Free The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride by Hortense Calisher Page A

sometimes they came out of the hot fat like a butterfly and sometimes like a blossom, but always they were miles lighter than a doughnut, and gone quicker. It was a queer kind of eating experience and a delightful one, but the kind more or less remembered afterward as a one-time affair, without needing to hunt for it again. People tried to be faithful, sometimes sent their children for a treat or came by themselves for takeouts, but a taste for fritters never seemed to settle itself to a time of day, enough for regularity, and there’s no doubt that the best business is regulation business. There was one young man named Jim, he used to come, it began to be said, some said always when Emily had her turn in the window; some said no, it was Lottie—but the truth was he couldn’t stand sitting in that lighted window, at the one little zinc table and wire chair. If they’d had two chairs and tables put in, it would have helped, but they hadn’t. He never thought to bring a mate with him at first, which would have helped matters too. For although he was a man, and even in those days, even without many automobiles, men could get about easier in love than women, Jim had a trouble not unlike the sisters. He had been born at the other end of the town.
    I don’t know that this needs much explaining, even now. Though in his case, it wasn’t a question of railroad tracks but of barges. On the Erie Canal, there was always a part of barge life that was family and respectable; the wives and men too could go to Sunday church and did, though it couldn’t always be the same one, except now and then through the year. That was the difference. For the people of the upstate region—whether they live forty miles from a great lakeside or ten from one of the fingerling small ones—are a landlocked people. And they want it that way, though in those days, without so many cars and planes, you could see this clearer. It troubled them too, maybe, that their state was so various. The people in the towns and farms of that nor’nor’west part of New York State had given their hearts to the chasms and ravines mostly, and there wasn’t much left over for water. Winters, on the short, overcast afternoon when the dairy farm ponds were frozen, of course they skated them, and summers, many a canoe was flipped onto the smaller waters, of Honeoye maybe or Canadice or Hemlock. Otherwise, they sat in their tight dark winters, which the women hotted up with calico, and stared out at the numb farmland through air the color of an oyster; nine months of the year there is never much sun in those towns. Or they drove out to look at that hill near Palmyra where Joseph Smith the Mormon had his vision, or past Oneida, where a community had once hammered silver into free love. And when the barge people came to town—even though a family of these might get to their church several times a year, and come around steady as a season year after year, married as close as anybody and maybe as schooled too—the others looked at them with eyes that were the color of oysters, even though maybe they themselves had never seen one.
    At least that was the way it must always have seemed to Jim, as a barge child. At times, he even went to school on land with the others, but although he had a last name like some of theirs, and once in a while even kin here and there, it was the once-in-a-while and the general scatter that did it; he might as well have been a gypsy, or one of the Italians from the wineries which had made a little Italy out of the hills around Naples and Hammondsport, who went to the Pope’s church. Or else it was the water itself that was an invasion to the others, the farm and townspeople, even though it was the found money that worked their truckland and wetted their apple orchards and humbled itself to carry down from the flour mills at Rochester and the knitting mills at Cohoes, and everywhere else. Summers of course, there was more roister on the canals, and the