3stalwarts

by Unknown

  Mary looked down at them. Then the baby cried, again. She turned, picked it up, drew a chair to the fire, and sat down. She opened her dress, and, feeding the baby, comforted herself. But her eyes kept wandering. She thought again, “A hired house.”

  Interlude “Spit on your hands and dig”

  Independenceville

  On a Sunday morning, the Mayor came walking down the main street of the city. He wore an old three-cornered hat upon his head; the black rolled felt shone dimly green. His old blue army coat with the buff facings had been brushed threadbare; and his buff waistcoat showed no single spot, “because,” as the Mayor would tell a person, “for thirty year I’ve took it off to eat my Sunday dinner.” But instead of breeches and black gaiters he wore homespun pants stuffed into cowhide boots.

  “A-l.” Mayor Barley leaned upon his stick to contemplate the shoes. “A new cobbler made them for me back in March. He bought out Willie Bender’s circuit here. A man I wouldn’t notion towards for a citizen to live into my city, but handy as a cobbler. Name of Harley Falk, he drives a blind white horse.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” said Jerry. “He made my wife a pair of shoes.”

  “You’re married, are you, boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look here!” The Mayor turned on him. His little sky-blue eyes swam sentimentally. “Why don’t you bring the Missus here and settle? Here’s the rising city of the west. I tell you what. I’ve took a notion to you. And the copriation will make out a lot to you for nothing. Just toss your eye around, boy, and see where you are standing. There’s Jackson Avenue a-coming into Main Street where we stand, with Steuben Alley running into it. (I give Steuben an alley for remembrance of his everlasting present arms.) Now here, real handy, is the public market. Look over there— what do you see?”

  Jerry looked. He saw a dead skunk cabbage beside an aphised alder clump.

  “A handsome site. That’s the Constitution Opera House. A handsome building. Across the way is the Washington Hotel, or Lafayette Bar, I disremember. The lettering’s wore off.”

  Jerry walked over to a painted signboard tilted halfway over.

  “It’s got the mark of a P, and there’s an R a little way along.”

  “God damn!” Mayor Barley struck his stick deep into the mud. “Elkanah’s got them mixed again. The idea of a livery stable setting in amongst an oprey house! Paul Revere Livery. No sir— it’s the bar. I’ll show it to you on my map. Then if you’re minded, as you say, to build you boats on this canal, I’ll let you have a yard on the main basin. Elkanah’s digging of it in the spring. I had to make him alderman to do it. He’s the common council now for putting up these buildings, besides being swamper in my bar.”

  The sun glanced brilliantly on his red nose.

  “Ain’t it handy?” he demanded, proudly.

  “It’s a handsome layout,” Jerry said.

  “I take it I’ve been kind of cute in naming of the streets. I’ve got it close to near completion, only for the schoolhouse. And I’ve got a bell to put in that.”

  “I don’t believe I’ll settle down just yet,” said Jerry.

  “Well, it makes me sorry. But I’m glad to have you living in my bar. It’s going to do me good to see some part of this canal get done. By dog it! I’ve set on my porch and watched those poor bezabors heeling down in muck and getting nowhere. All the while they get the fever. Even whiskey don’t do any good. You’ll mark I laid this town out on high ground. I’ve lived here twenty year and never had a touch of ague. Yes sir!” He touched Jerry’s elbow with his stick.

  “Let’s just turn in to Clintonia Street, right here. It takes up by the town hall into the park where Linas Barley’s is. A good place for a drink!” The Mayor stuck in a word of advertisement for his tavern. “Good liquor and a bug-free bed to follow.”

  They walked along over the hummocky ground marked off with myriad signboards. The streets had no relation to pedestrian comforts. They clambered over logs or circled tamarack trees and crossed a sluggish creek on one frail board.

  “Some day I’ll trace that crick back,” said Linas Barley. “It ought to flow from salt or maybe coal, I ain’t made up my mind.”

  They circled the park, where an aged cow was brooding over clover dreams and chewing a cud of buffalo grass, and came out of the sparse woodland on the edge of the marshes.

