Chapter
Six
Books
Vin
walked into the Potomac Library for the first time. It was small but inviting, with a perimeter
of stacks surrounding circular reading tables and half-height reference shelves
in the center of the room. A librarian
at the information desk guided him to a shelf devoted to
Sunlight
slanting through tinted windows warmed his shoulders as he placed a notepad and
pencil on the cubicle desk. He jotted
down the names of the authors and leaned back to open the first book, Walter
Sanderlin’s The Great National Project: A
History of the
He
set it aside and opened A Towpath Guide
to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal by Thomas F. Hahn, which offered a terse
mile-by-mile discussion of the architecture, history, topography, and ecology
of the
Another
Hahn book, The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal:
Pathway to the Nation’s Capital, seemed more promising. He skimmed an entertaining account by an
itinerant New Englander of his experience as a novice boathand on a coal barge
during a trip from
Renner. Rumsey.
No Reed. No
No
listing in the index for Pennyfield Lock, but he found this: Pennifield, Charlie. His eyebrows arched as he silently recited
the beginning of Lee’s note.
“Charlie, If it is April and I am
missing…”.
Dismissing
the spelling discrepancy, he flipped to page 134 and read, “Charlie Pennifield
at lock 22 made and sold boat poles and grab-hooks to the boatmen.” I found something in your shed last month,
Charlie -- not far from the workbench you used to build your poles and
hooks. A message someone left for you
seventy years ago. Why was it
hidden? Why didn’t you ever find it
yourself? What happened to Lee
Fisher? Did Lee’s note reflect an
unfounded fear, or was he really “buried along with the others at the base of
three joined sycamores?”
And
what of the young woman, K. Elgin? The
Hahn book held no other insights into Charlie Pennyfield, so he closed it on
the cubicle desk and opened the fourth book.
Home on the Canal by Elizabeth
Kytle. Along with a distilled chronology
of the
He
felt a tingling at the edges of his scalp.
But
Swains was on the lower portion of the canal, and if the flood hit D.C. on
March 31, the floodwaters must still have been far upstream when Lee wrote
those words. So the event Lee alluded to
must have preceded the arrival of the flood at Swains. And once it hit, wouldn’t the locks and the
towpath at Swains and Pennyfield have been swamped? But Charlie Pennyfield’s shed, Vin
remembered, was part-way up the wooded hillside above the Pennyfield
house. So even if the flood had
submerged the towpath and the lock, the shed would have remained dry.
He
flipped through the second half of Kytle’s book and smiled when he realized
that it consisted largely of transcribed interviews the author had conducted in
1979 with survivors of the canal era. The
interviewees had grown up on the canal and were teenagers or young adults when it
closed, but the interviews were full of references to memorable characters from
the generations that preceded them.
The
first reminiscences were from a person Vin had just encountered in Hahn’s
book: Otho Swain. Otho had been born on his father’s barge and
boated with his father until 1909, when he was eight. At that point his father gave up boating and
assumed responsibility for tending Lock 21.
Otho’s father Jess Swain was the person for whom Lock 21 was named.
Vin
skimmed through several more interviews, then turned to the index. No listings for
The
next paragraph described the Rileys’ neighbors and friends, but Vin’s focus was
drawn sideways to an annotation. The
name Charlie Pennyfield was underlined in the text and an arrow pointed to the
right-hand margin, where a penciled comment read: Be
careful you don’t share my fate.
The
final line from Lee Fisher’s message to Charlie Pennyfield! Written, he thought, in a woman’s hand. His mouth suddenly felt dry and he swallowed
and rubbed his temples. No one but he
and Nicky had seen Lee’s note! The
writing wasn’t hers. Instinctively he scanned
the library to see if anyone was watching him.
He leaned forward and pushed the book deeper into the shade of the
cubicle. Following impulse, he used his
pencil to erase the arrow and annotation, then swept away the residue and set
Kytle’s book atop the others on the desk.
He
carried his notepad and pencil back to the card catalog and flipped through the
entries under
It
was
“Sure,”
he said, and she turned to her terminal.
“Can
you tell me the author and title?”
Vin
checked his scrap of paper. “It’s by
Wesley Vieira,” he said, spelling the surname as she typed. “And the title is The Level Trade: Lock-Tenders and Merchants on the Chesapeake and Ohio
Canal.”
She
studied her screen. “Well,” she said, “I
can place a hold on it for you, but I’m not optimistic. Our system says it isn’t checked out. It should be on the shelf. So someone may have walked off with it.”
He
thanked her and left the library. The
air had cooled noticeably and the last sunset colors were fading to black.
Nicky
heard the muffled thump of a car door in the driveway and looked up from her
magazine to watch Randy trot down to the front door. Then came one of Vin’s standard
greetings: “Randolfo! Howza whatza, buddy?”
Trailed
by Randy, Vin came to greet Nicky on the couch, putting his books on the coffee
table and leaning over to give her a kiss.
She eyed the books. “Looks like
you’ve been to the library.” She spun
them to read their spines. “The Great National Project – A History of
the
“You
laugh, but one of the books I wanted was checked out. Or maybe stolen.”
“I
guess you’re not the only canal nut,” Nicky said. A flash of worry darted like a sparrow across
the path of her thoughts and she squinted, turning her eyes a darker blue. “Wasn’t today supposed to be a consulting day
for you?”
“It
was,” he said, turning toward the kitchen, “and it was. I spent an hour on a conference call with
Rottweiler this morning. They like most
of what I sent them but my old team in
Nicky
watched him recede across the living room.
With his loping gait, he sometimes reminded her of a wolf. Those stone-colored khakis must be ten years
old. And that loose cotton sweater over
his broad, bony shoulders gave him the angular aspect of a college boy. Nicky started to smile but sighed
instead. And sometimes the maturity of a
college boy, she thought. What accounted
for that?
“Anyway, I got a green light for the main specifications
on phase one,” Vin said, returning to the living room with a beer. “And I spent most of the day writing
definitions for the stuff they want to add.”
He sat down in an armchair and stretched his legs onto the table. “And then I decided I needed a break. And a little local culture.”
“So
I see.” Nicky pulled her knees up to her
chest and tucked her feet under a cushion on the couch. At least it sounded like Vin was committed to
the Rottweiler project. It seemed like
he was on the hook to develop this database and Web stuff for the next six
months. But where were things headed
after that? He hadn’t said anything
about looking for a full-time job. Their
wedding remained entirely unplanned, a concept.
They hadn’t even picked a date, since Nicky’s parents were spending two
months at a university in
Instead
he seemed to be immersing himself in a riddle spawned by the 1924 note he’d
found in that decrepit shed a few weeks ago.
And now this incipient obsession with the canal. Did it imply some kind of low-level
detachment?
“It’s
really fascinating, reading about the C&O.
When we walk along the towpath, the history is all around us. It’s practically alive.” He sipped his beer. “If I ever figure out what happened at Swains
Lock, it might make a good screenplay.”
He laughed and slumped back in his chair.
Nicky
looked at him but said nothing as her eyes narrowed and another sparrow flashed
behind them.