I’m lucky now to be along and live with Dorothy. She’s been so good.”

  He kept walking as if he marched, steadily, left, right, left, right, as if there were no corduroy to slip on.

  “I’m happy, Jerry, I’m happy. Honest. You mustn’t mind what I said. There’s time enough. Only I do get lonesome.”

  Her contrition was as breathless as her burst of discontent. She eyed him as she walked. And seeing him thinking, her eyes suddenly grew shy.

  Before he turned she had stopped, but he stepped back swiftly to her, took her shoulders in his hands, and shook her gently. He was grinning.

  “Tell me just what’s wrong, Mary. Don’t put it off.”

  “I’m going to have a baby, Jerry.”

  She opened the throat of his coat with her hands and hid her face inside. Her shoulders heaved. She felt him stiffening.

  “I didn’t know,” he said. “I just knew something, but I never thought.” His hands kept fumbling with her shoulders. “How long have you known it, Mary?”

  She said, her v
oice muffled almost to extinction, “Almost a month, now.”

  “You might have told me sooner.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you till you had the lock done. You was so excited.”

  He patted her.

  “You weren’t scared to tell me?”

  She could not speak for sobbing, but he felt her face jerk up and down.

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “It seems as though I’m just a drag hitched to you. Always costing money.”

  “We can afford it. I guess there ain’t a better way to spend it. A doctor, I’ve heard tell, will cost you round about two dollars. We can get a woman in to help you. I wouldn’t care if it was twice as much. Why, Mary, soon I’ll be earning more. You ain’t scared for yourself?”

  Her sobs were easing. She shook her head.

  “Not much. A little sometimes. Way out here.”

  With a bent forefinger he fished for her chin.

  “Think of it.” He laughed a little. “Three of us. Right here.”

  She smiled. Her eyes were wet and drops were stiffening the lashes. He bent his head and kissed her.

  “It’s time we hurried. You mustn’t take a risk of cold.”

  He held her close to his side.

  She asked him, “Jerry, would it be all right for me to stay at Dorothy’s to have it? It seems homey, somehow.”

  “Surely. Let’s see, when will it?” He counted.

  “August, maybe,” said Mary.

  He counted again.

  “By then I will be working out in Jordan Lock. I’ll come back when your time is due. You mustn’t be scared, Mary.”

  She put her hand in his. They walked silent through the silence. The twilight came in, pale green and wavery. The night rose up in the east, a steely curtain cut for stars. They heard the frost rustling the grass.

  Jerry kept his glance ahead, and Mary looked up at his face. She traced his ear under the fringe of hair, the set of his jaw, until her eyes ached. He must be thinking of the lock to build in Jordan, she thought. And then she thought with pride that it would be a fine lock. She felt very proud, now, of his work. Caleb had praised it. Mr. Wright. They spoke to him as to a man of equal station. It made her humble to feel proud, and she did not mind his thinking of his work. But when she asked him what he thought about he answered promptly.

  “I was just revolving names. I’d thought of Richard for a name. Or Francis. I like Francis, don’t you, Mary?”

  She lifted her face.

  A mischievous quirk bent her lips.

  “Yes, but suppose it is a girl.”

  “I never thought!”

  He felt something inside his arm that made him pause. They were just on the verge of the farm. They saw the lighted window and Dorothy’s face anxiously peering forth.

  “For such an unspoken girl it seems to me you’ve said a lot.”

  3

  ‘As if they minded cold”

  When the winter came at last, it settled an icy grip upon the farm. Christmas Eve began with thawing; the roofs dripped rhythmically all the morning; but as the day wore on, the dripping slowed. When Melville went out at dusk to measure the icicles hanging from the kitchen eaves, he found one four feet long.

  “Four feet of snow,” he reported. “It don’t seem possible.”

  “Four feet deep upon the ground?” Mary was incredulous.

  The end of Melville’s long nose bent humorously.

  “I guess the snow don’t fall like that in England.”

  “No,” she said, and Jerry remembered a winter when the snow was six feet deep in Uniontown and the ground-floor windows had up-slanting tunnels dug down to them to bring in light. Then Melville told tall stories of the drifts. A minister had been entrapped in Pompey meetinghouse one Sunday morning by a blizzard. The congregation never could dig in to him, or he dig out. They found him frozen stiff next spring,— it was so cold,— but he had preached a sermon for them. The whole sermon was frozen stiff. They brought the words out one by one into the warm air and listened to them thawing. A fearful tale. Only the deacon was an unread man, and mixed the words.

  “Shush, shush, you Robert,” Dorothy said. “Such tales before a girl!”

  He looked embarrassed, with a sidelong glance at Mary. Jerry hushed. Mary smiled at her spinning. She knew that time was showing in her, but it was comforting to be so guarded.

  One week later the snow began in earnest. The sun had lost itself at noon, and all the day long the wind veered slowly through the north to eastward. At sunset time, without a warning, it snapped back again to west and the snow started.