  There a large log house, of two full stories with a lean-to kitchen in the back and a porch on cedar piles in front, faced eastward. The air was clear of haze. Jerry could see as far as Montezuma, nine miles off. The marsh grass was a maze of grey netted with blue, meandering threads, and through the middle of it, straight away, ran the line of the canal. It showed not as a ditch but as a ribbon of roiled water. There were no diggers on a Sunday, but the eye could sight the thin lines of stone laid down on either side, waiting for puddling.

  “You’ve tackled a hard job to lay foundation for that lock. One contractor has gone bust on it. I don’t know why young Dancer Borden bought him out. But he won’t never muddy his Russian boots in any mud. He told me just the other day he’d found a man to make it— meaning you, I’ve got no doubt.”

  He stamped up the porch and into the tap. Jerry followed. At the table sat his helpers, Piute Sowersby and Cosmo Turbe.

  Piute grinned to see him.

  “Do we get a driver for the piles, Mr. Fowler?”

  “We’ll need one,” Jerry said.

  “Cosmo has been hankering to put his hand on one of them contrap-tions.”

  The little frog-mouthed man grinned blandly. He poised his hand above a sugar-colicked fly that lay kicking just in front of him. His left hand made a motion of cranking and the right hand was raised slowly. Then he knocked an imaginary paul and the right hand came down like lead. Piute shuddered ostentatiously.

  Cosmo Turbe turned his hand over. Underneath, the fly still kicked with colic. He had cupped his palm. He grinned and whistled in his teeth. Slowly he cranked up his hammer. Once more the palm came down. When Piute looked back, there was no fly.

  “Now what you gone and done to it?” demanded Piute.

  Cosmo put his eye level with the table and ostentatiously blew some dust.

  Linas Barley was taking off his coat and waistcoat. He hung them on a peg, came forward to a chair beside the iron stove, and sat down comfortably. He had a pipe in his hand and tobacco in a brass box. The sunlight, shining on his shoulder, touched his leathery old cheek.

  “Yes sir,” he said, “she’s quite a city.”

  Piute looked at him under his shaggy brows.

  “Me and Cosmo has been looking at the map of it.” He pointed with his thumb at the wall behind him. “It’s going to be a handsome place, Mr. Barley. But ain’t there going to be no church?”

  Barley lit his pipe; he put out little puffs.

  “I didn’t bother to set them down,” he said. “I figgered they’d just come themselves. They always do.”

  Jerry went to his small sleeping room. The tavern was strangely clean. Upstairs the walls were papered with old news-print. The window of his room had colored paper curtains— blue and orange; they crackled faintly in the breeze. His bundle lay on the foot of the bed, ready for unpacking. With one ear alert for the dinner bell, he set to work to put away his things. Below, he could hear Linas Barley holding forth to Cosmo Turbe.

  “I got these lands by the Pension Law of ‘83. They wasn’t good for farming, so I just settled down here and built me a bar. The Durham boaters come in sometimes. And lately I got word of this canal. Right then I got my notion for a city. There she is.”

  The dinner bell clanged brassily.

  “Six hundred acres for a sergeant. Elkanah, he come with me. Now I’ve got me a black woman for a cook and things are comfortable and the diggers make me trade. I’ve sent in copriation papers into Albany, but they don’t answer. Not that it makes a lot of difference. If a man intends to have the finest city of the westward land, who’s got the right to stop him?”
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  They ate at the long table along the taproom wall. Elkanah Kew was a cadaverous image built of skin and bone. His eyes were bleary and his nose bothered him in breathing.

  “Elkanah ain’t got much enthusiasm for this canal. He don’t exactly fancy digging out the basin, do you, hey?”

  Kew did not raise his head.

  “Wait till you get stuck, waist-down in that-there muck,” he said to Cosmo. “Hell! A little wart like you will be chin-deep.”

  Cosmo rolled his eyes.

  An ample black woman wearing a bright green kerchief served them with fried bass and buckwheat fritters. Elkanah stabbed in heavy mouthfuls. A bone in his jaw kept knocking as he chewed. His monotonous words came round the food.

  “Last summer half the gangs was sick with fever. Every time they shoveled out the muck, some more ran in. There’s niggers working now, and they get sick with colds.”

