3stalwarts

by Unknown

  He said, “I consider this the biggest work the whole line will show. Bates has been arguing me out of wood, Mr. Fowler. I don’t need much convincing.”

  Bates, in his dry, matter-of-fact voice, said, “Yes, Jerry. Look here. Look over there. You’re not an engineer, but you can tell how much wood will do for us. Can you build us a trough to carry forty feet by four of water over there?”

  Jerry looked down upon the crossing as if he looked down on a map.

  “The hill looks ninety feet to me,” he said.

  It dropped off sheer from his feet. Now he could see the course the canal would follow. The hill stuck out into the horseshoe pond like a lizard’s tongue. To west the ground sloped up again, almost to the hill’s level.

  “We’re standing on a hundred feet,” said Bates. “But the bottom of the ditch is seventy-six feet over the pond level. Eighty feet in all. And west, there, the ground mounts up again to this level in twelve hundred feet. Near a quarter mile.”

  “How wide’s the pond water there?”

  “Four chains and seven links from edge to edge.”

  Jerry thought.

  He said, “Water that length and height would have an awful outward thrust against the braces. Myself, I wouldn’t undertake to make it hold-whoever drew me plans.”

  Holley sighed.

  “I think the same. But I have got to convince them back in Albany. They passed over my head in ordering timbers.”

  Bates said, “We can use them other places. Now they’ve spent that money for economy they may feel better towards us. They’ve showed their will.”

  “What am I to do?” Jerry asked Bates.

  “Mann’s done all his spring sawing. We’ve had to rent the mill for summer to let down the water. We’re going to build a stone culvert.

  After that, we’ll tell them. Then if they want wood they can send someone out to build it. They won’t get any engineer.”

  “And me?” said Jerry.

  “You’re to lay a flooring, boy. You’ve got to set in piles. I’ve figured out embankment slope for that height. The floor has got to be 245 feet long. Twenty-six across will handle all the water if we make the arch full Roman. The piles are all stacked down there.”

  Next to the monumental stacks of gleaming, brand-new timbers, Jerry saw a great black heap of piling.

  “Most of them are twenty foot,” said Bates. “You’ve got to pile in quicksand and I’ve figured on eight hundred piles. But there are two hundred more in case it’s bad.” He faced east. “Mann’s opened up his sluice.”

  Jerry and Myron Holley looked down across the treetops. Mann’s dam made just a thread beyond the deep-blue pond, and his mill was a tiny box to look at. But below the dam a surge of coffee-colored water boiled away.

  “It will take two days, to get it down,” said Bates.

  “You’ve got a piler?”

  “Bemis. Roger Hunter has brought him in.”

  Jerry looked back at the culvert-site. Behind a clump of hemlocks stood a shanty, and beside the shanty he saw a small grey spot that marked a wagon-hood. He made out Hunter’s odd-colored horses grazing alongside.

  “We might as well go down,” said Bates. “I’ve got a boat to row across with.”

  Holley said good-bye.

  “My driver’s down at Mann’s. I’ve got to get back to pay up with Dancer Borden by tomorrow night.”

  He went away.

  Jerry looked out before he followed Bates. Miles and miles west he could see across the level upland. Rochester lay that way, the Genesee, and miles beyond was Erie. But he turned quickly south. There lay the end of Mann’s pond, and the creek coming in through flags. His eyes followed the course southward through a soft-wood forest. There was a clearing a half mile beyond, and in it he saw a little gristmill. Eastward the view was closed to him… .

  In the shanty, Hunter was polishing his bells. He rose up eagerly as Jerry entered.

  “Jerry Fowler— man, I’m glad to see you.” He shook hands powerfully. “When I got in last night I seen your tool box in the corner. And I thought I’d wait.”

  His hard face shone, and he sat down again and occupied his strong hands with vigorous polishing.

  “I haven’t seen you for a long time.”

  “That’s right, I guess. We’ve been right occupied in Rochester. They’re trying to make stone stick in the Genesee above the falls. And I’ve been hauling it for them. Jerry, when do you plan to come out there?”

