Wild Wind Westward Page 14

  Joan, he decided, was simply a lusty, affectionate girl. Her touching him on the first night, he decided, was instinctive, brought on by the excitement of the evening and what he, she, and Mick had been through together. He could accept that without judging anyone, neither himself nor her. She had never touched him in that intimate manner since, though often in tossing dreams he formed her image and felt her fingers. She was naturally expressive, he concluded, outgoing with hugs and kisses for her mother and brother, and never failing to give Eric himself one of her full, lovely smiles when she saw him in the evenings.

  In truth, once Eric entered upon his work routine with Mick, he saw Joan quite seldom. She kept the tavern, Liz the boardinghouse, and Mick, with Eric’s help, saw to the transport business. The only time Mick had spoken to Eric with regard to his sister was during one of their first drives from the boardinghouse to the isolated East River ferry slip that Mick favored.

  “Don’t you go gettin’ no ideas about Joanie,” he advised. He spoke, habitually, in a manner not exactly rude and not precisely arrogant either. One might make of it what one wished. Mick did not bother Eric, so he made nothing of it.

  “I have a girl in my homeland,” he told Leeds.

  “Oh, yeah, is that right? Is she good looking like Joanie?”

  “She is very attractive,” replied Eric, diplomatically, “as is your sister.”

  “Yeah, ain’t she a sweetheart, though? I don’t know what me and Liz would do without her. How come you left your woman back in…where was it again? France?”

  “Norway. I had no money. When I get some, I hope to send for her.”

  “Hey. Is that right? Well, you just stick by me an’ do what I say an’ before long you might just be writing that sweetheart of yours a little letter that says, ‘Come on across, lover, I’ve got the bed all warm.’”

  He laughed his rude laugh, which was as indeterminate as his speech, neither good humored nor mean spirited. It was beginning to impress Eric that, somehow, the Leeds existed in a certain middle world of their own, ventured into the life of the community when they had to, but afterward retreated to a secret, special haven of their own, that Eric had sensed though not observed.

  The matter was not of importance to Eric anyway. He wanted money; he had work to do. Mick provided the work, Liz the bed and board, and Joan—sometimes—touched him and smiled at him in a tantalizing dream.

  Very soon after Eric began to help Mick in his shipping business, the young immigrant could not but observe that the roughneck’s methods were eccentric, if not erratic. Yet he was a hard worker, and he made money. So at first Eric kept his own counsel and held back his questions. After all this was America, not Norway, and Eric was just beginning to learn its peculiar ways.

  New York had grown first along the harbor at Manhattan’s southern end, and spread inexorably northward until, at the time of Eric’s arrival in America, the city stretched, teeming and sprawling, to the middle of that slender rocky island and beyond, a symbolic, haphazard organism of wealth and elegance, ugliness and poverty and greed. Great mansions shadowed pathetic hovels; perfumed tycoons strode the streets beside feckless beggars and hapless urchins; thoroughbred horses cantered past the stray, rooting pigs of the poor. America, Eric observed, seemed very much like Europe, except it was harsher in its contrasts and it held, always, always, the promise of quick money, sudden power.

  Eric pondered the contradictions, riding on the wagon beside Mick, as Leeds drove his team of big brown Belgian draft horses up the island, past the mansions and hovels, to the ferry slip. The tides of American life seemed founded on money; money was the only nobility. The fat, wealthy man being helped into his carriage in front of his new, raw Park Avenue palace might by some turn of fate become the ragged, scrawny beggar lurching along Canal Street. And the reverse was likewise true.

  Eric resolved to have the mansion and the carriage and the gold. If to get it he had to put up with Mick Leeds, he was willing to accept the hand that destiny had dealt.

  “Why do you use this ferry? It’s so far out of the way,” Eric had said, on one of their first trips.

  “Don’t ask no questions!” Mick snapped, then seemed to think the better of his harshness. “Two reasons,” he explained. “First, not too many people cross here. It ain’t crowded an’ we don’t have to wait. Second, it’s a shorter route to where I buy supplies, out on Long Island.”

  That made sense to Eric, although he had come to wonder why, so often, Mick preferred to leave Manhattan at night and also, inevitably, return at night as well. But at first he didn’t ask, and in time he knew.

