3stalwarts (136 page)

He looked embarrassed at his burst of speech. Jerry turned his eyes. Caleb seemed uncomfortable.

“Say, Bob, we’ve got to get along. It’s getting on towards dark.”

They didn’t protest. They just waved good-bye; but when Jerry looked back he saw them still leaning on the fence together, eyeing the marsh.

Caleb made a poke at laughter.

“It took them kind of hard,” he said, “Bob’s had a hard time farming here. Crops was bad, too, last winter. I’ll tell Holley to ask him to take a contract hauling stone or maybe I’ll give him one on timber.”

Jerry said, “It’s a lonely place.”

He was thinking of Dorothy Melville’s eyes.

And Caleb said, “Yes. It’s a funny thing she never had no children. Her built so strong.”

“Yes,” said Jerry. “It must be lonesome for her.”

“She works along with him. Two years ago I come through this road, and their steer had died, and her and him was pulling on the plough along with the ox, taking turns. She’s powerful strong, for a woman. I didn’t think to see her take on so.”

Dusk was settling on the marsh, a warm, still evening. Sounds of frogs in the rushes echoed heavily across the level grass. The road skirted the wet land carefully. Bourbon kept his nostrils working, as if he distrusted the smell of it. Through the rising haze, they saw a light born over the grass, and the road turned towards it, and at the same time Bourbon’s hoofs thumped on corduroy.

“There’s Cossett’s,” said Hammil. “I’d like better to be with Melvilles, but I’ve got to see this brute; and them two looked as if they’d like to set alone just holding hands.”

As Caleb said, the wonder about Cossett’s tavern was that it had ever been built. And the wonder about Cossett was that when you saw him you couldn’t imagine how a woman had ever consented to live with him, and when you saw Mrs. Cossett it seemed impossible that any man had ever considered her a proposition.

The tavern stood right in the middle of the marsh. There was one way up to it, and one way out beyond. Nearest was Melville’s, and on the other side it was two miles to the salt works at Salina. A small frame building, once a mustard yellow, its scabrous clapboards were now the color of dead marsh grass. It had no trees to shade it, there was no sign of shrubs or flowers. A little weedy garden patch behind the kitchen stoop seemed to cower at the encroachment of the marsh.

The earth had a peculiar feeling underfoot. It made Bourbon uneasy and, in spite of his long travel, obviously impatient to be gone.

Caleb’s roaring hails, batting back from the walls, were lost against the marsh mist. The door opened and a little man with a twisted shoulder and a permanent cock to his head came out with a lantern.

“What do you want?”

“It’s me, Hammil,” said Caleb. “I want a room for tonight.”

“Single or double?” said the man, eyeing Jerry.

“Don’t talk that way,” Caleb said. “You know there ain’t a body in the house outside of you and Missus.”

The man grumbled.

“Want to stable the horse, I s’pose.”

“Fowler can do that,” said Hammil. “Give him the light. Say, Jerry, fix Bourbon, will you? And don’t use tavern oats. They all go sprouty here. Use ourn.”

Jerry took the lantern from Cossett and led Bourbon round the tavern corner. Built against the end wall was a small stable. He unhitched Bourbon outside and led him through the door. The barn smelled sour and damp. The lantern showed him cobwebs on the walls, black with sticky dust. There were three stalls; and in one a mangy mule turned flat, gleaming eyes, and laid her ears back.

Jerry shook his head. It was a poor spot to night a horse after a long trip. He spent half an hour rubbing him down dry, rubbing him till the lather was gone and the skin was loosened under his bare hand. Then he scraped the stall out and found some comparatively dry dead marsh grass and made a deep bedding. He gave Bourbon only a smack of water, for he distrusted its smell. Just enough to cool his mouth.

“I’ll fetch you out some brandy to take the disease out of it and give you a real drink.”

Bourbon pointed his small ears, and nuzzled Jerry’s shoulder. He snuffled eagerly when he heard him taking out the grain bag.

Jerry left him uneasily. It was no fit place to night a horse in, he told himself again. And when he entered the inn he told himself that it was no better place to night a man.

