A Day in the Life

by Gardner Duzois

  The routiers themselves were surrounded by a mass of legend. There had always been gangs of footpads in the Southwest, probably always would be; they smuggled, they stole, they looted the road trains. Usually, but not invariably, they stopped short at murder. Some years the haulers suffered worse than others; Jesse could remember the Lady Margaret limping home one black night with her steersman dead from a crossbow quarrel, half her train ablaze and old Eli swearing death and destruction. Troops from as far off as Sorviodunum had combed the heath for days, but it had been useless. The gang had dispersed; gone to their homes if Eli’s theories had been correct, turned back into honest God-fearing citizens. There’d been nothing on the heath to find; the rumored strongholds of the outlaws just didn’t exist.

  Jesse stoked again, shivering inside his coat. The Margaret carried no guns; you didn’t fight the routiers if they came, not if you wanted to stay alive. At least not by conventional methods; Eli had had his own ideas on the matter, though he hadn’t lived long enough to see them carried out. Jesse set his mouth. If they came, they came; but all they’d get from the firm of Strange they’d be welcome to keep. The business hadn’t been built on softness; in this England, haulage wasn’t a soft trade.

  A mile or so ahead a brook, a tributary of the Frome, crossed the road. On this run the haulers usually stopped there to replenish their tanks. There were no waterholes on the heath; the cost of making them would be prohibitive. Water standing in earth hollows would turn brackish and foul, unsafe for the boilers; the splashes would have to be concrete lined, and a job like that would set somebody back half a year’s profits. Cement manufacture was controlled rigidly by Rome, its price prohibitive. The embargo was deliberate, of course; the stuff was far too handy for the erection of quick strongpoints. Over the years there had been enough revolts in the country to teach caution even to the Popes.

  Jesse, watching ahead, saw the sheen of water or ice. His hand went to the reversing lever and the train brakes. The Margaret stopped on the crown of a little bridge. Its parapets bore solemn warnings about “ponderous carriages” but few of the haulers paid much attention to them, after dark at least. He swung down and unstrapped the heavy armored hose from the side of the boiler, slung its end over the bridge. Ice broke with a clatter. The water lifts hissed noisily, steam pouring from their vents. A few minutes and the job was done. The Margaret would have made Poole and beyond without trouble; but no hauler worth his salt ever felt truly secure with his tanks less than brimming full. Especially after dark, with the ever-present chance of attack. The steamer was ready now if need be for a long, hard flight.

  Jesse recoiled the hose and took the running lamps out of the tender. Four of them—one for each side of the boiler, two for the front axle. He hung them in place, turning the valves over the carbide, lifting the front glasses to sniff for acetylene. The lamps threw clear white fans of light ahead and to each side, making the frost crystals on the road surface sparkle. Jesse moved off again. The cold was bitter; he guessed several degrees of frost already, and the worst of the night was still to come. This was the part of the journey where you started to think of the cold as a personal enemy. It caught at your throat, drove glassy claws into your back; it was a thing to be fought, continuously, with the body and brain. Cold could stun a man, freeze him on the footplate till his fire burned low and he lost steam and hadn’t the sense to stoke. It had happened before; more than one hauler had lost his life like that out on the road. It would happen again.

  The Lady Margaret bellowed steadily; the wind moaned in across the heath.

  On the landward side, the houses and cottages of Poole huddled behind a massive rampart and ditch. Along the fortifications, cressets burned; their light was visible for miles across the waste ground. The Margaret raised the line of twinkling sparks, closed with them slowly. In sight of the West Gate, Jesse spun the brake wheel and swore. Stretching out from the walls, dimly visible in torchlight, was a confusion of traffic: Burrells, Avelings, Claytons, Fowlers, each loco with a massive train. Officials scurried about; steam plumed into the air; the many engines made a muted thundering. The Lady Margaret slowed, jetting white clouds like exhaled breath, edged into the turmoil alongside a ten-horse Fowler liveried in the colors of the Merchant Adventurers.

