The Dark (41 page)
When in Rochester the crew of the
Morning Star
had to forage farther and farther from the canal to find liquor. After the gentle tilting of the
Morning Star’s
deck, John found the macadam and brick hard and unyielding. One Sunday of April 1830 he ventured up Exchange Street, down Main. He was disheartened. Signs over shops proclaimed that no liquor would be sold. There was quietude even in the Four Corners. Everywhere, everyone was alarmingly sober. That morning he had seen two merchants roll a barrel of whisky to the canal’s edge, and then, to the disbelieving eyes of the canallers, stab a hole in its side and let the whisky drain into the water. The merchants had called out their vows to temperance, though they could hardly make themselves heard for the catcalls and swearing.
John was stewing over this when he saw Leah not a carriage length away.
… You were coming out of a chandler’s with a basket over your arm and a blue shawl draping. I’d have known you anywheres, even if you were ten feet tall. Your walk hadn’t changed nor your springy curls and you were pretty as a daisy in your yellow walking-out dress. Then you turned and I saw that you were near confinement or past it even. ’course I saw that Bowman Fish loping aside you and holding your elbow and trying to steer you, and ’course I saw that he was plenty older and greying in his hair, but that he had a tooth of gold, tasselled boots and cravat of all-silk. He looked bewildered as a snared stoat and I might well have pitied him if it weren’t my Beloved Daughter he’d got with child …
Leah stopped and looked in this direction and that, and then in John’s.
John-Before drew into a shadow. Heard the man beside his daughter saying, “Now Leah, now angel. I’m your husband, I know what’s best …” The man’s voice trailed off as they rounded a corner.
Husband. At least they’re married, then. But Christ in a fucking handcart, why had Margaret allowed it? Leah was barely a woman. John decided to demand an explanation from his wife. This time for certain he would knock on her sister’s door … and then? He was the wayward husband. The drunken father. What authority did he have? He wandered the streets of Rochester for the better part of that day, his mind steeped black.
When he returned to the
Morning Star
, John was a changed man. Purpose was in his step, determination in his hawkish face.
“Where the buggered devil you been?” Erastus asked, without much interest. He was morose these days. Had threatened to sell the boat and go west. Become a buffalo hunter, a fur trader.
“We gotta take those fucking Temperancers on.”
“What are you gabbing about?”
“The Temperancers. The Sabbatarians. The what-you-call-’ems, fucking Evangelicals. Buck-up, Erastus. You got goddamned raisins for balls?”
“That ain’t a manner to be talking to your captain,” Erastus said with a sigh.
By way of answer John handed him a bottle the size of his hand. The label was dainty and pink.
“Fucking Christ, what’s this? Jeb, get your half-rotted carcass over here and read this!”
Jeb obliged. Held the diminutive bottle into the sun. “Says here:
Doctor Gibson’s Finest Brandied Infant Sleeping Draught
.”
“It were all I could find on a Sunday,” John explained. “That’s how fucking far it’s gone: infant’s draughts.”
Erastus shook his head at this outrage. He fumed for a time, then stood on the prow of the
Morning Star
. He looked bedraggled and weakened, but the green fire was back in his eyes. “Clement!
Ambrose! Move your fucking lazy arses. We’s got planning to do.”
The target was to be the Pioneer Line, a mix of packet and freight boats owned by one Josiah Bissell, Elder of the Third Church.
