Swains Lock

For Lee Fisher on this su

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 ru

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 Pe

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 Pe

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 ru

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 Pe

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 ru

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.