3stalwarts (154 page)

For a moment the scene was one of utter quietude. The marsh mist lifted silently to the sun’s drinking. The morning was brought in with peacefulness.

Then, in the thinning mists, some shapes began to move. They were men, walking in bare feet, single file behind their leader. The damp was pearled in his black beard. His shirt was open to the waist, showing his bright red undershirt.

“Hogan.”

His voice whispered incredibly soft and hoarse, but a little bat-eared fellow with jouncy steps moved up beside him, and cocked his face to get his orders.

“Yis?”

“Ye’ve got the hammer and the big spike wid ye?”

“Yis, O’Mory.”

“Then it’s you for nailing the door.”

Hogan grinned. As he began stealing for the door, O’Mory motioned up his cohorts. The rush-men carried two fifteen-foot poles.

“As soon as Hogan dhrives his spike, you bhoys rush up and belabor on thim two-by-fowers.”

He moved with them cautiously. The latchstring was drawn in. From the inside of the privy no sound came, and outside the Irish crept with an unholy stealth.

Suddenly Hogan’s hammer banged. It banged again— the sound of a heavy spike being rammed in. And then as the mist swirled under the sun, the marsh was made alive with shrieking. A dozen men nailed on the two-by- fours. Along behind them came the stamp of running feet. They screamed with laughter, but the privy remained as still as death.

O’Mory roared above them all. His teeth glistened like porcelain through the black hairs of his beard.

“Lift it up, me bhoys. It’s in an unconvaniant place. Just bring it round until I’ve found it out a dacent spot.”

A dozen men put shoulders under the bars. The privy swung aloft. It teetered as they took their first step forward. Then a dark-faced boy named Peter started singing. He sang in Gaelic, a hero’s song, how his most faithful soldiers carried him to his bier. The others caught the tune. Their faces lighted with a kind of melancholy joy. Their feet moved into time, and like a palanquin of a queen they bore the privy towards the shanty.

The other shanties had been built on reasonably dry ground farther along the marsh. Singing still, they started down the berm. Half of them went before and half followed after. From the peg over his bunk O’Mory had brought forth the fire helmet he had worn to fires with his company back in New York. Bright red, its varnish sparkled in the rising sun. He marched before the palanquin with the strut of a queen’s bed-master.

A quarter of a mile they bore it down, and at each shanty other Irishmen lit up their eyes and joined them till they had a hundred strong. And they all sang.

They turned about, and slowly came back along the marsh. At Independenceville, old Linas Barley in his tricorn hat first heard them. He called for Jerry.

Bates and Jerry caught the wild swirling of voices. The singing was like nothing human they had heard. Without music, it had music in its heart; it had no beauty, but it was sad with a desire. They forgot, in hearing it, the letter from Utica that Bates had just begun to read, and they came out with Linas and looked down on the brown procession winding serpentwise along the berm.

O’Mory came marching up to them. He stopped beside the wall of the finished lock. He spied there two eighteen-foot planks left over from the gate planks. He lifted them up alone and cast them over the well. Then, motioning his men, he had them inch the privy out so that it stood in the middle of the lock, ten feet over the bottom flooring, with the door flush with the outside edge of the front plank.

He raised his hand for silence.

“Here’s a place, me bhoys.”

In the sudden hush of those wild men, a frantic hammering sounded from inside the privy. O’Mory’s jaw fell open.

“God deliver me, there’s someone in it!”

“Hey!” came the muffled voice. “Hey! Hey! Let me out.”

“Oh God,” wailed the jouncy little Hogan— “I think it’s Mister Brown.”

“Why didn’t annybody tell me he was in it?” roared O’Mory.

Every face was hangdog.

“Don’t stand shtupiding! Let the poor man out! You, Hogan, you’re handy with a hammer.”

The little jouncy man jumped on a plank. He reached around the corner with his hammer and clawed forth the spike. The iron squeaked through the wood. And Jerry and Bates, with laughter grasping them, managed to look soberly at the door. An instant there was silence. The door swung wide, and in the privy they saw Edwin Brown, doing up the buckle of his belt. He took one dizzy step and then shrank back.

The faces of the Irish were very sad. They looked embarrassed.

