3stalwarts (180 page)

His round smooth black arms were like the pistons of a steamboat’s engine. And when his fists struck, they thundered on the Irishman’s chest. And when they came away, the others saw that they had left their color on the skin, as if the white could breed to black, octoroon, quadroon, mulatto, black.

O’Mory’s body whipped before the blows and his teeth showed in his beard. He seemed far quicker than the negro, with his lithe strides, the grace of his arms, and the snakelike lashes of his fists.

Hogan screamed, “Go afther him, O’Mory! Bhoy! Bhoy! Don’t let him grasp ye!”

“Watch his feet!” cried the one-eyed man.

“Look out he doesn’t grasp yer lip!”

“Mind yer eyes, O’Mory!”

A roar of voices swelled. The Irishers were all upon their bunks. The negroes were lining the wall by the doors. They were silent. Their dusky faces made a line of intensity against the yellow of the planks. Suddenly one jabbered in an outlandish tongue, as the two men came together.

“O God!” shrieked Hogan. “Stand off from him!”

Each had his chin on the other’s right shoulder, and out of sight between them their hands interlocked like antlers.

There was not a breath of movement.

Suddenly the Irishman’s left hand shot round the black man’s waist, slipped down behind his thigh, and his foot slid forward. He strained heavily, his muscles crackling. The negro lifted; the flat feet shuffled suddenly in air; and then slowly they came back to the floor and the two men snapped apart. The negro had broken the hold; but he spun as he came free and went against the table. With a roar O’Mory was on him and bent him back upon the board. The Irishman’s knees pressed into the negro’s crotch, keeping his legs vertical, while, with both hands reached under the black man’s armpits, he caught his chin and forced the neck back… . The eyes in the black face swelled. The whites became bloodshot. A strange moaning broke from the negroes, and jouncy little Hogan began to jibber with delight. “O’Mory, O’Mory, O’Mory, ye darlin’!”

And then the negro’s hands drew back and his foot lifted. The blow seemed futile from that angle, but it found the Irishman’s chin. The black hand was lost in the black beard, the head snapped back, and the white hands broke from the black chin like limp straps. At the instant, the negro’s feet found room and kicked the Irishman away.

O’Mory reeled. The walls swam in front of him, a dizzy line of faces. He heard a shout of warning. He heard a weird, high-pitched kind of moan. “He’s butting!” He heard the pad of feet. It seemed to be behind him. He tried to whirl, but the black head caught him on the thigh and he spun away and fell.

As he fell he heard the crash the negro made. He had been hurt, he knew he had been hurt, but he could not feel it. But it was a hurt that gave something into his hands. He wasn’t lonely any more. The wedding was out of his mind now and he was a man, and he found that he loved Jay-Jay, loved him as a precious object for his hands to destroy. A grin broke his lips apart. His hands found the planks and he was on his feet.

As the negro faced him, O’Mory knew that he also was hurt, and he put back his head and laughed with pure joy. Nathan Roberts, who had come to the door when the hullabaloo broke loose, with the clerk and the cooks, and the axemen and rodsman, understood why someone had called this gang the Devil’s Angels. For the rest of them had caught O’Mory’s laughter and laughed with him, and the long room heaved with roaring.

But the negro had become a travesty of the human thing. The purpose of the human brain was behind him now, but the face was bestial.

They came together.

“Stand off from him!” cried Hogan.

But, as though they had agreed to it, they abandoned themselves to their fists.

O’Mory saw the black face before him, the one thing in the world, and his love for it filled his heart with the desire to feel it breaking under his hands.

They traded great blows. They had no notion of defense. They broke each other as they would have broken stone, with the instinct of three long years in the Deep Cut to compel their arms and shoulders.

O’Mory felt the pain growing in his body like grass. He felt the blades like arrows in his chest and the roots fingering his vitals. But his brain sang as he saw that the negro’s blood was red. He swung without moving his feet, again and again and again, until his arms had acquired a rhythm. And through the room, which had once more grown silent, he heard the voice of Hogan catching it for him, giving his hands truth. “Wa-a-ay up! … Heavy … Down! Wa-a-ay up! … Heavy … Down!” Over and over. And the sting in his forearms was like the taste of the sledge. But he was hammering rock that would not break. He knew that it would never break and his heart sang with laughter and he was glad.