  “It’s a fact,” said Barley soberly. “They’ve dug a year at it and only got a mile to show. The muck, it wets right in.”

  Dancer Borden

  Mr. Dancer Borden’s residence overlooked the marshes from the south shore of Mud Creek in the southwest corner of the town of Galen. It was a white frame building, handsomely fronted with pilasters that merged into arches over the second-story windows. A grove of young elms gave it delicate shade.

  Mr. Borden lived alone. He had a dozen negroes on the place to work his orchards and tend his blooded cattle; but no sight of them was visible from the house itself. The barns, the oast-house, and the deerhound ken-nels were all concealed by skillful hemlock planting.

  “Mistuh Bo’den is expecting of you, suh.”

  The sly-eyed, slim mulatto girl gave Jerry a knowing glance. She seemed to giggle underneath her skin to see his sturdy shoes slicked up with grease, his homespun coat that wrinkled on the shoulders; even his freshly laundered flannel shirt amused her.

  She left him in a drawing-room whose windows overlooked the slope down to the creek. The sun was setting westward. A mile away Jerry could see Linas Barley’s tavern and the site of Independenceville. In the marsh itself the black-gnat specks of negroes waded in the muck. On the very edge of the marsh he saw the site of the lock and the web-like beams of the pile driver waiting to be hauled away.

  The river gleamed with a steady change of sunset color. Far away towards Montezuma, an active pile driver was thudding piles to hold the causeway towpath.

  But the windows revealed these things as interesting pictures that a man could put out of sight by a mere drawing of brocaded curtains. A flowered carpet made comfortable the floor, and silken-covered chairs invited elegant meditation. There were small tables of foreign makes; one, carved in dull black wood, attracted Jerry. Some day, perhaps, when he had his own house, he would buy such a table.

  “How are you, Fowler?”

  In the door stood Dancer Borden; an indolent, slim figure, oval-faced, with black, possessive eyes. He held his hand out.

  “Evening, Mr. Borden.”

  Jerry was conscious of the hat held in his hand. Mr. Borden made a tiny gesture, and the mulatto servant stole in and gently removed it to the hall. She passed her master with a demure bending of her head; and he ignored her.

  “Dinner,” he said, “is waiting.”

  A pointed finger-tip on Jerry’s elbow guided him along the hall; his thick-soled boots raised clatters from the tiling. The dining room was walled with a French paper on which pink shepherdesses disported with pink swains. The furniture was pale Domingo, suggesting, in its slimness, the elegance of the master of the house.

  He seated Jerry on his right and took his own place. He left his napkin folded on his knees. There was an odor in this house that puzzled Jerry, a fine perfume he thought might come from antique wood. He had smelled nothing like it in his life. It made it hard for him to speak; and he was glad that there was only Dancer Borden to confront him.

  They ate a creamy pinkish soup— tomatoes; then fish, broiled collops of a western sturgeon, liberally sauced with a flavor Jerry was unable to identify; then quail, split upon a kind of toast, with a glass of wine; and wine again to go with the roast of lamb; and another wine to follow venison; and then a strange fluffy dish on which Dancer Borden sent out his compliments to the kitchen. He called it a souffle. Always, after that evening, Jerry would think of Dancer Borden by that outlandish dish that looked so frail, like fluff between one’s teeth, and had a virile taste of foreign cheese. It grew upon one after it was gone.

  Two new maids waited on them, both mulattoes, in caps and dark brown dresses. They moved silently, with trained, averted eyes. In all the houses Jerry had eaten in the waiting girl sat down at table, but these two were like shadows, of which he only seemed aware.

  Borden talked with charm. There was no unmanly posture in his speech. He talked about his hounds. He hunted deer with them, on horseback, like a western gentleman. One carried a rifle and followed the hound’s voice as close as the horse could take one through the woods, striving to head off the deer at a clearing. It made for chancy shooting. He asked Jerry’s advice on boring worms in apple trees, and Jerry spoke of the potash ring they used in Uniontown, and Borden made a little note of that in a little book with a silver-capped small crayon.