  At first, in fact, Mick did not even require Eric to make the entire trip out to Long Island. Eric would load empty barrels onto the wagon at the Leeds’s own tavern, and at several other taverns and restaurants in the city. Then they would drive to the ferry slip, cross the East River, and drive out onto Long Island until they reached a grimy inn at which waited a number of other wagons, teams, and drivers. Mick seemed to know the other drivers, although they were not a communicative lot. Eric was left behind, to shoe horses and repair harnesses at the livery next to the inn, while Mick went farther out on Long Island with the other teams. When he returned, the barrels were full, and, touching with his fingertips and tasting on his tongue some slight seepage between the barrel staves, Eric knew: Mick was shipping whiskey.

  What was the American law? He did not know. But, while travel by night may indeed have been an honest preference on Mick’s part, certainly it also carried disconcerting connotations.

  Eric decided to ask someone about it. But whom? If he acted rashly, what might befall him? If these shipments were illegal, he was already a participant in that illegality. And the Leeds family knew he had jumped ship. He was, quite soundly, in a trap. If, indeed, something was amiss.

  He said nothing to Mick about his misgivings, said nothing to anyone for several weeks, although he worried about the matter.

  Joan, perceptive as she was lovely, noticed his preoccupation late one night, when Eric and Mick made a liquor delivery at the tavern. Eric had been working for about a month, and a sudden February thaw, turning the roadways to muddy ruts, had made the trip more arduous than usual. The tavern was empty. She poured him a glass of whiskey, then checked to make sure her brother was not within earshot. Smoothing her thick, silky red hair, she asked Eric what was troubling him.

  “I know you have a beloved in Norway,” she said. “Mick told me. Is she heavily upon your mind?”

  “No,” he said, “it’s not that.” He did not think it was wise to confide in one of the Leeds. They were too close. They told each other everything. But Joan seemed so kind, so worried about him, it was late and he was very tired.

  “The liquor we bring in from the country,” he said, “and the manner in which we do it. Is that not…?”

  He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. Joan interrupted his worrying with an easy, gentle laugh. “You mean is it against the law?” she asked. “Of course not.”

  “But those police who were here the night I left the ship? The ones looking for Mick?”

  “Oh, that was just a personal thing between Mick and a cop,” she answered, dismissing the incident “No, it’s all very simple. I’ll explain it to you. See, there are powerful men who want to force all tavern owners to buy liquor only from them. At very high prices,” she added, nodding her head. “So we buy ours out on Long Island from farmers who distill privately, and thus save money. Mick must work by night, because these powerful men have been known to intercept and destroy shipments, and even to burn down the taverns of people who do not cooperate with them.”

  Eric was incensed. All the old unfairness of the powerful in his own country, all of his contempt for the chicanery and high-handedness of the hated Rolfsons, came flooding back to him. Joan leaned forward, her face close to his, her eyes locked on his.

  “I like you, Eric, very much. We all like you. And we would never involve you in something b
ad. We would never do anything bad ourselves.”

  Mick never mentioned this conversation, if Joan did tell him about it, and by springtime Eric no longer had to remain behind at the inn, tending horses, but was invited to accompany Mick out to the still, there to unload the empty barrels, load the full. He was not permitted to observe the still itself, nor to meet its operator, who, Mick told him, “is a sort of recluse. You know, like an artist. It takes time. One day, when he’s in a good mood, I’ll take you up and introduce you. You know, naturally, I’m thinking of letting you make some of these runs on your own. I could use a rest, now and again.”

  Eric nodded, feeling almost flattered.

  “Naturally, too, there’ll be more money in it for you.”

  Money. Eric skipped meals to save it, sewed his own clothes to save it, mended his own boots to save it. And, by July of 1861, he had three hundred American dollars, which he kept hidden in his room, just as, once, the Starbanes concealed coin in a hollow place behind the chimney brick. Here in his bedroom, however, he had pried loose a floorboard plank beneath his bed, wrapped the bills in oilcloth as protection from chance moisture, and returned the board to its place, putting one leg of the bed directly over it, in a precise position at the corner, so he might tell at a glance if his cache had been suspected or disturbed. Not that he worried. All was going well. And storing his money in this secret place seemed safer than a bank. The freemen of Norway were suspicious of banks. Banks were run by unprincipled deviants for the benefit of the rich. Banks failed. Indeed, American banks were failing all the time. Moreover, if he put money in an American bank, would they not ask questions? Who are you? Where are you from? When did you come to America? How? Are you a citizen?

