The Road to Reckoning by Robert Lautner

Author:Robert Lautner [Robert Lautner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-01-29T11:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

From southeast to northeast across Luzerne county are the Shawnee and Lackawannock ranges. They bisect the land, and about six miles parallel from these are the Wyoming and Moosic. These four mountains are like the pepper and salt pots that a man in a barroom will use to weigh down a map to plot his next day’s ride. And in between these corner-set pots, as God looks down on the map, is the Wyoming valley that even people who have never seen it are familiar to sing about around a piano. It has a beauty in winter, spring, and summer that you do not have to look for, but it is crowded more than you think.

In ten years the mines had doubled the population, but as I said, when these patch-towns’ owners ran out, the people found it hard. Harder still now the whole country was suffering and anthracite land is no good for farming.

Henry Stands’s notion was to skirt the Nescopeck and Berks mountains and meet the Wilkes-Barre road, which we could ride to Stroud. And then, God, I am nearly home! This detour would count for nothing! Any way you tossed it I was little more than sixty miles to Stroud and then the Delaware and home. My aunt Mary’s face was almost welcoming.

‘This is a stage road,’ Henry called back to me. ‘Although they are not on my map, there are towns. There is one that begins with S that I cannot remember. Lot of towns begin with S. That is the Dutch for you. Even the president is Dutch now.’

He yawed like a ship as his stud picked a path upward and I watched both their rumps rolling in front of me. It was easygoing as the ground was good, which was for the best as Jude Brown was no Conestoga. Those were the big horses that pulled the canal barges and those huge Lancaster county wagons all across Pennsylvania to the sea, before the railroads. Funny how you never hear about obsolete things, obsolete people. Those horses and their drovers gone in a puff of steam. I guess there is not a lot of usury and subsidy in a man with a team of horses or a coal mine that serves only a couple of towns.

‘I need rum,’ Henry declared, but happy with it, as if the rum were coming just by saying so. I reckon he liked this country for its trees and birds and I did not blame him. It was beautiful and I do not use that word lightly anymore.

We came out into a mud plain and to a three-story building that looked like a church and hid other houses and workplaces. A grist and corn mill stood on the side of a hill as they do them in the mining towns.

I would say that the menfolk of such towns spend so much of their days sloping down to work that they must like coming uphill all the way for their houses and stores.

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