I had ever slept with anybody, having no siblings, and I still do not know why people complain so. I could barely sleep for grinning.
We had flint, striker, and char cloth for the fire and it was my role to gather the wood and stones, which takes longer than you think. The small animals have no fear of you but rather chatter and chide with the birds that you are disturbing their house. We had some anthracite to fire the oven with kindling added and we made our tea first, with water from the rivers, which tasted of iron. We poured out and kept the tea in a kettle and fetched more water for the sofkee and put in the jerky to soften so it became like bacon. With the corn bread on the side, that was our dinner, and we kept to the hours of between noon and three if we were able and ate supper when we felt we had done enough. Supper would be the cheese and crackers and any sofkee meal we had left. At breakfast we would mash the dodgers with water and the scrapings of the sofkee and rewarm our tea, which would make me giddy with its strength overnight.
I did not complain, but I missed eggs and pork and I did not think it would have weighed Jude Brown too much to have carried eggs at least. I think my father had expected more farms or the towns to be larger but he never said a word on this.
Five days in, over the Delaware by ferry, and we had gained a hundred miles and made Berwick before noon. The place was busy with engineers and carpenters, the town having lost its bridge two years before due to an ice flood and keen to have it rebuilt. This progress of the bridge across the Susquehanna had brought great trade, although the men worked for half of what they would have done last year and someone with a big hat and cigar knew that and profited.
A poor businessman will pay his worker as much as he can afford. A rich one, in times disadvantageous, as little as he has to. That is the world. Still is. Your vote will not change it. You know that now. I work my land for somebody else and get on with it beside you. Maybe I am writing this to be a boy again. Maybe you are reading it for the same. A time before writs and accounts. I say a bill is not a bill until they come tapping at your window.
This place, Berwick, at least had hotels, the cheapest being eighty coronet cents and the greatest two dollars. We stayed at the cheapest, which gave us a hammock, but breakfasted farther up the street where we could get ham and eggs for one shilling, our New York term for the Spanish real, but we settled wiser on fried eggs and bread for nine red cents, thinking less of Gould’s saloon, where our hammocks were, who would charge you an extra three cents for toast. Even I knew that was costly. Jude Brown ate at the hostler and probably did the better for it.
We had made good sales so far. My father sold the Patersons for ten coin dollars, fifteen if it was sold with its kit, which included a spare cylinder and combination tool. That breakfast we had paper orders for one hundred and twenty dollars and even I knew that was not bad. It was with high hearts that we left Berwick, and even Jude Brown could sense our lack of troubles for he fair skipped along. But the towns got smaller, the road meaner, and it is along that a bit that I would meet Henry Stands. We still had the twelve Patersons, the wooden one occasionally my plaything, and I pointed it and shot at ghosts of Indians along the road.
It was the last time I played until I met my own children.
We now approached the endless green of the Allegheny mountains, the low end of the Appalachians, which got no closer as you went toward, and we came into the skirts of Milton, still following the Susquehanna. This was a tannery place and also a great lumber town and the air was thick with the smell of sawed wood and the dust of it in your nose. They had a proper sawmill fed by the river and also their own steam-powered mill, which we did not see but did hear aplenty.
It was at that time a bustling settlement where anyone could make a house and call it a hotel. There were tents outside the town and these were the abodes of those waiting for better fortune.
With so much wood there were stores nailed up every day. It had a bank, which was still open, and a main street called Front street although I did not see a Back street to accompany it. Lumber and shingles seemed to be in everybody’s hand. This was good to see. Everywhere else the hammers and the pickaxes had gone down. For ten years America had gone through a juncture of construction that had shamed the pyramids. The canals, the roads, and the bridges. Work in one place one day, walk a ways up the road and sign on as a teamster somewhere else. Now the only things building new were prisons. And we were worldwide proud of those.
This is where I will demonstrate how my father worked for Colt and his oddment of a gun, for up until this place we had gone without incident and I am sure that you would find little interest in the ordinary successes and failures of the traveling merchant.
In those days general stores would often have a table or two and double for butchers and feed stores also. Cards and gin probably more their bread and butter than bread and butter.
Let me tell you how my father did his business.
He would never introduce himself as a salesman. We would come in together and I would scuttle myself away to some corner to pick and prod at some barrel or other and my father would be a customer.
He would ask for something small. A finger of butter if they had it or a button for his waistcoat, and he would count out the tin in his palm like it was the last pennies in both their worlds.
Transaction done my father would say, ‘Let me show you something interesting, Mister Baker,’ for he would be mindful to check the name above the door and use it as often as he felt necessary. He did not talk down to people when he was selling. Many salesmen take the road that they should be superior to their customer, that they are doing them a favor by speaking to them, and that the customer will buy from them because the salesman is letting them become as intelligent as they are by purchasing the goods they extol. This is particularly true if it is a luxurious or superfluous item that must be shown to be aspirational, especially if the customer is not wearing shoes.
You may have seen these salesmen in colorful coats and silk hats shouting at bumpkins about their cure-alls. They may wear a lined cape and carry a silver-topped cane. Mister Colt exemplified some of these manners but my father did not. I maintain that you do not trust a man whose shirt and pants are colorful and expensive. This man is out to impress first and does not wish to be measured by his words and actions but by appearance alone. Nature has the same rules. The most colorful and banded creatures are usually the most venomous. My father did not even wear a hat when we went west as he had done for those bustled city ladies with their reading-eye deficiencies. I did wear a hat but I was selling nothing and it was useful to hide my shyness under.
‘Let me show you something interesting, Mister Baker,’ and he would take out the wooden Colt from behind his back but hold it like a hammer rather than a gun so as to not alarm mister Baker.
‘It is a new gun,’ he would say. ‘It is the pistol of the future, to be taken up by the army and navy. I have a note from President Jackson himself approving of the weapon.’ At this juncture mister Baker would find the pistol in his hands, holding it for my father while he pulled out the copy of the note that indeed Colt had acquired from Old Hickory, no longer president but impressive all the same. It did not mean that the military approved of the gun, just that Colt had the sand to go to the capital and ask. As I told you: snake oil.
Mister Baker held the gun in his hand like a dead fish. ‘It is made of wood, sir.’ This was said in sympathy, as if my father was not aware of it and had been duped.
‘It is a model. Now what do you suppose is so different about it?’
‘It has no trigger.’
‘It has a safety trigger. Cock the hammer, Mister Baker.’
He did so. A look of wonder as the cylinder wheeled into place with a click like a key in a lock and the trigger dropped in front of his finger. It would take a move of the digit to pass in front of the trigger, thus preventing unintentional fire. Now this rotating gun may seem an ordinary thing but not then. Collier’s revolving flintlock and Allen’s pepperbox were cranked by hand. This music-box action was as pleasing to the eye as to the ear.