There was just one room for public use downstairs. A bedroom and storeroom opened off it. Upstairs, he judged, were public bedrooms. The whole house was musty with the marsh air, but stale also with the smell of years of liquor and tobacco. The only fresh thing, barring a few new cobwebs, was the fire. Caleb sat close on one side of the fireplace with Cossett standing beside him. Across the hearth, a mountain of shawls, a woman snuffled upon a low stool. The eyes of all three were bent upon the cook. She was a negro girl, with the sinuous lank back of her race and the peculiar stiffness of the shoulders, neck, and arms. Her coal-black skin and frizzled brush of hair gave her a strange air of lowliness even in this marsh night where all life seemed to live at crawling. She looked wild-like a creature trapped in from the bogland and broken to human service.

As Jerry entered, all but the woman on the stool turned their heads. Caleb, solemn, puffing his pipe and drinking whiskey, asked about the horse.

“It’s a damp barn. A poor place for a horse,” said Jerry.

Cossett grinned, showing misplaced yellow teeth. His small eyes glittered.

“Damp? Ain’t it natural? What do you expect, young cock?”

The negress’s eyes showed white at the outside edges.

“Get back to work,” said Cossett.

Something in her glance made Jerry look at her more carefully. He noticed the dull sheen of her bare, black, narrow arms. But as he took a stool close to her, her scent came to him, pungent and overwhelming. He saw that the shawled woman was regarding him from sardonic eyes. She said nothing. All that long evening, even while she ate, she made no sound except to wrestle with her breathing. And all evening Jerry knew that if he looked at her he would find the eyes open, staring at him. Cossett and Caleb talked snatches about stone. Myron Holley had commissioned Hammil to ask. Cossett knew the stone hereabouts. He would deliver it if Holley gave him a contract when he came up in June. Gumaer would haul. Who was doing mason work? Hammil didn’t know that. Mr. Hayward Lewis, maybe, who lived in Onondaga. Cossett grunted. He didn’t know about mason’s work; but he could cut stone. His wry lips unfolded from his yellow teeth. A funny thing. Before he had left England he’d been prenticed to a stonecutter making burial stones. Years ago, that was. Now his trade was coming handy. Cutting stone for locks. A funny thing.

The nostrils of the woman on the stool made a sudden buzzing noise. They looked across at her. She was looking at the negro girl, who was finishing her cookery.

The negro girl rose to her feet. She bent stiff-kneed from her hips to pick up the pan of bullheads and bacon. She stooped again for an iron skillet that had been hidden under ashes. She took the teapot from the crane. She set them on the table and dragged it closer to the fire. She put another candle in a bottle neck and lit it and brought brown plates of earthenware. She stood around behind them, and Jerry saw that she was barefoot and noticed the long, flat heels and ankles. She waited on them, rolling her brown eyes in the yellow whites.

The food was incongruously good to eat. The skillet contained a soft, golden pone— a dish neither Hammil nor Jerry had tasted. The woman hitched her stool along the floor and ate. The food seemed to disappear among her shawls.

Through the end wall of the tap, Jerry heard Bourbon munching his oats. Outside, in the night, the restless silence seemed alive with creeping. There was a small wind somewhere, stirring the grass, that whispered and whispered. The naked feet of rats scurried overhead between the walls. Far away a frog kept croaking hoarsely, and the night smell of the marsh stole through the windows.

Cossett watched his face.

“You’ll be working out there,” he said. “Wright and his engineer boys think it’s easy digging ground. They don’t know marsh ground.”

He looked round him.

“Me, I’ve lived here now for fifteen years. I found this crossing from an Indian. Some of St. Leger’s Indians went across here. I built a house because I wouldn’t have no man to bother me here. But there’s things here Wright ain’t thought about.”

He swabbed his plate with a mess of pone and paddled it onto his knife.

“He ain’t thought about the August fever,” he said, his head cocked queerly. “He ain’t listened to this marsh working. It’s old, older than all the land there is about it. It’s got things living deep down under. Why does it shake to a man’s walk? Why can a man dig up ocean clams, fresh and living, if he knows where? Why is the water bracky when on the solid ground like here I’ve got a well of living fresh?”

He drew the back of his hand across his mouth and got up and hunched himself through a door. He returned with a thin bottle.

“Brandy,” he said; and then he lifted his voice by the shawled woman’s ear and shouted, “Brandy!”

She moved her eyes and suddenly her nostrils buzzed.

“Get glasses,” he ordered the negress.

The black girl came back with four thick glasses clamped in the thin fingers of one hand.

