The Road to Reckoning (12 page)

‘The boy’s book for his business. Bring it. And his clothes. I will fetch his horse.’

I pulled him down again and he began to hush me but I insisted.

He put his hand to his holster. ‘And the wooden gun, ma’am.’ I tugged him down again and Henry took off his hat when he rose.

‘The boy says, “Please,” ma’am.’

I changed from my smock behind Jude Brown on the ferry to Nescopeck, glad for the clean clothes that were just a bit still damp. I buttoned up and watched Henry Stands look out over the river and across the green waiting for us on the other side. He had on his long coat and had his back to me with his black horse at his shoulder. There was one man at the rope and another at the punt. They had drooping hats, slack jaws, and grins and were mindful to keep their hunched backs low in Henry Stands’s presence but winked at me all the while.

Henry Stands’s back lifted and fell in deep breaths as he took in the Susquehanna. I watched him and although I knew he had done me a great deed I felt further from him. You may know this. It is as when a neighbor does you a service that you do not expect or a stranger stands up on your behalf. It is almost an embarrassment. To a boy beholden to a strange man it is better to stay quiet than say too much thanks.

I remember once back home in New York waiting in line with my father at some store—the butcher’s would be it for it was early morning and the smell of blood and sweet sawdust before breakfast made me want to be sick. My father sent me over the road to the drain and I stood there for a time feeling bad. People passed me, hundreds of them, all ignoring a boy on the curb looking like he had been kicked by a horse. Then a man in a white-striped jacket and boater stepped out of the herd and put his hand on my back.

‘Are you all right, boy?’ he said kindly. ‘Do you need some help?’

My father called and waved and indicated that it was okay, somehow miming that I was with him. This man, about my father’s age, raised his hat and mimed back that he understood by winking across and then the same down to me and he receded once more into the whirl of the crowd.

I had said nothing. But it occurs to me often that at that time that stranger had broken from his morning, from his purpose, to come to my aid. I did not need him but it is the offer of being willing to invest that matters. By coming to the curb he was submitting to enter my troubles and I may have had a heap of them, a
thousand
of brick that he was committing to. And to Henry Stands now I did not know how to say thanks enough. My voice was small. No man across the street to speak for me and acknowledge another man’s concern. I would just keep quiet and respectful.

I expected Henry Stands to hand me back my father’s spectacles. I had seen the image. Him on his big, black stud, seventeen hands high, me on Jude Brown below him and his enormous arm passing the gold rims down.

‘I came back because I owed you these,’ he would say. ‘That was the measure of it, boy. I’ll be along now.’

But he kept the glasses and we rode off the ferry side by side with our horses stepping like dancers away from the water until the grass clasped their hooves and we were on the road east again and to Stroud, where the law would be informed of Thomas Heywood.

If I had known better, had the Devil’s view of the world, I would have begged of Henry Stands to cut that ferry’s rope and leave the Susquehanna behind as if it were China, another world entirely. That may have stayed my fate, slowed down those who were doubtlessly upon us, upon us as dogged as stars toward midsummer and just as without feeling for the men they look upon.

We had lost some of the day, the better half, Henry Stands would say, but he cheered me greatly when he informed that we were only sixty miles from Stroud. I had begun to measure that town as home even though it would still be two nights more past it before I would get back to mister Colt and then truly home. But Stroud seemed like civilization. There would be law, stone buildings. Doors to lock.

Henry Stands pulled up. We had turned off the river road and began to climb again between the tall trees, this land the same as that beyond Berwick.

He took out his Tanner’s map and fumbled on the spectacles. We did not dismount, being saddle-folk now, and I sidled up beside him.

‘Well.’ He blew. ‘Straight east to Stroud. Sleeping and eating. Shouldn’t be more than two days all along.’

‘Then we should get on!’ I said eagerly. ‘I am not hungry. We could pass dinner!’

‘We will pass supper. We have little belly-timber.’

‘I have my sofkee,’ I declared, but even I found the word unpalatable by now. I dreamed of stew. I had been cheated of eggs and bacon that very morning and thought of seeking a nest but was sure that Henry Stands would disapprove.

