THE RACE
by
James Rada, Jr.
Legacy Publishing
A division of AIM Publishing Group
Copyright © 2012 by James Rada, Jr.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Tony Fitzgerald didn’t consider himself a stupid man. What he was, though, was twenty years old, slightly drunk and fiercely loyal to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. The canal had been his home for the past ten years. It had given him a family, love, safety and a job.
He loved the relative quiet of the 184.5-mile trip between Cumberland, Maryland, and Georgetown. He looked forward to the time he spend alone piloting his canal boat or driving the mules. He could close his eyes and navigate the entire length of the canal without actually seeing the towpath. He knew every turn, culvert and lock that well.
Even so, when Tony heard someone say, “A canal boat could beat a train any day of the week. We’re just not in such an all-fired rush to move from one place to the next,” he thought the person was an idiot. Trains moved along five to six times faster than a canal boat. Even canawlers, as the people who boated on the canal called themselves, had to admit that the four-miles-per-hour pace on the canal was nowhere near the twenty-five miles an hour that trains moved. The C&O Canal wasn’t the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and it didn’t pretend to be.
Then Tony halted the glass of whiskey that was halfway to his lips, thought for a moment and realized that he had been the fool who made the comment. How many had he drunk to become drunk enough to say something so ridiculous?
“Four,” Thomas said.
Tony looked to the side. His brother Thomas had joined him in his birthday celebration at The Waterman’s Tavern in Shanty Town. It was a place that his mother had always warned him to stay away from. He usually listened to her, but this was a special occasion.
Shanty Town was the area of Cumberland, Maryland, that was home to the whores and roughnecks of the waterfront and railroad. Tony had been born here and lived the first ten years of his life here. He’d even been here from time to time since then to buy supplies and sometimes a meal. The place held no fear for him, but his mother’s first husband had been killed here. Tony understood why she didn’t like this place and he tried not to worry her.
But Tony was twenty years old today. He was no longer a child. He was a man so, of course, his first act as a man had been to do something foolish. He’d gotten drunk.
“Huh?” Tony mumbled to Thomas.
“You asked how many drinks you had downed,” Thomas said.
Thomas was a brown-haired eighteen year old. He was the same size as Tony, and people had said they looked alike when they were younger, The thing was they weren’t natural brothers and the years brought out the differences between the two of them. Thomas was more thickly muscled than Tony and when he finally stopped growing, he would probably wind up taller than Tony as well.
Tony shook his head. He hadn’t realized that he was speaking his thoughts. Maybe that was why he was saying some of the dumb things he had said this evening.
Unfortunately, someone else in The Waterman’s Tavern had heard his canal versus railroad comment and it wasn’t a waterman.
“You’d best shut your mouth, boy,” Henry Danforth said.
Danforth was a railroader so it was a surprise to see him in the Waterman’s Tavern. Then again, railroaders liked to frequent the favorite saloons of canawlers to cause trouble and start a fight. And to be honest, canawlers sometimes visited railroader saloons for the same purpose.
Neither group ever left disappointed. It was Shanty Town after all.
Tony and Thomas knew Danforth because there was time years back when he had been sweet on Alice Windover, Tony and Thomas’ mother. That had been back before she had gotten some sense in her and married David Windover. Danforth was in his mid-fifties. He used to be a trim man, but now the buttons on his shirt strained to hold the fabric together. As the hair had begun to disappear from the top of his head, he had replaced it with a long mustache that drooped down below his chin.
“What’s the matter, Henry? Can’t stand to hear the truth?” Tony said before he could stop himself. He was going to have to limit himself in his drinking. He would hate for his mother to find out that he had been acting the fool after all of the warnings she had given him about Shanty Town.
“Don’t push him,” Thomas whispered in Tony’s ear.
Tony nodded and pushed his brother away.
Henry Danforth not only was a railroader and so hated canawlers like dogs hated cats, but because Alice had jilted him, it had to drive him crazy when he thought about it.
Danforth walked around the men between him and Tony at the bar and stood in front of Tony. Though Tony was younger, Danforth towered over him by four inches. He also outweighed Tony by fifty pounds or more. Tony stared up at him and resisted the urge to reach up with both hands and pull on the ends of Danforth’s mustache.
