The Town Page 9

  He could see it still plainer in his mind when they started to put it up. Now it was like a long house with sides and a roof to keep off the rain. He couldn’t tramp that long ways to the river himself, but he could hear Guerdon tell about it when he got home. The little fellow would close his eyes and there all would be in front of him. He could see the river a shining and keel boats and barges moving up and down. He could hear boatmen cursing the bridge men, for they didn’t like bridges or fish dams, Guerdon said. Sometimes he could hear a friendly boatman play his fiddle or blow his horn as he floated by, or see King Sam come out of the back door of his Ferry House and shake his fist at the bridge, while all the time oxen pulled timbers into place or came toiling back from the woods splashed with mud and dragging wagons loaded with butts so heavy they bent down behind to plough furrows in the ground, or so Massey told.

  Chancey could see that bridge better sitting at home in a dark corner than if he was there. A couple times when Guerdon went back after dinner, he took him over. All the noise of hatchets, saws, axes and mallets confused him, the voices of drivers bawling at their log teams and of bridge-men pounding where they hung like squirrels far out over the water on the dangerous scaffold. Their cries came so deep and urgent, it sounded like they were falling in the water. Every now and then Chancey froze, for he heard a splash. He felt sure it was Guerdon and wouldn’t sit down again till his eye found him safe on the great golden caterpillars of fresh cut timbers, for one day Mr. Jackson’s axe had fallen in the river and for two shillings Guerdon had dove into ten feet of water to get it. Back at home Chancey could climb all over the bridge and scaffold. But here it made him giddy just to look at Guerdon standing on a single log high over the dark water.

  When he was here at the bridge, Chancey liked mostly to close his eyes. He would breathe the smell of the fresh cut timbers and hear the old men a talking. They sat around him boring the dirt with their canes and speaking a mysterious language of words like gin poles, trusties, cribbing, false work and block and tackle. The word they and Guerdon used that took him the most was “the chord.” The way they talked, the chord was the heart and master sinew of the bridge. They argued which was better, trusses or arches, was the footwalk better on the north or south sides, and if the bridge was heavy enough for loaded ox teams. On one thing they agreed, that it had more timber in it already than a frigate, that it would cost a pile of money and take a long time to pay it off. Even the minister would have to pay to cross, they said. Some had the toll all figured out: foot passenger, one pence; ox or horse, 4 pence; horse and rider, 6 pence; cart, sleigh, sled, wagon or chaise and one horse or ox, 9 pence; same with two horses or oxen, 13 pence; same with four horses, 20 pence; horned cattle, 3 pence; sheep and hogs 2 pence. And that was the way it ought to be, they said, for a sheep or hog was worth more ready money than a man.

  Oh, those old men knew everything, Chancey told himself. It was a shame they couldn’t build the bridge. All they said they backed up with stories of some bridge they built or crossed back in the old states. Two span were nothing grand in a bridge, they said. Old Mr. Tenafly told of one back in New York State of four spans of yellow pine with two roadways, one for going and one for coming. And lame Mr. Troxell said he walked many a time on a bridge across the Delaware with five spans. But the longest span any of them knew was in the state of Vermont over the Connecticut River, two hundred and thirty-nine feet with not even a pier below. Now that was something Chancey would have given much to feast his eyes on, a house of wood stretched and straddled across a river and the middle never sagging or falling in.

  Chancey liked to hear the names of those rivers back in the old states, the Kennebec, the Youghiogheny and the Monongahela, the Susquehanna and the Brandywine, the Merrimac and the Rappahannock. But the prettiest sounding was the Juniata, the blue Juniata, Mr. Troxell called it. The sound of any one of those names brought the river it stood for right up in front of him, a wide reach of water like he dreamed about last year. He could still see that river clear in his mind. It was blue as indigo, so blue that even the air over it shone with a bluish light. The wild buffalo standing in it had blue legs from the water. Never had he seen such a beautiful color, and it was a wide river, too. You could hardly see to the other side. He reckoned it must be the Blue Juniata, but when he told his mother, she said you could throw a stone across the Juniata any place and never was it blue, for she had lived on its banks and washed in it. When it wasn’t a dirty brown, she said, it was green.