  Jerry smiled.

  “There’s time enough.”

  “Not too much. Water will be in Montezuma soon. In two years more water will be in Albany, and long before that time boats will have hauled clear in to Rochester.”

  “That’s time enough.”

  “Listen here,” said Hunter. “I used to think a pity in it that I couldn’t roll my Pennsylvania wagon any more when this got finished. Now I am pernickety as a filly brought to stud awaiting its completion. I’ve spoke to Colonel Rochester, and he will back us up in a transportation company. Say, will you join in with me?” He looked across. “There’s no one I’d like better.”

  Jerry could not think of things ahead; something in him was stirred; a new nerve ripened.

  He said, “I’ve got this place to set up first.”

  “Well, you’ll have company for it. A suckish little runt. Bemis, you remember him? But Jerry, I’ll hold out for you till next spring. Can you let me know then?”

  “I’ll let you know then.”

  He felt Hunter eyeing him shrewdly.

  “If I’d not known you was a married man, I’d think you were girl-piney. Maybe you are at that. I wouldn’t blame you, knowing your wife.”

  The door slammed open.

  Bemis swaggered in under his bowler hat.

  He passed Jerry an unfilled receipt for haulage of a pibr.

  “Here,” he said. “Will you sign this?”

  “I’ll do my best,” said Jerry.

  “Thanks,” said Bemis.

  Jerry filled the receipt and passed it over to Hunter.

  “What’s news back eastward?” he asked.

  “They’re making progress,” Bemis said. “Them southern delegates don’t know how us Americans can dig. You remember Weston?”

  “The English engineer?”

  “Yes, him. He said it would take two whole years to blast the rocks around Cohoes. We’ve done it in eighty days.”

  Hunter gave Jerry a wink at Bemis’s “we.” But he said, “An Englishman’s all right. The only trouble with him is he hasn’t ever considered an Irishman. You put an Irishman against a stone mountain and give him plenty of blasting powder and he’ll go through. An Englishman would do it scientific, but an Irishman would just bust loose.”

  He had fought himself to keep away; but to-day with a south wind tossing out the trilliums up the bank, he would go.

  The track for the hammer was bolted together and was being raised on its angle braces. It squatted knee-deep in the slimy muck from which the water had drawn down, its sledges buried; and Cosmo Turbe on his spiked boots climbed the steep of the track with the rope to carry the weight. He passed it over the pulley. Piute Sowersby, boot-deep in mud, caught the end and guided it round the winch-drum, turned the right-hand crank until the driver’s weight was taken up and its wheels caught on the iron tracks. Dripping wet upon the bank, his plump, smooth face mud-smeared, Bemis rubbed his hands together and stuffed himself with pride.

  “She’s my own idea. I done her new this winter. A take-down piler especially built for this big ditch. I’ve got a patent onto her,” he added warningly for Jerry’s benefit.

  But Jerry was thinking with the wind against his face, “I’d ought to go and see if she’s all right. I’m responsible for her. I’d have gone up sooner but for starting things. I will go up tonight.”

  Piute was patting the crank.

  “I’ve always hankered to get my fists on this. You and me will have a picnic, Cosmo.”


  The little man slid down the tracks, leaped off, and landed in the mud. He came up squeezing fistfuls of black slime. He held them out to Piute.

  “You poor bezabor, what do you think you have got there?”

  Grinning widely, Cosmo opened his slimy hands.

  “What do you think you’ve got, you poor dumb frog?”

  “Picnic hands,” said Cosmo seriously.

  “Picnic hands? My God, what are you talking of?”

  “Well,” and Cosmo bashfully dropped his eyes, “the girls would have to wear white stockings.”

  Bates was casting the sight for the two corner-piles. His rodsman steadied a striped stake on the upward line upon the hill.

  With his monster all complete, Bemis forgot his importance. He was hungry to feed it. He laid his bowler hat face down upon a tuft of grass and sprang into the muck. He floundered out to his vast engine, an impish figure, his pants moulded tightly over his solid little buttocks.

