The Fields Page 20

  Sayward and her little girls crossed the run to the meeting house and took the lane that ran to the ferry. In front of George Roebuck’s and the ferry house, another lane ran up and down the river, and this they turned into for the boat yard. But they couldn’t get there as soon as the girls wanted. Every little ways somebody would stop Sayward to see the new baby or ask how much she wanted for a quarter acre here along the river or yonder by the meeting house.

  “Mam! Come on, Mam!” Sayward’s girls would say, pulling at her. They had been down plenty times to see those boats a building, and yet they couldn’t wait to see them again today.

  No telling how long Sayward would have left herself stand a talking to folks and putting off getting there if a horn hadn’t blown up the river. Oh, that was the liveliest sound in these woods, the music of a boat horn on the water. It was the first they heard all winter, for the river was still running with ice. It must be Jake Tench’s old keel boat, she reckoned, coming down from Tateville where it was stove in and froze up since before Christmas. She could see it now a rounding the bend with what looked like Jake himself standing on the cargo roof, steering with one hand and blowing his horn with the other. It looked for a minute like he was going by, then he turned it sharp to shore where several hands jumped out in the water with the cordelle and pulled it to the bank. Later Will Beagle would haul it up on trusses and patch it up. He would putty the cracks inside and pitch the seams outside with a calking mallet.

  It wasn’t long now till Jake Tench’s horn and Tim Fice’s fiddle were up on the cargo roof of the new boat. That was the sign for festivities to start. Sayward had to make for the boat yard now, for everybody else went, and her girls gave her no rest, crying and dragging at her till they had her standing by the two new boats, one only half finished, both perched on trusses along the river bank. Fine-looking hulls they were in their fresh, hand-planed lumber, long, slender and shallow-drafted, their sides and ends fashioned smooth and shapely as a mitten. A short mast stood above. The only heavy thing about them was the great four-by-four keel to protect them from submerged logs and a rocky bottom, and that’s where they got their name.

  Somebody called to them. It was Guerdon and Kinzie up on the boat ready for the water. Genny stood up there, too. When she saw them, she laughed and waved and called down and beckoned. Now that was the last thing Sayward wanted to do, climb up there where Jake’s woman was sure to be and where they’d have to stand in front of everybody. But Genny made Will come and help lift up the girls and baby, and Sayward had no other way than crawl up, too. Genny made a picture holding Sayward’s new baby. Sayward couldn’t get over the change in Genny since the news came that Louie was dead up at the English Lakes, and that Achsa had another man already. Oh, Genny tried to mourn her man but she looked ten years younger while she grieved him. All these years Will Beagle had stayed sweet on her, and now that she was free to stand up to the circuit rider with him, she was like a tree frozen for many springs so it could not flower, but now in a warm and balmy spring it was coming out in full bloom, a little late and up in years but a sight you couldn’t pass by without stopping.

  Today, rocking Massey on her breast and chattering to Sayward, she looked like a white magnoly. Oh, everybody all over the boat yard was swapping talk, raw-hiding his neighbors or calling to acquaintances farther off. A peddler had his wares spread out. “A genuine diamond breastpin for six shillin’s!” he dared the young fellows. “Made fifty feet under water! Give it to the girl you’re afraid of, and she’ll say you can stay with her before you get in the house!” An old woman threaded the woods folk with a basket of socks and mittens and Yankee notions, while a spry Tateville bake-man in a red stocking cap balanced a board of gingerbread squares over the heads of the crowd.

  It stayed noisy till Portius climbed to the roof of the keel boat and held up his hand to the crowd.

  “Blow that horn,” he said in a low voice to Jake Tench. Jake drew a mortal long note, and Portius began with reciting as often was his wont. His deep voice rang with feeling on the sunny winter scene.

  “O, Boatman! wind that horn again.

  For never did the listening air

  Upon its lambent bosom bear

  So wild, so soft, so sweet a strain.”

  Even the Maytown peddler was quiet now as could be. It didn’t take long to find out what Portius’s oration was about. He was talking on keel boats, praising them to the skies, how they blessed the upper rivers where bigger craft could not go, traveling downstream loaded with pork, flour and bales of skins, first into the broad Ohio, last into the great “Massasip” to the far city of Orleans. Then back they came a thousand miles or more with a cargo of hogsheads of sugar and bags of green coffee, faggots of Swedish iron and English blistered steel, of bales of cotton, kegs of salmon, barrels of mackerel, crates of queensware and crockery, tierces of oil, casks of nails, pipes of foreign wines and spirits, and boxes of Spanish segars. Oh, it was something to hear Portius puff Jake Tench and his boatmen and the hard work they had to do, poling and pulling their boat up stream, dragging it by hand through fish dams, sometimes unpacking it from stem to stern to carry every pound on their backs through a shallow ripple. He had a good word for the boatwright, too, and his masters of saw and plane, never using a poor piece of plank that might be stove in by a rock or log and lose all the boat carried into the river.

  Sayward didn’t listen all the time. She could hear Portius at home. Much of the while she looked the crowd over for Mistress Bartram and her child. What a strange feeling it would give her to see that child listening to its own pappy a speaking while its half sisters and brothers stood a short distance away. Sayward’s eyes searched every face, but not a sign of that slender body in seamstress clothes and with a curl on her pale forehead did she find. So it must be true what folks said, she sighed, that Jake’s wife was changed and shamed and would not leave her cabin, not even to see her own man’s keel boat put on the river.

