A Stop on the Way to Texas

by WARD DORRANCE

THE white mares pulled the van into High Street and whinnied and shook their bells. Their driver sat up straight, and his gray eyes narrowed.

The ruts of High Street lay ahead of him in the melting snow. Women in poke bonnets and men in top hats were milling about among the farmers. All afternoon he had watched them stroll along the plank walks, nodding and smiling in the air’s beady thaw. Now, just as the lamps were beginning to come on in the stores, and the people were about to return to their musty rooms, their eyes lit up to see the white team and the red wagon.

The driver reined the mares in until they pressed their chins to their breast bands. “Make it pretty!" he called to them, and when two lines of oval faces had gathered at the hitching rails, he laughed and gave the mares their heads.

They sprang forward in a trot. For all their grooved backs and big feet, they seemed to hang in the air an instant before they lit, sprinkling notes from the sleigh bells, and the stars on their blinkers and the knobs of their hames twinkled. The crowd laughed and yelled and tossed up hats, while the driver, pretending to dodge the children’s snowballs, shook his whip. At the corner where themares a res turned into a side street, he doffed his cap and showed his teeth in his dark beard.

“That was worth a dog fight,”he said. He sat back on the box with a smile and let the team jog on through t he empty street. At t he end of ii, where the road entered a cleft in the bluff and fell steeply to the river, he stopped and stood up on a hub. His eyes, which were as deep-set as a monkey’s, darted into the drop below.

Three crows were flying between him and the depot and freight house, which lay down by the tracks along the river. One bird held itself apart, above the two beneath it, and their slow coasting flight made his knees tremble, as if, van and all, he were plunging into space. He ran his hand across his eyes and squinted downward, through his fingers. The frozen river looked narrow between its fringes of naked trees; and beyond it, the three miles of flat snow over to the bluffs on the other side seemed like a single field.

All day the whole town and the bluffs and the river had lain under clouds, and although the men back in High Street had said that it meant more snow, he noted that none had fallen. Instead, the air had mellowed, and dripping icicles had made holes in the drifts below the eaves. He looked back uncertainly into the cedars that grew on a ledge beside him, and grinned and felt of the air with his fingers.

At home the young leaves would be casting a shade. Frogs would be singing in the ditch water. But here, in this country, people ran out without their coats, looking up and wondering and chattering to one another at a little check in the cold. He bent down to get under the hood of the van, but halted halfway to glance back into the valley.

From both banks, a line of shallow fog was beginning to roll out on the ice. It twined within itself, idling, swelling out like pipe smoke, he thought, when a man takes a draw on the stem and leaves his mouth open. The crows wheeled over it, cawing.

He watched them until a cluster of lights came on, one by one, in a settlement across the river; then he nodded and picked up his reins.

The mares took the grade slowly. Limping, and halting while the single-trees pushed against their hocks, they made their way down through the wet brush that crowded into the trail. At the bottom, they turned left and trotted past a hut that sat against the base of the bluff.

The hut was small and its logs had settled. The door and the one window were squeezed out of shape, but the words, Depot Saloon, appeared in white on the stone above the roof. At the window, in a spot that had been rubbed in the steam on the pane, a hand was waving.

The driver touched his hat, but glanced away and shut one eye and scanned the river. Here by the tracks it looked its mile across. The band of clear ice between the rolls of fog had shrunk. If the two rolls met before he returned from taking the freight across to the settlement, it would be up to the mares. He would have to sit, poised to jump, while they remembered the snags and the air pockets. “That,”he thought, “will be worth a dog light, too.”His eyes lit up; then he suddenly recalled the girl who had waved to him, and he moved to the side of the box and looked back.

She had come out of the saloon to watch him by. Dimly lit by a beam from the open door, she stood with her feet in the swirling ground fog, as if she were walking on water. He was not sure that she made him out, and he cracked his whip and would have called back something jolly, but the mares were already jolting the van across a spur of track into the freight yard.

They swept into a curve and stopped where he could back to the platform, and he hopped out and sat down on the splintered boards, with his shoulders to the freight house wall. A line of hogsheads, capped with sooty snow, stood along the fence rails. The fence stretched back to the bluff, and there the rock rose, black and dripping, like a prison wall. “It may be a thaw,” he said, “but it’s not much to look at.”

