3stalwarts (108 page)

They struggled downhill through the drifts into the valley. On and on; it took an hour or more for each of those last three miles. But the team were roused and battled the snow with a steady strength… .

Windows lighted with warmth blossomed out of the snow beside them. In the street they heard the clamor of their bell; and the team shuddered and stopped and tried to shake themselves. Dan wrenched the lines apart in his hands and felt his mouth crack as he grinned at the bald face looking round and the great head of the brown stretched forward, waiting to be driven. Franks grabbed his arm in a monstrous mitten and rang his bell at the horses, and shouted in his ears, “The dirty sons of bitches, look at them stand there!” and he burst out crying, letting the tears freeze on his cheeks.

They drove to a doctor’s and carried the man. in. He was still alive.

“Come and get a drink,” cried Franks, “on me, on the camp.”

“I got to go home,” said Dan. “I’ve got to mind the team.”

They shook hands, and, still ringing his bell, Franks went lurching through the snow to Bentley’s to get drunk. But no liquor could make him drunk now.

Dan drove the team to Butterfield’s barn. He turned in by the Sarsey Sal and saw a faint light burning in the cabin windows. He unhitched the horses and led them to the barn and rubbed them down. He felt weak and staggery, and they were spent.

He pushed the cabin door open. The lamp had been turned low.

“Molly,” he called.

He was weaving on his feet when she came out of the cuddy, but a light of achievement burned in his face. She stood looking at him, pale in her nightdress, feeling suddenly small before him. He had acquired stature.

Her eyes lighted.

“Dan!”

He sat down heavily, too tired to take off his clothes.

“Where’d you come from?”

He grinned, and said stiffly, “Goldbrook. There was a man had his legs broke. I brought him down with a man called Franks. I think he’s crazy.”

She stood off a little way. Then she said, as if to herself, “It ain’t possible.”

Both of them listened to the wind, the menacing whisper of the snow on the frosted windowpanes audible in lulls of the wind. He looked at her seriously.

“If you’d see the horses now, you wouldn’t think it was possible. It’s a wonder they weren’t killed. They’re a team, Molly. They’re the only team I know could have done it.”

He let his head back with an infinite satisfaction and went to sleep. She stood looking down at him, pride suffusing her, as a mother might feel who sees her son grown up.

A knock sounded on the door, and Mrs. Gurget burst in.

“He’s here!” she cried as she saw Dan. “A man came around from Bentley’s to tell me. A man came in busting for drink a while back saying they’d come down through the blizzard. Folks wouldn’t believe him till one of them went to the doctor. They can’t hardly believe it now. My land! There must be twenty of them out there looking at them horses, late as it is.”

She shed her wraps right and left.

“How is he?” she asked, her hearty voice sinking to a whisper.

Molly said, “He just come in. He went right to sleep there.”

Mrs. Gurget stepped forward, put her hand on his forehead.

“I don’t want to advise, dearie, but I’d get some blankets out and heat ‘em and take his clothes off and wrap him up and feed him hot tea. And if you don’t do it I’ll do it myself.”

Molly nodded, “It’s the best.”

They worked over him quickly, the fat woman puffing loudly through her broad nostrils. He only half woke to take a cup of tea, grinning at them foolishly.

“Now he’s sweating you’d better put him to bed, dearie. He’s all right-only played out. I’ll stay with you.”

They sat together before the stove.

“They must be a great team,” said Mrs. Gurget. “It was a fine thing bringing that feller down, poor man. They say he’ll live, but I don’t doubt he’ll be a cripple.”

Molly nodded.

“He’s a good boy, dearie,” said Mrs. Gurget, after a time. “Don’t you love him?”

Molly nodded again.

“You were a lucky gal,” said Mrs. Gurget. “I love him myself.”

Molly said a strange thing.

“I know how you mean.”

The fat woman looked at her speculatively. “Such a pretty,” she said to herself. Then she nodded. “Dan’s a good boy.”

“Yeanh,” said Molly. “He’s an awful good boy. Sometimes I think he don’t know what he wants. He just sits there looking out the window seeing things to himself. He’s so good-looking. The big shoulders and neck and them blue eyes of his’n. It scares me sometimes.” She folded her arms round her knees and leaned her head back as if she were tired. The fat woman breathed hard.