  It seemed Will Beagle hadn’t a minute to himself or Genny. He was down underneath they said, making sure of the calked seams, when Portius finished his speech, and then you could hear him and his hands knocking out the trusses. Every blow of those mallets you could feel on your feet through the cargo box. The younger ones shrieked. The boat was settling down now on log rollers. It had to lie crooked on account of the keel, and all had to hold to keep from sliding off the slanted roof. Everybody on the boat was a laughing, squealing and scrambling now, for an army of men pushed the boat on its rollers. Bumpety, bumpety, bump it went, rocking this way and that, jolting hard as blacksmith iron over rough places. Of a sudden the front end dipped. The young ones yelled. The front end kept on diving. Then it came up shaking off the water, and now it lay level as a table, smooth as butter and quiet as a setting duck on the soft bosom of the river. On the shore the people sent up a rough cheer.

  Some feared the boat would drift down with the stream, but Jake and Will had that all tended to. The long cordelle was fastened to the mast, then to the front end by another rope they called the bridle, and Jake’s men began to march up the bank hunched forward with the cordelle over their shoulders. They had to go mighty slow to get the boat started up stream. Then it followed like a dog after its master. The young folks on the boat looked at each other pleased. They were getting a free ride, a better one than on the ferry where it cost a penny.

  Sayward stood there with her babe in her arms. Now why did everybody reckon they had to swap so much talk with her? Ever since she came out of the cabin today, folks acted like they looked up to her almost more than to Will Beagle or Portius. She didn’t want to talk to anyone right now about selling more of her land for folks to build houses on. All she wanted was to see how those houses already built looked from here. That was the Griswold house with a high back step and a sawed plank outhouse, and that was the ferry house with a double log privy. And next was the back of the warehouse they were going to so Jake and his hands could load the new boat. Farther up was
where Tim Fice lived, next was Jake’s place and back there were Will Beagle’s smith shop and boat yard with the second boat still unfinished, its upright ribs uncovered below like a pumpkin mouth with its teeth notched. Beyond was the new sawmill. Over the tops of these buildings she could see the roofs of the meeting house and school house off yonder, and between them her own double cabin and barn.

  Oh, a hundred times or more had she seen these buildings from the farm side! But never had she seen them from the roof of a keel boat on the river. She couldn’t get over how grand and imposing the river bank looked with cabins and houses setting on it and a lane like a street running along in front. Her own buildings and roofs back yonder were weathered gray, but those along the street were brighter with fresher logs and shakes. Why, she could count nine or ten chimneys a sending out smoke at one time like Tateville! The street swarmed with humans a hurrying up to see the boat moored at George Roebuck’s and maybe get on and try it themselves when the others got off. You could hear their talk, the children crying and dogs a barking. Every little while the bakeman’s voice came over the water, “Swee-eet bread with Chiny spicin’.” Once she thought she heard somebody say plain, “Hurroar for Kentuck!” It must have been the miller’s parrot, for his back door stood open.

  Right yonder was a spot Sayward remembered. It was where she had waded in the river when she was a girl and washed herself all over with sand. She had stood there plumb naked then. She couldn’t do that any more, for there would be more than a porcupine to watch her these days.

  “Don’t you want to sit down, Sayward?” a deep voice asked her.

  Only one person ever called her like that, Sayward. She looked around and there was Portius standing by her with a boatman’s stool in his hands. Even Portius, she told herself, showed too much politeness today to suit her. She settled herself on her stool, her babe on her lap, while the others made a wide arc around so she could see out. Where Huldah was, God only knew, but her littler girls hung around the stool, and her boys stood a ways behind her. Not a word did she hear now about their having to give up and die if she didn’t move to Tateville. All they were set on today was this keel boat and that street of store, tavern, house and cabins along the shore.

  She noticed they didn’t say settlement any more. They said town. Already folks were talking of pulling stumps from the street and lanes to make it safer walking after nightfall. Now who would have reckoned, Sayward asked herself, that all the time this dark, choked-up river bank under the big butts and tangled vines here by the Moonshine Church was a townsite just waiting for its time in God’s almanack to come around.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Conrad Richter was born in Pennsylvania, the son, grandson, nephew, and great-nephew of clergymen. He was intended for the ministry, but at thirteen he declined a scholarship and left preparatory school for high school, from which he was graduated at fifteen. After graduation he went to work. His family on his mother’s side was identified with the early American scene, and from boyhood on he was saturated with tales and the color of Eastern pioneer days. In 1928 he and his small family moved to New Mexico, where his heart and mind were soon captured by the Southwest. From this time on he devoted himself to fiction. The Sea of Grass and The Trees were awarded the gold medal of the Societies of Libraries of New York University in 1942. The Town received the Pulitzer Prize in 1951, and The Waters of Kronos won the 1960 National Book Award for fiction. The Fields was first published in 1946. His other novels include The Light in the Forest (1953), The Lady (1957), A Simple Honorable Man (1962), and The Grandfathers (1964).

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