The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (8 page)

So what the sisters did, for they had a sort of quiet spunkiness between them, was to have a bay window cut into the front of the house, and they set up to boiling fritters in it and selling them to eat. The fritters were wonderful; sometimes they came out of the hot fat like a butterfly and sometimes like a blossom, but always they were miles lighter than a doughnut, and gone quicker. It was a queer kind of eating experience and a delightful one, but the kind more or less remembered afterward as a one-time affair, without needing to hunt for it again. People tried to be faithful, sometimes sent their children for a treat or came by themselves for takeouts, but a taste for fritters never seemed to settle itself to a time of day, enough for regularity, and there’s no doubt that the best business is regulation business. There was one young man named Jim, he used to come, it began to be said, some said always when Emily had her turn in the window; some said no, it was Lottie—but the truth was he couldn’t stand sitting in that lighted window, at the one little zinc table and wire chair. If they’d had two chairs and tables put in, it would have helped, but they hadn’t. He never thought to bring a mate with him at first, which would have helped matters too. For although he was a man, and even in those days, even without many automobiles, men could get about easier in love than women, Jim had a trouble not unlike the sisters. He had been born at the other end of the town.

I don’t know that this needs much explaining, even now. Though in his case, it wasn’t a question of railroad tracks but of barges. On the Erie Canal, there was always a part of barge life that was family and respectable; the wives and men too could go to Sunday church and did, though it couldn’t always be the same one, except now and then through the year. That was the difference. For the people of the upstate region—whether they live forty miles from a great lakeside or ten from one of the fingerling small ones—are a landlocked people. And they want it that way, though in those days, without so many cars and planes, you could see this clearer. It troubled them too, maybe, that their state was so various. The people in the towns and farms of that nor’nor’west part of New York State had given their hearts to the chasms and ravines mostly, and there wasn’t much left over for water. Winters, on the short, overcast afternoon when the dairy farm ponds were frozen, of course they skated them, and summers, many a canoe was flipped onto the smaller waters, of Honeoye maybe or Canadice or Hemlock. Otherwise, they sat in their tight dark winters, which the women hotted up with calico, and stared out at the numb farmland through air the color of an oyster; nine months of the year there is never much sun in those towns. Or they drove out to look at that hill near Palmyra where Joseph Smith the Mormon had his vision, or past Oneida, where a community had once hammered silver into free love. And when the barge people came to town—even though a family of these might get to their church several times a year, and come around steady as a season year after year, married as close as anybody and maybe as schooled too—the others looked at them with eyes that were the color of oysters, even though maybe they themselves had never seen one.

At least that was the way it must always have seemed to Jim, as a barge child. At times, he even went to school on land with the others, but although he had a last name like some of theirs, and once in a while even kin here and there, it was the once-in-a-while and the general scatter that did it; he might as well have been a gypsy, or one of the Italians from the wineries which had made a little Italy out of the hills around Naples and Hammondsport, who went to the Pope’s church. Or else it was the water itself that was an invasion to the others, the farm and townspeople, even though it was the found money that worked their truckland and wetted their apple orchards and humbled itself to carry down from the flour mills at Rochester and the knitting mills at Cohoes, and everywhere else. Summers of course, there was more roister on the canals, and the farm-boys meanwhile had their noses hard to the grind; if a runaway farmboy was lost to the barges, he might as well have been lost to the Indians in the days before these were all on reservations—for the amount of hullaballoo that was made. And even when Jim’s parents retired to the little wayside house by a bit of water, which was all that was left for him to return to after the war—and where else should he come?—still, for all the changes that had been made in towns and roads and people, there was still a lingering difference between him and them. A town that size always has people who remember its gypsies. And even if not, as Jim would often tell the mate he’d brought back to share the house—war-buddies, the town called them, quite fondly—even polite as the town was to him now, and even if he could see for himself that what with the house-and-lot developments going on everywhere (this was nineteen-twenty) that if he stuck around long enough he’d be an old-timer himself, still
he’d
be the one to remember, even then. Barge people had their own way of remembering, half land, half water.

