SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (19 page)

“You’re still here! Don’t you belong to
anyone?” she’d said teasingly.

“No,” he answered, “but I might like to.”
Then his face flushed, so he hopped onto the plank and crossed the
lock ahead of her, extending his hand to help her along the last
portion of the plank. When she clasped it and stepped down beside
him, he again felt a spark from her fingers against his skin. He
joined her for the five-minute walk up the towpath to Cy’s boat,
which was still tied up where it had spent the winter.

Along the way Katie explained that Jess
Swain was letting Cy, Pete, and her stay in the lockhouse during
the week before the canal officially opened. While they got Cy’s
boat ready, they could keep an eye on things and help the repair
scows lock through as they worked the levels clearing debris and
patching breaks. They reached the long plank to Cy’s boat and Lee
asked whether she’d like to visit Great Falls with him on Sunday.
She’d looked at him soberly for a second, as if reassessing him and
reaching a conclusion.

“That sounds wonderful,” she’d said,
brightening again.

And yesterday afternoon she’d been waiting
for him on the bench in front of the lockhouse, wearing a trim
jacket over her Sunday dress. The dress was light gray with white
pinstripes and a dark blue sash. Below its collar hung a sandstone
pendant necklace with an inscribed symbol he’d never seen before.
She wore a felt hat, lower on one side in the current style, with
an indigo hatband. Her wavy hair shone where it fell along her neck
and the dress picked up the hazel of her eyes. She smiled at him
and he was sure he’d never seen a girl as pretty. There was
something about her that suggested willingness – a readiness to
step forward into uncertainty, or maybe just to step onto a plank
across a lock. For Lee, this was part of her charm. They’d walked
down the towpath from Swains to Great Falls, and then he had paid a
quarter to have their picture taken out at the Falls overlook.

He extracted the drill from a completed hole
and raised the bit to blow the sawdust loose. What glowing gems
from yesterday’s conversation could he contemplate? Eighteen years
old. She hadn’t mentioned any particular boy in Williamsport,
though there must have been a posse of them chasing her. She might
enroll in a typing class this spring and then try for a job as a
secretary in Washington. A friend of hers had a spare room in
Alexandria she could rent.

Three brothers and one sister! With Cy the
oldest, Pete the youngest, and Katie in the middle. A second sister
died at six from the flu. All her siblings had been on the canal,
one season or another while growing up, with her daddy Jack Elgin
who ran the number 32 boat out of Williamsport for over twenty
years. Cy had done everything there was to do on a canal boat, but
he never liked it much and during the war he left to take a welding
job at the naval shipyard in Philadelphia. He got married to a
Philadelphia girl. The shipyard kept going strong after the war,
since they was repairing and scrapping the fleet. But then Cy fell
off a scaffold two years ago and broke his hip, and it never healed
right. Standing for long stretches was painful, so he couldn’t work
as a welder and he stayed home. A few months later his wife left
him and moved back in with her family. And when Cy couldn’t find a
job he wanted, he’d come home to Williamsport and applied to the
canal company to work as a boat captain. There was several
long-time captains quitting the canal, with business declining
every year, so the company had a boat for him. They gave him the 41
and 1923 was his first full season as a captain on the canal. A
slow season. And Cy had told Katie that things was going to get
worse for the canal, with the good coal deposits in Cumberland
mostly mined out.

Lee spun the screw to open the vise and
pulled out the last drilled pole. Cy’s boat was almost ready, and
after that he’d be waiting for the canal to open and for his two
new colored boys to come up from Washington. So Katie was taking
Pete down to the amusement park at Glen Echo on Wednesday. Her
friend from Alexandria was going to go with them, and then they was
all going back to Alexandria for a couple of days. On Friday, Katie
would bring Pete back to Swains, and then she could meet Lee at
Pennyfield around sunset. Four days from now and it seemed
unimaginably distant. Katie had told him she’d pick up the photo at
the Great Falls Tavern and bring it with her on Friday. He gathered
up the finished poles and carried them out of the shed and down the
path to the house, where he added them to the pile on Charlie’s
porch. As he started gathering a new batch, he heard a distant
bleating sound – four squawking notes from a tin horn. Silence.
Then four more squawks, a little louder. His pocket watch read just
past 4:30. He put the poles back on the porch and headed across the
meadow to the lock.