“I don’t want to hear you spouting ridiculous lies in front of a bunch of waterlogged boys and old men. They’re stupid enough to believe you,” Danforth said.
“I’m not lying,” Tony said.
Beside him, Thomas groaned.
“Then you’re an idiot. My engine goes thirty miles an hour once it gets up a good head of steam.” Danforth poked Tony in the chest with a finger. “And no canal boat can come near to matching that.”
“It’s not that we can’t. We just don’t want to,” Tony said.
What was he saying? Tony knew a canal boat couldn’t match a train. It had to be the whiskey, or more likely, his stubborn pride that wouldn’t allow him to admit anything to a railroader, especially to this particular railroader.
“Then prove it,” Danforth said.
“Prove it?”
Danforth smiled. “That’s right. Prove it. Let’s see which is faster your boat or my train.”
“How?”
“A bet. A bet on a race. A canal boat against a train.”
Tony felt himself being backed into a corner, but he couldn’t do anything about it. His head hurt too much from his four drinks to see a way out.
“What do you want to bet?” Tony asked.
Danforth thought for a minute and then smiled. “If I win the race, then I’ll get to turn your canal boat into kindling to heat my home.”
Tony gulped. It wasn’t his boat to lose. He captained the West Virginia for Amos Lewis. Amos owned the Lewis Boatworks on the basin. He built and repaired canal boats but he also rented some of the boats he built to young boatmen like Tony who couldn’t afford their own boats.
“It’s not my boat,” Tony said.
Danforth poured himself a drink and swallowed it smoothly. “So? If you lose, you’ll just have to pay for a new boat.”
“That’s at least fifteen-hundred dollars!” Tony said. It would take him years to save that much money and when he had, he wouldn’t be using it to pay for his own boat.
“When you bet, it has to be worth something to make the bet mean anything. Besides, from the way you were talking, it sounded like you would win. I should be the one who is afraid,” Danforth said. He shook as if he was afraid.
“So what do I get if I win?”
“Your wildest dream comes true.” Some of the people in the crowd surrounding them laughed, including some of the canawlers.
Tony took a deep breath and tried clearing the fogginess from his head, which was hard to do in a smoke-filled saloon. Maybe this situation was like a poker game that he could bluff his way out of. He would see Danforth’s bet and raise him...a lot.
“No, I think if you want to watch my boat burn in your fireplace, then you should be willing to buy me a new boat if I win. In fact, I think you should have to build it yourself,” Tony said.
Danforth sucked in his breath so hard that he almost swallowed his mustache. “That’s ridiculous! I don’t know how to build a boat.”
“Then you’ll have to learn how.”
“That would take me months and it would still cost me hundreds of dollars!”
“I know, but a foolish man once said, ‘When you bet, it has to be worth something to make the bet mean anything. Besides, from the way you were talking, it sounded like you would win,’” Tony repeated Danforth’s earlier comment.
The crowd laughed again and Danforth’s face reddened. Tony crossed his arms over his chest and waited. He hoped that the pot was too rich for Danforth and he would fold.
“So do you still want to bet?” Tony said.
Danforth pressed his lips into a tight line. He glared at Tony.
“Where will we race?” he finally muttered.
Tony gulped. He had been called.
He pictured the canal route in his mind, each level, lock and turn. He knew that the longer the race was, the more difficult it would be for a canal boat to beat the train. Plus, the path had to be in an area that was close enough where it would look like the canal boat and train were actually racing.
“From south of town near Wiley’s Ford to Kirkendall’s Ferry just past where the towpath leaves the river,” Tony said. That would be about three miles. It might be too long, but it was the best stretch that Tony could think to use. Under normal circumstances, he could move three miles in forty-five minutes, but it would take a train only one-fifth of that time.
Danforth laughed loudly and Tony wondered if he had made another mistake. “That’s fine with me. I can win the race and be back in Cumberland before you’ll have even gone halfway.”
“You’re getting a bargain,” Danforth told hiim.
“How’s that?”
“I’ll pass you twice before you pass the finish line, but it will only cost you one boat. You get two losses for the price of one. We’ll race two weeks from today. I’ll have to make arrangements so that no other trains are on the track.”