  —

  Till it was over, Sayward told herself, she would be glad to see the end of that bridge after all. Oh, it had kept Guerdon around his home town a while longer, and they had all learned plenty about bridges. Even little Chancey kept harping on them. But it was Guerdon who acted the master hand, telling them how he’d a done it different if he had it his way. More than once he said he told Mr. Jackson how the bridge ought to be. “That’s impossible,” Mr. Jackson would say. “Tain’t impossible,” Guerdon claimed he said back. But old Jackson would never listen. He couldn’t take a point from anybody. He always gave the excuse that if he done that, the bridge would settle when he pulled out the last trustle. Now if he, Guerdon, had been putting it up, he wouldn’t have hired any men who got fits or giddy. What’s more, he would have hung that bridge high. It might have made a steep pull for teams up the bridge hill, but it would have let boats run under it easy even in flood time.

  Many an evening she sat mending his bridge clothes and listening to his bridge talk. The rub was that about the time she and the others got ready for bed, Guerdon was just getting ready to go out.

  “Where do you have to go at this time of night, Guerdon?” she’d ask him.

  “Oh, I just said I’d be out with the boys a while,” he’d say.

  His while lasted as a rule till two or three o’clock in the morning and when he came through her and his father’s room to go to the loft, he left a reek of rank cigars and barrooms behind him. Now Portius always had a smell of pipe and jugs around his person. Even in the night in his bed he gave out a scent of tobacco and spirits. He wouldn’t have been Portius without it, and she was so used to it she reckoned she’d find it slow to go to sleep without it. Why, when she fetched their bolster in from airing, she could always tell which was his end just by laying her nose to it. The scent of spirits would be mostly gone by that time but not the sourness nor the bite of the sharp weed. And yet when Guerdon came home after putting in a night with the bridge gang, he left a trail of stale tobacco and foul liquor behind him that put his father to shame.

  Well, she was only getting paid back for pushing that bridge before its time, she reckoned. In her heart she knew she had done it mostly for spite and cowardice, spite against King Sam and cowardice to let her second boy go off from home a bridging. Now she could see what you got for putting in your nose where it wasn’t wanted.

  But never had she expected she’d get punished as hard as she was, and Guerdon in the bargain, when he wasn’t to blame. Before the bridge was done or even the scaffolding knocked away, Huldah told her the bad news.

  “Well, Resolve’s not the only family man now. Did Guerdon tell you he’s married?”

  “Married!” Sayward stopped mighty short. “Who to?”

  “Something that’s no good,” Libby put in.

  Sayward looked around at the other girls. The worst was written on their faces.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Effie Clouser and she lives up in Fishtown,” Sooth said.

  Sayward’s heart sank. She tried to remember somebody of that name in the scrubby little shanty settlement up the river. She knew now where Guerdon had spent his long evenings.

  “She’s a slut,” Huldah spat out.

  Sayward turned on her sternly.

  “Who are you to say such a thing! Or any of you for that matter? I can’t believe yet that Guerdon’s got a wife, but if he has, remember she’s your sister.”

  Through supper that evening Sayw
ard let her eyes rest on her second oldest. Could this be true what they said about him? Of all her children, save her littlest, Guerdon was the one least fitted to stand up for himself in life and get what he wanted. He was good enough company. His black head would throw back and he could sing most every catch Genny could and some that she couldn’t. But never could he take care of himself like Genny. He let others impose on him, would stand it till they pushed him too far and then, look out! Something in him would snap. He lacked the staying part and balance the others had, like he lacked all their ten fingers and thumbs, one of his having been chopped off when he was little.

  “Is it true you have a wife, Guerdon?” she asked quietly, when, save for Chancey, she had him alone in the kitchen.

  Oh, he flushed up at that and bumbled around.

  “Yes, it’s true, Mam,” he said.

  “Aren’t your father and me good enough to be told beforehand and asked to your wedding?”