At the sound of voices inside, he turned toward the lamp-lit window. “Two for town,” a man was saying, “and one for over the river.” A weight shook the floor and a second man repeated, “One for over the river.” After a while he added, “Where is Johnnie Reb?”

The driver smiled, but he sat still and let them have their joke. The men were German, and in their accent they made of his name, John Webb, something that sounded like John Reb. It made them laugh. The civilian buttons on his butternut jacket were still new.

He watched the men through the dirty pane — Kurt with his pale blue eyes and his nose that had no bridge; Helmut, with his hair sticking out like straw from his leather cap. They were stooping and rising and squinting at labels, as grave as two old women cleaning a room. He yawned and looked back at the team.

The near mare was sniffing at the mist which crawled along the ground around her feet. She craned her head about when he whistled and, in the lamp light that fell from the window, walled her eyes at him, he thought, as she had done on the night he had met her.

Kurt and Helmut that night, leading the way to the stable with a lantern, had brought him past the van. It was long and bowed in the middle, and the canvas hood gleamed white. The polished bed — how well the civilians did themselves! — reflected their faces, He had supposed that a team which was fit to draw this must be stallions, but Kurt, and Helmut, ahead of him, were talking about “them girls.” “Tame as pigeons,” Helmut said. “Them mares, they wouldn’t hurt a baby.”

At the box stall, John had stopped and let out a low whistle. “Where did you Yanks steal them?” he had asked. There the mares had stood; fat and white and matched, and as soft as glove leather; steaming, in the warm light, as if they had just broken out of the mold that had formed them. Each had looked around with hay between her lips and stared and, seeing the stranger, lowered her black lashes. They looked like very fat women, whose faces happened to be pretty, and he had thrown back his head and laughed to hear that their names were Violet and Maud.

“So now you take the job?” Kurt had asked. He had stood, rubbing his hands together, until John wiped his eyes and said, “Sure. You fellows’ve sold me a ticket.”

Now, while Violet looked back, and pensively studied him where he sat on the platform, Kurt spoke up inside the freight house.

“I didn’t hear Johnnie come up yet,” he said.

“He’s maybe hanging around Elsa at the saloon,” Helmut suggested. He added something in German, and they both laughed. “But Elsa is a good girl, and smart,” Kurt said sternly. “Wait and see what happens to her Pa’s trade when she finds her man.”

“Anyway,” Helmut said, after a silence, “if that dumkopf goes over the ice this evening, a shot of whiskey won’t do him no harm.”

John looked at the mare. “Do you hear that, Vi’?” he asked. “It’s not a bad idea, is it?”

He jumped down from the platform and stopped beside her, and kneaded her plump, divided chest with his fingers. She swelled her nostrils and tried to lay her head across his shoulder, but he pushed her away and made off through the fog toward the lighted window of the saloon.

2

A ROUND-BELLIED stove stood glowing on the sanded floor, inside. An old man with no teeth and a young one, in a fur cap with ear flaps, looked up from their drinks at a table in the center of the room. Behind the bar, a young woman wearing a black dress glanced back as she reached up to place a bottle on a shelf. “I thought you’d forgotten me,” she said.

Her hair was cut into bangs above her startled blue eyes and drawn into a yellow knot at the back of her head. She turned around to face him, between the two lamps that shone to either side of the bar, and held out her hands. “Now what can I give you, Johnnie?” she asked.

He looked at her, pursing his lips, until she laughed. “I know,” she said, and she whispered as she filled a shot glass, “Tell Mama hello.”

He waved to a gray-haired woman who sat upright in a hard chair behind the bar. “Good evening, Mrs. Sensentaifer!” he called out, and she looked up from a piece of fancy work and nodded.

The girl was leaning on her elbows across from him, watching him drink. “You’re not going out tonight,” she said. “Kurt and Helmut say you shouldn’t.”

“Forget that,” he told her. “Stand up and let me look at you.”

She straightened up and threw her big shoulders back playfully. The blue stones in her earrings glittered. A gold crucifix, lying where her breasts came into a line above the yoke of her dress, lifted with her breath and caught the lamp light.