It was all in the names of places, the difference between them and the town, he’d now and then say to the mate, across the deal table in the kitchen of the little house, after the dinner they’d cooked quite neatly, and just before they got down to talking, night after night, of what kind of business they’d go into after they’d saved enough from the fat, steady but no-account jobs they’d got into but wouldn’t stay at—no, not they. Jim’s mate had come from the coal mines of Pennsylvania out of Lancashire, England, when he was thirteen, and farmland was to him what the canals were to Jim—though to him, by an even more cut-off memory, it was of what he’d never yet had. He didn’t talk much, either of what he had had or he hadn’t, but he could sing of it now and then—and he could listen.

“It’s all in the names of the places,” Jim would say. “There isn’t a square foot of New York State that isn’t within spitting range of some kind of water—falls, rapids, lake or creek—and within day or two range of the great waters. You wouldn’t think that this inland fever would hit some people this way.” But it did. It was his contention that, let a New York town stand back only ten miles from a river and it called itself something like Middlesex or Woodsville, or Horseheads or Roseboom, or Painted Post. Nice enough names, but landhungry, in a town way; The canal names were another breed, wider and lazier, lots of them Indian or classical, or marined from elsewhere, or simply practical, like Lockport. “Three canals of the inland waterway, there were at the beginning,” Jim would say, in the special, swinging voice he kept for this use, though the voice itself knew that this was nearly nineteen-twenty-one, and the canals were done for. “The Erie, the Champlain and the Oswego. Then, only as far back as nineteen-oh-three—I was already eleven—they even voted to make way for the new big ones, to hold barges up to one-thousand-ton burden. Troy to Waterford, along the Hudson. Kept the old part of the canal, up the Mohawk, to Rome. Rome to Clyde, the canal takes in the Oneida and the Seneca. Rivers, mate. Westward from Clyde, it goes up to the Niagara, at Tonawanda. I was born Mohawk to Rome, just outside of Oriskany.”

“Aye,” would say his mate, who had never seen big water, not even from the troopship. By the map though, pulled out on the table for his education, he could see well enough that Jim had barely escaped being born outside of a town called Whitesboro one way and a Middleville the other, but he never pointed this out, nor the plain fact that many of the waterway towns had a landlubberly enough sound, and many of the mountain ones a wail of water. To him, the hills around here looked enough like Scotland to be Yorkshire, and he knew well enough what it was those hills—and what they had or hadn’t in among them—could do to people. If people here aimed to keep their feet out of water, no matter how much they had of it, it could be these powerful hills alongside, and so wild in the beginning, which had been to blame. Bears and bobcats, even now. But this he never said, either.

And all this was only after-dinner talk, transportation talk really, of the kind men always get involved in, even if it’s only how long by bicycle to Maple Avenue. Though, in their case, it was preparatory to whether the joint business would or would not be what had begun to be called a “garage.” Nor did the town’s semi-distant way with newcomers, or even with its own, much bother them; if the two of them spoke between themselves of such things, it was only a joshing way of admitting to each other that in certain ways they were shy. The town was a nice, pert one, with most of its clapboard in good condition, plus half a dozen mansions made of the small cobblestone that used to roll up on the shores of Ontario, and a lot of silent money in the sock—also not too many grannies with hair on their chins, or other characters left over from before the world got smart. Indeed, Jim and his mate often spoke of it, how it was in the air here that the young people were in control—or soon would be. It was just the town to make your way in, once you knew your way. And its name, if not the most dashing, still had bits of nature in it—Sand Spring.

Shy they both were, though they went everywhere with the returned soldier’s bold air of still seeing the world, and Jim’s mate blamed his own hanging back on his not being American enough yet. He was away on one of his surveying jobs, the two three times, three it was, Jim walked over to Pardees—which meant two miles to town, one and a half through it and four on the other side round by the lake shore. Oh yes, there was a lake in Sand Spring, but back of it there was a rack of hills, making the town a sort of valley—though like all the valleys in this double country it was only a temporary valley, between the hills holding their breath and the waters holding back. Anyway, it was a lot of walking just to appear casual, but to bicycle all the way just for fritters went against the grain, though it was the ideas of the fritters that got him—set up in a bay window for all to see, four miles out of town!—plus a little bit the idea of the Pardees.