He saw in Jay-Jay’s face a change coming slowly, as if his understanding had been lighted from the same fire. All at once the broken lips of both men grinned covertly at each other. For a few blows they continued from the pure joy of it. Then, as at a word, they held back their arms, stepped together, and shook hands.

Jouncy little Hogan laughed. He came leaping down on his bowlegs with his old Hessian high over his head. He baptized them both with stinging whiskey and gave them the drum to drink from, first the negro, then the Irishman. As the two drank, there was silence. And in the silence all men heard a different sound.

It came from the open door, from the frosted night, from the spot where the Great Dipper was suspended over the cleft in the mountain ridge. It was the sound of water. It was the sound of a small trickle of water finding its way down the tumble bay beside the double flight of locks.

But for a moment the Irishmen and the negroes did not understand what it could be. It was not until Roberts, the engineer who had given their labor form, cried suddenly, “It’s the water coming through!” that they knew.

But they stood still. They heard his feet pounding down to the bridgehead, they heard the broken note in his voice, they saw the rodsman and the axemen and the cooks running after him, but they stood still, with a queer wonder in their eyes.

Some smiled, some simply stood with open mouths. O’Mory put his arm across Jay-Jay’s shoulders and grinned at jouncy little Hogan.

He knew.

It meant the end of their long initiation. Roberts wanted to see it because of the shape it would have, the form for the picture he had seen in his mind’s eye; the rodsman and the axemen because it meant the end of their stay in this piece of wilderness; the cooks because it meant that they would no longer have to wash the plates of Irishmen and negroes. To the contractors it would mean profit or loss. To the farmers in Ohio it would mean a decent price for wheat. To the merchants in the east it would mean cheap transportation. Even in New York City it would mean money in the hope chest of Tammany Hall.

His face lengthened.

But to himself and to these wild Irishers, who had chopped at stumps, who had shoveled where half of each shovelful ran back at their toes, who had wheeled barrows, who had had the sun on their backs, the frost in their feet, the cold wet against their bellies, the ague and fever in their lungs, who had had stumps to pull, and piles to drive in quicksand, limestone to blast, and rock to devil which no force but their own could loosen, this water meant the sweat they had dropped in labor; it meant the blood of life in their veins; it meant the end of the job.

He looked round on them. They were staring at him hopelessly. Even jouncy little Hogan was staring at him like a miserable lost dog.

He said to them, “It’s finished, bhoys.”

The one-eyed man asked over his quid hoarsely, “What’ll we do now, O’Mory?”

And he said, “In Newport at the wedding Misther Fowler said that freight boats now are wanting crews. They’ll hire ye on.” He laughed. “What more do ye want? Ye’ve built the thing. It’s whome to ye. I’ve had me offer already. I’m a captain as I stand. Hogan, will ye be a crewman? Ye’re short. Ye won’t have to duck for bridges.”

Hogan’s flat mouth opened, stretched, and grinned.

“Have a pull at me old Hissian, O’Mory, Captain, sir.”

O’Mory felt a stiffness in the shoulders under his arm. He felt sorry for the black men now. They were sons of toil. It was the tradition in their blood.

“Niver mind, Jay-Jay,” he said. “You can lick anny man but me. Let’s go on out and see the thing.”

They walked down to the Deep Cut, and they saw that the canal was more than half full. Coming slowly for the new banks, the water had made small impression till the lock gates dammed it. Then it had risen quickly. It made a dark, straight track along the towpath wall, stretching back into the still blackness of the stone. But even in that blackness it held reflections of the stars.

The moon was directly overhead. At their feet it swam upon the water. And all at once, in the white pool, the men saw a long, black shape.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a fish!” cried Hogan.

“It’s too big a fish to be one.”

“And I saw it, I’m telling you. I saw the tail of it,— and the fins of it,— and the mouth of it,— and the round eye as great as a whale.”

The rodsman bent over. He was a man from Buffalo. As he looked, the long shape swam across the light again.

“It’s a muskallonge,” he said. “I’ve seen plenty since I came out here. They’re handsome fish and grow to forty pounds.”

“No!”

“Isn’t he telling you?”

