3stalwarts (160 page)

He would go now; but he knew too that he was only serving time. He was afraid.

Day after day, the men at the crossing drove their piles. They had to sink a staging to work on, for the piler broke the mud crust and a man would lose his boots in quicksand. They drove two hundred piles. In June they drove two hundred more. The crowns stuck up through the muck like cobble-heads. The sun hung high in the blue sky over them, or they had rains. A dank, outpouring stench followed the rain and made mias-matic shimmers in the men’s eyes. They ate into the great stack of piles, dragging them one by one to the edge of what had been the pond with an old, chest-foundered horse whose lungs rattled in the heat; they dragged the piles out from solid ground by hand, rolling them through the muck with peavies, and staggered them up to feed to Josey’s beetle jaws. For days on end they seemed forgotten of the world. Mann had left to spend the summer in Canandaigua on the strength of the state’s rental of his mill. Even Bates had had to leave them.

They had three cases of fever in the barrack; and as the men did not get better, they used a Saturday and Sunday to set up a shanty on the brow of the hill where the men could lie looking down at the driving in the muck. They built the shanty out of the lighter timbers that had been stacked to build the ordered wooden aqueduct. A solid structure, it might serve some day to house a watchman for the earth embankment.

The provision wagon came in once a week. But the driver always was anxious to get back again. Sometimes, though, he brought a paper in which they read that boats had come to Montezuma. They read about that for three weeks— it had made a deep impression on the editor. The first boats bore the canal commissioners and gentlemen and ladies, and a brass band in blue uniforms. As Bemis read it out to them, they watched the fireflies weaving patterns over the mud flats that had been the mill pond. Water-logged tree trunks and stumps, from whose roots the mud had shrunk in drying, sprawled in monstrous shapes that waited only for a devil’s word to rise and walk. A brass band! Gentlemen and ladies!

When they came in at evening, they left their shoes outside the door and put their socks in a common tub to soak the mud out. Now and then one of them would make a fuss at mending clothes, for the cook had an oldish needle he would lend. One of the men knew barbering and shaved their heads to make them easier to wash. They saw the shapes of each other’s heads as ivory images; and all the shapes seemed wrong. There was no tavern in four miles; so each man kept wage-whiskey in his leather bottle or Hessian wood flask hung on the wall above his bunk, and drank it lying there while Bemis read the paper. A brass band, gentlemen and ladies!

To amuse himself the cook put in a dozen hills of potatoes; they sprouted quickly. Every day the cook would go out to see how much his potatoes had come up overnight. There was a patch of mallow just beyond the potatoes; but he never saw the mallow bloom. A blister beetle came one morning out of nowhere to eat the potato vines; and he brought it in to drown it. But Piute declared that only the most unmissionated cannibal would boil a living beetle in a pot; he saved its life and kept it under a tumbler next the salt dish on the table. For a while they played roulette with it. They whittled lines like sunbeams from the tumbler rim, and Piute with a watch kept time while they laid money on the lines. Whichever heap the beetle pointed to at the tenth minute took the pot. It was a slow game, drawn out like their nerves… . They fed the beetle on green leaves— until he began ailing. Cosmo Turbe slipped out while the cook was snoring and cut leaves from the potatoes, and for a while it lived on them. But in the end it died.

Bugs came overland to infest their bedding. Bedbugs traveled an un-conscionable way through wilderness. They got rides on animals; but they always dropped off at the smell of human meat. Jerry ordered sage because he could find none growing round about, but it took two weeks to get it. The other men hunted out their bugs and passed them on to Bemis’s bed one evening while he tarred the piler. Bemis made easy pickings for a bug.

Sometimes they wondered how the boss found energy to take long nightly walks.

“Visiting somewheres, maybe.”

“Where’s a man to visit here, I’d like to know?”

“He’s not a drinking man.”

“Not enough to walk eight miles for plain corn liquor.”

“We’ve got better here, anyway.”

“A girl, most likely.”

“Where’s a girl, I’d like to know?”

“Sometime, maybe, when I have got the time, I’ll find that out.”

They pricked their ears.

“It ain’t possible round here.”

“A girl.”

Cosmo and Piute exchanged glances.