  After dinner, when they had gone into his library, a maid brought brandy in a small glass bottle. Borden explained that it was old French his father had brought back from Quebec, when he was a prisoner there (“Seigneur’s Brandy”). And only then did he ask about the progress on the lock.

  “My job’s done except for the gates,” Jerry said. “Your mason’s putting in the tiers.”

  “That’s fine. I knew when I laid eyes on you that you would do the trick.”

  “I’ve had experience by now.”

  The firelight beat on the still, pale face of Dancer Borden like small hands. His profile, turned to Jerry, offered clear-cut lines. His dark eyes had grown velvety, woman-like, Jerry thought. Though here was no woman-like creature; but a man who could mark his buck at forty paces from a galloping horse.

  The brandy grew in Jerry, blossomed inward, and turned his thoughts from digging. Through the curtained windows, where the night was still and cool and clean on the neat lawn, he looked back to Montezuma. Mary would be in her cabin. She seemed happier now. It was a counterfeit of the small home she hungered after. She would have put the baby to bed by this time, and would be spinning, maybe, or sewing at his worn-out clothes, or making herself a dress out of the stuff they had bought together at the store. This summer she had worked a little garden patch. She had had daffodils in spring, and planted rhubarb. She moved about her daily round with a placidity that sometimes Jerry longed to break, but could not move against.

  And all at once he tried to think why this strange gentleman had invited him to dinner; for he had caught some of the same restlessness, half reckless, and half bitter, like a distillation from all these beautiful luxuries. But when Jerry looked up to meet the dark, cool eyes, Dancer Borden laughed. “Go lightly,” his laughter seemed to say. “Look about you, see, and have. But do go lightly.”

  “I was thinking,” Dancer Borden said, “that we’ve been digging through that swamp for twenty months. And there hasn’t been any real progress. One Galen and three Mentz contractors have been broken by it. What was done was done in winter. It’s not the men’s fault. They’re pretty faithful, but the fever weakens them. Poor devils.” He laughed lightly. “I suppose I’m a fool, but I’ve taken up the contracts.”

  Jerry stared.

  “I see you agree, Fowler. But you know the marsh involves just one thing. That’s human toughness. Now they’ve tried our local peasantry that ought to be inured to ague and the intermittent fever. They went down south for Pennsylvania Dutch, strong shovelers, but the fever poleaxed them. Just about every race under the sun was tried except the yellow men from China— where that table came from that you were admiring, by the way. Then I got interested. My own niggers have kept healthy. So I se
nt down into Virginia for a hundred negroes. I bought them. When they got up here I set them free under the recent act, but put them under contract to work for me two years. They still work like slaves under that big buck, Jay-Jay. You’ve seen him. The fellow with the earrings. But they’re chilled; they can’t stand that wet muck. It seeps right through their black hides.”

  He made a little gesture with his hand.

  “Two months ago when I was in Albany I fell to talking with a sailing master. I put the problem up to him. And he said right away there was one race to dig it— the Irish bog-trotters. I commissioned him to get a shipload of them. They ought to land at Hudson before long. We’ll have them here next month.”

  Jerry said nothing. He wondered vaguely what a bog-trotter would look like; but he felt no interest. The brandy blurred his senses, and Dancer Borden’s face hung like a medallion beyond his mazy stream of thought… .

  Rough-and-Tumble

  “She’s done,” said Piute. Nodding his head, Cosmo Turbe swung a gate back and forth. Jerry looked out over the marsh. Work was where it had been, for all that an eye could see. The cook came forth from the first barrack to clang his gong for supper. The three lock builders gathered their tools.

  “Cosmo,” said Piute, “she’s done, and me, I’m going to get drunk.”

  The little man examined his partner, with popping eyes.

  “How about it, Cosmo? How do you feel?”

  “Real active, Piute.”

  They trudged together up the hill, along the Canal Boulevard of Linas Barley’s Independenceville. Jerry remained to pack his chest. He heard the dinner bell ringing in the tavern. A fine rain was sifting through the dusk.

  As he walked up the hill, half an hour later, he saw a group on the tavern porch. Old Linas Barley in his tricorn hat stood right between two men, like a master at a ceremonial.