“You know what, Elsa,” he said. “You’re prettier than Vi’. ”

They laughed, but they both jumped when the old woman spoke. She dropped her crocheting in her lap and wagged the square comb that stood high in her hair, and began a speech in German.

John stared at Elsa until she blushed. “I thought you told me she was hard of hearing,” he said.

“A deaf woman can hear some things,” Elsa protested. “She says a nice boy shouldn’t talk like that. You shouldn’t call me a horse; you should look at the bedspread she’s making. A nice boy would like that.”

The old woman watched him as Elsa spoke, and snatched up her work as if she were angry with it when he shook his head.

“They’re all alike,” he said softly. He held his glass up to the light and added, “Now, take my Ma ...”

Elsa picked up a cloth and rubbed at the bar top. “You’ve got a mother, then,” she asked.

“And a father,” he said. “What did you think? They got me back out of the army, and right away they wanted to get me out to the field — and marry me off to the girl on the next place.”

”I expect she was pretty,” Elsa said.

“About like you. Yellow hair, but her eyes were brown, It wasn’t her so much; it was my folks. They’re all church and farm work.” Elsa put her head to one side and watched him as he went on, “They had belter luck with the older boys. The older boys were broke in before the War.”

“Nice steady men,” the old woman said in clear English. She lifted her needles to the light and examined her stitches. “My Elsa will get a section,” she added. “Every acre of it cleared.”

Elsa looked away, “Mama knows a little bit of English,” she said. Her lips trembled and her lashes blinked, as if she were going to weep; then suddenly jolly, she thrust her plump hands toward him and called out, “Toss!”

She caught his glass and returned it, full. “Is it true, like Kurt says,” she asked, tracing a figure with her thumb on the bar, “that you rode around the Union lines one night?”

“With Stuart, sure!” His loud voice startled him, and he added meekly, “It was just a bunch of us boys out burning some hay ricks.”

He bolted the whiskey and held the glass out again, but she did not take it. “Not if you’re going across tonight,” she said. “You’ve had enough.”

Seeing tears in her eyes, he glanced at the old woman and whispered, “We caught, the Feds with their pants down.”

Elsa did not smile. “I know why you have the job you’ve got,” she said, and her voice grew tense. “Oh, I know why!”

“So do I,” Mrs. Sensentaffer said. “He likes the red wagon.” She tilted her head back and gave him a good look at her square cheek bones and her pale gray eyes. “With little boys it should always be the Fourth of July. He would like fire crackers, too.”

Elsa was slowly shaking her head at him, “Not fire crackers,” she said. “Guns is what you want. You wish you were back with those Rebels.”

He met her gaze soberly. “ Listen, Elsa,” he said, and he moved his hand up and down before him. “I’ve told you before; now I’ll tell you again. I left home to get out to Texas.”

“Texas,” the old woman cried. “That’s big enough to hide in.”

“You’re right!” He grinned at her and looked back at Elsa. “At Natchez, I had to get a job on a boat. At Saint Louis, I heard about this work up here in the State capital. This job” — he raised his voice and pounded on the bar — “is just a little something to keep a man alive till spring.”

“That’s not true,“ she said simply. She hid her face in her apron a moment, then dropped the apron. “You wanted that job,” she spat out, “been use you may break your neck at it!”

He laughed and put up an elbow before his face. “ Hey, wait,” he said. “ You act like I was a drunk. Or took dope, maybe.”

She backed away from the bar and looked at him, wide-eyed. “In a way you do,” she said.

“All right then,” he said, and he stood up to go. “You know how those boys act.”

“I do,” Mrs. Sensentaffer broke in. “They double the dose,” and Elsa said, “Mama’s right. Just look behind you.”

The young man with the ear flaps on his cap had gone. His old companion lay asleep, resting his head on the table. One of his eyes was partly open. His tongue protruded from his lips.

John turned away from the bar and strode past him to the door. “Much good may it do you,”Mrs. Sensentaffer called, over Elsa’s good by. He did not answer them, but looked back with a smile at the threshold. Nobody saw him. The old mother had risen from her chair. The two women were walking past one another with their arms up-lifted, shrilly disputing, between the lamps. He grinned and shrugged his shoulders and stepped out into the dusk to face the river.