“You started it,” she said accusingly.

“I played up to him,” Molly said. “I let it catch me.”

“What’re you going to do now?”

“I don’t know. I love him. Honest, I do. If he wants me to stick, I will. It’s only fair now. But I couldn’t stand it ofFn the canal.”

The fat woman’s broad face worked into a smile.

“Poor pretty,” she said. “I don’t blame you. When did you find out?”

“That gypsy told me partly. She didn’t know very good herself, I think. I’d been wondering afore.”

“That’s how it was?” The fat woman mused. Then she sighed.

Molly spoke softly.

“He was so big and so nice. Right away I liked him. He didn’t seem to know nothing, and I wanted to see him take hold. I thought I could make him.”

“It’s what you’ve got to do now. He don’t know where he’s standing,” said the fat woman.

Molly nodded.

“He’s thinking what he wants to do. When he knows, he’ll do it.”

“If he stays here on the canal, you’ve got to stay with him,” said the fat woman grimly.

“I couldn’t go with him anywheres else.”

“If he sticks, he’ll have to fight Klore.”

Molly nodded.

“It’ll be a big one. Dan’s awful strong.”

“Right now he’d want to dodge it,” Molly said.

“Not now,” said the fat woman. “He’s commenced to wake up. I could see it on him sleeping there.”

“If he fights Klore, he’ll lick him.”

“It would be a good job,” said the fat woman.

Molly stared at the clock striking three. At times she felt as if she expected to see the horse start galloping.

“I tried to make him have a good winter,” she said.

Mrs. Gurget patted her hand. “He’s had it, dearie.”

She cleared her throat.

“We’ve got our own lives we’re born with,” she observed. “Once in a while we reach outside of it, but there’s only something that’ll fit. It ain’t in us really to pick and choose like men. When it comes to the finish afterwards, you’ve got to do the best you can with it. I’ve seen women fixed like that.”

Molly drew in her breath.

“I do really love him.”

“I know it,” said the fat woman.

Toward the end of the month they began to get rains from the southeast and the roads became bad. Dan and Solomon traveled early every morning to take advantage of the frost. A thinly veiled excitement began to show in people’s faces, and one morning the fat woman came bursting in to show Molly some cotton crepe she had just bought for summer nightgowns.

That day, coming down from the camps, Solomon, who was leading, stopped the bays until Dan had caught up. Close beside them in a sugar bush a man was tapping maple trees and hanging buckets out.

“Look,” said Solomon, pointing the stem of his clay pipe and loosing a ring of smoke.

Mist was hovering all along the riverbed, and it wavered with a delicate lifting motion. While they sat there with the red sunset glow on their faces, —Dan watching the mist, not knowing what to see, for he had not lived by a river,— the horses, all four of them, suddenly pricked their ears.

“I thought so,” Solomon said, a tremble in his voice; and he took off his hat and wiped his high bald head with his red handkerchief. “Now look at it, Dan.”

Gradually a motion became apparent in the mist, a pulling away upstream. As the dusk settled and the violet shadows came into the valley with grey darkness on their heels, the mist stole off over the river, faster and faster, until they saw the last of it, a single streamer, vanishing.

The tapping of a man’s hammer in the sugar bush ceased. He came out to the road.

“If it goes up three nights,” Solomon said, “we’ll have spring.”

The man nodded.

That night Dan found a new excitement in Molly, a shine new in her eyes, in the place of the broodiness he had seen there all winter.

When they crossed the river in the morning on their way into the woods, they heard the water talking under the ice. Just below the bridge, where the wind had swept snow clear, they saw bubbles passing under.

The next afternoon they stopped again on the edge of the sugar bush. The farmer was collecting buckets with his two boys. They had worn hard trails in the snow going from tree to tree, and a small path came out to the road, from where they could see the valley. Now the man walked out, and he had to step over the top rail of the bordering snake fence.

“The snow’s melting underneath,” he said, and he sat down on Solomon’s sleigh and took a chew.

“Did the mist go up again last night?” Solomon asked.

“Yeanh,” said the man.

“Two nights,” said Solomon.

“I’ve seen it lack the third in March many a year,” the man said. “I ain’t expecting it now.”