  After dark she listened to it, working crisply on the shingles overhead, the wind a steady drone like hiving bees; and the cold stole into the house and the log walls shrank and groaned. When morning came, a stillness hushed the world. Melville’s stockinged feet thumped loud as guns when he got up and opened up the door.

  “She’s snowed all right,” she heard him telling Dorothy. “My Lord! I’ll bet two feet has fallen.”

  His voice was loud, as if he took pride in this elemental demonstration.

  “Dry snow,” he said. “It’s drifting powerful.”

  “You’ll have to dig us out a passage to the barn,” said Dorothy. “Mary hadn’t ought to flounder out in snowshoes. Early-morning sweats are bad at her time.”

  Jerry woke up with a startling catch of breath, and sprang from bed.

  “It’s surely snowed for fair.”

  He looked round the loft.

  “Funny,” he said, “how snow will creep in places you think chinked.”

  He laughed and bent to gather a handful from the floor. His face was bright. Laughing again, he showed it to her in his fist. Suddenly he jerked his nightshirt off and rubbed himself all over till his skin was red. He kept on laughing through his chattering teeth.

  Melville bawled up through the opening.

  “No more carpenteering now for you, Jerry, for a spell.”

  “It don’t look so.”

  “Even hauling won’t be possible for a piece.”

  “I’ve got my flooring ready hauled for Number Two,” said Jerry. “That’s all I care about.”

  That day they did not even attempt to break the roads. They kept a trench shoveled to the barn and spent their time in splitting wood. Mary watched them through the window, red-faced, their clothes all fresh with color against the sky and snow, their axes rising and swooping, their voices talking between the stroke-sounds.

  At dusk the snow began again.

  That evening she started to weave her coverlet on a frame that Dorothy had stored somewhere. The two women discussed the pattern. Neither knew a design for so small a spread and so they made it up. A star set in the middle with little stars for borders, red and white. Dorothy had dyed the red. She made the tint in peach wood-brew.

  From time to time the men would walk across and look on, making knowing suggestions. Mary and Dorothy would accept these silently and then go on with their own plans.

  Every day, no matter how bright the morning was, it seemed to Mary that the snow began again at dusk. At first it fascinated her, the endless gentle downward drift of flakes, or the wild skirling westward winds that smothered everything with the very excess of their breath and fired icy flakes like birdshot from the racing clouds. There was a comfort in feeling herself shut in, herself and Dorothy completing the household duties early and spending their long hours inventing new flavors for their simple food or indulging in their fill of spinning, weaving, and sewing.

  She milked at evening when the barn was warm and cosy, the air invigorating with ammonia. The heifer calved and made a fuss about her calf, and they had a week of fun in teaching the awkward thing to dip its muzzle in a pail.

  There was excitement, too, in seeing Melville take the ox-sled out to break the roads, the white curving horns dimly shining through the flakes as the oxen bent their necks and buffeted the drift with crooked knees. He had a contract to keep the ro
ad open; for one contractor was still digging in the marsh. It had been found that in the wettest stretch the men made better progress when the muck was frozen— even though they had to shovel out the snow each morning.

  Their food was brought in once a week on three horse-sleds. Each sled could carry little, for the perishables had to be wadded thick with straw.

  Dorothy would look out when she heard jingling of bells along the Orville road. Her homely face worked.

  “From December into March, me and Robert never saw a person but our own two selves, and now they come past close to every week.”

  Strange faces had no interest for Mary. Jerry was off again, now that the crust was formed, buying and hauling timber to the other lock-sites. She liked to sit at her sewing or weaving, close to the hearth, watching the big day-log disintegrate and calling Dorothy when the time had come to pry another foot of it into the coals. She could see the flakes through the window, drifting down, and her eyes traced patterns in their fall that brought strange meanings to her.

  Icicles sprouted on the eaves and broke away according to the fluctua-tions of the weather.

  One still clear night it got so cold that Mary woke half numb. It seemed to her for a long time that only the child inside of her kept her alive. She thought she could feel it taking on the forms of life, breathing, turning over to rest its side from its long dormance. The cold was all in her legs and arms and face; her chest felt shriveled with it. She knew she should get up and find additional warmth, and she tried to steel herself to movement. But her muscles remained unwilled. She thought, “I’ll die, surely.” Downstairs it was as still as death. The Melvilles had each other for their warmth. She wondered where Jerry might be, where he was that minute, if he thought of her or if he slept. Her thoughts swam into one another, confusing her, and she only knew she was cold.

  Outside the cabin the brittle whisper of the snow put life into the stillness. It had a sinister low note. Without looking at the window, she knew that there was moonlight.

  Then a queer, sharp, living voice came to her ears. At first she thought a dog was barking, but it was querulous, half human. The sound of it frightened her, and she had a sense at once of the snow pushing against her, smothering her like a blanket so large that she could find no edge. The voice was like the voice of snow. She lay still, shivering.