The Dark (40 page)

Erastus eyed him appraisingly. He stumped out of the barber chair, adjusted his suspenders, then heaved his fist at John’s head. John ducked, sprang up and kicked at Erastus’s knees, dealing him a glance-blow to his throat at the same time. Erastus staggered into a shelf of hair tonic and oils. The bottles rattled but held.

Erastus grimaced. “Fuck-lucky for you I were holding back.”

“Fuck-lucky for you I were too.”

Erastus straightened. Jed flipped a page with a wetted thumb.

“Well, that satisfies,” Erastus said.

The
Morning Star
was seventy-eight feet long and ten feet wide. She was flat-bottomed and squat like all canal boats so as to fit under the bridges and aqueducts. Had a long, covered hold for the cargo, stacked bed-slots for the crew, and an oak stable for the resting mules. Her paint was a ravishment of vermillion, blue and panoma green. Her rails were nickel-plated and polished to a gleam. “A flesh woman couldn’t be more beautiful,” Erastus said, and his crew chorused agreement.

Ambrose York was the steersman, a heavy-framed man near to forty who lacked most of his hair and one of his front teeth. He contended he lost this tooth when he was held captive during the Indian
wars. “They pulled it out to torture me. Some squaw is wearing it round her neck even now, such are their adornments, I’ll have you know it.” He told this with a genial snort, as if recalling a fatherly beating. Ambrose, John soon realized, was one of those who lived in the sun-shaft of nostalgia. By afternoon he was missing the morning. By evening he was missing the afternoon. As for his tales of his life as a boy, his life as an Indian captive, John was to hear them relentlessly.

Clement Kinsworth was the mule hoggee, and was near big as a mule himself though not yet eighteen. His strength was legendary. Once a gangplank slipped when Clement was tailing on a mule; mule and hoggee should have crashed into the canal but Clement kept hold of the mule’s tail and hauled it back to the towpath as easy, it was said, as if he were hauling up a baby. Erastus depended upon Clement, not just to rescue his mules, but to do his ledgers as well, for the boy could cipher in a blink. Still, he was often taken for an idiot given his toad-wide mouth, his swivel eye and lumbering gait. Or else a constant drunkard, which he wasn’t. “Christ’s truth is that the boy don’t drink a thing except ale,” Erastus said with faint disdain.

He had no such disdain for John’s drinking abilities. “Never seen your like. Liquor must pour out your damned fingers for all it marks you.”

John was set to earn ten silver dollars a month with his board an inclusion. His unit of monetary value was whisky gallons. At twenty cents a gallon, that meant ten dollars a month was fifty gallons. A decent wage, then. Not even he could drink that amount.

Erastus. Jeb. Ambrose. Clement. John. These five stopped each night at taverns or lock stations, even toll stations, anywhere the mules could be bought clean stabling and decent feed. There the five men of the
Morning Star
met with the crews of other boats, drank to oblivion, participated in foot races and wrestling matches and fist-fighting bouts until the acreage around was trampled. John worked from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. like all canallers. Sleep was a snatched luxury during idle hours.

John’s first battle came one morning after his hiring. They’d been held up at the Cohoes Lock, a waste weir having broken through. Already they were running a half-day late for arrival in Buffalo. “A half-day less fucking profit!” Erastus roared. He called to Clement to kick the mule up a pace. Called to John to ready the tow line. John was confounded by this, then saw the boat, specking the distance. As the loaded boat the
Morning Star
should give the right of way and press to the berm side so that the lighter boat, coming unloaded from Buffalo, could pass over the lowered tow line. This was canal etiquette, such as it was.

Erastus looked through his telescope. “It’s the
Sweet Eleanor G
. That’s Severen’s boat. I’ve sworn to never give way to that son-of-a-whore.”

Childish. All of it. John-After can see that. But not John-Before. Already whisky-eyed he balled his fists. Erastus called to Clement to hitch up the mule and wade on over. Jeb folded up his cook’s apron and hefted a fry pan. Ambrose hauled out a length of chain.

The
Sweet Eleanor G
drew near. Looked to have a five-man crew as well. An equal match, then. Demands were leavened, and then insults hurled, and then they were poling over to the
Sweet Eleanor G
while the other crew cursed them on and the
Morning Star
men cursed back, gleeful as boys. The battle raged across both boats. John took on a man wearing begrimed cover-alls. They grappled, then fell into the prow. John’s head rang from a glancing blow and his nose dripped blood and then he gripped the man’s arm and wrenched it backwards. The man screamed out his surrender. John accepted and kicked the man into the shallow waters.

The
Morning Star
won the day easily. The right of way was theirs. It was not won without pain, however. Erastus had split and swollen knuckles. One of Jeb’s eyes was a flower of violet and black. John’s head had a lump the size of a ball of yarn, and Ambrose was missing half his remaining front tooth. Only Clement was unscathed. Had taken on Captain Severen as if he were a boy in short pants.

They stopped at the nearest canal tavern to doctor themselves and have a celebratory draft. Other canallers crowded round to hear the livid details of the battle. Erastus didn’t care that now they would be behind schedule. Erastus didn’t care that now they would surely be behind schedule. Severen and his crew had been the toughest on the canal. No longer. That honour now belonged to the crew of the
Morning Star
, and that honour was often challenged. They had to often fight for the right-of-way—a spectacle so common that children came running as soon as the shouting started. And there were arguments to settle at taverns and grog shops. But soon they wallowed in respect. They allowed the hurry-up boats to pass on to their tasks of repair and rescue, but they catcalled to the packet boats, those passenger-haulers with their velvet dining rooms and deck chairs of teak. The packet boat captains ignored the canallers as if they were calling out in Gaelic or Chinese. The female passengers shielded their faces with parasols. The male passengers shook their heads in disgust.

