The Black Gates of Keokuk

by RICHARD PIKE BISSELL

THERE is always sonic alarming or dismal feature about every job, and in towboating on the Upper Mississippi River it is the lock at Keokuk, Iowa. This depraved lock is too short and too deep; the loekmen are more bored and obstructionist than any others: the extension guide walls arc floating sheer booms that disintegrate and produce lowsuits, resignations, and dementia praecox; the upper sheer fence angles off from the direction of the lock wall causing despair and vulgar language on the part of the deck crews; and it is always either raining or 400 degrees Reaumur there. When the boats leave St. Paul or St. Louis the crews begin to bet and speculate as to which watch will get stuck with Keokuk lock, and mates have been known to commit self-destruction and other acts against nature on coming on watch and seeing the familiar contours looming in the river ahead.

“We’re it,” said Joe, the Second Mate, as we foregathered at watch time by the engine-room door, and a beautiful zigzag of lightning suitable for framing shot down through the dark clouds hanging over the willows on the Illinois side. The rain we had been expecting all day began to fall. In the steaming misty near distance we could see the black gates of Keokuk lock beyond the drawbridge, and the old wooden fence of the sheer boom float mg in the water below the huge pile of concrete.

“I’m glad I greased up these oilskins, I said.

“ Where’s Shorty? Joe asked.

“Back in the pigpen trying to borrow a raincoat off of Hubert,”said Diamond.

The town was close over on the port side, and we were all thinking what a good evening this would be to go to a show or out to the dance hall as we looked up at the streets and houses. Wo would be all evening getting our barges locked through, and with (he raindrops already splashing in the river, it looked as if we were in for a treatment.

Captain Sargent blew the whistle for the bridge below the lock, and after a while the big swing span commenced to wheel open, so slowly you could hardly see it movent first.

So we stood there and Sargent eased her past town and on up toward the bridge. We could see right up the main drag. This was a sad kind of evening on the boat, with the neon lights reflected on the wet street so near at hand, a few cars so close we could hear the tire noises, and a smell of pork chops in the air. A Model A came down the street and stopped, and a girl in a blue slicker got out and ran into a store.

We could see the lockmen moving around up on lop of the lock, getting ready to open the lower gates — they looked about the size of window washers way upon a building. We were right in the draw bridge now, and the lights of cars waiting in line for the bridge to close, and their suggestion of dry comfort, shows, restaurants, cocktail bars, didn’t cheer us up much.

The lock blew an OK whistle at us as the big lower gales, like a pair of doors to a De Mille temple, parted in the middle and very slowly began to open in the gathering gloom.

“If that don’t look like the goddamn gates to hell,” Joe said.

The rain came down in big drops and finally broke loose with a regular backwoods cloudburst, so we could scarcely see the gates, and Captain Sargent, four barge lengths back, could see neither the gates nor us. We wore coming up dead slow.

Shorty pulled off the rake hatch cover and slid down inside, out of the rain. Joe was on the starboard corner of the lead barge looking for that floating timber sheer boom. The rain was dropping down so hard it splashed right up your legs and found a way to get you wet in spite of the oilskins.

“There she is,”Joe said. “ Bill, run back a ways and holler at Sargent the Great and tell him he cleared the sheer fence.”

I trot led back and hollered up at the Captain, He didn’t hear me, so I went back further and hollered some more. Finally I went clear back to the boat and climbed up to the pilothouse and told him.

“Tell Joe to tie her off if he can, until the rain leaves off,”he said. “ I could see a hell of a lot more if I was under a thousand ton of coal. I’ll drop her against that wood boom, and be careful you don’t tear nothing up.”

I went down and the rain was harder yet, and began to blow from the east, across the water. When it first started, it came straight down, but now it was beginning to slice and slash. I ran back on the port side and got an emply vinegar jug from the stern, slid into the galley, and filled it with coffee about a third of the way. The cook was standing there clean and dry in his white clothes, smoking a cigar. “Why don’t you just get a pail and bail the whole river into my galley? he said.

“Aw, have a heart, Harry,” I said. “It’s wet out there.”

“Here,” he said. “Put some milk in that there coffee,” and he handed me a can of Carnation. “I’ll leave you out a extra pie I made. Now get the hell out a my galley.”

I got back in the rain again. I couldn’t sec much. The canyas line covers on the foredeck had blown their weights olf and the coils were filled with water like little lily pools. I got back to the head of the barges all right and the tow had dropped against the floating guide fence and was still inching along upstream, hut dying fast.

