For Lee Fisher on this sunny Monday afternoon in early spring, everything was a metaphor for his future with Katie. The blossoms were pulled apart so he forgot them and got back to work, alert for the next harbinger of fortune or loss. If he was going do some drilling in the shed, he needed to reset the lock for a loaded boat. He leaned against the end of the beam to swing the gate; when it met its counterpart in the center of the lock, the downstream gates were closed.
He stepped onto the walkway on the upstream gates and swung the first lock-key. Water flooded through the square wicket below him and kicked up a gushing fountain of whitewater in the lock. She loves me. He sidestepped to turn the second paddle. She loves me not. He continued across, opening the wickets on the berm-side gate. Four surging fountains reveled below him; he dismounted to the lock wall as the water rose.
He checked his pocket watch and wound the stem. It was 3:15, and the canal had been running at Pennyfield since early Saturday. Over two days now since they opened the guard lock up at mile 22 and started watering the canal from the feeder at Dam 2. So by now it was a clean run from Seneca Creek down to Georgetown. With three straight days of mild weather, the winter’s heavy snow and ice should be gone out to Harpers Ferry and further west. If the canal company also opened the feeder at Dam 3 on Saturday, his cousins should have been able to get their scow moving early Sunday morning, since they tied up for the winter just below the feeder level at mile 62.
Knowing them Emorys, they’d be driving a single team of mules, with no sensible schedule for work and rest. They’d just boat along until the mules or the driver didn’t want to walk no more, then tie up, put out the feed trough, and take a nap. And since the canal wasn’t officially open yet, some of the locktenders wouldn't be at their locks. So his cousins might have to set some of the locks themselves. Even allowing for all that, they should have been able to make twenty miles from Harpers Ferry yesterday, easy. Another twenty miles would get them here to Pennyfield. So they might be here late this afternoon.
Lee watched the upwelling fountains subside into swirls as the water in the lock reached the level of the canal upstream. When the swirls dissolved, he criss-crossed the lock to open the upstream gates. Set for a loaded boat.
He headed for Charlie’s house across the meadow. The house was quiet, since the Pennyfields were still in Baltimore visiting with Louise’s family. Lee was staying in the lockhouse and keeping an eye on the big house for Charlie. Everything looked proper. On the side porch were two piles of the pine poles that Charlie used to make the pole-hooks he sold to boatmen. The larger pile was the raw poles and the smaller pile the ones Lee had drilled already – two holes for the clevis pin that held the hook. He collected ten undrilled poles and headed up the hillside to the shed. Entering the woods, he noticed the fingertips of branches were tinged red with the warming blood of spring, the season he’d been waiting for.
Inside the shed was a solid wooden workbench that Charlie had outfitted with a vise. He propped the ends of the poles on the bench, laid one inside the vise so that six inches were protruding, and spun the screw to hold it tight. The eggbeater-style hand drill was on the bench and he examined it again before resuming work. Charlie would be happy with it. A gear tooth on his old drill had broken a few weeks ago and he had left Lee instructions to buy a new drill in Georgetown, along with money and permission to use the bicycle Charlie kept in the shed to get there. Bicycles were outlawed on the towpath during boating season because they scared the mules, but Lee had been able to ride to Weaver’s Hardware and back on Friday, before the repair scows started running. Riding along the towpath, the sensation of speed was intoxicating. The best part was the locks, since the towpath had a little downhill slope at each one, and you could fly down those hills and gather speed. Of course, it was the opposite coming back upstream.
Since then he’d managed to sneak in a ride on the towpath every day. The only way to do it was to keep the bicycle down at the lockhouse rather than in the shed. It looked almost new and Lee would hate to lose it, so he knew he needed a lock. Things that weren’t nailed down had a way of disappearing on the canal. Luckily there was a war surplus store near Weaver’s, and he had found a pair of old leg-irons there for sixty-five cents. The cuffs were adjustable out to a four-inch diameter and had a key lock, so he could use them to lock the bicycle to a thin tree or a railing. Katie would be back from Alexandria on Friday and they had plans to meet that evening for a picnic at Pennyfield. Maybe he’d be able to convince her to go for a spin with him. That would be the cat’s meow. He put the drill down and used the pencil and ruler to mark spots on the pole for the pin holes. The bit was tight in the chuck, so he started the outer hole.
The work was simple – measure, mark, drill the first hole, rotate the pole in the vise, drill the second hole – and he soon found himself revisiting his encounters with Katie Elgin. Until two days ago, he hadn’t seen her since the canal stopped running last fall. She’d come down from Williamsport the Saturday after Thanksgiving to help her brother Cy close up his boat after a hard freeze hit out west and the company drawed the water off the whole canal. Cy was captaining the number 41 back from Georgetown to Williamsport after his last run of the season and he got stuck on the White Oak Springs level, just above Swains Lock, when the canal closed for the winter. When that happened you just had to lock up your boat and leave it there until they refilled the canal in the spring. All the boat captains knew that was the risk you took when you tried to squeeze in one last run to Georgetown that late in the year.
Cy’s younger brother Pete was on the canal with him, but Pete was only ten, just a mule driver. Them two colored boys that Cy took on as hands last season disappeared the night they drawed the water off the canal. That was strange. Maybe they figured they’d already been paid in Georgetown for the last trip and Cy wasn’t likely to pay them again. So Katie had come down to help get the boat squared away and take Pete back to Williamsport to be in school for the winter.
Lee had already finished his season boating with Ben Myers on the number 9 and had made his way down to his family’s farm near Seneca after Ben tied up for the winter in Hancock. As far as Lee could tell, Ben Myers and Cy Elgin didn’t have much use for each other. Cy looked to be in his late twenties, seven or eight years older than Lee, and even though Cy had only been a captain for one season, he didn’t seem too impressed with the other boat captains on the canal – not even the captains with decades of experience like Ben Myers. Cy seemed either aloof or surly; Lee wasn’t sure which. He and Cy had crossed paths once or twice while boating last season, so they recognized each other but had never actually met.
All the same, when Lee heard Cy’s 41 boat was stuck in the drained canal just six miles from Seneca, he’d gone down the Sunday after Thanksgiving and climbed the plank up to the stranded barge to ask if Cy wanted help with his mules. They was company mules but two good teams, and Lee told Cy that he could take all four up to a farm near Seneca that occasionally took on mules for the winter, and then bring ‘em down to Cy’s boat again in the spring. That way Cy wouldn’t have to take them almost fifty miles out to the canal company’s main winter farm in Sharpsburg. That Sharpsburg farmer practically starved the mules all winter anyway, cutting straw into their feed, and in the spring they could barely walk, much less pull, until you fattened them up on corn and hay. Lee’s farmer friend in Seneca knew Mr. Nicolson, the manager of the canal, so Lee was sure his friend could get the company to pay for wintering the mules.