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

farm-boys meanwhile had their noses hard to the grind; if a runaway farmboy was lost to the barges, he might as well have been lost to the Indians in the days before these were all on reservations—for the amount of hullaballoo that was made. And even when Jim’s parents retired to the little wayside house by a bit of water, which was all that was left for him to return to after the war—and where else should he come?—still, for all the changes that had been made in towns and roads and people, there was still a lingering difference between him and them. A town that size always has people who remember its gypsies. And even if not, as Jim would often tell the mate he’d brought back to share the house—war-buddies, the town called them, quite fondly—even polite as the town was to him now, and even if he could see for himself that what with the house-and-lot developments going on everywhere (this was nineteen-twenty) that if he stuck around long enough he’d be an old-timer himself, still he’d be the one to remember, even then. Barge people had their own way of remembering, half land, half water.
    It was all in the names of places, the difference between them and the town, he’d now and then say to the mate, across the deal table in the kitchen of the little house, after the dinner they’d cooked quite neatly, and just before they got down to talking, night after night, of what kind of business they’d go into after they’d saved enough from the fat, steady but no-account jobs they’d got into but wouldn’t stay at—no, not they. Jim’s mate had come from the coal mines of Pennsylvania out of Lancashire, England, when he was thirteen, and farmland was to him what the canals were to Jim—though to him, by an even more cut-off memory, it was of what he’d never yet had. He didn’t talk much, either of what he had had or he hadn’t, but he could sing of it now and then—and he could listen.
    “It’s all in the names of the places,” Jim would say. “There isn’t a square foot of New York State that isn’t within spitting range of some kind of water—falls, rapids, lake or creek—and within day or two range of the great waters. You wouldn’t think that this inland fever would hit some people this way.” But it did. It was his contention that, let a New York town stand back only ten miles from a river and it called itself something like Middlesex or Woodsville, or Horseheads or Roseboom, or Painted Post. Nice enough names, but landhungry, in a town way; The canal names were another breed, wider and lazier, lots of them Indian or classical, or marined from elsewhere, or simply practical, like Lockport. “Three canals of the inland waterway, there were at the beginning,” Jim would say, in the special, swinging voice he kept for this use, though the voice itself knew that this was nearly nineteen-twenty-one, and the canals were done for. “The Erie, the Champlain and the Oswego. Then, only as far back as nineteen-oh-three—I was already eleven—they even voted to make way for the new big ones, to hold barges up to one-thousand-ton burden. Troy to Waterford, along the Hudson. Kept the old part of the canal, up the Mohawk, to Rome. Rome to Clyde, the canal takes in the Oneida and the Seneca. Rivers, mate. Westward from Clyde, it goes up to the Niagara, at Tonawanda. I was born Mohawk to Rome, just outside of Oriskany.”
    “Aye,” would say his mate, who had never seen big water, not even from the troopship. By the map though, pulled out on the table for his education, he could see well enough that Jim had barely escaped being born outside of a town called Whitesboro one way and a Middleville the other, but he never pointed this out, nor the plain fact that many of the waterway towns had a landlubberly enough sound, and many of the mountain ones a wail of water. To him, the hills around here looked enough like Scotland to be Yorkshire, and he knew well enough what it was those hills—and what