“You can eat now,” Cossett told her, and the others moved back to, the fire, the woman hitching along on her stool. The negro girl sat down at the table and began scraping the dishes.

Jerry said, “I’d like a tumblerful of brandy to sweeten Bourbon’s water.”

“The well water’s all right,” said Cossett, “if you draw it new.”

Hammil nodded.

“That’s right, Jerry.”

“Annabel can take him a bucket,” said Cossett. “She’s got to tend the mule.”

Jerry looked at the negress.

Her face was drawn, but she left her eating silently, at Cossett’s stare, and went out to water the beasts. They heard her drawing up the bucket in the dark outside.

“Where’d she come from?” asked Hammil.

“Runaway. She’d used up what she had when she got here. I kept her. She’s feared to fainting of the marsh— she dassn’t run away in the dark.”

He cuddled the brandy glass and drank. Presently the girl came in again and set about cleaning the dishes. They sat together awhile and then Jerry and Hammil were taken to their rooms.

“You’d best lock your door,” Hammil said, holding a candle against Jerry’s face. “Cossett won’t do harm to us, but he might steal.”

He went away to his room and Jerry listened to him fitting the back of a chair under the latch. He looked round his own room, a cubby near the stairs, with a damp board bed and a mattress of marsh grass. Rats chattered near the head of it. He blew out the candle and looked out through the window. The mist lay level with the sill, and there was starlight on it. Jerry saw nothing else.

He went to his bed and lay down gingerly in his clothes. He could not sleep for a long time, thinking of Mary and the sweet, cool scent of their room, the pleasant sounds of the sleeping town, and her clean warmth. Then he thought how it would be to work out here for weeks without sight of her, and he resolved to bring her out and maybe let her board with Melvilles, so that he could get back nights. And that contented him, for already he felt her nearer.

As he drowsed down, he dimly heard Cossett bolting doors and the wheezing and creaking the fat woman made moving to her room. He heard the bare feet of the negro girl, like a rat’s feet, slithering up the stairs, and a while later Cossett, hunching himself along the wall and following to her room. The house became very still. But even in his sleep he seemed to feel the marsh mist pushing against his window.

The sun came in with a white light, and they left early, feeling cramped and stiff from their night’s sleeping. Bourbon went eagerly across the marsh. All round them under the mist was the harsh mutter of blackbirds, but the mist clung to earth until they had emerged from the dead grass and were once more on solid road.

That morning they passed the wooden vats of the salt works in Salina, and Hammil told him how they made the water evaporate by leading hot air in pipes through the troughs, but in other works they let the sun do it, and in Geddes they boiled the water off in enormous cauldrons.

They followed a road along the river into Hannibal, where Hammil spent a half day discussing lumber with Ashel Pritchard, who ran the mill for Esquire Forman. There were fine spruce growths south of the town, Pritchard said; and the next morning Jerry and Hammil drove from farm to farm contracting the hewed beams.

For the first time Jerry saw land in process of clearing. The little log houses that came so close to the finished farms on the edge of timber, the women hoeing in between the stumps to ready their garden patches; the burnt pieces; the trees in other places being felled in windrows for the fall burning and the gathering of black salts which were traded at the stores as a man used money; the acres of trees standing girdled. It seemed to him that the land was spoiled and stark and dreadful, without shape and without promise; and he had to wait again until he saw a pasture, or a field of wheat, smooth with green, before he regained his confidence in the promise of the earth.

Hammil went about his dickering with tremendous gusto. It was astonishing how many people recognized him. He knew the women, who had ready smiles for him, and seemed somehow to remember all the children’s names. He would walk out with the man of the place to inspect the timber and sit down on a log and quote him prices, spending often a good hour bringing down the man to his own figure.

“If I give you a dollar fifty more a thousand,” he would say, “what am I going to tell Jonas Whitbeck? He lives half a mile from here and his timber’s just as sound and grows freer. He’s stacking his beams, hewed, in wagon reach of the road. And taking my price, too. I’ve got to haul, remember that. And I pay cash money as the timber leaves your fences.”

The man would cut himself a toothpick out of pine and whittle it to suit and talk about the price of wheat and how the cattle got the split-hoof, and ask Caleb if he knew the story that was going round about McNeiland’s daughter. So Hammil would gather in that story and cap it and air his patriotic pride in this great canal he was going to build.