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Sound carried down the canal, and Isaac heard the clop of the mules’ hooves before they had rounded the bend a half-mile south of the lock or, on a quiet day, the one a mile north. For the most part, the canal was a straight line, though it did zig and zag to avoid natural features like rock outcroppings—much as Isaac himself sought to avoid conversation.
One morning a year after he had arrived at the lock, Isaac heard a woman’s voice shrieking from down the canal, and he grudgingly put aside his book.
Professor Branson had been right. The lock-keeper’s cottage was miles from town in either direction, the perfect refuge from the noise and commerce of the city. If it weren’t for so many of the barge masters!
Some were quiet men like himself. They communicated their desire to enter and leave the lock with grunts and motions, and Isaac could keep a book open as the water filled or drained. Occasionally he would pump water for their mules or their hoggees and exchange the barest of greetings.
Then there were those who insisted on chatting. Isaac understood it was a lonely way, the sixty miles of the canal, with only the mules or the hoggees to talk with, and that some men relished the chance to exchange gossip and complain about the weather.
A fully-loaded barge with a team of healthy mules could travel as much as thirty miles in one day. Sometimes barges unloaded their cargo at Easton, picked up coal there, and returned the heavy black chunks to the southern terminus at Bristol.
Others followed the Lehigh Canal all the way to its end, where they loaded up with coal and then returned south. In either case, the same captains and bargemen passed through the lock, and Isaac was often forced to speak with them while they waited for the water to rise or fall.
Many of the hoggees were boys from eight years upward, though there were a few, usually foreigners, in their twenties and thirties. They had to be strong to tug forward the mules when the stubborn beasts didn’t want to move. The sun along the canal in on this late spring day was bright, and many of the men wore long-sleeved shirts and wide-brimmed hats to protect their skin from burning. There were very few women, so Isaac was surprised by the woman’s voice outside.
“Stupid!” he heard her cry. “Can’t even walk a path without falling! How did I ever get saddled with such an idiot? Me, a poor widow woman on my own!”
Isaac recognized the voice. Mrs. Anderson, one of the only women barge captains on the canal. She had been widowed the year before and taken over her husband’s command.
He hated that he knew such a petty detail. All he wanted was to be left alone. He made only the occasional trip into Stewart’s Crossing, some miles south, or New Hope, in the other direction, when he needed goods, or to attend the Quaker Meeting.
As Mrs. Anderson’s voice grew closer, he put his already worn copy of Thoreau’s Essays down on the small table in his kitchen and hurried outside.
“Go on, you stupid mules!” she cried. “And you, idiot, keep up if you don’t want to be left behind!”
Isaac saw Mrs. Anderson had taken over as hoggee, walking beside her mules and urging them forward in shrill tones. She wore a broad-brimmed hat over a scooped-neck blouse, and she had pulled up the skirt of her dress and tied it around behind her like a bustle, revealing stocky calves in heavy stockings, and black leather boots.
A few hundred feet behind them he spotted her man, a taciturn German named Lenert, dragging his left foot, clearly in terrible pain.
That did not bode well. The tenets of Quaker hospitality had been engrained in Isaac since childhood. Even when his parents had little to offer beyond the shelter of their roof and a few crusts of bread, strangers had been welcomed. He had learned that caring for those in need required a generosity of energy, love, and care had to push aside any immediate repayment. “No one who comes to our door should go unacknowledged,” his father had often said.
It made him uncomfortable that such teaching was in direct contradiction to his own desires. As a child he had disliked those ragged men and women who appeared at his family’s doorstop. He didn’t mind giving up his food or his bed—he just wanted them to leave him alone so he could read and engage his mind.
Upon seeing the injured man, he rushed back inside and pulled out his emergency medical kit. It wasn’t much, just gauze, dressing, bandages, and sutures, but it usually served to handle the scrapes and cuts of hoggees.
When he returned outside, the mules were moving slowly as they recognized their stopping place. “Go on, a few feet more,” Mrs. Anderson cried, as she slapped the mules’ backs with a long-handled whip.
Finally she left them to their trudge and hauled herself onto the King Arthur’s red-painted deck. She began to unspool the bow rope and Isaac moved ahead of the barge, ready to catch it.
She chose to throw it toward Lenert, though, as if knowing he could not move fast enough to catch it, and it fell in the water with a splash.
“Stupid, stupid man!” she cried. “What is a poor woman like me to do when all I have to help me is a lump of a man like you!”
Isaac dodged around Lenert, grabbed his long, hooked pole, and picked up the sopping rope. He tied it expertly around the bollard at the north end of the pier, then moved quickly to the stern, where Mrs. Anderson threw him the second rope.
When he had it tied, Isaac noticed Lenert had sunk to the ground, his left leg splayed out in front of him.
“What’s happened?” Isaac asked Mrs. Anderson.
“The worthless louse hurt his leg, and he’s been pretending he can’t walk for a mile or more.”
Isaac looked at the way Lenert’s lower leg rested at a strange angle. “Perhaps it is broken.”
Mrs. Anderson attempted to sigh but belched instead. “Then he is no use to me. What good is a hoggee with a broken leg?”
She motioned toward the lock. “Shouldn’t you be running the water now?”
“Yes, yes, I’ll get right to it.”
He hurried to the south gate and closed it behind the King Arthur. Then he passed Mrs. Anderson again, as she stared at her boat, completely ignoring the pain her man was in behind her.
Isaac opened the north gate and the water from the higher level began to rush in. Then he walked over to where Lenert was collapsed on the ground, wincing in pain and heaving for breath. Isaac didn’t see any bone sticking out of the man’s rough trousers, so perhaps it wasn’t too bad. He could find a piece of wood and some rope, make a rudimentary splint, and then see him and Mrs. Anderson on their way.