“You’re dumb crazy, Andrews. Fowler’s married.”

“What else would he sashay out that way for?”

“His wife’s a handsome article, I tell you.”

“She’s two days’ walk away unless he rides. He can’t get back to her. And he’s been here three months.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“It’s hard upon a married man.”

The speaker bent his thumbs back, each in turn, and snapped them forward. He had large hands; in the palm of one an R was burned. It was an old scar, hardly visible, dull grey; but when he used hot water for his washing, it stood out lividly. He was a runaway redemptioner; in westward land few people questioned such.

He got up slowly, sat him on his bunk, unlaced his boots.

“Christ! It was better breaking stone on the Cumberland. A man could find him a plantation nigger if he could dodge the dogs.”

He pulled his shirt off. His red undershirt had stains under the arms, the color of logwood dye. His forearms bulged under their straight black hairing. He stretched himself and yawned… .

All day long Jerry would find his thoughts veering away to Corbal’s. There it seemed like a different earth to him, as if when he put down his tools he had cast loose the anchors. Once, he remembered, before he found his manhood, a camp-meeting had been held near Uniontown. As he walked, the fireflies brought back the scene to him: the torches redly waving, spewing their resinous smoke into the air; the narrow redemption aisle that led to the exhorter’s pulpit— four empty rum kegs from his father’s farm for pillars. The men stood to the right, their faces lean, their hands half closed, their breathing like a steady wind when there was silence. It made a deep impression on a little boy to find men he had seen bending easily to many toils suddenly grown so wooden that their bodies stood like trees. Across the aisle the women’s figures were pliable as grass before the wind of the exhorter’s words; and under the torches their eyes shone with the unfed fervor of their souls. Jerry remembered little of the afterspell, when the feelings were unleashed to the storms of preachment. Rather he recalled the quiet beginning; the white hair of the exhorter, his hollow cheeks, the fine mobility of his eloquential mouth. He had said that the soul of every man or woman was like a boat with sails, and life was like the sea to sail it on, with a wind that blew away from Heaven. The strong soul rowed against the wind, but the weak soul sailed with it. The exhorter’s hands performed a period; the meeting sighed in expectation of the agonies to come. Then he lifted his face to the sky; his lean chest swelled; with all his might he shouted, “Ain’t it so, Peter?” The woods were breathless; and from somewhere in the upper branches they heard the deep voice of Peter answering, “Yes, Brother Thompson, you have put it well.” Then the exhorter would begin again to work on their emotions; and again, at the tantalizing instant, he withdrew his fervor, calling upon a saint: “What do you say to that, Paul?” or “Come now, John, speak up and tell us.” Preacher Thompson had a speaking acquaintance with the saints. There was no question of it; a person could see that he saw them— the gift was in his face. As he stole away, Jerry observed Saint Luke wetting his whistle with a bottle; Saint Luke was in a tree, straddling a branch, and hugging the trunk to his breast, and Jerry thought that his buttocks stuck through his coat tails uncommonly like the buttocks of Preacher Thompson’s lay companion, Arnold Jones. But the picture the old exhorter had drawn of his soul remained with Jerry; and now as he walked through Corbal’s meadow he felt it as a boat with sails.

He entered the mill and touched the miller’s elbow; and Corbal kicked out the trundle, shook his hand, and shouted against the silence, “Pleased to see you, boy. She said she would be down the meadow”; or, “She’s gone, I take it, gathering berries in the pasture”; or, again, “I reckon you’ll find her by the creek. She likes it there.” He beat the dust from his loose sleeves and said, “Stay back for supper with us.”

Jerry went forth as he had been directed, to find her waiting for him. As he sat and talked to her, the thought occurred to him that she was still awaiting. Her face was calm; but the blood that moved so close under the dark skin was always ready at a word to blossom. Sometimes she seemed to him like earth too rich for the sowing of plain seed; and again, her eyes were sad, as if she kept a secret self and it were hungry.

She looked so fragile then that he felt that if he could take her in his hands she would bruise like a leaf of maidenhair; the thought would leave him unprepared for her veering back into her mocking vein, when her small body became vibrantly provocative and her dark eyes tantalized him with a kind of dance. Yet even then she seemed to him like an over-gifted child… .