3

A LONG the bank, the fog lay level at the height of his knees. Seeing that it hid his trail across the ice, he put his elbows to his sides and jogged back, at a dogtrot, past the van and up the steps and into the room where the men were still sorting parcels.

Helmut looked at him silently. Kurt, who was tacking on a label, put his hammer down. “It’s warm outside, Johnnie,” he said. “The ice is maybe soft?”

“Why talk to him?” Helmut, asked when John did not speak. “If you’re so afraid for him, you should see the agent, Kurt.”

”I did it already,” Kurt said. “The agent does like this.” Kurt held his shoulders up to his earlobes. “He says, ‘When the ferry don’t run, I hire a man to cross the ice.’ ”

John stood with his feet wide apart, frowning at them. “You boys scared of something?” he asked. They looked at him and at one another, and dropped their hands to their sides. “If that’s the way you feel about it,” Kurt said, “come help us load up, then. This load ain’t feathers.”

When the last crate was roped down in the van, the men walked with John to the left front wheel. They went silently, in step, and crowded so close to him that he stopped and laughed at them. “You fellows deputies?” he asked. “Are you taking me in?” He shook off the hand which Kurt laid on his arm and leapt up to the box. Leaning over, so that they would see his smile, he said, “You grannies get buck to your stove.” He reached for the whip, and as the van lumbered over the rails toward the river, he yelled back, “Go knit me a bedspread ! ”

Then he slipped to the far side of the box, to be ready with a goodnight for Elsa; but when the van drew abreast of the hut, the place was dark. The lamps on the bar had been put out.

The mares slid down the muddy bank and halted on t he ice. He shook the reins, and at his cluck they trotted on, holding their noses above the fog as if I hey had been swimming. He gave t hem their heads for a few hundred yards, then stopped them, and looked back to see the town.

Upstream, high on the bluff, he found the State capitol building by its little galaxy of lights. Downstream, tiny tier on tier of lights pricked out the cell blocks in the penitentiary, and between the two big buildings a lamp here and a lantern there, some of them moving, flickered in the woods that hid the streets. The combined glow lit up the clouds, and as the clouds parted, showing the white dome of the State House, the town appeared to be burning.

Involuntarily, he looked back to the spot where he knew the landing was, behind the fog. It was quiet. No band of horsemen was out to take him, but his heart was pounding. He put both hands to his chest, and when the clouds roiled up about the dome again and hid it, he bore down in his boots as if they had been stirrups. “Get the son of a bitch! he yelled. “Get the raider!”

“Haider!” the stone of the bluff repeated, and the mares, as if they had been spoken to, moved on. He sat down, breathing through his mouth, and stared at their weav ing heads.

A short way before them the rolls of fog, which had been moving out from either bank, now met. They mingled, and rose into a bluff much higher than the one he had left, but at the top a narrow slit through the mist and clouds revealed a bit of the outer sky. He lifted his face to its clear, sunset pink — wondering at it, as if it were a thing he had once known and now, in a rush, recalled — and let the mares walk on.

They entered the high fog and drew the van into it after them. Their heads rocked from side to side as they plodded forward, and their ears, he thought, seemed oddly far from the buckboard. Once when a wheel scraped the side of the wagon, he realized that they were making an unfamiliar turn, but he sat back in the half dark, listening to their bells, and allowed them to choose the way.

When they pulled up short and stopped, he sat up alert. And when they would not start again, he leaned out and tried to see the ice beneath the wheels. Was the van resting in its old ruts, he wondered, and did horse sense tell the mares that the ice in the ruts would have melted first? He spoke to them, but they stood fast, and by the rattle of the bells he knew they were trembling. He reached for the whip, but they backed delicately into the I races.

“Well,” he said, “we’ll soon fix that.” He jumped down to the ice and scuffed about it with bis boot. He could not find the trail, even though he dropped to his hands and knees, hut he saw that Maud had got a leg out of her chains. She shuddered when he struck her, and made him lift her foot. Vi’ too, he saw, was shaking.

He walked around to her and pulled her head down by one ear, and kissed her warm skull. “What’s the matter, girl?” he asked. “Did you lose the road?” He waited, but she kept her nose pointed tensely ahead. “I’ll get you back on the trail,” he said. “You watch,” and he set off alone in the fog.