… Who didn’t know of him and his filthy rich kin in Rochester town? He originated that pious rag the
Rochester Observer
and a more righteous man never sucked air. You know the kind, they’d have you think our Jesus loved the rich and scorned the poor and was joyous to see suffering instead of healing all and sundry as He did. I reckon in another time Old Bissell would have led Crusades to the Holy Lands and butchered Saracens for their lack of Christian feeling, but in our time he had only the Working Men to hate so. His Pioneer Line hired only men who had forsworn all spirits—even coffee was considered a kind of sin—and these men did not work on Sundays, not ever. Fine and dandy for them, but Old Bissell demanded that all boating traffic cease on Sundays, that all horns and bugles be silenced, that all liquor be banished. Everywhere. And not just on Sundays, but for the rest of God’s Time, and as you might imagine that didn’t sit well with us canallers. We found him out one morning leading a bannered march over Calamity Bridge and on down the steps to his lead packet boat. Jeb hollered out what the banner said and I recall it ever yet—
There is a Special Place for Drunkards. It is not the Tavern. It is Hell’s Hottest Circle
. We laughed, thinking it horse___, but I came to understand that Bissell’s thoughts on drunkards were smack on, though the man himself had the wrong tack on religion—unlike Brother Able, who was God’s True Emissary though he could barely utter a thing, and I’ll get to him presently. Anywise, aside Bissell was a boy of six or so, and he, too, was as pious as a barn rat. That was Bissell’s son, also named Josiah, and he was the one who led the torpedo attack on you and your sisters at the Corinthian Hall. He was the very lout who tried to get you mobbed and even murdered, and he was the one who called you
blasphemers and witches and such, and I admit I felt a stir of the old pride when I heard how the Young Bissell’s attempt to rout you did naught but bring you sympathy and attention from all quarters …
That spring and summer of 1830, the
Morning Star
led the other canal boats in the battle against the Sabbatarians. With a common enemy, fighting plummeted among the canallers. Handbills touting the Pioneer Line were torn from posts and walls. John himself cut the tow line to Pioneer packet boats on four occasions. Soon boats of the Pioneer Line could not get a half-mile before their tow lines were cut by one canaller or another. The sight of Pioneer Line hoggees dodging back from the whipping lines, cursing in a way most intemperate, became a common entertainment for Rochester’s children.
The battle intensified. Canaller boats formed barricades when one of Bissell’s boats wanted through an aqueduct. They cut in at the locks. Prodded mules into the canal to flounder afore the Pioneer boats. Used flotillas of logs to block narrower passages. Pried up the planks on the towpaths when a Pioneer boat was behind them. They levelled abuse at Bissell when they spied him. Laughed when he begged God to smite them.
And the Pioneer Line suffered mightily. Their boats took twice as long to attain their destination as boats with imbibing captains. The ladies aboard were scandalized by catcalls. The men infuriated by the waits. The children, however, enjoyed the mayhem no end.
Soon enough the Pioneer Line was bankrupt. The canallers celebrated with as much whisky and rum as they could find. The celebration spilled off the boats and into the Four Corners, where Erastus Bearcup was arrested and thrown in jail for an evening for shouting obscenities at the ladies.
The victory celebrations went on for days. How was John to know it was only a battle won, not the war? That the Elder Josiah Bissell had published a letter addressed to the Reverend Charles Grandison Finney, the greatest preacher ever known, in his stronghold of Adams, New York.
… I recollect the letter even yet because it was published in a newspaper and we laughed it up buckets and made a mockery of Bissell and Finney both. Bissell wrote about “the specimens of the large budget of evils rolling through our land and among us. The Devil was a water serpent that rises from the canal and infests Rochester with its spawn.” He weren’t far wrong. It was Finney who sent emissaries out to the canallers as a forerunner to his own coming …
John pauses in his writing. Mops his forehead even though his room has grown cold with the dying fire. He writes in a tired scrawl:
Brother Able was one of these emissaries
.
The beginning of the end—an October forenoon of 1830. The
Morning Star
glided up the main street of Syracuse, crossed under the Salina Street Bridge, then passed the Coffin Block Building wedged at the fork in the canal. It passed the ornate edifice of the
Syracuse Daily Star
, passed warehouses, men fishing, children diving. Outside a tailor’s shop, an incongruous potted tree shimmered crimson and orange. The sky was the blue of a baby’s eyes. The rancid heat of summer was gone and the air was flannel-warm and smelled of new-pressed apples, of bayberries simmering for candles. John-Before hummed the ditty
Mad Sally the Slut
and mended a hemp rope, as happy as he’d ever been. Jeb read his almanac and scoured a cook pan. Ambrose was at the wheel whistling past his broken teeth. Erastus stroked his massive beard and drank his rum and coffee and spat tobacco over the side and waved to the passing ladies. Clement hulked amiably with the mule along the towpath. The towpath functioned as a sidewalk alongside the water roads, and here in town pedestrians stepped round the mule and over the tow line with nary a glance.
