SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (16 page)

As he had learned from a trip to the Potomac
library, some of the blocks used to construct the aqueducts,
culverts, and locks on the canal had these marks etched into them.
The marks were traditionally used by stonemasons to ensure they
would be paid for the stones they had cut, and each mason carved a
distinct symbol to designate his work. But since the masons hired
to build the C&O in 1829 were paid monthly wages, rather than
by the piece, there were few mason’s marks to be found on the
structures of the canal. He crossed the footbridge to the towpath
and turned downstream.

Locks 19 and 18 were just ahead, and he
reflexively stopped to scan the lock walls as he passed them. No
mason’s marks. The walkway out to Great Falls emerged to his right
and he noticed that the tendon of river it spanned was brown and
frothy, flying at the high level of spring. Past the walkway, Lock
17 lay in tatters, its downstream gates and swing beams gone. No
marks here either. When the wooded slope to his right fell away
into a cliff, he veered over to the wooden railing to look down. As
he suspected, the cliff wasn’t natural; it was a man-made isthmus
of stacked rocks that carried the canal and the towpath from the
Maryland riverbank to Bear Island. So the isthmus had severed a
finger of the river and annexed it to the canal. Across it the
rocks and woods of Bear Island rose abruptly on his right.

He stopped to read a display sign that
referred to two massive stone walls that squeezed the towpath and
the canal just ahead.

Structures such as this stop-gate were designed to
divert flood waters from the canal. Wooden planks were dropped into
slots, forming a dam which diverted rushing waters along a stone
levee and back into the Potomac.

He proceeded to the stop gate and scanned
its ten-foot-thick walls for mason’s marks, finding none. Vertical
slots as wide as his hand faced each other across the sliver of
canal and towpath. The wall before him end-capped a levee of stone
and earth that receded through the Bear Island woods toward the
river. He walked back to the display sign. Below its text was a
grainy photo of the Potomac during a massive flood. His eyes
widened when he read the caption.

Flooding in 1924, at Six Locks near Great Falls.

Not far from where he was standing now. In
the photo’s foreground, the river had risen dozens of feet to
engulf the canal and the towpath just below a lock. Scattered
tree-tops scarred the water halfway to the Virginia shore. If the
photo was shot from the hillside above the Great Falls Tavern,
those submerged trees might have sprung from Olmsted Island, and
the lock might be Lock 17 or 18. Right now he stood below those
locks on the towpath, or underwater during the flood of 1924. He
read the remaining text in the corner of the sign:

Although this stop-gate was a local success, the
canal as a whole suffered great damage from periodic floods which
became more frequent and violent as land was cleared for farms and
towns along the Upper Potomac. By World War I, traffic and revenues
along the canal had dwindled to a point where it was touch-and-go
to continue operations. After violent spring floods wrecked miles
of canal and towpath in 1924, the “old ditch” was closed for good
in all but the Georgetown area.

“A local success”. He tried to imagine the
1924 floodwaters coursing along several feet overhead and slamming
into the stop-gate’s planks and stone walls, then draining across
Bear Island, guided by the earth-and-rock levee that extended from
those walls.

The trailhead for Section A of the Billy
Goat Trail abutted the sign, and feeling he was unlikely to find
Kelsey Ainge’s elusive mason’s mark along the heavily-trafficked
towpath, Vin followed the trail toward the cliffs overlooking the
Potomac’s Mather Gorge. The levee peeled away and dissolved into
the woods as thin trees gripped patches of dirt between
lichen-stained rocks. He crossed knee-deep fissures along the ridge
and clambered over rounded rocks packed together like sea mammals
on a beach, some the size of a walrus and some the size of a whale.
He found himself searching for the next blue blaze, then deciding
on the best rock-hopping sequence to reach it.

When the trail swung onto the highest rocks,
he stopped to assess Mather Gorge. It was dead straight for over
half a mile, with the cliffs on the Virginia shore mirroring those
he presided over now, the two-hundred-foot-wide river running swift
and deep between them. Turning through a panorama, he saw no one
else along the trail or across the river. And no sign of human
presence: no houses or buildings; no towers, wires, or roads; no
boats. Just the mid-morning sun peeking through sliding clouds to
illuminate the cliffs on the far side of the gorge. Nor any human
sound – just the shrill moan of the northwest wind driving
endlessly past his ears. This, he realized, was what the Algonquin
saw five hundred years ago as they climbed down to fish. Today made
timeless, in Kelsey Ainge’s words.