A year slid by and then another. In winter the
Morning Star
was mud-larked and the crew worked on caulking the seams with oakum. John could have visited his family during these months when the canal was drained. Instead he found work repairing locks and drinking, ever drinking. He missed his wife only in the rare evenings when he was vaguely sober. Had, for compensation, the paid attentions of a widowed seamstress whose breasts, though near the size of Margaret’s, lacked the musky scent, the moon whiteness.

In the months of navigable weather John came to know every ingenious thing and every wondrous sight along the length of the canal—the weigh-locks with their front pillars sunk into the water
like some ruins of old, the swing bridges and bascule bridges, the towns that were said to be alike to Venice, with water-streets lapping at the boardwalks and towpaths and house fronts, the aqueducts fenestrated with arches. He knew the towering rocks of the Niagara Escarpment, the green hills of the Mohawk Valley. He knew all the businesses crowding the canal’s edge—the provisionists and gin mills, the doggeries where a drink could be had for a twelve-pence, the boarding houses, barbershops and smithies, and the shops farther down watery alleys, too, where a man could tie a skiff, enter an unmarked door and have a go at the faro, the whores.

Erastus had a fondness for the shanty boat people, for their children swarming in the brown water and for the women, certainly, who in the limpid heat went without petticoats and wore only a single calico skirt that showed the outline of their legs. The crew bought whisky and vegetables from these folk whose skiffs nuzzled alongside the
Morning Star
. Not for these people the same patch of immobile earth; they moved every few months as they were forced. John could have lived among them, but not his wife, Margaret. She would never love this liquid world as he did. Here a man’s worth was measured by how well he fought and how hard he worked. But most of all, by how much he drank.

Five months later, on a transparent August day, John and the
Morning Star
crew listened all-humoured as Jeb read from a pamphlet: “… 
and so give your workers a bible and cold water and they shalt respect you as a wise father
.”

Erastus laughed. Clement and Ambrose joined in; even John-Before gave his dry chuckle.

Erastus said, “Fucking what? Hah! Imagine the look on your pug-ugly faces if I gave yous all a bible and cold damned water as reward for your labour.”

Even Jeb—who usually held with the written—had to agree it was an idiotic proposition.

The
Morning Star
was awaiting loading at the docks on Rochester’s Warehouse Row. It was the third boat in line, but Erastus did not press the right of way as top boat of the Erie Canal, proving the truth of his near-daily remark that he had a magnanimous streak.

A wagon loaded with milled flour clattered up Warehouse Street. The wagon came from downriver where the mills and factories sheathed the cliffs aside the falls like battlements and the race chutes beckoned children and often drowned them. Even from the dock John could hear the rumble of the Grand Falls. He’d been told it was ninety-six feet high and two hundred wide and that farther north the Lower Falls were higher yet and torrented through a gorge. John-Before had never trudged the few miles to see these lower falls, which were said to be so awe-inspiring they could flush a man clean of sinning thoughts. But it’d take more than some damn waterfall, John thought, to clean me out of sinning thoughts.

He looked over to see that some well got-up gentlemen had made a table out of barrels. Another unfurled a rolled-up plan for what looked to be yet another factory. A flat-boat captain offered a bottle of whisky and the gentlemen passed it round. Erastus added to the bounty from his own formidable stash and the wagoners were invited down. More bottles appeared. Only in America would there be such an egalitarian sight, thought John, and he was glad again he was not born into some foreign country.

Workers filed out of a tannery, some half-grown children among them. The owner was said to be generous; he allowed the child workers a frolic outside each day, allowed a crock of ale for the oldest ones, and reasonable compensation for the family when a child now and then got yanked into the machinery and mangled.

John watched these children as they shifted on the rock paths. One plucked at the sooty leaves of a shrub. Another dragged a finger through the green slick of the canal. It was as if they had forgotten the rituals of play. Or mayhap they were lingering over each clock-tick of freedom. He wondered if tannery work was worse than school.

Ambrose and Clement poled the
Morning Star
up the line for loading. Clement and John readied the lines. Erastus led the crew in singing dirty ditties. The got-up gentlemen were laughing now, their mood lightened by the passed-round bottles. One of them sent a boy for some buckets of ale. “Help yourselves, ye men at toil!” this gentleman called, and the toiling men did, the shining on the amber drops of ale.

That was the last occasion of such camaraderie. The last, and John had not known it. None of them had. When they returned some ten days later the warehouse manager was at the dock, pacing before the line of canal boats. The manager was a grave-faced man, lately graver yet. His black stovepipe was centred exact on his wagging head. “There shall be no more liquor at my docks!” he proclaimed, and handed Erastus a paper bill that said so. “We men of God are sick of witnessing fingers crushed under barrels. Of hearing crude drunken ditties. Of smelling the demon-reek of whisky. Of seeing men squander their God-given time in debauchery and carousing. And we are sickened unto very death of men who destroy their families with the bottle. Temperance has come to Rochester, and thus to America!”

Temperance. At first John thought this was the name of some meddling woman. Jeb put him to rights, and the crew of the
Morning Star
stood as silent and aggrieved as if a strong friend had dropped dead without warning.

“A passing fucking fancy,” Erastus assured. “How can it hold?”

But Temperance not only held, it grew in strength and reach as the year went on. Rochester was the hub; from there it radiated along the
canal and into the surrounding towns and counties. Committees of men, many once proud imbibers themselves, demanded a closing of the theatres, the circuses, the ninepin alleys, the billiard rooms, anyplace a working man might find distraction and a dram. And no longer could a working man make a decent side-living selling liquor from his shoe store, candy store, livery—from anywhere he chose, that was. Licences were required, and licences were costly and were meted out from the miserly fists of men raised on three square meals a day.