The crew tied up the
Morning Star
in line at the Syracuse weigh-lock. Half of the weigh-lock rested on dry land, the other half reached over the canal where the front pillars joined a cement slab and formed a square tunnel. A canal boat was being slung in the harness. The gates closed and the waters drained, then rose again. All
in a mere fifteen minutes. Aren’t we Americans just fucking ingenious, John thought, not for the first time.
While they waited, Ambrose told again the story of how the Indians had held him captive. John paid only half a mind. The one constant about the tale was how it changed at every telling.
“They said this-here tooth of mine would be good for Injun magic. So they yanked it. And there was an old hag. She ordered me to give her a spawn else she’d go at my prick with hot tongs …”
John told Ambrose to shut up, then nudged Erastus and pointed. “What’s that mother-screwing stripling want, you reckon?”
The stripling was standing on the towpath gawking at the
Morning Star
. He had hair of dun-brown, lips red as a girl’s, and an expression like a kicked hound’s. He wore a black bang-up coat and a grey vest, both of homespun, both too large for his skinny limbs, unlike his hat, which was small-brimmed and also black and better suited to a child.
He cleared his throat and his bulging Adam’s apple jounced up and down. “G-Gentleman of the c-canal. I b-bring you, good news. Chr-Chr … Jesus is among us!”
“Go fuck your grandmother sideways,” Erastus called out genially, and had the satisfaction of beholding the young man’s pop-eyed astonishment. The young man gathered himself and started again. He stammered out something about salvation being open to all who choose it. At that, he got on his knees.
“Has he lost some fuck-what thing?” Erastus asked.
Jeb stuffed the almanac into his cook’s apron. “He’s lost nothing excepting his wits.”
“Ah, could be the poor mite’s gone and hurt his little toe,” Ambrose put in.
Clement hopped aboard. His toady face showed amazement. His swivel eye scrolled inward. “Gosh-damned. He’s praying,”
It was a prayer, sure enough, a droning stammer that seemed more a pitiful begging.
“I’ll be buggered,” John said. “They’re worse than water rats, these fucking preachers.” Like his crewmates he’d never seen anyone on their knees at prayer excepting saints in pictures. And like his
crewmates he found it unseemly, like shitting in the open, say, instead of finding the quiet side of a building.
“Stand up, you sorry arse, for fuck-what’s sake!” Erastus called.
The young man did so. “I should l-like, p-permission to sh-share with y-you the g-good news of our L-Lord.”
Erastus laughed. “Look here, Mister Preacher, whoever-you-were, we’ve trounced the fucking lot of you. Ain’t you heard?”
“My n-name is Br-Brother Able,” he said, a species of pride crossing his face each time he stammered out a word.
“Abel?” Jeb called. “I know that name. I suggest you watch your damned back if you got a brother named Cain!”
The crew laughed; even they knew that old bible story.
“N-No, my-my b-brother’s n-name was W-Willing. A-And my n-name is spelled
le
.”
“Able?” John said. “Sure it ain’t your sister who’s Willing, then?”
Erastus backslapped him for this witticism.
Brother Able’s pale cheeks turned scarlet. “N-No. S-See our ma r-reckoned it had a g-goodly r-ring. We d-did get s-some r-ribbed for it in the sch-schoolyard.” He sighed and turned to go, head down, carry-all dragging, his incongruous little hat making him even more pitiful.
Later, each man said Able recalled to them their own mother’s insensate cruelties. Erastus recalled being sent in short pants to school when he was a good year past the time for it. Jeb recalled his mother citing the tortures of Hell that awaited him if he did not finish his prunes. Ambrose recalled his mother making him count change for her clients while she whored in the room above. Clement recalled his mother dying and in delirium asking that he not be near, for the sight of him terrified her, and terrified the good angels come to get her. John-Before recalled nothing of his mother, she being dead soon after he was born.