With a southwest crosswind flowing over him, he felt like he was flying down the dim ribbon. The ripples along the canal fled toward the berm at his approach, and the bare trees creaked and groaned in the wind. The river was somewhere through the dark trees to his right, running with him. It approached and receded, approached again. Where the canal was carved into rock faces on the berm, the river ran fast alongside him down a steep, twenty-foot slope. It ran like a line of dark horses and sounded like rain. The apron widened and the river disappeared as the trees guarding the towpath grew taller.

Vin ran effortlessly, realizing at some point that his hip no longer hurt. His thoughts drained away and he became the motion of running. He came to the spot where he and Nicky had picnicked while canoeing last fall. They had pulled their canoe into the overgrown meadow where the trees had been felled for the buried gas line, then eaten apples while watching a beaver swim figure eights and thwack its tail in warning. But now there was no meadow; the trees were unbroken and had yet to feel the thwack of an axe. Thwack. Warning. His thoughts fell back into alignment. He had to find Nicky at Swains Lock before the flood arrived!

The towpath grew darker as the woods deepened on the apron. He rounded a shallow bend and saw a bright light in the distance, at the level of his eyes. It expanded slowly and seemed to radiate through an arc in his direction, like a wide-angled flashlight or the headlight on a train. Through the swirling wind and between the thumps of his footsteps, he listened for the sound of a train. Instead he heard a fleeting sound of bells. The wind rose up and the sound was lost. The light grew brighter and seemed to shift left of the towpath, still several hundred feet away. Another trace of bells and the thump of a heavy footstep that wasn’t his own, from somewhere downwind, ahead of him, as he flew on down the towpath. And suddenly the dark beasts filled his vision, ten paces ahead. He straightened his legs to brake with each step, veering to the fringe to avoid a collision. He heard a whinnied protest and the strenuous shaking of bells as a huge head and mane bobbed away from him, toward the canal.

“Jeepers, mister!” cried a young voice above him. “You about scared the mules half to death!” Vin edged along the fringe toward the second mule, which followed in line, harnessed to the first by straps, a spreader bar, and chains. This mule eyed him nervously as it passed.

“Giddap, Berniece!” called the boy as Vin heard the slap of hand against haunch. The bells resumed a walking rhythm and the towbar floated past. A taut, dark line angled out toward the light, now a hundred feet away. The bow-lamp cast a ghostly aura over the snub-nosed front of the barge, which rode high in the water and was painted white above the waterline. Framing the bow-lamp, black square windows loomed like eyes.

Vin walked quietly as the barge slid by him. Near its stern, a square cabin rose above the level of the deck, and a canopy was suspended above the cabin’s flat roof. Low voices drifted across the water from beneath it. A silhouette leaning on the stern rail turned to face him as the barge passed by, and Vin saw the dark shaft of the tiller extending from the man’s arm. He leaned into a jump-step and resumed running.

He was sweating now, so he pulled off his sweater and tied it around his waist. He pushed the sleeves of his turtleneck up and the breeze across his forearms cooled him down. A formless white shape materialized in the distance and bobbed closer as he ran, gaining definition. It was the lockhouse at Swains. He slackened to a fast walk. The water in the canal looked higher than usual and the wind blew ripples across it toward the entrance to the lock. The upstream gates were open – set for a loaded boat. He strode toward the footbridge but it wasn’t there. Water lapped at the stone walls of the lock, a few inches from the top. In a small yard beside the unlighted lockhouse, he noticed a clothesline of drying laundry blowing in the breeze.

“Nicky!” he yelled. No response but the creaking of branches overhead. He proceeded to the closed downstream gates and stepped onto the plank walkway. “Nicky!” he called again. No answer. He edged cautiously out over the dark water. A horizontal iron rod, curved up slightly at the end nearest him, angled toward his knees and he stepped carefully around it. It was a lock-key, he realized, seated atop an iron stem. He sidestepped a second lock-key to reach the center, where he felt the support of converging swing beams underfoot, then negotiated the remainder of the plank to the other side. He jogged to the lockhouse and banged on the front door. No lights came on and no one answered. Another knock brought nothing.

Where was she? Where was everyone? Had they all fled for high ground? Had they already been told? He looked past the lock at the scattered trees on the apron. There was no sign of life. Moonlight glinted off the undulating river as it poured between the Maryland bank and one of the ragged island stitches sewn into its heart. He passed two old benches in front of the lockhouse and turned the corner into the side yard. White shirts, colorless trousers, and small white sheets fluttered on the clothesline. He circled to the backyard and saw a forlorn picnic table near its center. A bare shade tree rose beyond it, overseeing packed dirt and patches of trampled grass.

A line of low shapes guarded the border of the backyard and the ascending berm, and drawing closer he realized they were gravestones. A row of eight, all facing the lockhouse. The first stone was tilted and looked ancient. Though the moonlight caught it from an angle, he couldn’t read the engraving on its eroded face. He paced the row of leaning, weathered stones, tracing their inscriptions with his fingers. The writing was intact but indecipherable. When he reached the last gravestone, he could see that it was different – planted dead straight, its face unscarred by time. The inscription looked freshly carved and the shadowed grooves were legible in the ambient light.

Nicole Callahan Hayes

1965-1996

He knelt and stroked the letters of her name with his index finger, choking back sobs. It was too late for Nicky. She was gone.

He blinked away tears and continued his circuit around the lockhouse, turning into the upstream side-yard that bled into the dirt driveway. Two racks of canoes stood across the parking area on the berm. He walked to the nearest rack and touched the inverted hull of a canoe in its middle row. The hull was birchbark, painted black, and he tapped the woodwork of its gunwales and thwarts. He tried to lift the canoe but its central thwart was cabled to the rack. He let go and turned back to the canal.

Across the water on the towpath stood a girl, staring at him. Her eyes were lapis lazuli embers and her hair fell in glowing green and gold braids like the tails of fireworks. She wore a long-sleeved top and a simple skirt above calf-high boots. A bracelet of thin bands circled each wrist and a glowing red feather trailed from each bracelet. Her face was in shadow, but he could see her lips part and her white teeth emerge as she started walking straight toward him, across the towpath, down the bank to the water, and across the surface of the canal.

When Vin woke up again he was screaming. Nicky came running into the bedroom, and he rose up through his fever and pain to embrace her.

Part Two

Chapter 14

Locking Through

Monday, March 24, 1924

Two fallen red-maple blossoms drifted slowly with the current toward Pennyfield Lock. On the towpath, the young man stood transfixed watching them. One was closer to the berm, and it was drawn inexorably away from its partner and into the breakaway current descending the flume. The blossom bounced and accelerated down the stone ramp before vanishing into the chute, where it was swept to the cataract that tumbled into the next level of the canal. Its companion curved idly into the eddy above the closed gates of the lock.