  Jesse was fifty yards from the gates, and the jam looked as if it would take an hour or more to sort out. The air was full of din; the noise of the engines, shouts from the steersmen and drivers, the bawling of town marshals and traffic wardens. Bands of Pope’s Angels wound between the massive wheels, chanting carols and holding up their cups for offerings. Jesse hailed a harassed-looking peeler. The sergeant grounded his halberd, looked back at the Lady Margaret’s load and grinned.

  “Bishop Blaize’s benison again, friend?”

  Jesse grunted an affirmative; alongside, the Fowler let fly a deafening series of hoots.

  “Belay that,” roared the policeman. “What’ve ye got up there that needs so much hurry?”

  The driver, a little sparrow of a man muffled in scarf and greatcoat, spat a cigarette butt overboard. “Shellfish for ‘is ‘oliness,” he quipped. “They’re burning Rome tonight. . . .” The story of Pope Orlando dining on oysters while his mercenaries sacked Florence had already passed into legend.

  “Any more of that,” shouted the sergeant furiously, “and you’ll find the gates shut in your face. You’ll lie on the heath all night, and the routiers can have their pick of you. Now roll that pile of junk—roll it, I say. . . .”

  A gap had opened ahead; the Fowler thundered contemptuously and moved into it. Jesse followed. An age of shunting and hooting and he was finally past the bottleneck, guiding his train down the long main street of Poole.

  Strange and Sons maintained a bonded store on the quay, not far from the old customs house. The Margaret threaded her way to it, inching between piles of merchandise that had overflowed from loading bays. The docks were busy for so late in the season; Jesse passed a Scottish collier, a big German freighter, a Frenchman; a New Worlder, an ex-slaver by her raking lines, a handsome Swedish clipper still defiantly under sail; and an old Dutch tramp, the Groningen, that he knew to be still equipped with the antiquated and curious mercury boilers. He swung his train eventually into the company warehouse, nearly an hour overdue.

  The return load had already been made up; Jesse ditched the freight cars thankfully, handed over the manifest to the firm’s agent and backed onto the new haul. He saw again to the securing of the trail load, built steam and headed out. The cold was deep inside him now, the windows of the waterfront pubs tempting with their promise of warmth, drink and hot food; but tonight the Margaret wouldn’t lie in Poole. It was nearly eight of the clock by the time she reached the ramparts, and the press of traffic was gone. The gates were opened by a surly-faced sergeant; Jesse guided his train through to the open road. The moon was high now, riding a clear sky, and the cold was intense.

  A long drag southwest, across the top of Poole harbor to where the Wareham turn branched left from the road to Durnovaria. Jesse coaxed the cars around it. He gave the Margaret her head, clocking twenty miles an hour on the open road. Then into Wareham, the awkward bend by the railway crossing; past the Black Bear with its monstrous carved sign and over the Frome where it ran into the sea, limning the northern boundary of Purbeck Island. After that the heaths again: Stoborough, Slepe, Middlebere, Norden, empty and vast, full of droning wind. Finally a twinkle of light showed ahead, high off the road and to the right; the Margaret thundered into Corvesgeat, the ancient pass through the Purbeck hills. Foursquare in the cutting and commanding the road, the great castle of Corfe squatted atop its mound, windows blazing light like eyes. My Lord of Purbeck must be in residence then, receiving his guests for Christmas.

  The steamer circled the high flanks of the motte, climbed to the village beyond. She crossed the square, wheels and engine reflecting a hollow clamor from the front of the Greyhound Inn, climbed again through the long main street to where
the heath was waiting once more, flat and desolate, haunted by wind and stars.

  The Swanage road. Jesse, doped by the cold, fought the idea that the Margaret had been running through this void fuming her breath away into blackness like some spirit cursed and bound in a frozen hell. He would have welcomed any sign of life, even of the routiers; but there was nothing. Just the endless bitterness of the wind, the darkness stretching out each side of the road. He swung his mittened hands, stamping on the footplate, turning to see the tall shoulders of the load swaying against the night, way back the faint reflection of the tail lamps. He’d long since given up cursing himself for an idiot. He should have laid up at Poole, moved out again with the dawn; he knew that well enough. But tonight he felt obscurely that he was not driving but being driven.