He studied the atlas. ‘If we cut from these hills, northeast, we will hit the Wilkes-Barre road. That is a stage road. High ground, but there are towns there. Mostly patch-towns.’

Patch-towns were those built by the mining companies for the workers and their families. You paid everything to the company. They paid you and you paid them rent out of the wage and bought your food and tools from them. If the anthracite ran out or was not profitable the company moved on. The towns did not and became right poor. The hills were filled with small mines that the townsfolk dug themselves beneath the veins. Not room-and-pillar mines, you understand, just holes in the ground or cut into the hills and mountains. Risking death for pails of black diamonds to sell on the road and to heat their shacks.

‘Maybe we could do some business.’ He put the map away.

‘What business?’ I asked.

‘You have your father’s book. You know the details of the gun. I have fired the piece. You have that paper from a president. What one man can do another can do.’ He rose up. ‘Do you not think that we could sell those guns? You with your father’s schooling and me with my honesty. What say you, son?’

I looked around to the trees for guidance and smiled weakly. ‘I do want to get on. If we move off going east, will we not add time to our days, sir?’

‘A little. It will mean entering the Shades of Death a bit more than when you came through the gap.’

‘Shades of Death?’
I am sure I was not alone in questioning such a locale.

‘The Great Swamp. It is the place of the Wyoming massacre. You will find that when Indians triumph and kill white folks it is called a massacre. When whites accomplish the murder of Indians it is called a battle.

‘I see it this way: if your Thomas Heywood is following—though I’m sure he is long drunk and given you up for dead—he will not take the high road. Between here and Stroud is hills and forest. If we go north a spell we will be on higher ground. See a man following us yesterday.’ He strapped his horse’s neck and began to move on. ‘Besides, I need a drink and your Mister Markham may set his women on the road to find you and wed me.’

I had no choice other than to accept that Henry Stands was right. Thomas Heywood may have shrugged me off as dead. He may have laughed over a campfire with that Indian-hatband fool that it was shouting at the moon to go after a boy and a wooden gun. They would have drunk me away and tossed the empty bottles to smash on the trees.

But he might not have, and I was in danger still and that thought is enough for a boy without a roof over his head.

Henry Stands pulled up again. ‘Show me that thing again.’ Henry Stands held out a gloved hand. I rode with my sack at Jude Brown’s neck, so I took out the model gun as quick as he asked.

He balanced it, played its hammer and trigger like he was tuning a fiddle.

‘I can do what another can.’ He tucked it in his broad belt. He had my spectacles and my gun now. I was being boned like a fish. ‘I shall play your father and allot upon selling these things stalwart as I can be. Let us off the road.’ He kicked his horse on.

I looked at spring about me, up to the sun. Behind us the ferry that cut our journey, and I saw in my mind four horsemen waiting for it to come across. They could not perceive that I would take the harder road. This was how I could beat him. Cheat him and set the law at him. And should he find me before I could do the right thing he did not know that I had Henry Stands in front of me. And a little of me hoped that that might happen, the same way on stormy nights you hope, just a little bit, that it might get worse before it gets better.

From southeast to northeast across Luzerne county are the Shawnee and Lackawannock ranges. They bisect the land, and about six miles parallel from these are the Wyoming and Moosic. These four mountains are like the pepper and salt pots that a man in a barroom will use to weigh down a map to plot his next day’s ride. And in between these corner-set pots, as God looks down on the map, is the Wyoming valley that even people who have never seen it are familiar to sing about around a piano. It has a beauty in winter, spring, and summer that you do not have to look for, but it is crowded more than you think.

In ten years the mines had doubled the population, but as I said, when these patch-towns’ owners ran out, the people found it hard. Harder still now the whole country was suffering and anthracite land is no good for farming.

Henry Stands’s notion was to skirt the Nescopeck and Berks mountains and meet the Wilkes-Barre road, which we could ride to Stroud. And then,
God, I am nearly home!
This detour would count for nothing! Any way you tossed it I was little more than sixty miles to Stroud and then the Delaware and home. My aunt Mary’s face was almost welcoming.