And then O’Mory said, “We beg yer pardon, Misther Brown. We didn’t know it was a private privy. The bhoys is very sorry. Shall we carry you back?”

Edwin Brown had his great moment then.

“No thanks, O’Mory. I think I’ll walk. It’s time I had my morning constitutional.”

They carried off the privy. Handsomely, Edwin Brown stepped out. Without a word he started walking back to the shanty, and behind him half a dozen men, like naughty children, bore his privy for him.

“Wait a minute, O’Mory,” Bates said. “It’s pretty funny in a way. But it’s time you had your gang at work.”

“We didn’t intend no harm, sor. We wouldn’t never have done it if we’d known that Misther Brown was in it.”

“Oh, I know that,” Bates’s voice was sober as the Irishman’s. “But this isn’t play you boys have tackled. I’ve just had a letter that I want to read you. It will show you that this is a great thing that you’re working at.”

He fished the letter from his pocket.

“This canal,” he said, “used to be a dream of a few men. But now there’s water in it. It’s up to you to carry it west through this marsh.” He opened the letter. “It’s from a gentleman I know in Utica. He says he thinks I’d like a comment not official. This is what he writes:—

“On Friday afternoon I walked to the head of the grand canal, the eastern extremity of which now reaches within a very short distance of this village, and from one of the airy bridges which crossed it I had a sight that could not but elevate and exhilarate the mind. The waters were rushing in from the westward and coming down their untried channel to the sea. Their course, owing to the absorption of the new banks of the canal and the distance they had to run from where the stream entered it, was much slower than I had anticipated. It was dark before they reached the eastern extremity, but at sunrise next morning they were on a level two and a half feet deep throughout the whole distance of thirteen miles. The interest manifested by the whole country, as this new internal river rolled its first wave through the state, cannot be described. You might see the people running across the fields, climbing on trees and fences, and crowding the bank of the canal to gaze upon the welcome sight. A boat had been prepared at Rome, as you probably knew, and as the waters came down the canal you might mark their progress by that of this new Argo which floated triumphantly along the Hellespont of the West, accompanied by shouts and having on her deck a military band. At nine the next morning, the bells began a merry peal, and the commissioners, in carriages, proceeded from Bagg’s Hotel to the landing.”

Mr. Bates looked up from his reading. He saw the clustered faces watching his lips with a polite absence of expression. His voice faltered. He had moved himself tremendously, but all at once he remembered that these men spoke very little English.

“O’Mory,” he said.

“Yes sor.”

“You might explain it to them.”

“Yes sor.”

O’Mory turned on his men. His black beard bristled as he drew a mighty breath. He roared in Gaelic:—

“The gent’s been reading at you unlearned devils, from a letter from the governor ginral of this-here nation. He says in it for me to paste the first wan of you that disobeys me orders. Ye see that stretch of bogland? Well, he wants it dug by spring. It’s wet in there, me boys. Git back to it. Take off yer pants. There’s brand-new shovels and tin barrows for yez. Spit on your hands and dig.”

Three NORAH

1

“The wood lots have a shape 9 ‘

“She doesn’t really look like either one of us.”

Jerry was sitting beside the hearth of the small cabin. It had become a comfortable place under Mary’s hand. The curtains at the window were a warm red woolen, heavy enough to shut out darkness. She had made closets with soft yellow cloth, and a quilt of dyed yellow for the bed. She liked the warmer, softer colors. It was a wonder to Jerry how she had made this cabin over, stamping it with herself.

Mary looked up quietly from the dough her hands were kneading. Flour had dusted her wrists. Her sleeves had been tucked up and she was kneeling on the hearth. Her quiet eyes turned back into the room where the child sat banging the head of her wooden doll upon the floor.

“I don’t know, Jerry. I keep thinking she takes after you.”

“Not with that coloring. Fowlers are always dark-complected.”

“She’s got the same-shaped head.”

“Maybe.”

He didn’t really care about it. It was talk. His eyes were for his wife. When he came into the cabin and smelled the sweet, free smell she brought into the place, his mind was carried back inevitably to that morning on the Albany docks, the sunlight and the river, and the taut snapping of pigeons’ wings. He had paid for her papers, owning her; and yet, since he had married her, he had never felt that she was actually his.