  Four gangs laid hold of corner ropes and dragged the engine to face north. She crept forward inch by inch to where Piute now held the upended pile; his great hands flattened like red lichens on the wood; his shoulders bent and his mouth breathing audible prayers for speed. They inched the engine forward until the angle of the track came flush with the top of the pile, and Cosmo set on the angle cap that transferred the slam of the hammer into a vertical thrust against the pile-crown. He leaped into the well and took the left-hand crank. Another man laid hold of the right. They turned. The paul tickled and the hammer climbed. Bemis with a mallet knocked up the paul. The hammer moved; the rope slid faster than the eye could follow; the drum gears roared; there was a heavy thud and Piute was looking down at his crooked arms and the blisters on his palms.

  “By dog,” he whispered, “she went down three foot.”

  “She’s set her tooth. Wind up them winches.”

  The gears began to rattle and the paul danced lightly. Once more Bemis tapped it up. The hammer fell like a bolt. This time the men holding the corner ropes felt the thud in the muck against their boot-soles; and the driver automatically lifted over the blow and squatted down again a good foot backward.

  Piute took Cosmo’s place at the left winch. They sank her in a dozen drives.

  Two men held up the new pile on the line that Bates was calling. The driver sludged her way ahead. Her beetle jaws took hold of the pile; she seemed to take it with an appetite for hemlock. Cosmo patted her timbers.

  “Bite her, Josey.”

  Josey bit.

  But Jerry, passing Bates’s orders and figuring the cribbing, thought, “I’d better not go up. I dassn’t trust it.” And as the pile-driver thudded down, he seemed to hear old Issachar say, “I wouldn’t blame you.”

  Bates said, “That’s old grass muck. It smells like ague.”

  3

  7 take the candle’

  Corbal’s Mill was a tiny shack housing a single set of stones. A nameless brook running west into the Irondequot supplied power for its ten-foot wheel; and a woods track of a quarter mile connected it with the Victor road.

  Jerry came upon it all at once. A turn round a balsam opened the tiny valley. A meadow full of swale grass bordered the brook with cowslips and the clean-edged blades of blue flag. The stream slid over a bed of moss and cress; when he lay down, the sod was cool and springy against his chest, and the water he sucked up was cold as snow.

  He splashed his face with water, and a trout sprang off as if some finger had released a trigger in it.

  Down the glade he heard the mutter of the running mill; and when he had followed the road a little way, he saw its roof against the tamaracks, shaking over the drive of the trundle. The race was drinking; just beyond it the buckets of the wheel caught frothy cupfuls.

  Jerry stood at the edge of the dam to listen to the noise of milling— the rush of the spillway, the sloshy creak of the wheel, the rumble of the trundle, and the mouthing roar of stones.

  His eyes swept over the clearing. There was a smoke in the house chimney. The door was open, letting a finger of sunlight into the kitchen, but he could see no moving dress. Behind the tamaracks a fretful dog was barking; the sound came faintly over the mill din. Corbal, he thought, must keep a cow. But nowhere could his eyes find what they searched for. So he stepped down over the shoulder of the dam to the mill door.

  Inside, a mist was powdering from the hopper. The upright timbers shook like trees in wind. The miller bent over the millspout to let the flour dribble through his fingers. Now and then he rubbed it in his palms and blew upon it. Then his left hand touched the brayer lever. He did not hear Jerry’s entrance; no sound could live in the running mill but that made by the feasting stones. But when Jerry put his hand on the man’s elbow, he turned slowly.

  “My name is Jerry Fowler,” shouted Jerry.

  In all his face the miller’s still blue eyes alone had color. His cheeks were dusted, his beard was coated white on every hair.

  His beard opened to say, “Hey?”

  He was without surprise.

  Jerry repeated his name. “Can you say if Norah Sharon’s in the house?”

  The miller looked at him a moment, shook his head, and slowly moved to the other side of the trough. His grey boot kicked the trundle lever.