After a dozen stops he lost the team, but he stumbled on with his arms out before him. A sludge covered the ice, and here and there the water lay in pools. He could not see. He stopped, and stood still until he felt his socks grow wet. “Hell,” he said. “We’ll have to give it up,”

He made a complete turn and walked back, but the spot where the team should have been was vacant. They made no answer when he called. He thrust out his left hand and shuffled after it until a slight tinkle of bells drew him over to the right. Presently his fingers touched the end-gate and he felt his way along the van. At the front wheel, he forced himself to crawl up slowly. “Don’t you get scared,” he told himself. “They’ll smell it on you.”

He sat silent a while. “All in God’s world we can do,”he said finally, “is make a dash for it.” He cut the air with the whip, but the mares did not budge and he let them wait. Jf they went on willingly, and at a walk, all the better. Still, they weighed two tons apiece. The van, loaded, would double that, and meanwhile here the whole rig sat. If they did not gel on, and keep off of one spot, a line of cleavage might flick around them. They would stand on a wobbling cake of ice. The team would go wild when it felt the “give,”

While he held the whip poised again, a muffled shot rang out and a long ripping sound followed it. Somewhere close, the ice was pulling a way from a log that was frozen in it, and, though he saw that the mares had started ofl, his arm brought down the whip about their cars.

Their lunge knocked him down. His head struck the seat-back and he lay limp, smiling sleepily. The van hummed and swayed and whipped back into line. He listened to the spinning hubs and to the mares’ feet, and he thought, “You got away one more time.”After a while a second thought occurred, “You galloping a team on ice,” and he got up. He braced himself and found the reins and worked his wrists downward, alternately, upon the leather until they ached. But the mares ran on.

“A common runaway,” he thought. He let the reins slip through his fingers and forced himself to sit down. “Let them tire themselves a bit,” he said. “There is time to turn them before we hit the bank.”

But when a rear wheel bounced and shook the load, and the rope that held the crates in the van behind him snapped, he sprang up and jerked back with all his might upon the reins.

One of the mares screamed, but they both galloped on. They had come out of the high fog into a ground mist near a bank. In a wide curve, they were making for a row of lights that floated above a wall on the shore to the right. He gazed at the lights, open-mouthed. “There are too many of them,”he said. He stood swaying as he counted them and added weakly, “They’re on the wrong bank.”

The mares’ legs were mov ing like shuttles in the thinning mist, and he knew by their level pull on the bits that they would not stop. Meanwhile the shore line grew higher and darker. He watched the black rocks that jutted from it and thought, “This is it.”

He grasped the buckboard and sank on his knees to leap — then looked around. At the sight of the two white necks, fending the mist that rose from the ground fog, he drew back and sat down slowly. “I’m going to give you one more chance,” he said.

It was Vi’, on the outside of the curve, that he would have to turn. He sorted out her left rein, and lifted it and drew in a breath, then glanced out ahead of the team and yelled.

Fifty feet away, a log thrust its muzzle at the mares, pointing the blunt end up, like a mortar, out of the ice. They never saw it. It passed between them and missed the tongue, but splintered along the belly of the van and lifted it, knocking the load from side to side, and as if it had fired off a charge, it split the rear axle.

He was down on the ice, spinning forward on his chest. Maud was gone, but Vi’ was sliding on her back, ahead. A wheel tottered and fell against her and he heard her cry out, then turned his eyes to the van. It was skidding, without its rear wheels, toward a ridge of ice that rose up before it. The ridge rolled onward a moment, rolled higher and stood like a fold of skin, and shot up in chunks when t he tongue pierced it.

He fell into the pool where the van had sunk, and turned over. His head emerged, but when he tried to make for the solid ice, his arms would not move, He went under and slowly rode downward, sucking in his lips. For a long while the dark and the stillness, even the cold, made him drowsy, until finally his feet landed on the hood of the van, and his mind cleared. He felt his knees flex; his torso descended as if it were about to sit down. Then his hair, which had been erect, lay back. He was rising, in an updraft of bubbles from the van.

The bubbles seemed to draw him up, and to help them he forced himself to raise an arm. It, too, appeared to lift him faster, and he held it high until his hand struck an object above him and darted back, with a force that roused him.