  “It’s not that, Mam,” he begged her. “It just happened so quick. I hardly knew it myself beforehand.”

  She stood there pitying him.

  “Well, you and her have my good wishes,” she said. “I hope you’ll both be happy. When are you going to bring her down?”

  “One a these days,” he promised. “I’m a moving up tomorrow when the boarder gets out. I’ll bring her down soon as she’ll come.”

  “Say her new mam wants to meet her,” Sayward said kindly. “Tell her she needn’t fret.”

  Guerdon took his things up to Fishtown next day to stay. Plenty times he stopped in back home after that and usually around meal time, but never was his bride with him. When Sayward asked, he claimed Effie was bashful and couldn’t make up her mind. But Genny said likely he felt ashamed to bring her. Though Sayward waited patient enough, never did she come. At last Sayward told him that if Effie wouldn’t come to see her mother-in-law, she was going out to see her and take along her wedding present. But she didn’t want to come unbeknownst, so she set Saturday afternoon. That would give Guerdon’s bride time to have her house cleaned up and herself washed and dressed for the coming Sabbath.

  Meanwhile she could spike her own girls’ mouths but she couldn’t Genny’s. Most of what she heard she didn’t like, nor how ravenous Guerdon ate when he came home. Carefully she wrapped up in some of Portius’s paper the same present she had given Fay, a pair of linen sheets of her own raising, spinning and weaving, and an embroidered bolster case. Oh, nobody would say she was not as nice to a poor daughter-in-law as a rich one, but she complained to herself that the Lord took it out pretty hard on her and Guerdon for the small pride she had in Resolve’s fine marriage.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE DREAM

  I was just a thinkin’, and if I hadn’t been a thinkin’, I wouldn’t a thunk that way.

  LITTLE MATHIAS COTTLE IN THE FIELDS

  THE LITTLE fellow lay in the entry. Every time they threw hay down the ladder hole, a little of it stayed on the entry floor. The fork could not pick it all up for the manger. It was too short or stubby or it was seed or chaff or the fine powdery hay dust that sifted down like gray snow from between the mow planks and hung on the ghostly cobwebs. In time it covered the floor with a springy carpet so you wouldn’t know there was plain hard earth beneath.

  On this springy carpet face downward, Chancey lay, and when they called his name from the back door, he gave no heed that he heard. His sisters were always bothering after him. Chancey! Where are you, Chancey? Are you all right? So that’s where you’ve been keeping yourself! Didn’t I tell you to put on your wamus before you went out! You’re as pale as a corpse. Come in now and lay down a while. Come in and wash your hands; dinner’s soon ready. Come in and see your A’nt Genny. Come in this minute, it’s going to rain and if you get wet the distemper will carry you off like the eagle and the little red hen. Not that his mother ever said this, but it must have been she who sent them out to look for him.

  In the house he seldom had anything to do. He had to sit all day tongue-tied as a trout and listen to his sisters’ chatter. From morn till night it went on, and never a let-up. They sat up to their talk like hungry men to their dinner, but never did they get full. It went all the better when their hands flew. They would throw words over their shoulder or cast them up from their needle or loom. Their tongues were loose on both ends and tied in the middle, Chancey believed. They kept it up at such a rate, gossiping and complaining, jeering and laughing, fighting and singing, all at the same time, till it made his head go round They wore him plumb out, but never did they get tired. Oh, what wouldn’t he give to have his brothers back in the house. Kinzie had left him first and all he saw of him now was his scrawl in a letter. Then Resolve went to live with Fay, and now Guerdon, the last brother he owned, had deserted him bag and baggage for Fishtown and left him alone in the cabin with all the women. Of course, his father still lived here, but mostly he was not at home.

  “Chancey! Where are you?”

  It was Sooth a calling, and she sounded mighty close. He struggled up and stood on the feed measure to climb over the edge of Hector’s manger. Then he tumbled in and lay mighty still with his heart pounding while somebody came in the entry door and called him again. Yes, it was Sooth. She went around every place in the barn a looking for him but she didn’t think to look in the manger.