  There came an instant diminution in the thunder of the mill. The dust rose thinner; the trundle clacked emptily on its ratchet; the timbers shook more easily; only the wheel outside, relieyed from work, began to gain a revolution. Silence beat in upon them, harder for Jerry to speak against than mill sounds.

  “Eh?” roared the miller. “I’m kind of hard of hearing. Speak out louder, mister.”

  Jerry bawled his question once more, conscious of the miller’s eyes on his strained mouth. The stones were falling off from their full-throated roar. The note rose up for a dramatic instant, then whimpered down.

  “You want to see the girl?” shouted the miller.

  “Yes.”

  “You needn’t get so hot about it.” The miller beat his sleeves out. “Most likely she’s down to the creek. A person, there, can hear that engine beating where they’re making the canal.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re Bennet’s nephewy?”

  “Yes.”

  “You needn’t look so hot. My name is Nathan Corbal. I was a boy myself once, queer as you may think it. So I ain’t surprised. Stay back for supper.”

  “Thanks,” Jerry said again.

  Corbal kicked the trundle lever over and the water laid its hand upon the mill, and the silence that had seemed so mastering a breath before was battered forth.

  The miller hoisted a sack and cast its contents into the hopper with a practised fling of his shoulder. He caught the flour from the spout.

  “This wheat smells colicsome to me,” he shouted.

  But Jerry had gone out.

  A footpath meandered along the brook bank; and the grass that Jerry walked through reached halfway to his knees. The sun was warm against his face, and the air perfect in its stillness; and the sunset flush reached itself upward, and floated a misty veil over the small valley.

  The stream crept under the overhanging grass banks, occasionally offering reflection in the corner of a bend; its current was like glass. It curved round the tamaracks and suddenly entered the dark water of the Irondequot; and here the footpath turned north, mounting into the woods.

  Jerry came upon her in an open patch of fine pale woods-grass where honeysuckle and rue unfolded darker leaves. She was looking down at the running water of the creek. On the far bank, flags raised a palisade along the water, and gazing back at the girl a heron stood on tiptoe. They looked as if they had not moved for hours. But when Jerry stepped forth, the heron tilted forward. He lost his grace; his wings became lugubrious, heavy, pulsing oars, and his reflection in the water, which had been so clear when he stood still, now broke across the eddies of the central current.

  The girl lifted her head to watch the heron go. For an instan
t Jerry saw her profile, clear-cut against the leaves, the small arched nose, the dark eye absorbed in the bird’s flight. She was wearing the same dress, fitting her slim arms closely as she leaned back upon them with her hands in grass.

  He could find no words.

  Then she turned slowly to face him. Her lips bent quietly. The heavy, deep-fringed lids sank slightly over her dark eyes, and her head bent.

  He sat down awkwardly beside her.

  “I couldn’t come up sooner,” he said at last. “I hope you’ve been all right.”

  She lifted her eyes to his.

  “Mr. Corbal has been nice, and his wife too.”

  Her answer subtly conveyed a different meaning.

  “It must have been lonesome to you.”

  “A person feels quiet here. A person feels safe.”

  “Just the same, it must have been lonesome to you.”

  Her glance was slow, time-taking; her voice half toneless.

  “Down here I heard where you were working.”

  “That was the piler.”

  “It sounded powerful. Like a bittern. But it came all day long.”

  Jerry’s hands twitched on his knees.

  “It does get into one.”

  Her eyes dropped down before him.

  “Yes. It must be a powerful piece of work,” her voice went on. “And the queer old man that brought me here said you had charge of it.”

  “I’m just building the culvert flooring. There’s stonework to do after, and then the embankment.”

  “I would mightily like to see it sometime.”

  “There’s nothing to see now, except a lot of men working in muck mud.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Drive piles.”

  He felt a little prick of pleasure at her interest. But as he looked at her, his instinct veered away from work. Now, by an ironic twist, he saw that he would rather be away, lost in a new land; and without thinking of it he saw his life as Mary had desired. Himself alone, performing his own tillage, coming home.