‘This is a stage road,’ Henry called back to me. ‘Although they are not on my map, there are towns. There is one that begins with
S
that I cannot remember. Lot of towns begin with
S
. That is the Dutch for you. Even the president is Dutch now.’

He yawed like a ship as his stud picked a path upward and I watched both their rumps rolling in front of me. It was easygoing as the ground was good, which was for the best as Jude Brown was no Conestoga. Those were the big horses that pulled the canal barges and those huge Lancaster county wagons all across Pennsylvania to the sea, before the railroads. Funny how you never hear about obsolete things, obsolete people. Those horses and their drovers gone in a puff of steam. I guess there is not a lot of usury and subsidy in a man with a team of horses or a coal mine that serves only a couple of towns.

‘I need rum,’ Henry declared, but happy with it, as if the rum were coming just by saying so. I reckon he liked this country for its trees and birds and I did not blame him. It was beautiful and I do not use that word lightly anymore.

We came out into a mud plain and to a three-story building that looked like a church and hid other houses and workplaces. A grist and corn mill stood on the side of a hill as they do them in the mining towns.

I would say that the menfolk of such towns spend so much of their days sloping down to work that they must like coming uphill all the way for their houses and stores. You have to be quite determined to settle if you do it on uneven ground with your house against a hill.

The church turned out to be the hotel and general store. It was strange to give it that pediment roof that gave it a holy air. Maybe it had started with grander ambition.

There were a few men in stained overalls and long hair milling around the mud street and I remembered that it had rained the night before, the night Henry Stands ran out on me.

He swung off his horse at the hotel post but I stayed, not liking the look of the whole place.

‘Mister Stands, do we have to do this? Did you not get enough food at Mister Baker’s for your journey?’

He staggered as the feel of the horse left him but it added to his surprised air at me.

‘I was not expecting
you
when I made my stores! I was not expecting to stop for
every
dinner and
every
supper and to wet up
every
tree between Mifflin and Monroe! Get down. We need a stake.’ He snapped down his gray coat and brushed it of its salt and road.

‘How do I look?’ he mumbled.

‘You should remove your hat,’ I said.

‘Why would I do that?’

‘It will make you seem humble and less like a forester.’

He took off his old headpiece and stuffed it under the pommel of his saddle. ‘How about now?’ He gazed off to the left as if posing for a portrait, his right hand set across his belly. I reached up and he bent his head as I straightened and smoothed his hair. It was greasy but I expected that and it did not hang together but in strands of gray and black.

‘I have a bow to tie it if that would help,’ he volunteered.

He would not kneel, but he put me back up on Jude Brown and I tied his hair about his neck as neat as I could and he made as much fuss as if it were a terrier I was plaiting.

‘Give me your book,’ he said when I was done. ‘Mind your horse.’

‘You cannot go in alone.’

‘And why is that?’

‘You will need help. It is better as a two-man endeavor. My’—I did not say the word and Henry Stands did not need me to—’nearly always took me on the road. Door to door, as we say.’ My eye was drawn by four horsemen on the mud road behind Henry Stands, and I guess I went pale. Henry rolled his head and followed my wide eyes but dismissed the old men the same as my sigh did a moment later.

‘Well,’ he breathed. ‘I reckon I could use some assistance from an old hand.’

We set toward the store and I beset to babbling.

‘You should buy something first, something small, and ask for some water for me. That will set his mind at rest.’

‘You should have water and gin or small beer. You may find water alone to disaffect your stomach around here.’

I did not pay his words any mind and prattled on in my teachings. ‘The guns are ten dollars wholesale. This is an opening offer, an exclusive; he will like that. He can sell them for whatever he pleases.’

‘Ten dollars is mighty cheap.’

‘That is wholesale. You do not understand these things.’

We mounted the porch. There was a disreputable fellow leaning on the post at the other end with a corn-pipe. I say disreputable because he had no hat or shirt, just his undershirt and braces over britches too short for his boots. He had a long knife in his belt but I took that as nothing: the boys and gangs in New York carried knives that could slit a horse’s barrel.