The thing was cold and tough, and whatever it belonged to was making the water whirr about his head. He jack-knifed to dive, but as he thought, “That was old Vi’s bag!” a rush of air from his mouth pulled him back.

She had lowered her feet around him. She was humping her back and wrenching herself from side to side; and the thing to do, he thought, was to feel along her to one end, and if he could miss her hooves, get out.

His hands on her stomach made her crazy. She twisted wildly and went limp and dropped her weight upon him. It bent his head down. The air in his gullet fought for room. He hiccoughed and let a stream of bubbles escape his lips. But he opened his eyes and blinked them as he thought, “I am under a horse!”

He said it again, and the thought so numbed his mind that the mare’s shoe, when it hit his temple, did not hurt. It made his jaws spread slowly open, like a snake’s. The cold water filled his throat and he was only conscious of a loud humming.

4

THE humming went on as he slept, and dreamed that he lay under a blanket. The board beneath him felt like a table top, and now and then it seemed that the humming was trying to tell him something. He moaned and stirred, and after a while he asked, “Did somebody speaks?”

“Do you hear me now, young man?” a voice answered.

He opened his eyes. Lanterns, in a wide, low room, were standing about on packing boxes, lighting up a wall that was made of bread-loaf stones and wet with seepage water. “It smells like tadpoles in here,” he said, and a second voice, as kind as an old negro’s, whispered at his ear. “Don’t you study about no frogs. You just listen.”

He tried to remember the negroes on the place, but gave it up. “Ask Pa to get the arnica,” he told the man, “I think I’m hurt.”

“That boy’s ravin’, Doc,” a third voice said, “lie thinks he’s home.” The voice was wheedling. It would belong to a white man, he thought, but to a thin one, with a weasel face. He lay still, and rolled bis eyes toward a stout man in black, who had moved into view.

The lamp light caught the man’s blond beard, and his blue eyes and yellow lashes, as he leaned down to speak. “Young man,”he said, “you mistook our lights for those across the river, You were headed downstream, not across. These men are convicts. With my permission, they went out.” He hesitated, and made as if to brush something back from John’s brow, and John asked, “Did they get my team?

“One of ‘em’s in. Site’s the off mare, by what’s left of the harness.” It was the man with the fawning voice who had answered, and John felt his eyes grow wet. “I scared her to death,” be said. “Poor Vi’.”

His chest shook as be heard the man in black go on, “You are in the cellar of the State penitentiary, my boy. We must do what we can for you here. You cannot be moved.”

The voice trailed off. The doctor had turned around, and was lifting an instrument from a satchel by one of the lanterns. It flashed as he wiped il with a rag, and John sat up, He had time to see the two men in striped clothes—the big negro with gray hair, and the little white man with the long nose and small eyes, who smiled and drew back against the negro. Before they could pull him back, he put up a band and felt a section of skin that hung down abov e his eye.

“Jesus Christ!” be said. ”Is it the bone, too, mister? ”

“Takin’ the Lord’s name!” the negro whispered. His breath was hot on John’s ear as he said, “Watch out!” Then he stood aside, with his head bowed, while the doctor strode up to the table.

“Jace!” the doctor said, “did you let him up?”

“He was cussin’. Doc,” the other convict said. “He ain’t got time.”

John widened bis eyes at him. “Some pickpockets,” he tried to get out, “have got a lot to say.” But his lips grew stiff. A film, that seemed to rise from a gust in his lungs, spread between him and the man, and he could not see.

The doctor shook the negro by the arm. “Jaee, you fool,” he began, but he halted and for a long moment looked at the form beneath the blanket. Then he wheeled about and threw his scalpel into the bag and wiped his hands upon the cloth. “All right, Jaee,” he said. “It’s your turn now.”

The negro dropped to his knees. He wagged his while head from side to side, nosing his face into his palms and talking hoarsely to himself.

The ferret-faced man glanced around, from lantern to lantern, about the room, and back at the ridge of toes under the blanket. Hearing the clasp of the satchel snap, he put a finger into his mouth and whimpered, and as if it hurt him, he got down to his knees, too. He did not move his lips, but he clasped his hands before his chest and stared at the wall, rapt, as if a fair shape were moving through its sweaty stones, outward, into the pure night air.