He had been home for three days. April was nearly over. It was time that he moved on to Irondequot. They were going to tackle it at last. Bates had gone out two days ago. He had to tell her that now.

He said, “Those Irishmen have surely dug a great strip out of the marsh.”

Mary said, “They’re wild-appearing men. The people here are frightened every Saturday for fear they’ll visit in the village.”

“They haven’t done any actual harm, have they?”

“No. They fight amongst themselves. But they don’t look bad to me— just strange, and I like to hear them singing. Polly was in the garden patch the other day. I’d left her on a blanket in the sun. One of them picked her up and took her down to the tap, and I didn’t miss her until three of them brought her back again. She was laughing fit for all and pulling at the big one’s beard.”

“O’Mory,” Jerry said.

“Maybe it was. There was a little man with pointed ears beside him and a boy with dark and sad-appearing eyes.”

“Jouncy Hogan.”

“They were all three drunk, but real polite. They took their hats off and went off on tiptoe. I don’t know why they went off on tiptoe. Perhaps not to frighten us.” Mary smiled.

The knocking of the doll’s head came as steadily as the beating-out of time. The baby made a funny little crooning sound. Then she laid the doll down and spat on it carefully.

“What does she do that for?”

“She does it to anything that’s lovely— in her notioning at least.”

“It’s a queer thing to do, even for a baby.”

“It would seem strange unless you knew her. She’s quite a stranger to you, Jerry. Isn’t she?”

Jerry checked himself from looking at Mary. After a moment she said, “I’m getting that way, too. Ain’t I?”

“What do you say that for?”

His voice had become brittle.

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

He thought, “It’s true. It’s not my fault. She doesn’t see I have to work. It’s she’s grown different.” He did not answer out loud. Instead he picked the doll up.

“It doesn’t look pretty to my eyes, I must say.”

“Maybe it doesn’t.”

“Where’d you get it? You didn’t carve it out yourself?”

Mary shaped the loaf and carefully tucked its edges into the baking iron. As she thrust the iron in the ashes and raked on the coals she said, “Oh no. Harley Falk made it for her. They’re real good friends.”

“Does he come here often?”

“He stops in most generally, when he goes through.”

“I’ve heard queer things said of him.”

“So have 1. 1 don’t believe them, though. Have you ever seen him, Jerry?”

“I saw him once, riding by. He was going to the Irish shanties. But even then I didn’t like his face. It looks wrong somehow to me.”

“I don’t see that it does. I feel sorry for him.”

“I wish he didn’t come around here.”

“What do you want me to do? Close the door on him?”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“It’s nice to know somebody may come in to see me.”

Jerry was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I’d want to shoot a horse like that.”

“Poor thing. I suppose Mr. Falk has got a friendly feeling to it.”

She got composedly to her feet and wiped the flour from her hands.

“Why do you feel so short, Jerry?”

“I don’t feel short.”

She gave her head a little shake, drew up a chair, and resigned herself to sewing.

“What are you making?”

“Overalls.”

“For Polly? For a girl?”

“Yes, why not? They keep her clean.”

“Boys’ clothes on a girl.”

“What’s wrong with it?” She bit a thread.

“Nothing.”

She gave him again that odd, searching glance. He stirred uncomfortably.

“Is everything all right here?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t have any trouble with Mrs. Peck?”

“Oh no. She’s a sinful drinker for a woman; but she’s kind enough.” Mary laughed lightly. “Lately she’s taken to dressing like a woman under thirty. She sent down to Albany for a yellow wig. She told me she was forty actually. And I’ve been told she has passed seventy for a fact.”

“I’ve got to see her.”

“About rent?”

“Yes. When would she be found?”

“Most any time.”

“I think I’ll just go over and see her now.”

Jerry’s voice was muffled. He got up suddenly and stepped outside. The baby looked round at the inflow of cool air. Mary continued her sewing.

Jerry crossed the yard in a few strides. The path brought him to the kitchen door. He knocked.

While he waited for an answer he looked out across the river flats. It was still, with the half -grey of evening. On the banks he could see a snipe loop down. Beyond, the traces of the digging showed along the causeway towpath. The Irish were still working. Since they had come not one had fallen sick. Fever and ague never troubled them. They were too tough. A minister had preached against them in the church.