“If we can get two lines on her we’ll stand less chance tearing up something. I’ll ketch a line here and you ketch one on the quarter head. Bill, and we’ll check into each other easy when she starts dropping back.”

We got her tied off and a gull came and sat on top of one of the stakes they had the 40-watt bulbs strung on, and let the wind blow him around, and the rain was running off his feathers in trickles; he couldn’t keep his balance the fence was rocking back and forth — and he finally gave up and made a flop take-off and disappeared east.

“Ain’t nothing much to do but set on these lines,” Joe hollered. “You OK, Bill?”

”I could use a couple shots of old Peoria whiskey,” I said.

“Someday I’m gonna buy me a rain outfit,” Joe said.

2

THE rain began to slack off; first we could see the big wide steps beside the lock, then the gates came into view, and the big dark lock with sheer black walls. Sargent gave a toot, meaning turn her loose, and we spun our lines off the timberheads on the fence; they lit with a splash in the river and we pulled them aboard.

“Comin’ ahead!” Joe hollered in a voice loud enough to scare the kids clear back to Canton lock, and gave a slow drag of his arm from low down in back, up over his head, and forward, like a slowmotion baseball pitch. Sargent poured it to her and we commenced moving up.

We got in the lock, and Sargent flopped the eight barges against the wall and they slid along slow and easy, once in a while throwing up cement dust and sparks when they rubbed the wall. Cap turned the light on Joe and Joe gave him a slopping signal and we drifted for a few minutes.

“Watch your heads. Here come the lines,” hollered the lockman from way up in heaven someplace at the top of the wall and out of sight in the rain.

Diamond was hack at the second coupling and I heard him holler. “Ok, let her come. You can’t kill me. Toss her down, old man Keokuk.” Then I heard the klunk as the monkey-fist knot on the end of the heaving line hit the rake deck.

At the same time I heard another klunk, only more like bouncing a baseball on a cement sidewalk, followed by a clatter of breaking glass.

“What’s that? Did Shorty drop that coffee jug? Shorty!” Joe said.

Shorty was lying down in t he coal as if he wanted a nap.

“He’s knocked cold,”I said. “Joe, here’s Shorty, out like a Monday night. He got hit with the heaving line.”

Shorty was lying there in the coal with his finger still through the ring on the neck of the busted jug, and his old slouch hat had rolled off and was gathering summer rain.

”Oh, pretty mama,” said Joe, coming across the deck. “That’s what we need, a deck hand in the hospital.”

I went over and bent the heaving line into our lock line while Joe was working on Shorty.

“All right, take it up!” I hollered up into the empty spaces, and my voice echoed back and forth in the walls of the lock. The line arose from the deck like the Hindu rope trick and traveled up and up till the eye in it disappeared over the edge of the lock wall forty feet above.

“Shorty. Shorty, you get up, hear me? Shorty, get up. Bill, this ole boy is cold,”Joe said shaking Shorty and banging him around. “Oh, oh. Feel that knob on his head. Now I got nobody to stand the head line.”

About this time Shorty opened his eyes and said, “I knew that mule would git me some day.”

“Ah,” said Joe, “he’s alive,” and picking him up and shoving him across the deck he said, “Give him the line, Bill. Let’s you and me go back and jackknife. Come on, kid.”

Shorty was standing there with a dazed look on his face. He didn’t know where he was but he laid the lock line around the center cavel, ran it over to the timberheads, and began to check her like an old master. Last I saw him he had a good strain on the line and was standing there bareheaded with the rain still coming down, rubbing that knot on his head and looking up at his line rising in the air.

Joe and I jackknifed and broke the couplings on the two outside barges and Sargent backed her out, leaving three in. We tied off on the sheer boom and sat down in the rain. Shorty and Diamond were up in the lock on the barges, locking through, and the rain was coming down steady.

“Hightail it back and get us another jug of coffee,” Joe said. “I’ll set here and mind the lines. I can’t get no wetter regardless.”

I went to the stern again to hunt up another jug, and stood there for a minute and let the rain hit me from the east, and watched the cars down on the bridge, and then went into the messroom.

When I got out on the head again Joe was sitting on a timberhead and the rain was not coming down in such big drops but more concentrated, like a hotel shower. The lock gates were still shut; Shorty and Diamond were tying them off on the upper sheer boom about now; one of them would stay up there to watch the loads and the other come back to help with the second locking.

