A City Called July

THIRTEEN

When I got into the bush that ran along the side of the canal, I tried to orient myself. I had never been totally familiar with the territory, but my teenage memory gave me some encouragement. The black mass ahead of me was the shadow of the Niagara Escarpment. At the top I could see a light in what must have been a watchman’s hut at the quarry at the rim of the cliff face. Below I thought I could make out the metal girders that formed a railroad bridge. I knew the bridge, and seeing it, or even imagining I saw it, made me feel better. Somewhere out to my right, I guessed I was facing south, ran two rights-of-way, two generations’ ideas of where the canal should run. They crossed like a double cross a mile below where I was standing. If I wanted to get back to the city, I was going to have to find a way across the old canal and the new one.

I didn’t hear the door being broken down, but it couldn’t have taken the boys very long. The night was still noisy with my own breathing, and a feeling that somewhere out there great ships were moving heavily through dark waters. I tried to think. Well, to be honest it wasn’t thinking. At times like this I get more intuitive than thoughtful. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference. I knew that I couldn’t cross the steel bridge. They would be waiting for me there. At least they would if they knew the territory half as well as I did. I stopped and listened. Nothing. Through the dark, looming up at me was the grey form of a discarded lock on the old canal. It looked like a dry bone, with all the wooden and metal works removed from it. I headed south, towards the escarpment and the railway line. There wasn’t much cover, but at least there wasn’t a moon to give me away. On the top of the first lock I came to I sat on an ancient bollard and could make out the rope burns along the limestone facing at the edge of the lock. The lock gates had disappeared years ago, so there was no way across the canal here. I pushed on, keeping the canal to my right.

Faintly, I could hear a car motor. That would be them, heading to cut me off. Once they got to the tracks they could cover a fair stretch. I’d have to cross where the bridge crossed the canal or head east until I was out of sight. I could see the criss-crossing girders closer now, and for a moment they were swept by headlights. Then to my right the deep whistle of a lake boat nearly lifted me by my belt into a stunted sumach that had grown between blocks of limestone. I could see the slow progress of the ship’s riding lights as it moved into position at the bottom step of the twin-lift locks. The old canal took twenty-five locks to lift boats in the 1870s up the escarpment. The present canal did the same job for ships three times as big, in eight huge cement steps.

I could now see the railway embankment. There was no way I could slip by under the bridge without being seen. And the embankment was high enough so that I’d be seen clambering up the slope. I kept to a fringe of sumachs that began in a depression that ran east, parallel to the railway. It suited me, so I went along with it. From the edge I could still see the bridge, and now I could make out a flashlight beam running up and down the rails. My comfortable, well-shaded depression turned towards the tracks, and just as I thought that we might have come to the parting of the ways, I could see that it was running straight for a culvert that ran under the tracks. It was made to order. It was even dry until I was within fifty feet of the entrance, then I felt both feet go wet at the same moment.

It was a narrow squeak through the culvert. Ahead of me something scampered close to the ground. Things brushed across my face, and my head banged into the overhead arch every time I tried to give my aching back a break. As I eased through, it sounded like a pipe-band rehearsal; the sloshing of my feet through the muck between the stretches of water nearly deafened me. I was glad when I came out the other side. By now I was very close to the base of the escarpment. If I had to escape to the south, that meant I’d have to go straight up.

I looked back towards the bridge. That was when the beam of light caught me. The glare blinded me and I heard the sound of the bullets cutting through the branches of the trees before I heard the echo of the shots bombarding off the face of the escarpment. I turned the shot-gun on them and let them have one blast. When I stopped running I was at an intersection of depressions. The one I was in turned east, the larger one, like a track for oxen, moved south-west. That was roughly towards the new canal, and gave me the feeling of doubling back on my pursuers, so I took it. It went low, lower than the other stream-bed, and the longer I followed it the more it seemed like an abandoned road or trail.

By now the track had continued in a gentle curve moving in the direction of the old canal. At the same time it was cutting deeper into the ground, giving me complete protection on both sides. My feet slipped in and out of muck and tripped over stones as I went. By starlight I could only see a few feet ahead at a time. For some reason, I trusted this trail. I kept moving. There was a dark round spot ahead. I was almost on top of it before I could see that it was the handsome entrance of a tunnel. I could make out a curve of well-matched stone blocks over the arch. From where I was standing, it looked enormous, although it couldn’t have been much more than about twenty feet high and fifteen or sixteen across.

It hit me at last. I’d been walking along the old right-of-way. Now the old canal was crossed by the black iron bridge I’d seen, but at some earlier date, the tracks went under the canal.

I moved in, holding to the middle and trying not to think of the creatures of the night that used to haunt my bedroom when I left my clothes in an untidy tangle on the chair when I was a kid. The tunnel curved gently, continuing the arc of the graded trail. The middle was mush. There was no sign of ballast or railway ties anywhere, and the place smelled as dank as a sewer. It seemed to go on forever, but it couldn’t have been more than an eighth of a mile until I saw an arched section of magenta light ahead of me. It got bigger as I slushed on. It must be the glow above the foundry that had located off the St. David’s road. In fact, I could hear the distant thump of drop-hammers through the night.

Once out the other side, I turned north for just long enough to let the embankment over the tunnel reach a reasonable grade. As soon as it looked no steeper than about forty-five degrees, I scrambled to the top. To the north I could see the present line of track with the steel bridge almost shining in the dark. That’s where I’d last seen the boys. There wasn’t any way that I knew of for getting to where I was faster than the way I came. I had the old canal between us now. I was kneeling on one of the oddest pieces of man-made engineering ever made: the spot where an abandoned railway tunnel passes under an abandoned canal. I’ll have to think of that spot again sometime when I think that Grantham is moving into the twenty-first century too quickly.

Half-way down the embankment again, where I’d half slid, half fallen, I heard a distinct rattle among the sounds of slipping feet and stones. I moved my feet quickly before the rattlesnake of my nightmare struck at my unguarded ankle. I must have been hallucinating. I didn’t see anything, and whatever it was it was gone without another sound. Over my shoulder I could see lights from the flight locks and I could hear the faint hum of motors. Beyond the other-worldly twin locks with their regular light standards lifting the buff planes out of the darkness, I could make out the pale glow of Papertown on the other side.

I kept hiking along the ghostly railway track, knowing that it would eventually lead me back to the main line from which it had separated years before I was born. I kept pushing the pace. “Before I was born,” as though that’s a measure of anything. It was like my asking when I was six if the ocean was over my head. The universe was divided into what was over my head and what wasn’t. Not a fair division at all unless you happened to be six. Ahead I could see the present canal’s surge tank. It looked like a gigantic car muffler on end. It must have stood two hundred feet in the air. Right beside it ran the railway right across the new canal. The bridge was down so it was easy over and home free for Papertown.