  That was something he would have to explore: becoming a citizen. But he was a man of property now. Three hundred dollars. He would write Kristin and tell her, somehow phrasing his letter safely, should other eyes read his words. Could she escape Rolfson? One hundred dollars would buy her passage. With one hundred fifty he could get a wagon and a team of horses, and go into business. With the rest he could acquire an address of his own. It was true: three hundred dollars was more actual money than he had ever possessed. He did not regard as money his house and land in Norway. Those were part of his soul, pure and simple, and of a value incalculable. So was the name he had not yet won back.

  Eric’s life was progressing with extraordinary felicity that summer, and it mattered to him not at all when Confederate gunboats fired upon Fort Sumter, and when the new president Lincoln took the North into war against the South. Everyone spoke of war, ranted of war, reveled in the prospect of war all along the way out to the Long Island still for another shipment of liquor, but Eric barely heard. He was working out, in his mind, the phrases of the letter he would send to Kristin. He was loading the last of the barrels onto the wagon when Mick Leeds emerged from the woods that shielded the still.

  “It’s your day of honor, Eric,” Mick proclaimed. “Old Krich says to come on up and have a drink on him. You’re about to be accepted by the man himself.”

  Eric had never heard Mick, or anyone else, refer to the stillmaster by his name. He did not want a drink, nor even to delay, now that the wagon was loaded, but curiosity won out. They walked through the woods along the north shore of Long Island, down a trail overhung with leafy branches, and came upon a small clearing. High, ancient oaks and maples surrounded the clearing, protecting it from all but the most resolute—or accidental—visitor. Tree stumps of various heights stood in the ground, like tombstones in an old cemetery, and the wood from felled trees, now split into lengths of firewood, was stacked next to a weatherbeaten shack. Smoke rose wispily from a pipe on the roof of the shack. Mick motioned Eric inside, where a small wiry man was busy putting more firewood beneath a huge metal tub. Thin coils of pipe rose from the tub, circles and circles of a pipe that emptied into a big barrel just like the barrels Eric had just loaded onto the wagon. The man turned from the fire when Mick and Eric entered the shack, and permitted his thin mouth to twitch into a cagey grin.

  “So you’re the new man, eh?” he rasped, pulling a pewter jug down from a shelf on the wall. “How about a sample of the product?’’

  He pulled the cork from the jug and handed the container to Eric, who raised it and took a tentative gulp.

  “Na, na, not that way,” complained the stillmaster, grabbing the jug. Deftly he swung it over his shoulder, turned his head, clamped his mouth over the neck of the jug, and took five or six gurgling swallows. “Ahhhh,” he said, handing the jug to Mick.

  Eric, trying not to cough in reaction to the fiery liquor that had burned his mouth and throat, and which was now etching the walls of his stomach, took the stillmaster’s outstretched hand, and shook it.

  “This here’s Krich,” said Mick, corking the jug.

  “So you’re the new man,” Krich observed, studying Eric with a wary eye. “Figure it’s time I met you. Does he know the ropes?” he asked Mick.

  “He sure does. And can keep his mouth shut, too.”

  Krich nodded sagely. “Let’s hope so, an’ let’s hope he can do it if the cops catch his ass and start beatin’ his brains in to find out where we distill the juice.”

  Eric was simultaneously startled and angry, startled because he knew now, for certain, that Mick’s shipping operation was illegal, angry because Joan, in her sweet voice, had lied to him. Eric was also angry at himself: deep down, had he not known, all along, exactly what was going on? Had he not taken advantage of a dangerous situation simply because he was making substantial money from it?

  “Eric’s all right,” Mick was saying. “We been watching him for quite a while now. Besides, he’s a ship jumper. Knows he’d be in a mess of trouble if anybody ever found it out.”

  Old Krich gave Eric a measuring look. “He-he-he,” he cackled, slapping Eric’s shoulder, “looks like them Leeds got you by the short hairs, son.”

  Eric forced himself to smile. “They take care of me and I take care of them,” he said easily, hating himself for the hypocrisy as well as the need for it. He was already thinking how to go about breaking away from Mick and Joan and Liz, once and for all.