  He valved water through the preheater, stoked, valved again. One day they’d swap these solid burners for oil-fueled machines. The units had been available for years now; but oil firing was still a theory in limbo, awaiting the Papal verdict. Might be a decision next year, or the year after; or maybe not at all. The ways of Mother Church were devious, not to be questioned by the herd.

  Old Eli would have fitted oil burners and damned the priests black to their faces, but his drivers and steersmen would have balked at the excommunication that would certainly have followed. Strange and Sons had bowed the knee there, not for the first time and not for the last. Jesse found himself thinking about his father again while the Margaret slogged upward, back into the hills. It was odd; but now he felt he could talk to the old man. Now he could explain his hopes, his fears. . . . Only now was too late; because Eli was dead and gone, six foot of Dorset muck on his chest. Was that the way of the world? Did people always feel they could talk, and talk, when it was just that bit too late?

  The big mason’s yard outside Long Tun Matravers. The piles of stone thrust up, dimly visible in the light of the steamer’s lamps, breaking at last the deadly emptiness of the heath. Jesse hooted a warning; the voice of the Burrell rushed across the housetops, mournful and huge. The place was deserted, like a town of the dead. On the right the King’s Head showed dim lights; its sign creaked uneasily, rocking in the wind. The Margaret’s wheels hit cobbles, slewed; Jesse spun the brakes on, snapping back the reversing lever to cut the power from the pistons. The frost had gathered thickly here; in places the road was like glass. At the crest of the hill into Swanage he twisted the control that locked his differentials. The loco steadied and edged down, groping for her haven. The wind skirled, lifting a spray of snow crystals across her headlights.

  The roofs of the little town seemed to cluster under their mantle of frost. Jesse hooted again, the sound enormous between the houses. A gang of kids appeared from somewhere, ran yelling alongside the train. Ahead was a crossroads, and the yellow lamps on the front of the George Hotel. Jesse aimed the loco for the yard entrance, edged forward. The smokestack brushed the passageway overhead. Here was where he needed a mate; the steam from the Burrell, blowing back in the confined space, obscured his vision. The children had vanished; he gentled the reversing lever, easing in. The exhaust beats thrashed back from the walls, then the Margaret was clear, rumbling across the yard. The place had been enlarged years back to take the road trains; Jesse pulled across between a Garrett and a six-horse Clayton and Shuttleworth, neutralized the reversing lever and closed the regulator. The pounding stopped at last.

  The hauler rubbed his face and stretched. The shoulders of his coat were beaded with ice; he brushed at it and got down stiffly, shoved the scotches under the engine’s wheels, valved off her lamps. The hotel yard was deserted, the wind booming in the surrounding roofs; the boiler of the loco seethed gently. Jesse blew her excess steam, banked his fire and shut the dampers, stood on the front axle to set a bucket upside down atop the chimney. The Margaret would lie the night now safely. He stood back and looked at the bulk of her still radiating warmth, the faint glint of light from round the ash pan. He took his haversack from the cab and walked to the George to check in.

  They showed him his room and left him. He used the loo, washed his face and hands and left the hotel. A few yards down the street the windows of a pub glowed crimson, light seeping through the drawn curtains. Its sign proclaimed it the Mermaid Inn. He trudged down the alley that ran alongside the bars. The back room was full of talk, the air thick with the fumes of tobacco. The Mermaid was a haulers’ pub; Jesse saw half a score of men he knew: Tom Skinner from Powerstock, Jeff Holroyd from Wey Mouth, two of old Serjeantson’s boys. On the road, news travels fast; they crowded round him, talking against each other. He grunted answers, pushing his way to the bar. Yes, his father had had a sudden hemorrhage; no, he hadn’t lived long after it. Five of the clock the next afternoon . . . He pulled his coat open to reach his wallet, gave his order, took the pint and the double Scotch. A poker, thrust glowing into the tankard, mulled the ale; creamy froth spilled down the sides of the pot. The spirit burned Jesse’s throat, made his eyes sting. He was fresh off the road; the others made room for him as he crouched knees apart in front of the fire. He swigged at the pint, feeling heat invade his crotch, move into his stomach. Somehow his mind could still hear the pounding of the Burrell; the vibration of her wheel was still in his fingers. Time later for talk and questioning; first the warmth. A man had to be warm.