After crossing to the towpath, he had a
better view of the canal upstream. The scow was still two hundred
yards away but he recognized it immediately. Company scows had
decks of planks nailed across a hollow hull, with no storage below.
Toward the stern there would be a small cabin, painted white with
green trim and windows on each side. And there would be
wheelbarrows, shovels, hoes, and bags of cement scattered across
the deck.

You couldn’t see the deck on the scow
upstream because it had a cabin in the bow, painted grayish blue.
It was a stable for two mules, but the Emorys used it as a
hayhouse, since they only worked one two-mule team and kept the
mules out at night. They had a separate cabin toward the stern. In
between the stable and the cabin were six wooden hatches, painted
gray, that covered the cargo stored in the hull. The Emory’s scow
was two or three feet narrower than a coal barge and less than half
as long, so it was much easier to steer through locks. If you had
someone on board who knew how to steer, Lee thought.

The mule team approached pulling in single
file along the edge of the towpath, close to the canal. No bells on
this team – for the same reason, he guessed, that there was no name
painted on the transom. The driver was Kevin Emory and he walked
behind the team down the center of the path. When he saw Lee, he
raised his tin horn and blew a few celebratory toots. Lee jogged up
the towpath to greet him.

“He-ey-ey lockee! Set your gates, keeper,
we’re driving through!” Kevin pushed his ratty black fedora back on
his head and grinned at Lee with tobacco-stained teeth; his fleshy
face reddened above his russet mustache. “Good to see you,
cousin.”

Lee shook Kevin’s hand and waved to Tom, who
waved back from the tiller but said nothing. Lee fell in alongside
Kevin as the mules kept walking. “How’s your run going?”

“Fair enough,” Kevin said. “Though I’d
rather be steering than driving.” He turned his head to spit
tobacco juice onto the path. “We’re switching at every lock, but I
always seem to drive the long levels. Today I drove the damn
seven-mile level of Point of Rocks and then the damn eight-mile
level of Riley’s Lock.”

“I guess that means Tom drove the damn
nine-mile level of Whites Ferry in between.”
Kevin laughed and the crow’s feet around his eyes burrowed into
soft red skin. “If you say so, Lee. Didn’t seem like no nine miles
to me!”

“Where you coming from today?”

“Monocacy River. We tied up just past the
aqueduct, above the lock.”

“That’s about mile 42,” Lee said.
“Pennyfield is mile 20.” He looked at the chestnut coats of the
mules, whose ribs were showing. These mules were much thinner than
the four he had returned to Cy Elgin on Saturday. “I hope you’re
not asking your team to start the season with a thirty-mile trick.
They get any breaks today?”

“Sure, lots of ‘em,” Kevin said. “Every time
we was locking through!” He flashed Lee a jowly smile, and Lee
watched a drop of dark juice slide over his lower lip. Kevin put
his hand on Lee’s shoulder and his voice softened. “We put our feet
up for a bit and watered ‘em at Chisel Branch, just past the Goose
Creek River Lock. And we figured they might enjoy some
canal-company corn when we got here.” He winked at Lee. “Case you
seen a delivery yet.”

Lee looked away to hide the irritation on
his face. Charlie’s corn crib was partly full, but Lee wasn’t sure
it was from the canal company. Even if it was, his cousins
shouldn’t be counting on it to feed their team. He changed the
subject. “What are you hauling?”

“Why, cord-wood, of course!” Kevin said with
a look of mock surprise. “I thought you knowed our business,
cousin!”

Lee laughed and shook his head. “Must be a
whole eight, nine cords. Might fetch three dollars a cord in
Georgetown. You fellas should be able to take the rest of the
season off!”

Kevin spat a gobbet at the nearest hoof.
“Seven cords,” he said. “Don’t want to punish the mules on our
first trip of the year. Plus we got some ballast under a couple of
the hatches. You might want to do a little inspection at the lock.”
The mules were within a hundred feet of the open gates and they
knew enough to slow down. Kevin made eye contact with his brother
at the tiller. “You got a snub line for us, captain?”