  When she went out, peace flowed slowly back in the barn again. His heart let up and the world stopped going around in circles like it did when he stood up in too much of a hurry. He hadn’t meant to fall in the manger, but now that he was in, he wouldn’t trade it for his bed in the loft. He had hay under him and a cradle around him and could look out the wide cracks and see daylight coming through chinks in the logs. He could look up and see the gray tents of the spiders caught with dust and chaff. They minded him of bird wings about to take off, a lifting him with them. Now why was it he couldn’t sleep at night but could in the daytime, especially if it was a place and time he shouldn’t with the rain on the roof singing to him and his cradle a rocking when he closed his eyes.

  The cow was red with milk white udders. It stood behind the stable and waited for him to climb up. Then he rode it over to town, through the square and up and down Water Street. People looked and smiled at him to see him riding a cow. A driver couldn’t get his oxen up the bridge hill, so the red cow gave milk in a big brass kettle and the driver drank it, holding the kettle up with both hands and after that the oxen could pull their load of heavy green logs up the bridge hill easy enough, the leaders with their heads down picking their way carefully step by step into the strange dark tunnel till eight beasts, wagon, logs, driver, Chancey and the red cow all hung over the middle of the river. On the bridge walk and shore the people held their breaths. But the bridge timbers only creaked and groaned. If it stood for that, it would stand for anything, Mr. Jackson said, and now the boy could go back to the house with his red cow, for it looked like rain.

  When Chancey heard the rain on the roof, the cow had gone. At the entry door of the barn he saw the water coming down in sheets. He could hardly see the house. Likely that’s why he went the wrong way and fell in a pool of water, but he told himself he would have been wet to the skin anyway from the rain till he opened the kitchen door and heard his sisters cry at him.

  “Chancey, where have you been? We’ve been looking everywhere for you! Take off your things. You’re wetter than a scalded chicken. What were you doing all this time?”

  Chancey suffered them to push him to the fire and pull him this way and that. His shirt came off and then his britches, drawers, shoes and stockings, till he stood there, a grotesque little old man, gaunt as a plucked banty rooster, gaunt with cold, bending down as far as he could to hide his nakedness. He said not a word, only made faint sounds of grief and protest as they rubbed his wobbly body one way or another and jerked at limber limbs that wouldn’t stay stiff enough to have stockings pulled over them.

  “Now you better tell us where you were!” Libby th
reatened, buttoning his dry blouse and pinching as punishment some of his cold skin into the buttonholes.

  “I was out in the stable,” he said meekly.

  “Oh no, you weren’t. I was out there just a half hour ago.”

  He considered. He hadn’t heard Huldah, only Sooth.

  “That must have been when I was over in town.”

  “How did you get over there?”

  “I rode over on a cow,” he said gravely.

  Now why did his sisters have to set up such a honking like lady Winters’ geese when somebody came in her yard?

  “Who put you up on a cow?”

  Chancey thought.

  “Nobody. I got up myself.”

  “It must have been a mighty little cow. Whose cow was it? Ours?” Libby jeered.

  “No. I never saw it before.”

  “Well, was it an old or young cow and had it any horns and what was its name?”

  “It didn’t have a name, I think.”

  “Did anybody see you with this cow over in town?”

  “I wasn’t with it. I was on it,” Chancey corrected her. “And lots of people saw me. They were strange people. But they smiled at me. If you’d ask them, they’d tell you.”

  “How can we ask them if we don’t know who they were? Where’s this green cow now?”

  “It was a red cow,” said Chancey. “I rode it back to the stable. But it’s not there now.”

  They all made those cackling sounds again.

  “No, I guess not and never was.”

  “It was, too,” Chancey said mildly.

  Then he turned and saw his mother listening. Her face looked uncommonly sober.

  “Chancey, I’ve heard a good many wild tales from you. Now I have nothing much against them. You can make the girls believe them all you like. But you’re getting to be too big a chunk of a boy to believe them your own self. You’re old enough to know now what’s real and true and what’s make believe. Now I want you to tell me real and true where you were this afternoon.”