He sought out the next blue blaze. There
were countless stone surfaces along the Billy Goat Trail, but none
etched with mason’s marks. The photo he’d seen at Kelsey’s studio
showed the mark on a stone block, but blocks served no purpose
along this high route. The trail descended to cross a drainage that
emptied into a small cove, then quickly climbed back up a wall of
rocks on other side.

When the trail and the river began to curve
out of Mather Gorge, he reached a sign post. Beside it was a spur
trail through the woods that the sign said was a shortcut back to
the towpath. Thinking the less-traveled paths held more promise, he
followed the spur, which wound past boulders and a dark,
translucent pool before meeting the towpath near the upper end of
Widewater. Towering sycamores mocked him across the water from the
Maryland berm. He turned left onto the towpath, looping back toward
Great Falls.

What am I doing, he wondered? Circling
time-worn paths along the river and the canal, searching for a
mason’s mark and a trinity of sycamores. An old photo and a
dried-out note were the two fragile threads tethering his search to
the real world. “In your search for me you may find the truth.”
Maybe the truth awaiting him had nothing to do with Lee Fisher’s
fate, or with the money, the killers, or the dead. Maybe his
vulnerability was the truth, and maybe Emmert Reed’s albino mule
was really an albino whale. Yet he knew that walking away would
extinguish a mystery and curl up a hidden dimension of the
world.

The towpath crossed a bridge over a small
cove that bit into Bear Island, its head sealed by a wall of
mildewed, block-shaped stones. He stopped to look at the wall and
wonder why it was there. If the ground behind it was higher than
the water, the wall would serve no purpose. If it was lower, the
wall would prevent the canal from draining into a depression on
Bear Island. But the canal could easily fill a swampy depression
and then recover its desired level; the wall still wouldn’t be
needed.

Unless it was more than a depression behind
the wall. Maybe it was a drainage. He remembered the drainage he’d
just crossed on the Billy Goat Trail, shortly before climbing to
the spur trail. Maybe the wall blocked a draw that ran all the way
to the river. In that case it might be there to prevent the canal’s
exsanguination. He crossed the remainder of the bridge and found an
entry point into the woods.

Working a diagonal, he aimed for the
opposite side of the stone wall. He ascended a mound through dry
foliage and found an oblong pond on its far side. Just past the
head of the pond to his left, the ground rose to the back side of
the wall. To his right, the tail of the pond was obscured by
scraggly trees where the shoulders of the drainage drew together.
The gentle grade before him was covered with matted brown grass and
the truncated spears of trees felled by beavers. But no water was
flowing, so while beavers had been active here, the pond wasn’t
their work. He circled toward the head of the pond and picked
through a tangle of vines and branches.

The stone wall was about his own height, and
he walked along it examining its stones. The faces were too flat
and the edges too straight to be natural. Since there were no
meaningful gaps between them, the stones must have been cut by
masons to make the wall watertight. No marks were etched on their
faces. The path to the far side of the pond was blocked by imposing
boulders, so he retraced his steps across the grassy slope. The
tail of the pond was bordered by a thicket of saplings sprouting
from the steep banks on both sides. Broken shadows loomed inside
the thicket, extending into the water and leaving only a slice of
pond visible between them.

He followed the crest along the side of the
pond and down past the thicket that held the shadowed forms. Their
backs faced south and were brightly lit – two old stone walls,
screened by the tangle of brush. Seven feet high with flat faces,
straight edges, and a body-length gap between them. The walls
merged with the shoulders of the drainage. He pursed his lips and
whistled softly. It was a stop-gate.

Why here? He glanced at the tail of the
pond, which meandered left around a bend with the drainage, and
grasped the stop-gate’s purpose. Not to keep the canal’s water in,
but to keep the river out. If this drainage led all the way to the
river, then it was also a backdoor to Widewater during floods. A
path for the river to reclaim its severed finger.