  “Eric, here, will be making trips on his own, starting next month,” Mick was telling the stillmaster. “See you don’t shortship the barrels on him.”

  “Hell, have I ever done that to you?”

  “Damn right you have an’ you know it,” Mick retorted.

  Old Krich just chortled and cackled some more. Then the two young men walked back to the wagon and started for New York. It was already late afternoon, and Mick had no doubt that they would make a safe crossing of the river, unmolested by the forces of the law. Eric, whose trip out to Long Island had been brightened by his intended letter to Kristin, now found himself dwelling upon dark matters.

  “What did Krich mean,” he asked Mick, feigning innocence, “about the cops beating my brains?”

  “Aw, that’s nothing. He just talks that way. Tries to scare new men a little. Don’t worry about it.”

  Eric caught Mick giving him a suspicious, sidelong glance.

  “I won’t,” he said. “I’m looking forward to making some more trips. How much extra will I get?”

  “Well, Liz’ll have to figure that out. Should be at least five bucks a trip more, though.”

  Ah, the temptation of money. Two trips per week, and ten mote dollars than Eric was already making. That would be an extra forty dollars a month, a fortune! But he could not have it. Another thought came to him: What if the Leedses were setting him up in some way? What if they would send him on a trip, inform the police, allow him to get caught, thus throwing suspicion off themselves, should the police be getting ready to strike?

  All the more reason to break away now, take the three hundred dollars he had already saved, and try to make a living on his own.

  But Kristin! Eric’s mind worked furiously. If he left the Leedses, would they make trouble for him? True, he knew abo
ut their whiskey running. He might make trouble for them. No, he couldn’t. He was compromised. Besides which, what if Kristin could not get away from Norway, could not come here? His heart plummeted, and all his plans spun away, frail wraiths fashioned in happier times by a too sanguine heart. But he would write Kristin. He did have some money now; he could offer her something, at least.

  “Looks like you’re thinkin’ mighty hard,” observed Mick, as he urged the big horses down toward the darkened ferry slip.

  “Just tired,” Eric said, “just tired.”

  Eric mulled his situation for several days after the trip to Long Island, the trip on which the stillmaster, Krich, had unwittingly revealed to Eric the depth of his involvement in crime. He was tense and tried not to show it; he knew he had to get out, but did not yet know when or how. Mocked by his own lofty ambitions of independence, mocked as well by his paltry three hundred dollars, he hovered on the edge of action, decision. Were he a rich man, or even a sworn citizen, his bonds would be as nothing, nor would he have considered for even a moment the possible reactions of the Leeds family to his departure. But he was neither rich nor a citizen.

  Around the boardinghouse, too, he noticed tension. Uncharacteristically, Liz snapped at her children, and they at her. Several boarders quarreled, and moved out. No new occupants appeared to take their places.

  “I don’t trust this bunch a tinker’s damn,” one of the departing boarders muttered to Eric, as he left. “It’s a strange and devil-blasted lot. You give them the finger, they take the whole hand.”

  Eric said nothing, but he agreed. The Leedses were corrupt. And yet. And yet the beautiful Joan seemed, somehow, immune even to Eric’s conscious attempts to place the Leedses all together in his mind. She had a hold on him; she was a lambent, shimmering presence all the time.

  A spell of hot weather fell upon the city, and life slowed, slowed, until everything came almost to a stop. In the evening people sat on their doorsteps, or on porches if they had them, trying to find the hint of a breeze. One such evening Eric returned to the house and found himself apparently alone. Enjoying relief from the nameless tension of past days, he tore off his sweat-stained work clothes, washed thoroughly, and put on a clean pair of trousers and a new shirt of blue cotton, light and cool. Then he decided to write Kristin, finally, and trust to luck and fate. Weeks earlier, he had purchased paper and envelopes, and these he took downstairs to the table at which the boarders usually dined. It was not yet twilight, and he needed no lamp. He uncapped a small container of black ink, dipped his pen, and began, telling her that he was safe in New York, describing his voyage briefly, explaining that he now had the wherewithal to support himself and “whoever else might choose to be with me.” He lingered over that phrase for many a long minute. “I cannot say more about it now, but for strong and sufficient reasons, I must immediately depart my current situation…”