Lee spun the screw to open the vise and pulled out the last drilled pole. Cy’s boat was almost ready, and after that he’d be waiting for the canal to open and for his two new colored boys to come up from Washington. So Katie was taking Pete down to the amusement park at Glen Echo on Wednesday. Her friend from Alexandria was going to go with them, and then they was all going back to Alexandria for a couple of days. On Friday, Katie would bring Pete back to Swains, and then she could meet Lee at Pennyfield around sunset. Four days from now and it seemed unimaginably distant. Katie had told him she’d pick up the photo at the Great Falls Tavern and bring it with her on Friday. He gathered up the finished poles and carried them out of the shed and down the path to the house, where he added them to the pile on Charlie’s porch. As he started gathering a new batch, he heard a distant bleating sound – four squawking notes from a tin horn. Silence. Then four more squawks, a little louder. His pocket watch read just past 4:30. He put the poles back on the porch and headed across the meadow to the lock.
After crossing to the towpath, he had a better view of the canal upstream. The scow was still two hundred yards away but he recognized it immediately. Company scows had decks of planks nailed across a hollow hull, with no storage below. Toward the stern there would be a small cabin, painted white with green trim and windows on each side. And there would be wheelbarrows, shovels, hoes, and bags of cement scattered across the deck.
You couldn’t see the deck on the scow upstream because it had a cabin in the bow, painted grayish blue. It was a stable for two mules, but the Emorys used it as a hayhouse, since they only worked one two-mule team and kept the mules out at night. They had a separate cabin toward the stern. In between the stable and the cabin were six wooden hatches, painted gray, that covered the cargo stored in the hull. The Emory’s scow was two or three feet narrower than a coal barge and less than half as long, so it was much easier to steer through locks. If you had someone on board who knew how to steer, Lee thought.
The mule team approached pulling in single file along the edge of the towpath, close to the canal. No bells on this team – for the same reason, he guessed, that there was no name painted on the transom. The driver was Kevin Emory and he walked behind the team down the center of the path. When he saw Lee, he raised his tin horn and blew a few celebratory toots. Lee jogged up the towpath to greet him.
“He-ey-ey lockee! Set your gates, keeper, we’re driving through!” Kevin pushed his ratty black fedora back on his head and grinned at Lee with tobacco-stained teeth; his fleshy face reddened above his russet mustache. “Good to see you, cousin.”
Lee shook Kevin’s hand and waved to Tom, who waved back from the tiller but said nothing. Lee fell in alongside Kevin as the mules kept walking. “How’s your run going?”
“Fair enough,” Kevin said. “Though I’d rather be steering than driving.” He turned his head to spit tobacco juice onto the path. “We’re switching at every lock, but I always seem to drive the long levels. Today I drove the damn seven-mile level of Point of Rocks and then the damn eight-mile level of Riley’s Lock.”
“I guess that means Tom drove the damn nine-mile level of Whites Ferry in between.”
Kevin laughed and the crow’s feet around his eyes burrowed into soft red skin. “If you say so, Lee. Didn’t seem like no nine miles to me!”
“Where you coming from today?”
“Monocacy River. We tied up just past the aqueduct, above the lock.”
“That’s about mile 42,” Lee said. “Pennyfield is mile 20.” He looked at the chestnut coats of the mules, whose ribs were showing. These mules were much thinner than the four he had returned to Cy Elgin on Saturday. “I hope you’re not asking your team to start the season with a thirty-mile trick. They get any breaks today?”
“Sure, lots of ‘em,” Kevin said. “Every time we was locking through!” He flashed Lee a jowly smile, and Lee watched a drop of dark juice slide over his lower lip. Kevin put his hand on Lee’s shoulder and his voice softened. “We put our feet up for a bit and watered ‘em at Chisel Branch, just past the Goose Creek River Lock. And we figured they might enjoy some canal-company corn when we got here.” He winked at Lee. “Case you seen a delivery yet.”
Lee looked away to hide the irritation on his face. Charlie’s corn crib was partly full, but Lee wasn’t sure it was from the canal company. Even if it was, his cousins shouldn’t be counting on it to feed their team. He changed the subject. “What are you hauling?”
“Why, cord-wood, of course!” Kevin said with a look of mock surprise. “I thought you knowed our business, cousin!”
Lee laughed and shook his head. “Must be a whole eight, nine cords. Might fetch three dollars a cord in Georgetown. You fellas should be able to take the rest of the season off!”
Kevin spat a gobbet at the nearest hoof. “Seven cords,” he said. “Don’t want to punish the mules on our first trip of the year. Plus we got some ballast under a couple of the hatches. You might want to do a little inspection at the lock.” The mules were within a hundred feet of the open gates and they knew enough to slow down. Kevin made eye contact with his brother at the tiller. “You got a snub line for us, captain?”
Tom wrapped a line around the tiller and crossed to the starboard rail, where a thick rope lay coiled on the stern-most hatch. The rope was cleated to the bow, but the Emorys had learned that you needed to have the snub line close to the captain when no one else was on board. Tom unwound a few coils and threw the remaining loops toward the towpath; they unwound in flight and the last segment landed on the bank. Lee ran to grab it before it slid back into the canal. The rope was heavy and wet, over an inch thick and coated with sand and grit. He reeled it in and coiled it loosely around his arm. “If you get ‘em past the lock,” he told Kevin, “I’ll snub you.”
Kevin grabbed the lead mule’s bridle and guided the team past the lock. As he watched Tom steer between the walls, Lee carried the heavy rope to the snubbing post. It was as high as his waist and almost as thick, with deep spiraling grooves burned into it. He wrapped the snub line around the post as the scow entered the lock, allowing thirty feet of slack. The mules were standing still now, but the boat glided forward under its own momentum, heading for a collision with the downstream gates. When the line grew taut and began to stretch, he wrapped another loop around the post. The line slid and groaned and he smelled a curl of woodsmoke. He added a third loop and the scow decelerated to a swaying halt, like a bull brought to its knees by the final knife. Its bow was still fifteen feet from the downstream gates. Not much challenge snubbing a scow, he thought. A coal boat was a different matter.
Tom Emory hopped down onto the lock wall and walked over to greet Lee. Tom was six or seven years younger than Kevin, which would put him in his late twenties if Lee remembered right. He was lean and quiet, almost taciturn, with a dark mustache, a joyless slash for a mouth, and hard, glittering eyes that often looked black. Lee always pictured Tom with a Bowie knife in his hand, since at idle moments Tom invariably seemed to be carving or whittling something, or casually flipping his knife into the deck of a boat. Lee was relieved to see that the knife had been sheathed on Tom’s belt while he was steering into the lock. “I think I’ll stretch my legs a minute,” Tom said with a humorless wink. “All three of ‘em.” He strolled across the towpath, unbuttoned his fly, and urinated on the fringe of grass next to the lockhouse.
Lee unwrapped the snub line and pushed the swing-beam through a ninety-degree arc. She loves me, he thought, as the gate swung closed. He crossed over the scow and swung the gate closed on the berm side. She loves me not. From the walkway, he used the lock-keys to open the wickets on the downstream gates. Swirls formed as the water drained and Lee’s prospects rose and fell. When the swirls subsided, he opened the downstream gates.