Standing on the deck and leaning back against the windowless forward wall of the cabin, Cy hadn’t answered Lee right away. Instead he looked him over like he was trying to decide whether Lee was working some kind of angle. It turned out Cy was right, but Lee didn’t know it yet, since he first met Katie a few minutes later! She came walking up the towpath from Swains, and Cy saw her approach from over Lee’s shoulder. A young boy followed a ways back, scavenging rocks that he could toss toward the scattered puddles at the bottom of the drained canal. Without saying anything, Cy walked past Lee and stepped onto the fall-board. Lee followed and they descended to the thawing mud on the bank below the towpath, then climbed up to meet her. Lee noticed that Cy walked with a slight limp on his left side, so maybe the surliness came from physical pain.
It was the last day of November, opaque and dingy, but whatever sunlight managed to slant through the clouds seemed to get tied up in Katie’s face and hair as she approached. She was wearing a wool coat but no hat, and her wavy hair glinted in the gray light. Lee felt a strange current run through his chest. He tugged the brim of his flat cap down, pushed his hands deep into his coat pockets and kicked self-consciously at a lump of mud on the side of his boot. Katie stopped when she reached them and smiled at Lee before turning to Cy.
“Did you find Jess Swain?” Cy asked.
“Cyrus, don’t be rude. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend before you interrogate me?”
Cy grunted and turned toward Lee, and Lee saw the dark depressions beneath his eyes that he hadn’t noticed from further away. “My little sister Katie Elgin.” The towheaded boy came trotting up next to her, stealing glances up at Lee and Cy, who ignored him. “And our kid brother, Pete.” Cy looked back at Katie. “This is Lee from Captain Myers’ boat.”
“Lee Fisher,” he said, removing his cap with a smile and extending his hand toward Katie. “I’m pleased to meet you.” And the skin on the inside of his wrist had been singed when she touched it softly with her index finger.
Katie studied Lee for an instant through hazel eyes, then turned to Cy and confirmed that Jess Swain had offered to give her and Pete a lift to the railroad station on Monday in time to catch the afternoon train to Williamsport. So they had the rest of the day and tomorrow morning to get Cy’s boat squared away. And Katie had convinced Cy that he would be a fool not to accept Lee’s offer to take the mules to the Seneca farm, since with Pete and the mules taken care of, Cy would be free to pursue the unspecified business he claimed to have in Georgetown. Lee could meet them tomorrow morning at Swains Lock and accompany Cy to the stable on River Road, where Cy had been given permission to keep the mules for the weekend.
And so Lee had seen Katie on the following morning as well. By which point he’d already decided to take care of the mules at his family’s farm over the winter. He arrived at Swains early, hoping Katie might be there early as well, and she was. And Cy was late, coming not from his stranded boat, but from down the towpath toward Great Falls. Lee and Katie sat at the picnic table behind the lockhouse and talked for half an hour while Pete darted around finding stones to throw at a rotting tree. During their conversation Lee collected a fistful of gems to meditate on through the coming winter. Among them was that she would probably return in the spring to drop Pete off again and help Cy prepare the boat for the 1924 season.
Then Jess Swain had come down from the main house in his Model T to collect Katie and Pete. Lee watched them leave for the train station and felt a warm rush when Katie glanced back at him as the car pulled away. Cy limped into the backyard ten minutes later, unshaven and bloodshot, and nodded curtly toward Lee. They walked up Swains Lock Road to the stable on River Road, where they fed and watered the mules and harnessed them into a team of four. Then Lee mounted Jewel and set out for Seneca with Ed, Belle, and Lila following.
That had been December 1, he thought, as he loosened the vise screw and laid another drilled pole on the floor. And when he’d seen her again two days ago, it was as if no time had passed at all. On Saturday morning, he’d driven Cy’s mules down from his family’s farm in Seneca. He was proud of the team, since they were well-fed and groomed sleek after a winter under his care. He walked the mules down Swains Lock Road to the canal and tied them to a hitching rail. When he circled to the front of the lockhouse, there she was, coming out the front door on her way to Cy’s boat.
“You’re still here! Don’t you belong to anyone?” she’d said teasingly.
“No,” he answered, “but I might like to.” Then his face flushed, so he hopped onto the plank and crossed the lock ahead of her, extending his hand to help her along the last portion of the plank. When she clasped it and stepped down beside him, he again felt a spark from her fingers against his skin. He joined her for the five-minute walk up the towpath to Cy’s boat, which was still tied up where it had spent the winter.
Along the way Katie explained that Jess Swain was letting Cy, Pete, and her stay in the lockhouse during the week before the canal officially opened. While they got Cy’s boat ready, they could keep an eye on things and help the repair scows lock through as they worked the levels clearing debris and patching breaks. They reached the long plank to Cy’s boat and Lee asked whether she’d like to visit Great Falls with him on Sunday. She’d looked at him soberly for a second, as if reassessing him and reaching a conclusion.
“That sounds wonderful,” she’d said, brightening again.
And yesterday afternoon she’d been waiting for him on the bench in front of the lockhouse, wearing a trim jacket over her Sunday dress. The dress was light gray with white pinstripes and a dark blue sash. Below its collar hung a sandstone pendant necklace with an inscribed symbol he’d never seen before. She wore a felt hat, lower on one side in the current style, with an indigo hatband. Her wavy hair shone where it fell along her neck and the dress picked up the hazel of her eyes. She smiled at him and he was sure he’d never seen a girl as pretty. There was something about her that suggested willingness – a readiness to step forward into uncertainty, or maybe just to step onto a plank across a lock. For Lee, this was part of her charm. They’d walked down the towpath from Swains to Great Falls, and then he had paid a quarter to have their picture taken out at the Falls overlook.
He extracted the drill from a completed hole and raised the bit to blow the sawdust loose. What glowing gems from yesterday’s conversation could he contemplate? Eighteen years old. She hadn’t mentioned any particular boy in Williamsport, though there must have been a posse of them chasing her. She might enroll in a typing class this spring and then try for a job as a secretary in Washington. A friend of hers had a spare room in Alexandria she could rent.
Three brothers and one sister! With Cy the oldest, Pete the youngest, and Katie in the middle. A second sister died at six from the flu. All her siblings had been on the canal, one season or another while growing up, with her daddy Jack Elgin who ran the number 32 boat out of Williamsport for over twenty years. Cy had done everything there was to do on a canal boat, but he never liked it much and during the war he left to take a welding job at the naval shipyard in Philadelphia. He got married to a Philadelphia girl. The shipyard kept going strong after the war, since they was repairing and scrapping the fleet. But then Cy fell off a scaffold two years ago and broke his hip, and it never healed right. Standing for long stretches was painful, so he couldn’t work as a welder and he stayed home. A few months later his wife left him and moved back in with her family. And when Cy couldn’t find a job he wanted, he’d come home to Williamsport and applied to the canal company to work as a boat captain. There was several long-time captains quitting the canal, with business declining every year, so the company had a boat for him. They gave him the 41 and 1923 was his first full season as a captain on the canal. A slow season. And Cy had told Katie that things was going to get worse for the canal, with the good coal deposits in Cumberland mostly mined out.