“Where were you born, Norah?” he asked her one day. She had been gathering late strawberries along the woods edge of the pasture.

“I don’t know, Jerry, for a fact; but I expect it was in the tavern on Wood Creek.”

“Wood Creek? The one that passes Rome and runs into Oneida?”

She nodded.

“Yes, it was a wild place. Just the tavern. The sign said Jackson’s Tavern. But my father’s name was Ferris.”

“I’ve heard of Jackson’s Tavern on Wood Creek.”

“There’s only one, I guess. It tended to the Durham boaters.”

Jerry nodded.

“That must have been when the Inland Navigation Company was running its locks.”

“I don’t know. Ma was terribly fearful of the Durham boaters.”

“What was she like, Norah?”

“I guess she was a lot like me.” She took a strawberry from her basket and bit the end off. A drop of red juice formed on her lower lip. She sucked it in, smiled, and offered Jerry the bite from the hull.

“She hardly ever spoke. She never chided me for running in the woods. But when a Durham boat came up the creek, she’d holler for me, if Ferris wasn’t there, and hide me in a closet. She served them with a shotgun. She was fearful of them. I don’t know why.”

“I’ve heard they were a chancy lot,” said Jerry.

Norah shook her head to free her mouth of a bonnet ribbon curled up by the wind.

“Some of them looked so, I guess. But some were young.”

She munched her berries thoughtfully.

“Ferris could never like me somehow. Maybe it was because I was afraid of him. It makes a man cruel if a woman’s scared of him, I guess. He used to strop me sometimes. For being late, or little things— however it fancied him. When I was thirteen and he once caught me bad for fair, though, it didn’t seem to make a difference to him.”

“What was your mother like, Norah?”

“She never talked to anybody much. Not even me. She was a silent person, Jerry.”

“Where was she born?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never heard it.”

“It must have been a dreary place.”

“It did get dull when the turnpikes opened up and boats got few. I used to be so scared when the boats came through. Ma hid me in under the roof; but there was a knothole looking into the tap. I remember crawling out and watching boaters drink. It made me fearful to see Ma so fearful and I’d hold my breath. But I was curious to see what they would look like. Once one looked up and met my eye. He was young and looked away. I remember him. He came back after.”

She sorted over the berries in her lap.

“I mind when I was just a little girl a boat came down from Rome with gentry in it. One of them had a uniform, and one was very young and stood up straight. Ma talked to him a little. His name was Mr. Clinton, or something like it. They didn’t sleep inside, but had a fire down beside the creek.”

“When did you run away, Norah?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Some time ago. It was in spring and I had been out fishing in the woods. It seemed to me it was a shame to go back home. When I looked up and seen the tavern in the dark and Ferris in the tap awaiting for me, I just took his skiff and lit out down the creek. Then I landed and got out and walked south through the woods. I came out on a farm. There was a young surveyor there; and since then I’ve been here or there.”

Her eyes looked slantwise toward him. “Now I’m here,” they seemed to tell him. Jerry fingered a loose callus in his hand. She signed a little.

“It scarcely seems as if I’d been brought up. It seems there’s only just one thing I know to do. And sometimes I feel sad.”

Jerry’s heart hammered.

“What do you like the most in all the world, Norah?”

She gave him her little tingling smile; but suddenly her eyes darkened; she put her bonnet back from her head and let the evening wind blow on her face.

“I’d like to hear a sermon. There’re no camp-meetings round about here, are there, Jerry?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’d like sometime to hear a meeting and an exhortation. The exhortation is the best there is to hear.” Her voice became abstract. “When there’s a powerful exhorter I can feel a push in me, as if I lifted on my toes. It’s like what I suppose deliverance is to a woman.”

Her voice broke down.

“I’ve never been gifted to confess myself. Jerry, have you ever confessed in public meeting?”

Her mouth was trembling and her eyelids uncertain: she looked ready to cry.

“I always go if I’m opportuned to it. Hoping. But it never comes. Jerry, I think if you could take me sometime, maybe I could. You’ve been so good to me. You’re a good man, Jerry. I have never felt so good toward anyone before. Maybe I could.”

She put her hands on his knees.