3

It SEEMED like forever waiting for them to lock through and dump the water again; from the time the gates closed until they would open again to receive the second locking it was about an hour, maybe an hour and a quarter, but try sitting still or standing with nothing to do except think about how far it is to Wabash Ave. and what’s doing tonight at the Aragon Ballroom with the rain coming down your neck and trickling down your backbone so it tickles and the cuffs on your gauntlet gloves wilt and crumple and the coal paste oozes in the hole in your shoe, and your cigarette falls apart and your clothes begin to smell like an old Irish wet wash without benefit of Hilex, and after ten minutes you’d swear to God you’d been in there a week and a half. It gets tiresome.

“Well,” said Joe, “it’s better than farming.”

“ Have some coffee,” I said, handing him the jug.

We didn’t look very romantic, dripping like a couple of muskrats in the evening gloom, even if Joe did have a star on his cap; so unless you want to take a lot of punishment, and work an 84-hour week, just stick to that course in bookkeeping, boys, because you won’t, find any white whale out here, and the packet boats and the gamblers are all gone. So wipe off your chin and look serious and they’ll give you a desk to sit at and show you how to work the water cooler and you can buy a blue serge suit and after a while get advanced from a single-tier letter basket to a double-decker. Well, I like to put on a new tie and go to the show on Saturday night as much as the next guy.

“This here is just a disease, this steamboating, a incurable disease,” Joe said, and set the jug down on the deck at his feet. “There ain’t hardly a man aboard that likes this here life, but they’re all here to stay. Diamond is thinking about chickens. Shorty is moaning and complaining all the time worse than a Methodist preacher. The mess boy wishes he had never left that red clay farm. You got that St. Paul girl and all the rest of the world’s troubles on your mind. Vincent ain’t hardly got the brains to be unhappy but he manages it somehow. Curly wishes he was back down on the Ohio River. The cook wishes he never had quit working in that restaurant he is always raving about. And Sargent is the biggest joke of them all. He thinks he is gonna get his pile and quit.

“I seen plenty of these smart guys that is just out here to make their pile and they are getting on and off these boats like they was streetcars. They are never content again. They don’t know enough to hold down a good job on the bank. Any high school kid can slide up Main Street and get a better job. Can’t you see Sargent striking out for a job down home. He goes to the mill. ‘Well, what can you do?’ says the foreman. ‘Can you run a band saw?’ ‘No.’ ‘Can you read a blueprint?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, what can you do?’ ‘Well, I got Pilot’s License All Tonnage from Minneapolis to Baton Rouge and Cairo to Pittsburgh and Grafton to Chicago and Prescott to Stillwater and Kansas City to the mouth and Paducah to Sheffield and the Hennepin Canal.’ ‘I dunno what that s all about,’ says the foreman, ‘but whatever it is you better go do it.’ He got no more chance to retire from the river than a catfish has to get into the Knights of Columbus.”

About this time the gates commenced to open and Diamond came down the steps from the lock and climbed over the fence and aboard the barges and I went back to see whether Cap was up and about. He was taking a nap on the bench in the pilothouse and I told him the gates were open, so he blew a tool to turn loose and we shoved on up and tied off three more.

Perhaps Joe was right. Steamboating is an incurable disease. And as for getting away from it, why Blackie Johnson quit the river and never did come back; of course, he finally got locked up at Stillwater and the problem of his triumphal return as Mate was no longer a problem to him or anyone else except the parole board. Then there was old Captain Lawrence Arkwright Buckingham who made more farewell appearances than Geraldine Farrar and after cussing the river in a squeaky voice and inadequate vocabulary for seventy years retired at the age of eighty-nine to a houseboat which he parked dangerously near the channel below the dam at Alma, Wis., so he could continue to lacerate his nerves with the passing of each boat.

After you have been on the river long enough to get the disease, everything looks different: Chicago is a town 200 miles east of the river. South Dakota is someplace west of Minneiska and of no interest as it hasn’t even a mile of Mississippi River in the whole state. Lake Superior is an inferior watery deposit of some kind, in a general northeasterly direction from Grey Cloud Landing. And as for St. Louis, Quincy, Davenport, Moline, Rock Island, Dubuque, La Crosse, Winona — what are they? River towns, of course. Not towns — river towns. And what a difference that makes.

There isn’t anything in any of these towns, but they are the most romantic and wonderful in the world because they are old Upper Mississippi River towns. Of course there’s a bird in La Crosse who made a scale model of St. Patrick’s Cathedral out of matchsticks, a girl down in Muscatine born without any arms who can knit with her feet, and a fellow at Winona named Trask who made two holes in one one Sunday in 1928, but those towns would be worse than Waterloo, Iowa, in spite of these local attractions, except for the big Mississippi River rolling past the door day and night.

4

DIAMOND and I stayed in the lock to ride the barges up, and Joe stayed below with the two loads he had left and tied them off to the boom.