  She managed somehow to cross and stand behind him, spoke before he knew she was there. He stopped chafing his hands and straightened awkwardly, conscious now of his height and bulk.

  “Hello, Jesse . . . “

  Did she know? The thought always came. All those years back when he’d named the Burrell; she’d been a gawky stripling then, all legs and eyes, but she was the Lady he’d meant. She’d been the ghost that haunted him those hot, adolescent nights, trailing her scent among the scents of the garden flowers. He’d been on the steamer when Eli took that monstrous bet, sat and cried like a fool because when the Burrell breasted the last slope she wasn’t winning fifty golden guineas for his father, she was panting out the glory of Margaret. But Margaret wasn’t a stripling now, not anymore; the lamps put bright highlights on her brown hair, her eyes flickered at him, the mouth quirked. . . .

  He grunted at her. “Evenin’, Margaret . . .”

  She brought him his meal, set a corner table, sat with him awhile as he ate. That made his breath tighten in his throat; he had to force himself to remember it meant nothing: After all, you don’t have a father die every week of your life. She wore a chunky costume ring with a bright blue stone; she had a habit of turning it restlessly between her fingers as she talked. The fingers were thin, with flat, polished nails, the hands wide across the knuckles like the hands of a boy. He watched her hands now touching her hair, drumming at the table, stroking the ash of a cigarette sideways into a saucer. He could imagine them sweeping, dusting, cleaning, as well as doing the other things, the secret things women must do to themselves.

  She asked him what he’d brought down. She always asked that. He said “Lady” briefly, using the jargon of the haulers. Wondering again if she ever watched the Burrell, if she knew she was the Lady Margaret; and whether it would matter to her if she did. Then she brought him another drink and said it was on the house, told him she must go back to the bar now and that she’d see him again.

  He watched her through the smoke, laughing with the men. She had an odd laugh, a kind of flat chortle that drew back the top lip and showed the teeth while the eyes watched and mocked. She was a good barmaid, was Margaret. Her father was an old hauler; he’d run the house this twenty years. His wife had died a couple of seasons back, the other daughters had married and moved out but Margaret had stayed. She knew a soft touch when she saw one; leastways that was the talk among the haulers. But that was crazy; running a pub wasn’t an easy life. The long hours seven days a week, the polishing and scrubbing, mending and sewing and cooking—though they did have a woman in the mornings for the rough work. Jesse knew that like he knew most other things about his Margaret. He kn
ew her shoe size, and that her birthday was in May; he knew she was twenty-four inches around the waist and that she liked Chanel and had a dog called Joe. And he knew she’d sworn never to marry; she’d said running the Mermaid had taught her as much about men as she wanted to learn; five thousand down on the counter would buy her services but nothing else. She’d never met anybody that could raise the half of that; the ban was impossible. But maybe she hadn’t said it at all; the village air swam with gossip, and among themselves the haulers yacked like washerwomen.

  Jesse pushed his plate away. Abruptly he felt the rising of a black self-contempt. Margaret was the reason for nearly everything; she was why he’d detoured miles out of his way, pulled his train to Swanage for a couple of boxes of iced fish that wouldn’t repay the hauling back. Well, he’d wanted to see her and he’d seen her. She’d talked to him, sat by him; she wouldn’t come to him again. Now he could go. He remembered again the raw sides of a grave, the spattering of earth on Eli’s coffin. That was what waited for him, for all God’s so-called children; only he’d wait for his death alone. He wanted to drink now, wash out the image in a warm brown haze of alcohol. But not here, not here . . . He headed for the door.