Tom wrapped a line around the tiller and
crossed to the starboard rail, where a thick rope lay coiled on the
stern-most hatch. The rope was cleated to the bow, but the Emorys
had learned that you needed to have the snub line close to the
captain when no one else was on board. Tom unwound a few coils and
threw the remaining loops toward the towpath; they unwound in
flight and the last segment landed on the bank. Lee ran to grab it
before it slid back into the canal. The rope was heavy and wet,
over an inch thick and coated with sand and grit. He reeled it in
and coiled it loosely around his arm. “If you get ‘em past the
lock,” he told Kevin, “I’ll snub you.”

Kevin grabbed the lead mule’s bridle and
guided the team past the lock. As he watched Tom steer between the
walls, Lee carried the heavy rope to the snubbing post. It was as
high as his waist and almost as thick, with deep spiraling grooves
burned into it. He wrapped the snub line around the post as the
scow entered the lock, allowing thirty feet of slack. The mules
were standing still now, but the boat glided forward under its own
momentum, heading for a collision with the downstream gates. When
the line grew taut and began to stretch, he wrapped another loop
around the post. The line slid and groaned and he smelled a curl of
woodsmoke. He added a third loop and the scow decelerated to a
swaying halt, like a bull brought to its knees by the final knife.
Its bow was still fifteen feet from the downstream gates. Not much
challenge snubbing a scow, he thought. A coal boat was a different
matter.

Tom Emory hopped down onto the lock wall and
walked over to greet Lee. Tom was six or seven years younger than
Kevin, which would put him in his late twenties if Lee remembered
right. He was lean and quiet, almost taciturn, with a dark
mustache, a joyless slash for a mouth, and hard, glittering eyes
that often looked black. Lee always pictured Tom with a Bowie knife
in his hand, since at idle moments Tom invariably seemed to be
carving or whittling something, or casually flipping his knife into
the deck of a boat. Lee was relieved to see that the knife had been
sheathed on Tom’s belt while he was steering into the lock. “I
think I’ll stretch my legs a minute,” Tom said with a humorless
wink. “All three of ‘em.” He strolled across the towpath,
unbuttoned his fly, and urinated on the fringe of grass next to the
lockhouse.

Lee unwrapped the snub line and pushed the
swing-beam through a ninety-degree arc. She loves me, he thought,
as the gate swung closed. He crossed over the scow and swung the
gate closed on the berm side. She loves me not. From the walkway,
he used the lock-keys to open the wickets on the downstream gates.
Swirls formed as the water drained and Lee’s prospects rose and
fell. When the swirls subsided, he opened the downstream gates.

Kevin slapped the lead mule in the haunch.
“Giddap, Mike! Bessie! Up now!” Tom had jumped back onto the scow
and the mules drew the towline taut, leaning forward against their
harnesses with muscles flexed and ears twitching. Lee watched from
the lock wall. Starting a boat from a dead stop was a real strain
on the mules, even with a small boat like the scow. For a loaded
coal boat, a two-mule team might have to thrust against their
harnesses for a minute before they could take a single step. Some
captains would bring out two teams to start a loaded boat. If the
load was too heavy, the mules could get spavined legs, and then the
swelling around their joints was very painful. Lee walked back to
open both wickets on the nearest upstream gate, and the swell of
water into the lock helped push the stern forward. With the mules
pulling steadily, the scow crept out onto the next level of the
canal.

They tied up next to the towpath and Kevin
unharnessed the mules while Tom set up the feed trough. On one side
of it was a folding leg, which he unfolded. On the other was a
rope, which he tied to a tree across the towpath. Mules couldn’t
knock over this kind of trough. Tom dumped in the contents of the
bucket and the mules began feeding half-heartedly. Rejoining his
cousins, Lee saw that the hay looked discolored and old.

“Hand me your bucket and I’ll fetch them
some corn,” he told Tom. Charlie’s corn-crib was in the side-yard
of the lockhouse, and Lee drew half a bucket of dried kernels. He
added it to the trough and the mules immediately ate with more
enthusiasm. He noticed that the chestnut hair on the backs and
hindquarters of the mules was sweat-streaked and dirty, speckled
with the debris of budding trees. The harness pads were worn thin
and more flies than Lee would have expected circled the mules. “You
ever curry that team?” he asked Kevin.