For if those girls had been left none of that family business to go on with, it was no fault of their being women; women had run that sort of business before, just as women had now and then done the same on the canals. Whose fault was it, certainly not those two girls’, that there were getting to be no livery stables any more? It was something along this idea he had in mind, as he walked. He’d had women before; he wasn’t
that
sort, and except for just now he wasn’t even particularly backward with those you could marry. But at the moment, as he told his mate later, he was thinking of how the barges were going down, dropping down, derry-down, into a lock they’d never get out of—and how the livery stables were already almost gone. Those who lived by the wheel, or the clop-clop of a horse, or even water, were always being flung offside, and in the moment that whelmed them there was maybe a kinship between them, or maybe a warning, like those failed families that sometimes get together on a back street. Even for a bargeman, who always has some allowable thinking time, Jim had been a dreamy one—not that the mate was far behind. But these thoughts were not unlikely ones for any man who was thinking of setting up the first auto agency in a town, and nearly the first garage. In any case, this was how it came about that his idea of the Pardees wasn’t pushing at the fact that they were young women.

It was three times he went there, no, four. The first and third times he went, there was a crowd of others, or some. On the first time, as he told his mate later, they were just the selection of people you might see lined up outside a mechanical Dairy Cream bar on any roadside today, not important, you understand, but interesting just the same, and always about the same. Only this time, being of the neighborhood, some of them were in the house. But all the rest of it was queerish, or maybe just for those times, or maybe—just for him. She had set herself up in the bay window, you see, stove and all—and although there was nobody sitting just now at the ice-cream-parlor table and chair, she was going at it, wire basket dipping up, and a great bowl for the finished ones and a sweep of the powdered-sugar canister, and then back to the wire basket again—never done. And it was at her doings people were standing to stare. It was Emily. Lottie was back there in the front room, which had been cleared of its rugs and put down with lino, and she was flitting about as much as a roly-poly like her could, serving, serving from a tray and probably eating too, and—it was hoped—taking people’s money, though as he came up to the sight of it all, it was more like a lakeside party—that moment of a party when if stopped to be looked at, it is queer.

As he came up to the house, the sun was going down on the lake in front of it in a stew of orange, and behind it there was that grim, green light which always comes from lakeside woods at this hour—on a fuller body of water, one of the great ones, the light would have been blue. Or brown-black, he thought, though he hadn’t the idea quite yet how much the actions in the bay window reminded him of the way barge life was always moving, while the land and people stood still.

But what he did fancy to himself in passing was that what she was really doing, up there, was making the minutes into fritters, and when he went inside to taste them, he didn’t change his mind. “Quicker’n a minute,” one man inside even said, as he poked his child in the stomach. And it was true, just like it is true of some ice-creams even today; these fritters, really a kind of puffball with barely enough outer crust to hold them in life, were gone almost before you could taste them, no matter how many you had—and the child, after a number of them had been popped into him, opened his bewildered red face and began to cry.

Jim went outside again, to look. She was still making them, cooking up the minutes in that same hard and perfect way women will do handwork of the silliest pattern, as if it were important and admirable. Since that sort of handwork bored him stiff, he went away that time, but not without casting a look about for the stables—until he remembered that these would have been in town of course; this house, wintertight as it might be for the climate, would have been their “other house,” as people who had gone into town business here sometimes said of the home farm. Or else the Pardees, having lived long enough over the stable while the money was being made, might have bought this house later. Still, it was odd he saw nothing in the small barn, not even a wagon, or even on the back porch, a bike. But as he cast a look back over his shoulder he saw that they had the electric, even way out here, though they had waited until the very last of the real light to turn it on; people were sparer with the cost of it in those days, when it was still new. But now they had snapped it on, and with that, the party look was gone, and the place was only one of those halfway businesses with a porch still to it, and people going away from it to homes that were still all home. Enough fritters had passed by. It was time.