“How big is this one, would ye say, Misther Roberts?”

Roberts, who had drawn off to be by himself, came back. He too knew the fish.

“It’s a muskallonge all right. I’d call it over thirty-five pounds.”

“What do you suppose he’s afther, now?”

The fish had approached the tumble bay. They could just make him out, estimating the water, and finning backward from it.

“I’ll tell you,” cried Roberts. “I’ll work him through the locks, if he wants to go. O’Mory, you get over on that other gate. Take that lever and pull up; that opens the sluice.”

He opened the gate on his side of the western flight.

The water sluiced through with a loud, thirsty swish, tumbled over the upper sill. In a moment the new plank of the floor had lost its gleam. The level began to rise in the inner chamber of the well. The men watched it silently. For the time they had forgotten the fish. They saw the water fingering the walls, they saw the stars borne upon the surface. A pool was made to float a boat, higher, higher, until it rose above the till, to the level in the Deep Cut.

Roberts leaned on the balance beam of the nearest gate, and O’Mory, with Jay-Jay to help him, opened the other. They swung silently through the water and the moon floated in between, and under the moon went the fish. The men cheered. The gates were closed.

“He knows a thing or two,” cried Hogan, delightedly, peering over.

Moving slowly, the men followed the water down, and through each lock the fish swam composedly eastward, and at the very end he slid out on the Rochester level. He hung for a moment at the bottom of the tumble bay, over which the waste water was already gaining considerable volume. Then he wheeled with a smooth eddy and disappeared. The silent men watched him go.

O’Mory heard a man crying softly behind him. He turned. It was the boy, Peter. He understood.

He laid his hand upon the boy’s shoulder.

“I’ll be needing another hand on me boat besides Hogan. Will ye sign on, Peter, lad?”

The boy nodded, and the growing roar of the water on the tumble bay mastered all other sounds.

‘There has been a fine young man’

The sun was going down into a blazing pile of clouds.

In Rochester, little knots of people came out on the streets, and converged slowly on the four corners. Little by little, they moved on down Exchange Street, past Child’s Basin, to the end of the aqueduct, mounted the arched bridge over the canal, and looked down on the manceuvrings of the packet boat, Young Lion of the West.

The four matched blacks that the United States Mail Line had furnished for the occasion were hauling the boat out from the dock. On the bow, a gentleman in a tailed coat and high black stock and dove-colored waistcoat raised his arm as if to hail a boat.

“Who comes there?” he cried.

There was no one coming, but at his words the eight companies of militia lining the canal raised rifles. No shot was fired. And the gentleman on the boat dropped his arm futilely.

Someone on the bridge asked his neighbor, “Is that Mr. Child?”

“I take it for Levi Ward.”

“Can’t be. He ain’t tall enough, mister. It’s Jesse Hawley, I believe.”

The sun was in their eyes. Due west of them the canal ran between lines of brand-new warehouses, broken by the Presbyterian house and an occasional back garden wall. Here and there freight boats were tied up; from a few, smoke issued white against the deepening shadows. The boater of one was putting a pair of horses aboard the bow. On another a woman in a blue calico dress was gathering in a line of wash, stuffing her arms with red and white. The eastern wind at their backs was drawing the scent of the flour mills across the river.

“What are they doing with that-there boat?” asked a wondering farmer.

“Tomorrow they’re going to welcome Clinton’s boats from Buffalo. They’re practising.”

“What for?”

“My Lord! Don’t you know that the canal’s been opened past Lockport? Clinton’s on the way.”

“I heard a powerful lot of cannon-shooting this morning,” said the farmer, reminiscently picking in his ear. “Then in about two hours I heard a powerful lot more. I calculated some kind of a party was getting up.”

He got his jaws working again on his tobacco. Behind him a woman tittered.

“Mamie,” she whispered, “that man don’t know the canal’s been opened.”

“No!”

“Can you credit it?”

Titters again. The farmer leaned his overboned wrists comfortably on the rail.

“Now they’re bringing the boat back to the edge,” he announced. “Appears to me they ain’t doing nothing.”

“They’re practising for tomorrow.”

“What for?” he repeated.

“It’s the celebration. The canal’s finished, you see.” The speaker was elaborately patient and polite for the sake of the tittering behind him.