The lower gates closed and there we were at the bottom of the watery pit, waiting for salvation. I was tending the lines on the forward end of the barges, and Diamond was lost down at the other end in the gloom and rain, by the lock gates. I had a lock line to the center cavel and a peg line on the quarter timberhead to keep the barge from surging.

I sang “O Sion, haste, thy mission high fulfilling, To tell to all the world that God is Light,” then switched to a lighter mood with “I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time,” and finally they started raising the water and the barges got a little bit restless and commenced to creep up the wall.

“Hey, Diamond, think we’ll get to the top by Hallowe’en?” I hollered.

“Wordely,” he said, or something similar. It rattled around and bounced so off the lock walls it might have been almost anything.

We had been in here twelve years already, so it didn’t much matter any more. I sang the “Freight Train Blues” for a while, and thought about whether Merle would wear the black dress, the pink sweater, or the gray suit when I met her in St. Paul, and whether I should marry her or not, and whether I would have time in St. Paul to kiss her in all the different places I wanted to. After that I returned to Keokuk lock and spat on the slimy lock wall to add to the general moisture of the evening. Modern science had raised us up about twenty feet but there was more than that left to go, and whoever made the rain had sure left the faucet on.

One of the lockmen leaned over the top of the lock wall and looked down at us. “Think it’ll rain?” he hollered. A humorist.

“Hell, no,” I replied. “Wrong time of year.”

“Well, it’s good for the corn,” says the guy upstairs. “Been awful dry around here.”

— THE CORN,” Diamond hollered, making himself intelligible at last.

The lockman disappeared, his feelings hurt. I took up some slack in the lines. “By God, I believe we’ll make it after all,’ I said to myself, because we were getting somewhere near the top now, and I could see the lights in the lock house through the rain, with the rain pouring down the windows and the lights unperturbed inside.

“Hello, you meat ball,” I said sotto voce as the fat lock tender appeared again. “Merry Christmas, you silly bastard.”

“Hey, how about hauling up some slack?” he said.

“What a capital idea, old man.”

We were really at the top now, and ready for the upper gate to open. Meanwhile we had to go through the inexplicable waiting period connected with getting heavy pieces of machinery to start moving. It’s always the same. You blow your whistle at the bridge tender and he comes out and waves a flag and rushes back in the control house again. What does he do in the next ten minutes? Read the instruction book on how to open bridges? Get out the dental floss and give his teeth a good going over? Finish a chapter in the Gypsy Dream Book? Finally the bridge commences to open.

Same with the locks.

“OK on the number three,” says one lockman. “OK?”

“Yeah —OK.”

Five-minute lapse.

“OK then on number three.”

“OK?”

“Yeah, OK.”

O’Neill should get hold of some of this dialogue.

“Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel, and open those lock gates,” I implored.

“How’s that?” said the lockman, returning after a further exchange of OK’s with the boss.

“It’s a nice night for waterfowl, I said.”

“I hope they enjoy it. I ain’t,” he replied. He was a fat goof who needed a number of pills or some Father John’s medicine from his friendly naborhood druggist, Frankly, I could have used a tablespoonful of Konjola right then myself. The rain had got inside my oilskins and I was steaming inside like a baked potato. Finally I gave up in disgust and took my oilskins off.

The upper gates commenced to submerge and I took up all the slack I could get and threw on some turns; the barges started to surge for the open water, and the line squeaked and jumped; I checked easy and the barges gave up the idea and settled down. The lockman brought me the towing wire and I slipped it over the timberhead, and after another round of Ok’s we commenced to creep out into the pool above. The lockman was wiping his glasses and complaining and abusing I he weather department and cussing the government and the state legislature— as far as he was concerned there were no prospects in sight.

“Please, Lord,” I said, “bless Papa and make it rain harder. Watching this man suffer makes me forget all my sins.”

“ What ? ” he said.

“I said down on the farm they are all setting around the kitchen table listening to the radio,” I said.

He said if it didn’t let up raining pretty soon he was going to tell them to take the job and shove it .

Our little game with the Keokuk lock was about over. Had I met the challenge? Had I faced up to the reality of things? Had I made myself worthy of MERLE, the beautiful ticket seller? Had I played the game or was I a rotter?

In short, the coal was on its way to St. Paul, but just where was I going? That was the question. Had I taken the right attitude with the lock tender? There I was and there was the coal and somewhere there was Merle, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Should I marry her, or sell her to an agent exporting girls to Buenos Aires? I couldn’t fit the pieces of the puzzle together.

In answer to my request the rain came down harder than ever.