“Let’s wait and see,” Solomon said.

Dan nodded.

The horses shook themselves with a jingling of traces, and the bald-faced black pawed at the snow and snuffed up deep breaths.

From where they sat the men could see the valley spread out below them, the city small and flat in the perspective, and the farmhouses dots upon the grey snow. The farmer licked his thumb and rubbed the edges of his nostrils and drew deep breaths.

“There’s a sour smell to the snow.”

“I’d noticed it already,” Solomon said. “The tracks are running wild all through the woods.”

“The river’s been talkin’ all day.”

A deep silence brooded.

“I had my cows in the barnyard this morning,” the man observed. “My wife’ll turn them out soon for a spell.”

Even as he spoke, out of sight beyond the woods on the right they heard a cowbell ringing. The sound brought a lump into Dan’s chest and he stared as if he would pierce the trees to see the spotted figures.

Beyond the river the railroad tracks ran straight in a narrow black band. Along it a train swooped, the engine a bright glitter of blue and silver, spouting a trail of smoke. As it passed, it gave a long whistle, then two short; and the sound crept up to the two boaters until it seemed to lie at the feet of the horses. In all the scene the train was the only moving thing. The farmer pointed it out and gave a long spit of brown down the road toward the valley.

“They’re going to kill the canal.”

The little man snorted.

“Them dinkey wagons,” he said.

“They make money in the winter,” the farmer said. “In summer now they can cut their rates for competition. They go fast.”

“Cripus!” said Solomon. “Let ‘em try.”

But it came to Dan that the farmer might be right. And the farmer said, “People like things to come quick. Mail, and freight, and money. It saves a bother of thinking.”

As the sun set, the same soft colors they had seen before were evolved on the hills, shades of vermilion, and violet, and cobalt blue. A cloud of rolling masses of grey reared up in the south, with a warm look of rain in the depths of it. Far down on a farm, dull sappy chunks of sound broke out; a man was splitting firewood. His axe glittered in front of the shed, flashing a speck of gold.

All at once, in the snow round them, they heard a pulse begin to beat, a faint slow ticking, as if a clock, dusty and forgotten in an attic, had suddenly begun to run. Without warning a blotch of gold broke out in an open space beside the road, and spread upon the snow and began to move toward the river.

They stared at it unbelieving.

“I never knowed a brook ran there,” Solomon said. “I’d never guessed it.”

“Yeanh,” said the farmer. “There’s good fishing into it. My boy caught a trout weighing better than a pound last May.”

Suddenly he pointed, his arm rigid.

“Look!”

The mist was being born upon the river. It spread rapidly. Feelers of it began to creep up from the valley, winding in and out among the balsams, bringing the perfume of the trees with it.

For a breath they watched it.

“It’s moving up,” Solomon said. “Look, you can see it down there against them elms.”

“Yeanh,” said the farmer.

He got to his feet.

“I’ve got to be getting back. I expect a heifer due tonight. She might be coming in early.”

He went back into the sugar bush, calling his boys.

Dan and Solomon still lingered. “It’s spring,” the little man said. Each began to see in his mind’s eye the canal coming to life, the long lines of boats moving east and west. The strokes of the axe sounded like the crack of whips. They heard a wail like a horn, and for an instant they were tense, looking for the boat. But it turned out to be a train of cars, running in from Albany, and the engine blew again on a flat whistle.

“Ged-dup,” said Solomon.

The teams started on into the dusky valley. Both men felt the spring stirring, and the brook on their right went with them toward the river. They thought of the boats, and the sound of water, and Dan had a picture of the big teams pulling the Sarsey Sal, and Molly on deck in his old blue shirt, with the wind fingering her hair.

Then also he saw a picture of the farmer in the shadow of the barn, with his wife holding a lantern while he helped the heifer with his hands.

Word was given out from the weighlock next morning that the canal would open early the next week. In the basin a new life had entered the boats tied up. Men were oiling harness and going over their towlines foot by foot. A woman was putting a patch on a grey canvas pit-covering. A little man was painting his boat— a gay pink-salmon shade— while his wife looked on with a voluble friend and considered the color of the trim; and he brushed away with his hat over his eyes, his eyes furtively watching the docks for men who might guy him for his wife’s artistic tastes.