He picked his way along the bank toward the
near wall and his eyes settled on a waist-high block on its right
edge. Amidst white and green lichen, an eroded symbol was carved on
its face. Kelsey Ainge’s mason’s mark! He felt compelled to touch
it, but it was out over water of unknown depth. He pushed through
saplings to the wall and found a foothold on its face. Cracks and
bumps served as handholds, and he was able to edge out far enough
to trace the mark's outline with his fingers.

Vines and moss were sprouting from cracks
between the stones as the woods slowly engulfed the stop-gate.
Looking across at the opposite wall, he saw two saplings growing in
dirt that had accumulated on its scalp. His fingers stiffened, so
he shifted back and dismounted from the wall. Retreating for a
broader view, he noticed that the near wall was also lidded by a
layer of dirt, moss, and dead vines. No trees, but three pale
sticks visible through the vines. They were vertical and aligned,
which seemed odd.

He climbed the slope and beat his way down
through the thicket toward the top of the wall. The pale sticks
were crosses, planted in the shallow dirt near the far edge, above
the stone with the mason’s mark. He stepped carefully onto the top
of the wall and knelt in front of them. The crosses were made from
broken sycamore branches stripped of bark and lashed with twine,
and each was annotated with black ink. The shaft of the nearest
cross bore a single word, two letters above the arm and two
below:

t

h

e

n

The second cross had writing on both its arm
and shaft. Vin didn’t recognize the name.

1

9

Miles Robin Garrett

7

2

The third cross bore a single word, or
perhaps two, written on the shaft above and below the arm:

s

o

o

n

How soon, and what? The ink was still dark
and the crosses were planted too lightly to remain upright for
long. Planted for him, he felt certain. He uprooted them one at a
time. The buried ends had been carved into rough points and the top
ends were broken to form sticks of the desired lengths. They felt
dense and heavy, not long dead.

Who was Miles Robin Garrett and what
happened to him in 1972? The year resonated for a reason Vin
couldn’t place. If the words referred to a sequence in time, how
long ago was “then”? And how far away was "soon"?

With the crosses in one hand, he retreated
up the shoulder from the top of the wall, climbing through the
thicket. A penetrating chill struck and he felt the presence of
someone or something watching. Heart pounding, he flashed a glance
toward the head of the pond. A light breeze pushed a fleet of
ripples toward him. He swiveled toward the legion of tall boulders
guarding the far side of the pond, but saw no sign of the presence
he’d sensed.

As he turned back to the slope, his foot
hooked the root of a vine and he went sprawling. Left hand still
holding the crosses, he extended his arms to break his fall. His
elbows hit first, followed by a snapping noise and a sharp pain in
his hip as his knees, chest, and face collided with the
hillside.

“Shit!” He released the crosses and pushed
himself to his feet, then brushed the dirt and grass from his face
and hands and assessed the damage. His hands were dirty but uncut.
He swept debris from his sleeves and the knees of his jeans as a
stinging pain arose in his left hip; he pulled up his jacket to
find its source. A finger-length gouge was turning from white to
red and beginning to bleed freely. Raising his arms must have
exposed the skin, he thought, and his hip must have fallen on one
of the carved ends of the crosses. He pulled a folded bandanna from
his pocket, moistened it with saliva, and drew it gently over the
wound to clear the dirt and blood. It’s a large scrape, but
superficial, he thought after cleaning it to get a better look. He
pressed the bandanna to the cut and tightened his belt to keep it
in place.

“Fuck.” Realizing that his fall was
triggered by a baseless anxiety made him feel embarrassed and
angry. He snatched sullenly at the crosses lying at his feet. All
were dirt-stained now and the shaft of the “soon” cross had snapped
in half. Its broken base was tinged with earth and blood at the
point. He gathered the pieces in his hands and marched defiantly up
the slope, then jogged along its crest past the tail of the pond.
When the drainage bore away, he continued straight along
thinly-wooded level ground. Ahead he saw a row of boulders. Beyond
them were larger rocks ascending to a rounded ridge and beyond the
ridge was open sky. Still holding the crosses, he climbed from rock
to rock, up to the base of the ridge. A blue blaze stared at him
from the trail. He reached the crown and the sky opened up, with
Mather Gorge and the river below and the views along the ridge
unbroken. He advanced to the edge of the cliff, selected a cross,
and gripped its base.